I was a marketer who became an influencer.

Growing up

A family of employees

Everyone I grew up around worked for someone else. The advice was always the same: go to school, get a good job, retire.

Building something of my own wasn't part of what I was raised to believe was possible. When I talked about it, people smiled and told me to have a backup plan.

20 years · U.S. Navy

I wanted to be the best at something

I joined the Navy at 18 and set out to be the best at something. I became one of the top-ranked IT specialists at one of the largest naval telecommunication stations in the world, running network security for more than 200 fleet units and writing programs that saved the command thousands of hours a month.

That work took me to the Pentagon, the Office of the Secretary of the Navy and the White House. I served twenty years and retired as a Chief Petty Officer. I loved the Navy, and it taught me the habit that changed everything later: when I want to get good at something, I read every book I can find.

Age 28 · a night shift

Seeing it with my own eyes

On a night shift, a colleague showed me a video about building a business by telling a few people, who told a few more. I thought it was too good to be true. A year later, he had done exactly what the video said, and I knew I could outwork him.

I'm not someone who dips a toe in. I thought about it for a week, then went all in on learning business. I quickly found I hated the cold calling and the pitching to friends and family. With an IT brain, I figured there had to be a better way.

Eight years · on the side

Two hours of sleep

So I did what had worked in the Navy: I read. Mike Dillard first, because he had hated cold calling too. Then Gary Halbert, John Carlton, Jim Edwards and marketing books going back to the 1800s. I copied every Gary Halbert letter out by hand.

I bought course after course, started company after company, and kept finding what I didn't know yet. All of it fit around my duty days, on about two hours of sleep a night, and it took eight years before anything worked. The slow way is expensive. Most creators shouldn't have to pay for it.

Deployed · Bahrain

The first win came from free content

I found a small niche nobody was fighting over: growing mushrooms. With no money for ads, I built an audience the way creators do, with free content: articles, a YouTube channel and Facebook posts.

The audience came first, then the first affiliate sales. Because I owned the email list, I could launch a product of my own: I wrote my first sales letter and built my first funnel. That company was Curative Mushrooms. I was deployed to Bahrain when it took off, and I still remember watching the sales come in, one every hour.

Within a couple of years

One post could flood the warehouse

The company grew into a grow course, a book and my own products. My email list passed 300,000 people. I had more than 100,000 followers on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, millions of views on YouTube, and a podcast where well-known guests came on to talk mushrooms. One post or one email could fill the warehouse with orders.

We even started helping other influencers make money from their audiences, because they knew how to make content and didn't know how to sell. The funnels I built went on to earn me the ClickFunnels Two Comma Club award.

Then · a few months

Every platform switched me off

Then, within a few months, it was gone. My email provider shut me off and Gmail sent the rest to spam. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube closed my accounts, and Google stopped showing the website. I was in a niche the platforms had decided was high-risk, and no amount of fighting won it back.

About 20,000 people on my email list made it through. I carry that lesson into everything now: build on a relationship you own, and never let one platform hold the whole business.

Thailand · a reset

An employee in my own company

I moved to Thailand for a while to get away from everything and think. Looking back, the part I had liked least was running the company. At its biggest I had around 30 contractors: email, customer service, ads, video editors, social media managers, web developers. I was in meetings all week, putting out fires. I had become an employee in my own company.

What I loved, hands down, was the marketing. Marketing is how you bring your story to the world, and done right, people will pay you to tell it. When AI arrived, I started building a team of AI agents to run my own company, so I could get back to that work.

Now

Why Audience Upside exists

I heard Gary Vee make the case that as AI takes over more of the work, real people with real personalities become the gold standard. I believe that. And I know the gap from the inside: creators can make content and grow a following, and still have 100,000 followers and no income from them.

The help on offer is often a growth operator who found you through cold outreach and wants a share of your revenue for life, before anyone knows what is worth building. I'm a real marketer, a real influencer and a real business owner, and I wanted to build something better.

So keep making the content you know how to make, and leave the marketing to Audience Upside. It doesn't just advise you and leave you to it: it reads your audience every week and drafts the work with you, and you approve what goes out. The audit is free, and Upside Operator is a flat subscription. I'm my own customer, too. I use the same app I'm asking you to use.