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Podcasts about business and stuff.
G'Day I'm Austin. And over the past four years, I've made over 13 mil with ecom on Shopify. Used to live in Adelaide, South Australia. Left there, started living overseas a few years ago.
Austin:I've been traveling the world full time since, and I've had over a hundred thousand orders on Shopify, which is why I have these beautiful little trophies here from Shopify. And in this video, I'm just gonna keep it chill. I'm gonna walk you through my entire e comm journey. And at the end of this video, I will pitch you on something, but don't worry, it's free. Let's get into it.
Austin:So that's me holding that Shopify trophy I just showed you. As I said, over 13,000,000 in revenue generated, well over a hundred thousand orders by this point, that number is climbing. Millions in profit generated with ecom and been traveling the world full time and making over 6 figures in profit per month. Now I'm extremely grateful to be living this life, and here's a photo of me in Hakuba in Japan carving up the slopes. I like to think I'm carving.
Austin:I'm an okay skier, but it wasn't always like this. There's a photo of me ages ago when I was working at Foot Locker. And if we rewind to 2019, I was fresh out of high school, dreamed of making it on my own. I saved up and bought a camera. This camera right here, Canon eighty d bought it off eBay, and I started making videos for local businesses, real estate videos, corporate videos, weddings.
Austin:Basically, if anyone was gonna pay me to make content, I would say yes. I didn't care what it was. I had a camera and I was a young guy on a mission and I ended up making over a hundred thousand profit in the first year of business. I genuinely thought I was a bowler. Thought I had this all figured out.
Austin:I thought I was killing it, raking it in hundred k as a 19 year old straight bowling out. And actually I had this interview here with Iman still on YouTube if you go and search for it where I basically walked through my entire journey up until that point. Bit of a throwback to go and watch that interview if I'm honest. But then COVID hit and everything stopped overnight. Clients stopped working with me and I had to change everything fast, pronto, rapid because all my clients weren't paying me.
Austin:I had no money coming in. All my money was dependent on filming projects by myself in Adelaide. So if that stopped, had no money coming in, which is not good when you've got some bills to pay because I just moved out. And so a friend told me about making videos for e commerce brands because everyone during lockdown, what are they doing? They're on their phone.
Austin:They're probably meant to be working, but they're spending more time on their phone. And that's okay. It's great for e commerce brands because that means that people are buying their a lot more. So I got introduced to this opportunity at a very pivotal time. So I started pitching brands with no experience.
Austin:This is me right here. Look at me. My blue light blocking glasses. I was locked in, headphones on. Let's start pitching these brands and let's get them to buy a video ad package from me when I'd never done this before.
Austin:And somehow it worked. Somehow landed my first few clients. Shout out to those first few. Paperlike was one of them. Paperlike's actually a product I use now on my iPad.
Austin:It's a screen protector you put on your iPad and it makes it feel like paper. Shout out to Sebastian for even having a Zoom call with me when I reached out through email. He was like yep, let's do it. Love it. And that was all the start that I needed and so I spent the next two years building that agency.
Austin:It was called Crafted. Here's the fancy website I made in click funnels and we ended up working with a hundred ecom brands. Now say we, I was trying to build it as this really good agency. I was behind the camera for a lot of the first part, but then I got videographers and photographers to help when we transitioned to making UGC style content, which ended up working better than the stuff we're doing before and did about 460 k in revenue with the agency exclusively. But I was chained to my laptop, constantly checking emails, early AM and late PM Zoom calls.
Austin:Most of my clients were in The US and Europe. And so I was in Adelaide, and if I wanted to close those deals, I needed to be up for their business hours. And so I stayed up late quite a lot, got up early as I'm sure lots of people do when they start a business. What I'd done here is I'd created an online income, but I didn't have the full freedom that I dreamed of. The kind of freedom that got me excited about online business to begin with.
Austin:So I did the only thing I knew how to do that point in my life, which was just keep working. And I basically drove myself to a pretty low point. I had a bunch of clients that had stopped working with me. I was struggling to pay back a loan that I got from an ex mentor. I was working ten to twelve hours a day, really just trying to make this work.
Austin:I was overweight eating fast food all the time, no exercise. And there was this one vivid point I really remember with my health. Back when I was younger, I could just go for a run, run for ages or the sport I was playing football training. Like I was just running all the time. And so I could just go for a run here.
Austin:I had the same idea. It was like, you know what? Why don't I go for a run again? I haven't been on a run-in a little while. I looked like this.
Austin:I went for a run. I was gassed so quickly. And that was just such an alarming point for me. Something that I kind of prided myself on was the ability to just go for a run. I'd neglected my health so much that I just couldn't do that anymore.
Austin:And honestly, was really frustrated every day around this point. I was basically thinking how were people on Instagram making so much money when I feel like I'm doing just as much work as them? Because I felt like all the work that I was doing wasn't getting me the results that I actually deserved. It didn't look like it that at this point in my life I was really burned out and on top of that I had the bright idea, because I like to push myself, to move to Bali with my ex girlfriend. And so I was leaving Australia with an unstable business, the worst health of my life and doubts if I could actually do this or not for the first time, because I'd prided myself on having this really optimistic mindset.
Austin:I could do it. Doesn't matter. The money will come. I'll figure it out. And this was the time where I'm like, do I actually have this?
Austin:So here I am in Bali working out of co working spaces thinking I can't keep doing this agency thing. I just can't. I need something more hands off. I have to make e commerce work instead of servicing brands. I need to build my own.
Austin:And I'd tried a bunch of stores before general one product drop shipping stores, and I was spending all my agency profits profits on ads, but nothing really hit. And the reason that I was trying to do this behind the scenes is that I was making video ads for our e commerce clients and they were getting great results. And I was like, honestly, if you can do it, I think I could make this work too. I just need to find a product that's gonna work. And nothing was hitting up until that point.
Austin:But after 13 products, I finally found my first winner. Now this wasn't the first product that got me sales. I had plenty before that and almost every product I launched got sales. It was just either unprofitable or I couldn't scale it. And so this time I'd found my winner.
Austin:And so I hit my first one k day, then a two k day, eight k day, 14 k day, and it just didn't slow down. So I stuck with this. I'm like, I'm onto something here. Stuck with it. Monthly numbers kept going up and up 52 k, 95, one 20 one, three 80 eight, five 50 two, nine 14.
Austin:These are consecutive months. The growth it was just going up and up and it felt like everything I was doing was just working. For the first time in a long time it was actually a very very cool feeling to feel like I finally found it. I've cracked it. I've figured this thing out.
Austin:Finally I'm getting the results. And I ended up going on to make a hundred and 26 k in one day that Black Friday and finished that month just under 1,200,000.0 in revenue. And there I am stereotypical Dubai Ecom guy photo. There's me on a jet ski in JBR with the Dubai Marina and JBR in the background. Look at me.
Austin:I went on to finish my first full year in ecom with 4.2 mil in rev, 900 ks in profit and that's when my life changed forever. I didn't have to worry about money anymore which was kind of weird. I was able to lie down on planes which is something I'd always wanted to do. I was able to stay in beautiful villas with amazing people, visit places as well that I really just wanted to go to. Cape Town, Santorini, spend more time in Europe, all these things.
Austin:I was able to fly my mom across the world in first class to see me in Barcelona for my birthday, which is really cool and have the freedom to be anywhere at any time while making money from my laptop. That's what I wanted. I didn't just wanna make a lot of money, I wanted to make a lot of money and have the freedom to not work if I didn't want to. Even though I love work and I'm not gonna stop working, that's not the point of it. I just knew for me it was the feeling of not needing to to make money, knowing that I would make it anyway and if I wanted to work, I could work on the things I really wanted to work on.
Austin:And also just the ability to do that at any time, So I didn't have to do the early morning and late night zoom calls trying to run an agency, I didn't have to grind all day and night just to make an income and I could do it on the other side of the world if I really wanted to because I wanted to go exploring. I'd lived in Adelaide my entire life. I wanted to go and see the world. I knew the world had to be bigger than Adelaide. And when I met Will and Josh, they're now my best mates, we'd been on similar journeys.
Austin:We started with local businesses, we then started selling things online, and then that worked for us, so we started traveling full time. So what happens when you put three ambitious guys in the same apartment together? You start thinking of business ideas and so we started Freedom Club and what we did is we coached in our spare time. We taught the customer first brand formula which was our unique way of doing things that worked so well for me while we kept traveling together. And so we built this business together and this is actually a shot of our first live call and so we started doing these live calls for all the students and this one was done in Bodrum in Turkey.
Austin:And so basically went on to build what I think is the best done with you consulting program for ecommerce. I've been through a lot of courses. I've seen what they do. Objectively, I felt this was the best. And so we filmed training vids in 10 cities.
Austin:I can't spell training. Intense cities in thirty days and called it the freedom formula. So basically went around to all these different places and filmed our course material live. Chose a product, built a store, launched ads, scaled it a little bit all live while I was actually traveling around. It was a nuts month of my life.
Austin:It was crazy, but I'm glad I did it because it was a lot of fun as well. And the clients started getting results. Know, we've been teaching people for two years now and I've been getting incredible results. Like some of these are pretty nuts. Ben eleven ks profit in two weeks, Alisa six point three in seven days, Jamie, pounds one hundred and £20,000 profit in five months.
Austin:We get so many of these results, which is crazy. And it's not just people getting some sales from the customer first brand method and the freedom club teaching and coaching. It's that some are making from 5 ks to 50 ks a month in profit or more. And they're quitting jobs, traveling, more time with family. Like it's all the beautiful things that I wanted when I was starting online business and wanting to have for myself, students were able to have that too.
Austin:And we were changing lives. We're helping beginners make money with e comm, which was such a rewarding feeling because up until this point, I'd just be sitting at my laptop all day. I would be behind it trying to grow my own stores. And yes it makes great money and yes it gave me financial freedom, but still I felt this calling to serve. I felt this calling to actually help people and deliver value and so that was one of the reasons that Freedom Club came into existence.
Austin:Trustpilot started overflowing with amazing reviews and our members had made 38,700,000.0 in combined revenue. And we've only been doing this for two years. It's kind of crazy to think that we went from never teaching anyone to all of our members making that amount of money. And the cool thing is is that I didn't stop e comm either. I had this I don't know if it was a limiting belief, but I thought that as soon as I stopped doing the business model that I was teaching, I would be labeled the same as every other person that's ever created a course and I didn't want to be like that.
Austin:I wanted to keep doing ecom because I love it and it works so well for me and has given me so much freedom and I wanted to teach on the side. And so even though I started spending more time on teaching people and building freedom club, because it's a much more time intensive business, trying to teach people absolute beginners than it is for me to just scale my campaigns for my brands. This just goes to show that I didn't stop. I made 5.2 mil with e comm in the year I started freedom club. So I did a million dollars more in revenue in the same year that I started the education business with Will and Josh.
Austin:And so it wasn't like I just gave up on e comm so I could teach people and become a course guru. I kept doing the thing and the results were even better than the year before, which is kind of cool. And until this point in the story, so we've gone through this whole journey until this point, the coaching cost money because those one on ones, those 30 live calls, we had a big team, cost a lot to run and because we wanted it to be more hands on and done with you, that required all this team. I think at the max our team got to 62 people by the time of recording and so it's not at that anymore, but that was the peak that we got to when we're just trying to over deliver on all angles and this is actually some of the team on zoom. You can see them there.
Austin:That's where am I in this? I'll send the background. This was on our all hands meeting. So we do it once every quarter, all chat as a team. And so that's some of them on Zoom.
Austin:You have to flick through a few pages to see the rest. So what I did is I spent months creating a free course because look at my fancy little diagram here. I wanted beginners to be given this recipe, a series of video guides, templates, resources. I wanted it to be them plus these templates and resources and guides equals they can get profitable sales. I wanted it to be so easy to follow, like the most simple easy to follow recipe that anybody has ever released for creating a profitable ecommerce store.
Austin:And I call it the thirty day first sale challenge and it actually started working. So I helped hundreds of people get their first cha ching, that beautiful noise that Shopify makes when you get a sale. And look I've spent a lot of money on courses, coaching over the years, it's well over a hundred thousand dollars. Like it's not just on courses, but also coaching, mentorship, masterminds, all those things to try and upskill and learn how to make more money or learn how to grow businesses more. There's a photo of me here with Sabri.
Austin:I bought his 12 k course quantum growth. It's actually really good and I learned a lot from Sabri. Iman here, I've spent so much money with him over the years. It was the first course that I ever bought was a course from Iman and so learned a lot from him, but all of that added up over time. And I think I'd be a lot further ahead if I just had access to this kind of info back then.
Austin:I wouldn't have had to pay for the courses. I could have just figured things out much more cheaply. And so this thirty day first sale challenge, it's not a piece of rubbish freebie. I was very very particular with that. I don't just want it to be this BS lead magnet that has no substance, that has no ability to actually deliver what is promised and it's step by step video guides and templates, copy and paste with literally everything and it's free.
Austin:Just to reiterate, it's free. And my core belief was that if I had this four years ago, if someone had come to me four years prior when I was just starting out with online business and said here is this free course, I could have just used that money on testing to find a winner, so I had my own ecommerce store. I would have been able to do that so much more quickly if I didn't have to spend money on all those courses. And look I learned a lot from other business models, don't get me wrong, agency, traditional drop shipping, affiliate marketing. Yeah, running an in person video business, trying to sell ad services, not just creative services with an agency, which is a whole different ballgame.
Austin:I learned a lot from all these business models. It wasn't like I didn't get value from them or make money from them, but e commerce and building customer first brands gave me the lifestyle that I wanted. I wanted the three freedoms without being glued to my laptop every day. I didn't just want financial freedom, I wanted financial freedom, time freedom and location freedom and e commerce gave me that and that's what I was looking for. And so why have I created the first sale challenge?
Austin:Why did I spend time creating this? Because if I'm so successful with e commerce and making money, got these trophies. If I've got all this, why did I go through the effort of making this? Well, it's because partly I wanna pay it forward. I wanna help people and send that elevator back down because there was few key people at the start of my journey that if I never found them, I wouldn't be where I am today.
Austin:And so I would love to be that person for someone else. I would love to be the person that started their online business journey that gave them the self belief that they could do it, that gave them the recipe and what they'd learned so that they didn't have to make the same mistakes. And looking at our student results like it feels really cool to say that I can say that I've been that person for some people based on the messages that I receive and the testimonials that we get even from the free course. And so I'm just giving you the start that I wish I had and giving you the easy recipe to follow. I pride myself on being able to synthesize information, to break it down and keep it extremely simple, so that anybody regardless of experience, expertise, if you've done this before, if you've not done this before, whatever, you know how to follow it and it's simple and it's easy.
Austin:That's what I wanted and I pride myself on that. And so just know that this is not a collection of rubbish. It's not just me slapping all these videos together and hoping that it works. No, it's crafted so specifically. Crafted, little Easter egg, that was the agency from before.
Austin:It all makes sense, comes full circle. And also I know that if you get your first sale, you're gonna keep going, you believe in yourself, and you'll see how ecom can give you all the freedom that you've dreamed of. Let me just quickly hop in here and show you the first sale challenge. This is where you get when you actually join. So if we go in, there are step by step videos broken down into thirty days.
Austin:You spend about an hour a day and that'll get you through everything, not just watching the videos, but actually applying it. It may be a little bit more if you're not particularly tech savvy but it is what it is. You're gonna learn quickly based on the lessons and this is all high quality stuff. Like again it's not just some rubbish videos. Went to a full on studio recorded all this.
Austin:Know step by step guides, breaking down everything into super easy to understand points. And then when it's time to do walkthroughs, we've actually walked you through step by step how to do the things that we're teaching you. So if we're gonna create your branding, come up with brand names, all that, we're gonna show you how to do that. When it's time to build your Shopify store, we actually walk you through how to do that as well all in here. Step by step templates for everything, all the content, the graphics, how to get images, all that stuff is covered.
Austin:And then also all the way through to actually creating and launching your ad campaigns to get sales. And so no stone is left unturned in this free course, and it's all in here and it works because of all of our students telling us it actually works. Also because I'm an Aussie and Aussies like to tell it how it is, there are three core reasons why I'm also giving this away for free. I'm not gonna beat around the bush, there are other reasons. So number one is to wow you with value straight away so you trust that we actually know what we're on about.
Austin:If I can give you a lot upfront and show you what I know what I'm talking about, you're gonna listen to me long term. You're gonna trust in me when I show you how to do other things. The reason number two is because Shopify, the multi billion dollar company that you use to build your e commerce store with, if you stick with your subscription, you sign up using our link, you go through their free trial and you end up paying them to continue, then we get paid for that. And so I want to give you access to the best information, the lessons, the templates, the community, so that you can follow through and be profitable. Because when you are, you're gonna stick with Shopify and when you stick with Shopify, I get paid.
Austin:So it's a win for everyone. Instead of you having to pay for another course, you can just join it for free, follow what we teach, that actually works, Shopify pays us at the end of the day. They're essentially paying for you to learn which is kind of cool. And the last one is to get your contact details so we can give you a buzz and see if you're interested in our one on one coaching program. We check-in with you.
Austin:Have you started the free thing? Do you like it? Do you want more help? If you don't, no stress, hang up. If you do want more help, then we can do that for you.
Austin:So those are the three reasons and now you know. And to wrap up, ecom has changed my life. It's given me complete freedom, not just financial freedom, but time and location freedom as well. And I hope it can for you too. Godspeed.
Austin:Good luck on your journey with e comm. I'm gonna keep making videos where I just tell it how it is, break down things step by step, give you information, access to things for free, so I can help you out because that's what I'm on YouTube to do. And so hopefully you've enjoyed this. If you are interested in joining the first sale challenge, here's that pitch that I told you about at the start of the video. It's free.
Austin:You can click the link in the bio. You can go in there and click on that and you can sign up for free. Get access to all of the course material that I just walked you through that has allowed me to achieve these incredible results and taken me on this absolute roller coaster of a journey up until this point. Hope you've enjoyed this video and I'll see you in the next one.