How I went from $0 to making over $50 million for my clients (while being sick).

A thread on how an incurable disease and email changed my life:

Before we begin,

Let me just say it’s not that easy for me to share this with you.

And while not everything went well,

I did learn many useful lessons you might need down the road:

When I was 13 I used to play a ton of sports.

All of them.

Loved athletics and everything about it.

Until one winter break, I got sick with this thing called Crohn’s disease:

Crohn’s is basically inflammation of your digestive tract.

Meaning you have trouble going to the bathroom and just living a normal life.

The worst thing:

Doctors knew very little about it when I was diagnosed.

Which was TERRIBLE news for me…

I took a 90 minute commute every week only to see a doctor that didn’t know how to treat it.

Naturally, I got mad.

Not at the doctors,

But at the fact that over a million of people were suffering and there were very few ideas on how to treat it.

So I did something about it:

I’m not a doctor so I can’t treat it.

But the one thing I could do at 14 years old was raising awareness.

If there were other people with this disease, I wanted to help.

And help we did:

Flyers all over town

Spots on newspapers

We even hosted walks and fundraisers

And before we knew it, thousands of people were actively speaking for this.

Which could only mean one thing:

I was not the only one.

There was even this foundation called the Crohn’s & Colitis that supported people who had it.

After they saw all the noise I was creating, they called me in.

And made me the youngest board member of the foundation at 14 years old with one goal in mind:

Help people who needed it.

I didn’t make one cent from it.

I even took calls from young people all over the country who had this disease.

But I also had access to

-Millionaires
-Genius business people
-Networks of people who knew how to market and influence

And I loved it.

Every second of it.

I learned

-Guerrilla marketing
-Doing stuff myself
-Taking responsibility into my own hands

Lesson:

Sometimes you just have to figure it out on your own.

Then things got a little more fun in college…

I tried it all:

-Soccer
-Fraternities
-Entrepreneurship clubs
-Internships

College was one of the key parts of my life because of how much stuff I did.

Lesson:

Try your hand at many things before choosing one.

Ok, that’s the good part.

The not-so-good part is that everyone at my college had WAY more money than me.

We're talking families writing $250k checks without batting an eye.

My family wasn’t even near that level...

My parents struggled to make the monthly payments.

We were taking out grants and applying for scholarships.

So I just couldn’t stand there and watch.

I looked for internships so I could help them out with some of the payments.

-Sales
-Tech companies
-Consulting
-Cold calling

Everything.

Then I got this job in tech that had a HUGE opportunity:

College students need help with their classes.

Some students have already passed those same classes.

What if we gave everyone access to the same database with a monthly subscription plan?

We created the site,

Got into Facebook groups,

And blasted everyone in them.

I even created hundreds of profiles of attractive women to get people to join.

(Not proud of this one, but it is what it is lol)

With hundreds of thousands of members,

We knocked it out of the park.

That’s when I met email...

I used to send emails one at a time for people to join.

Copying and pasting all day.

One day the engineers caught me working they told me you could actually AUTOMATE IT.

Game changer.

I couldn't believe it.

"Is it really this easy?"

When I understood how simple it is to hack growth,

I got 2 more friends and we started a growth hacking agency.

Scaled it to $30k but for some reason we couldn't get past that.

Then we got into dating...

This company called Bernie Singles was for sale at $5,000.

So we bought the company,

Did our stuff,

And scaled it to millions of views per month.

Total success.

Until my buddy left...

He wanted to start his own company.

So the agency just fell apart.

Then I went my own way to consult for a small YouTube competitor.

Consulted 6 months full time there.

Raised $10 million.

And real talk:

I hated it.

The work was great.

Commuting for 3 hours every day to get there was horrible.

Yes, I was making good money.

But what's the point of making money if you don't have the time to enjoy it?

I said "I quit".

Then I accomplished one of the most successful ventures of my life:

Scaling a travel list from 0 to over half a million subscribers in just 10 months.

You can read it below, but before you leave...

Here's where it gets interesting: https://twitter.com/ecomchasedimond/status/1324744994448535552?s=20

After getting my case study from that experience, I didn't stop there.

I put it everywhere.

Social
Websites
LinkedIn

Everywhere.

Got people asking if I could do it for them.

Lesson:

Promote yourself shamelessly.

Email was ridiculously fun and intuitive for me.

Lots of people need email,

Lots of people have ecommerce stores,

Why not build an agency in which I can leverage everything I've learned?

And so it began...

We built our email marketing agency for ecommerce stores.

And we said no to everything else:

"Can you do ads?"

No.

"Can you do copy?"

No.

Can you do SEO?"

No.

We may have left some money on the table,

But it's nothing compared to the money we made from niching down.

Lesson: double down on what's working.

Fast forward to today, I had a couple wins:

We have over 50 clients
Have made over $50 million in email attributable revenue
I married the love of my life

But my biggest win is a tiny human crawling around the house with her PJ's on:

Yes, I have an incurable disease.

Yes, I have to inject myself.

Yes, I have to take pills every night.

But I'm grateful that I can live a normal life,

Create a business I'm passionate about,

And share it with the friends and family I love.

This is my story.

All these ups and downs turned me into who I am today.

And I wouldn't change any of it:

I’ll keep sharing content with you on

-Ecommerce
-Email marketing
-Building an agency
-Entrepreneurship

So follow me to keep in touch!

Thank you for reading up to here.

Truly appreciate it.

If you could like and comment I'd appreciate it tremendously.

I'll see you around my friend,

-Chase.