High risk plays

80% of my results online in 10 years came from 4 ads.

2 personal branding ads, and 2 ecom ads.

I found these 4 ads after testing 100+ ad campaigns.

I say 100+ because I don’t remember the exact amount, but it would easily be 300+ ad campaigns.

Hundreds for sure.

Apart from the revenue/profit, these 4 ads generated me over 200,000+ leads in different niches, and 150,000+ followers for my personal brand…

Which are assets that I still have years later and generate me consistent income.

These 4 ads all together were shown more than 200 million times on the feed.

Testing 100 ads to find 4 winning ads, is considered and extremely high risk, high reward move.

I invested time and money upfront, with absolutely no guarantee my ads would work.

All the odds against me.

The rule of %’s against me.

And I lost time and money on tons on tests, specially back in the ecom days where you just had to test product after product.

But I did so many reps that inevitably 1 test would work... eventually.

When I found a winning ad, I invested anywhere from $1,000 - $15,000 per day until I milked every drop of results from the ad.

Until the ad died and I started losing money.

That's when I paused it.

Even when the ad is working, there is risk in investing $10k/day.

Lots of things could go wrong.

But basically all my results have come from high risk plays.

I have never hit a big home-run by playing it safe.

By being passive and posting 1x per day on social media.

Or doing cold out reach to strangers.

I did these activities in the beginning for cash flow but they were definitely not my home-runs.

This is just the data I have looking back into my journey.

But the risk of doing high risk high rewards moves, is precisely… the risk.

What if it doesn’t work and you need to pay the rent?

What if it doesn’t work and you can’t pay the credit card?

So the key is…

Removing the “Desperation Mode”.

Let me explain:

Back then I was 19 years old.

I lived with my parents

So I had guaranteed survival even if I lost everything.

I would have a roof over my head…

I would have food…

Nothing in my life would change.

Apart from that, I had massive confidence in my skills to make money.

I was a beast closing $120 affiliate sales via Facebook chat as a 19 year old kid.

I was also really good at personal branding in general back then.

I knew, even if things went wrong, I could make money on demand by posting, chatting with people and getting on calls.

Therefore, I was comfortable thinking about the worst case scenario.

Actually… it was not that bad.

In this position, I had no desperation to make money.

Or…

No desperation if things didn’t work out.

Which allowed me to take massive high risk, high reward moves, have 96% chances of failure, and still aim to get the 4% of tests working.

Investment wise, most of my gains came from a 2-3 high conviction, “higher” risk investments.

I say “higher” because risk is relative to how much you understand a topic.

But 80% of my investment gains came from 2-3 investments.

I lost money in others, but the 2-3 made up for them and more.

So it’s the same concept.

Even if all my investments went to zero, I would still be fine because I had no debt, an emergency fund, cash flow, marketing skills and all the other things the financial gurus recommend.

If I didn’t have those things, maybe I would just have invested in the S&P500 and played it safe, until I was in a position to take risk.

But playing it safe I would have missed out of the bigger returns.

Investing In Shopify during Corona was one of my big home-runs.

High risk move but I understood the company because I used Shopify daily for years.

I knew it was a great product, the company was profitable and I loved using it.

This year my best performers so far are Meme coins.

I know this sounds stupid.

But on November 2023 I put a big bag on meme coins because I knew the first thing normal people would look for to get rich quick when the bull run started were memes.

They are easy to understand, and are the fastest horses in the race…

Massive economies and communities are built around memes.

In a way, memes are a language of their own.

Literally this bull run the lower your IQ, the more money you make.

The higher your IQ, and the more you care about the tech, the less money you make.

These are what I call, low IQ, high risk moves lol.

But I also understand the meme coin culture well.

So yeah that’s a big high risk, maybe dumb move, but I knew it would pay off.

And if it didn’t work, my life would not be affected.

I took profits on my initial investment and now I’m playing the game “risk free”.

(Don't buy meme coins at this point. 95% chances of losing.)

It’s extremely difficult to make high risk moves when you’re in desperation mode.

So the key is getting out on “Desperation Mode” as soon as possible, so you can then make high risk high reward plays that get you massive results.

To get out of “Desperation Mode” you can work on what’s considered a “boring” business to build cash flow.

Like being a freelancer, creating a mini agency, being a growth partner or simply doing affiliate marketing.

Or you can just build your personal brand and create your own offer.

These businesses are not very sexy, they take work and might not make you tons of money quickly.

But you will be able to build a foundation and safety net.

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Get your life in order and build capital with a boring business.

Step 2: Scale gradually, build a safety new and play it safe to get out of "Desperation Mode."

Step 3: Take high risk swings at life until you hit a 7 figure home-run.

In most swings you will lose time and money.

But eventually you will hit a 7 figure swing.

That swing will bring you another 7 figure swing.

And so on…

Your life will take off.

Swings can be anything:

A new company, ad campaigns, investments etc...

It’s very difficult to think about high risk plays when you need the money now, or when you can’t afford to not make the test work.

Because this is 80% a mental game.

And if the mental game get’s messed up, so will the results.

Finally, risk tolerance will vary in different points of life.

This is what I’ve learned from other people that have more life experience than me.

Right now I’m 27.

I can still afford to lose everything and in 3 years be good again when I’m 30.

But I also understand risk tolerance and priorities may change over time, with a family and more responsibilities.

So that’s when you can have 80% in safe plays, and 20% high risk swing plays.

So…

Create safety net, take massive high risk swings at life, collect the profits, put them away into safe bets, use a small % to continue taking massive high risk swings at life, with a big safety net to give to remove desperation mode.

Alright, that’s it for this one.

Go do your swings.

LFG.

- Sebastian

P.S. Many people love debt, credit cards etc... I'm not on that team. Mainly because I feel when you attack your debt and you're debt free, you can afford to take a lot more risk.