What’s your backstory?
I was born in Dominican Republic, a third world country. I graduated from college as an engineer but I hated my 9-6 job. Then, I dreamt of becoming a professional soccer player, that’s how I began to use social media, primarily IG, as a means of exposure. It took me 4 to 5 years of mistakes and total bankruptcy before I took a $2K loan to buy a marketing course in February 2016. Then, in May 2016 I learned about Russell Brunson and Mitchell Harper and applied their business strategies on my IG account and boom. That same year in September 13, 2016, I got my first paying client for $3.5k/month and business took off from there. Now we are currently generating over 6 figure a month.
I know this is not an easy job. What drives you?
I want to retire my parents. That is my immediate goal. They gave me everything they could, even though it wasn’t much, they did it and gave me everything sacrificially. I am also a major underdog almost everywhere that I go. The drive and the hunger to just beat the competition who has everything in their favor, is just motivating. English is not even my first language and I come from a poor third world country where I had nothing to depend & rely on for my dreams. It was only my will to never settle and the strong desire to succeed (even when everything was on the line), is what pushes me. Also that I know that if a work really hard a couple of years then I am gonna have the life of my dreams which what I am working for, a life in which I can be relaxing and living where I want and not just survive, but live.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? What lesson did you learn from them?
Virginia Kaztilio. She was the catalyst for everything. While she didn’t do the work for me, she certainly instilled in me the idea that I actually had something valuable to share and that I was actually worth something. She believed in me, showed me the power of networking, gave me that little push I didn’t know I needed and gave me permission to move forward & succeed (as stupid & silly as that sounds). I will forever be in debt to her because if it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be where I am today. Up until the moment I met her, I was broke. I was making very little money even though I had a pretty substantial audience on instagram. In order for me to hang out with her for 3-4 days, all I was able to eat was 2 or 3 granolas per day + water, because I didn’t have money for food in the tourist area where we were staying at (and of course, I have pride ok? I wasn’t going to ask her, WHOM I JUST MET, to feed me because I had no money lol). After that things picked up extremely fast. September 13th, 2016 was the first major transaction, $3500, on my PayPal
How do you push through your worst times?
The first thing I think of is that time will pass anyway. Whether i fight through this or not, time will pass anyways, and if i don’t do anything to change my present, then in the future i will live full of regrets and it might be too late to change things then. That is a burden that I don’t want to have because it will fill you with bitterness and it will consume you. The second thing is that I am just one stubborn person. If I go for something, I go all in, if not, I don’t even try. When I have a goal in my mind, I become obsessed with it, to the point where I would sacrifice almost anything, including my health, in order to get it. Throughout my entire life I have failed and have gone through pain more times than I could count.
Just one example, Throughout the year I was playing soccer and wanting to become a pro, i almost broke my back, knees popped, teeth kicked, countless muscle injuries, broke both of my ankles in different occasions (one of them so bad that the doctor said that there was a high chance i would never be able to run again. I was 15 when he told me that). A few years later I actually got the chance to become a pro, and thanks to the social media presence I had built. So my plan did work and I made it to where I wanted. I then made one of the toughest choices I have ever made and that was declining the offer to become a pro. The reason it is because I saw more opportunity and freedom in building something online, than with a pro contract, and my intuition and vision was right.