hey guys humphrey here thanks for being
back here i really appreciate it today i
want to share a little bit about my
background
and how i got here basically and how i
started my first online business and
eventually sold it
earlier this year i want to walk you
through the types of jobs that i did
after college and eventually how i
started my first business by the age of
29
and we actually ended up doing 1.7
million dollars in revenue over three
years
which was really great and hopefully you
can learn from my experience
and apply it to your own life and if you
want to start your own business for
example
or if you just want to learn from my
mistakes so i graduated college
in 2009 from loyola marymount university
in los angeles and yeah i know i just
took up my jacket it was hot
but i graduated in 2009 and i did a few
different jobs right after college i was
in customer support for a while for a
video game company
and then i actually wanted to transition
into being a financial advisor because i
thought
i graduated with a degree in finance i
might as well just
try it out and especially because i
think at the time i was 24 i wasn't
really
too sure still what i wanted to do with
my life and a lot of people in finance
were making a lot of money and i think
at that time i just really cared about
money
and so i wanted to get into finance in
any way that i could i'm in hindsight
obviously
i don't do finance anymore i mean i'm
into personal finance but i'm not really
into
uh finance as a business anymore just
because i'm not that interested in it
but at the time i thought it was the
solution
to everything so i actually became a
financial advisor for a few months
um i think it was about six to eight
months that i was a financial advisor i
was not very good at my job
and eventually i just i quit because i
wanted to find something different and
i actually wanted to go back to video
games right after college customer
support
tried out financial advisory for about
eight months i then became
a investment banking intern for three
months
then that's when i realized i didn't
really like any of that stuff
and in 2014 i went back into video games
so i was working at a really popular
startup
in my area called machine zone and i
became a monetization analyst
for them shortly after i joined machine
zone in 2014
and that's where i learned a lot about
psychological
pricing and psychological economic
behavior my job was
just to sell more in-app purchases
to the customers so basically you know
whenever you're playing like candy crush
or if you're playing clash of clans for
example
you'll see those little packages that
you can buy with real life money
for in-game items i was the one kind of
helping design those packages and trying
to figure out
what packages would sell the most that
company was really big into real-time
data and real-time analytics so i would
leverage real-time data to try to make
the perfect package
sales package within the game and
eventually sell that to the customer in
2015 and 2016 this was actually the top
grossing game in the app store
they we actually had a few different
titles that were in the top grossing
so i felt like that that was a really
valuable experience for me to have
especially working on the scale of
numbers that we were working on we were
selling
you know close i mean these were just
millions of dollars per day in revenue
and
that's just crazy to me it's still crazy
to me especially because
the business that i started we we barely
got to a million
million five in revenue over three years
so i mean that's basically what my own
company used to make in just
literally a day or maybe less than a day
so
that was super mind-blowing to me to
work there and i was super grateful for
that experience
fast forward to 2016 i quit my job at
that video game company
it was a ton of hours i was getting a
little bit burnt out and i
always had wanted to start my own
business before the age of 30. i don't
know why it was an arbitrary kind of
goal of mine but i was like man i really
want to be a business owner before the
age i'm the age of like 30. and
to be honest in hindsight that doesn't
really matter either like the whole age
thing doesn't really matter it's never
too late to start a business it's never
too early to start a business to start a
business i think it's one of the best
things that anybody could do for
themselves especially if they have
the resources to do so and the
risk-taking
appetite for it i do understand it's not
for everybody but if you're ever
interested in starting a business i
would just
suggest starting as soon as you can so i
quit my job in november of 2016
and in early 2017 uh january 2017 a
friend
a mutual friend approached me and said
hey do you want to start something
and i was like yeah sure what do you
have in mind and i think
at the time i was ready just to do
anything like i wanted to work
on any project that was going to be my
own and i wasn't
too confident in myself just yet so
i really like the idea of having a
business partner and having someone that
i could bounce ideas off of because i
had started many side projects in the
past while i was at the gaming company
and while i was just kind of doing stuff
on my own
and none of them really took off none of
them really got traction because i think
i just gave up too early
i think early on having a business
partner that can kind of push you
through those hurdles those mental
hurdles of man
this is never going gonna work uh those
types of thoughts
is really helpful so the idea that we
actually came up with or
he actually came up with was to sell
these custom posters and these posters
of
street maps and i really liked this idea
because it was a physical product
i understood the supply chain really
well and i underst
i just understood like listen if you
spend less than you make
you're gonna make money and there's a
certain cost of the goods there's a
certain margin that you're gonna make
and then there's certain marketing
dollars that are going to go into it so
as long as your return on investment
on marketing dollars was positive and
you're making up for the margin of the
actual goods you're going to make money
and so for me
this type of business was perfect
because it was physical goods
i could figure out a way to market it on
instagram pretty well or
pretty easily and i thought that the
business model was really
straightforward to me so
i really gravitated towards this project
and in early 2017 we both invested 10
000 uh we had a total of 20k in the bank
and we decided to get a website
developed for us real quick before i
move on let me just show you guys the
product
uh this is one of the products i don't
know if you can see this
but um it's basically a custom map
and the way it works is is you go into
google maps and you pick
for example this is stockholm i don't
know if you can read that but
you pick stockholm as a location and
then you can move the
map around as you wish and get a poster
of it delivered straight to your door
so that was pretty cool i thought that
was a
really interesting concept and at the
time there was only one other business
that was doing it online
so i thought that it was a really great
thing to get into so you're probably
wondering okay
you've got this idea you're developing a
website
where do you even get it printed right
like that that was my next question it's
like okay
who's gonna actually make these things
because that's one of the biggest
problems is okay we're developing
we're developing a website to actually
make the files
and we're going to have to transmit
these files that are going to be printed
uh to a printer so in the beginning what
we did was we explored a lot of options
but in the beginning we just decided on
finding a family-owned shop or a local
shop around us in san francisco
and trying to see if they would be
willing to print our prints and also
ship them for us to the end customer
eventually we did find
one local print and copy shop in san
francisco and here i'm going to
like bring up a photo of what that looks
like right now and
it was really great it was a really
great starting experience because we
worked directly with the owner
and we got to print our physical
products at his shop and see
like we were able to examine the quality
of it
like right there on the spot which i
thought was really valuable because
even though he was printing and shipping
it from his facility i guess you would
qualify that and that would be
technically called like technically
called drop shipping
it's not traditional drop shipping in
the sense that it's coming straight from
china
in this manner we were actually doing it
from the united states we knew our
supplier
we could see the quality of the product
right there and knew that if he shipped
it out
it would get to the customer within
three days which i think is
yes technically it's a drop shipping
model because i'm not physically
touching the product but at the end of
the day it's all within the united
states
and it's getting there within three days
so i did not think of this as drop
shipping at all anyway to give you guys
a breakdown of the cost
this local print shop charged us i
believe 20 to 22 dollars per
18 inch by 24 inch poster so
this is the size uh this is a 12 by 18
inch poster so it was a little bit
bigger than this
but they charged us 22 dollars for that
plus shipping
and we were using ups to ship at the
beginning which i would not recommend
either because their
shipping rates are just too expensive
for uh what we were trying to do
so our cost of goods out the door for a
product was about 30 bucks and we were
selling this product for about 55
on our website and i think that's a
healthy margin but it's
not healthy enough the margin i believe
is about 50 maybe a little bit less than
50
at that point anyway once we figured out
the printer and the website was finally
done
it was a single product website so that
what that means is is that the website
is
just dedicated to selling one product
and that was the city maps
and we launched it in may of 2017 and we
got our first sale
pretty quickly thanks to some instagram
advertising
and at the time we knew a few memers as
they
were called in the community so they
were instagram accounts that made memes
and this is one of the first ways we
actually began to market you know
our website was through the meme
community you know we would pay these
memers like a hundred dollars for a post
and see how it did and see how much
traffic it would drive in so that's how
we got our first initial sales
and that's how we basically scaled our
business throughout 2017
was i would pay an influencer i would
see how the influencer ad would do in
terms of driving traffic and i knew that
if i got enough traffic in for the
amount of money that i spent based on
our conversion rate i would make a
certain amount of money and hopefully
cover the cost of the influencer
marketing but one of the issues that we
started to run into is actually printing
our family owned pop mom and pop shop
could only really handle about 10 orders
per day
and we were getting to the point where
we were probably bringing in five to ten
orders a day at the
at that point and this was probably in
june or july of 2017.
so basically we were running into a
supply side issue
and it was clear that we weren't going
to be able to keep up with orders
especially if we wanted to scale it a
little bit harder
so in july of 2017 i ended up looking
for new suppliers that could handle our
volume and could also ship for us
and probably had better prices because
pricing was a huge problem for us at
that point
we weren't making enough money uh when
we were shipping something for thirty
dollars and only getting fifty five
dollars back so that's when i turned to
google and i actually
called a few different printers across
the midwest i chose the midwest because
they were centrally located and i knew
that shipping times you know to either
coast would be pretty quick
and also the cost of goods i knew that
in the midwest their cost of goods were
probably lower because they have a lower
cost of living
eventually i found our future printing
partner they were called the blanks
printing in dallas texas they were
really great guys
and you know i just kind of really liked
them
on the phone and they were just really
nice and they were really courteous and
they asked the right questions
and that's how i kind of decided on the
supplier and so what i did was i
actually flew out to dallas
i met with them i showed them our
product and we just figured out a way to
start
printing from there and we figured out a
way to start printing with them
from there and their prices were really
great i mean
now all of a sudden you know a poster
that was costing us thirty dollars out
the door
twenty five to thirty dollars at the
door started to become like fifteen to
twenty dollars at the door
and the margins started to make a lot
more sense where we could start to
afford to spend more money in marketing
so 2017 was all about influencer
marketing all i did was
spend money on influencers see what the
return was rinse and repeat and i had a
rotation of seven to ten different
memers that would post something every
day
and we would just drive traffic to the
website that way in november of 2017
this is when i realized that this thing
is pretty profitable i mean i'm gonna
show you the stats right here but we
made
nearly a hundred thousand dollars in
revenue in 2017
with a profit margin of roughly 15 to 20
so we were taking home 20 000
after all the expenses sometimes even a
little bit higher
that's when i knew that this business
could really scale really well is all
you know i'm doing all of this marketing
just through influencers and imagine if
i just i don't know
triple the number of influencers or i
started facebook marketing so fast
forward to 2018 and basically
the same strategy was a was being
applied we were still doing the same
thing i was still doing influencer ads
we started to
actually add a few different products to
our website which was really great but
it was actually causing a brand identity
issue because our website was called
your own maps.com
and we actually wanted to start to sell
different types of items
so the name your own maps wouldn't make
sense if we wanted to sell a different
type of poster that wasn't a map
so in july of 2018 we decided to change
our name
to crafton oak and that is the name of
the business as it is today and that's
the name of the business that i
sold earlier this year to my business
partner in hindsight if i could take it
all back i probably would i probably
would have just kept your own maps as
its own separate entity and then just
created a different website
for you know all the different new
posters that we were thinking about
selling
and the reason is this in the early
parts of july of 2018 we started to make
between
thousand to twenty five hundred dollars
per day in revenue
and i wasn't even doing that much
marketing so it was already getting a
lot of organic traction
and that is at the same time that we
decided to change the site's name from
your own maps
to craft and oak and i think that this
was in hindsight a mistake because
all of a sudden our revenue went from
like you know two thousand two thousand
two thousand and then once we changed
the name it just
it just dropped like it went from two
thousand to one thousand a day
immediately and you know at the time it
was fine because it was like a long-term
kind of vision kind of thing but we
never had such a profitable stretch like
that
in the history of the business like
right before we changed the name so
i wish that we didn't change the name
but you know it is what it is we changed
the name and we ended up actually
starting facebook ads in august of 2018.
so yeah so in august 2018 we started
facebook ads and we started scaling up a
little bit better
uh profit margins were getting a little
bit thinner because we were spending so
much money on marketing
however in november of 2018 we actually
had a really great month we had
over 120 000 in revenue and january
december january and february were all
pretty similar they all
looked like really really great months
but in march in april of 2018
that's when things started to go a
little bit not
bad but we weren't just we weren't just
making as much money anymore
um the profit margins were declining and
i think it had to do with seasonality or
the time of the year march march and
april are just generally slower
times of year but at that time uh
we made a strategic decision to
slow down on facebook marketing and slow
down how much we spend on facebook
and by the end of uh summer of 2019
we actually phased out all marketing and
in hindsight i think that this was also
a mistake
uh we still had some marketing
initiatives going in at the end of
summer 2019 but
all facebook ads had ceased by then
and this was a huge
talking point between my partner and i
and i think that
you know if it were up to me i would
have kept marketing but i definitely
understand his position he didn't
want to market as much because it
started to cause
more stress than it was actually
benefiting us like we were
always worried about how much we were
spending versus how much we're actually
making
and um i definitely understand his
position he just wanted a
passive kind of business that was always
making profit so
uh definitely understand that and yeah
some months we were spending a lot of
money marketing and
you know for a couple thousand dollars
in profit it almost didn't seem like it
was worth
the headache so at the end of the summer
of 2019 what actually ended up happening
was we slowed down all of our marketing
and it just was clear that we were
putting in way too much effort for the
amount of profit that it was bringing us
some some months we would put in a ton
of effort a ton of hours
and at the end of the month we only had
500 or a thousand dollars to show for it
and at that time is when i started to
look for different opportunities and
consulting and freelancing to try to
make more
of a monthly income for myself and at
the same time my business partner had
moved
to australia where he was starting a new
job so it was just becoming really hard
to manage the business together
uh with such long distance so i wish i
had a fun and happy ending for you uh
it's not a bad ending by any means but
basically
the business started to slow down
dramatically through the end of 2019
and earlier at this year in 2020 i
decided to sell my steak to my business
partner
i didn't make that much money on the
actual sale but i think i learned a lot
from the entire process of building this
company from scratch
scaling it up seeing what could go wrong
what could go right
and i have all these learnings for me in
the future at the end of 2019 i also
started a tik-tok channel where i talk
about personal finance
and i've just been doing consistently
that every day since the end of 2019
and i've noticed a lot of great traction
and a lot of great things are coming
from that
so i really appreciate anybody that's
watching this that came from my tick
tock channel i really appreciate you
guys
um and on youtube i'm trying to post two
times a week here and i'm just going to
try to up it to three times a week in
the future but
i find that personal finance is a topic
i'm pretty passionate about i love
teaching my own friends about personal
finance and
love challenging my friends to really
get a hold of their personal finances
i do think it's a topic that's not
talked about enough in schools so that's
why i made this channel and that's why i
made my tic toc channel is just to
bring more education to those platforms
eventually in the future i want to start
another business so i'm going to keep
you guys updated on that but uh in the
meantime i'm just making personal
finance videos i'm making
uh tick tock videos i'm trying to just
become a content creator entrepreneur
type of person so i hope that you guys
learned something from this video i know
that i'm not the most successful person
out there that you could be listening to
but
i am still on my own personal
entrepreneurial journey and content
creator journey so i'm glad that you're
here with me
and if you haven't subscribed to me on
youtube please do
i make videos here twice a week as i
said before and i'm trying to try to up
it to three times
so i would love if you guys are joining
me on my journey
and please comment any questions please
shoot me dms i have my own discord
channel
where you can reach me it's the link is
in the bio uh not the bio the
description below
i just love hearing from all you guys i
love making these videos and at 20 000
subscribers which i don't know
will be in how long but uh at 20 000
subscribers i'm gonna do something
special like
eat a cake on camera or maybe i'll eat
20 donut holes
or you know one for each thousand but
thank you for being here
i know that you took some time out of
your day to be with me so thank you
and i'll see you next time