Story time! Here’s how I built our clothing brand from $0 to $1.5M per month in about 4.5 years… WITH 1. Zero Initial Cash 2. Zero Outside Funding 3. Zero Rich Parents 4. Zero Prior Experience Only sharing this as it’s what I wish I had when I was first starting. Just needed to see it’s possible, and then I could figure it out from there 🙂 Start - January 1st, 2020 My twin brother and I worked in accounting and hated it. 3 months after starting my corporate career I felt dead inside and knew I wanted to do something else. Had the idea to start a clothing brand that I thought of when I was 16 - but actually put some effort into it. One day or day one? Day one! In January, we sold about $1,300 of tees + hats to friends and family, plus got our first customers from running boosted posts on Instagram. ….then the sales stopped. “Why aren’t we making any sales??” I asked my brother - “I dunno.” Super helpful, thanks Alec! That led to me step back and think - you can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, they can’t buy it! BOOM! There it was, the magic we were looking for - MARKETING! I went to school for business and accounting and I never even thought about marketing until the sales stopped rolling in😅 Anyways - I started to learn Facebook ads via YouTube. Literally just watching thousands of hours of videos, and then testing it on a very small scale. Started with $20 a day, then $100, $200, back to $20, and so on. As I kept getting better at running ads, we were making more money, and started figuring out the operations side as well. Learned how to make the shirts faster, get cheaper shipping rates, make new designs, source new blanks, etc. In June of 2020, we hit $36k in a month, still working part time. June of 2021 - we hit $180k. June 2022 - we hit $640k June 2023 - we hit $1.25 Million June 2024 - we’ll see! When I look back at it - I didn’t have any AH HA moments, instead it was the most annoying, drawn out process of showing up every single day, doing the exact same thing, and tweaking things over and over to test and improve.

Shiny object syndrome is the death of most entrepreneurs. I remember sams video years ago, death by 1000 cuts all the tools skool gives you are great The GIFs people are pushing, cool the sales tactic but ultimately it comes down to one thing giving your market genuine value. If you want to win, don't fall for shiny objects and other peoples businesses and go all in. do the work and give value to your audience. A gif or a mastermind wont change anything this is how you build the skool of your dreams! Focus on what moves the needle forward.

I need a judge's ruling here. We have a leaderboard. The rankings are based on points for quality content that Skoolers engage in AND, if I understand correctly, physically "like" with the 👍. It appears, that we can "like" 👍 our own posts and comments for points on the leaderboard, which is, shall we say......weird!!! Who does this? But, is that how we're doing this? Winners find the way to win and I'm a winner so I just want to make sure it's "approved" before I go like all of my own posts like overly obsessed girlfriend.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to get the mobile app to start showing icon notifications when there are new posts, and DM's in my groups? It was doing this when I first downloaded the app and I turned them off and now I can't seem to figure out how to turn them back on.. I've changed all the local Iphone settings in the notifications area and still, it's not working..

What are some features about stool that you discovered over time but that totally make sense and you absolutely love? Could be as a community owner or user. Example: For me it was pinning posts to lessons 😍 Thank you for sharing 🙌 You help me to create a guide for new members that I am happy to share with everyone to reuse in their community.