How I Went From $0 to $110 Million in 6 Years

My name is Micaiah and this is my story on how I went from zero to $110 million at the age of 31. I grew up as a shy kid, living in poverty from a broken home. I didn't have rich parents, connections, or even good grades. And yet somehow, despite all of that, I am now retired at 33. I'm living my dream life. I have multiple homes around the world. I drive my dream car. Me and my wife go on these incredible vacations whenever we want. So what I want to do is walk you through my journey and answer the big question. How did a kid with nothing... achieve everything he ever dreamed of and how can you do it too? So my story starts with me being born to hippie parents in a small town in New York called Ithaca. And one of the major events that would shape my life happened when I was just four. My parents got divorced and my mom actually declared bankruptcy. And so early on I would spend my time living with my mom and then my dad. My mom was a barista at a coffee shop and we didn't have money for like babysitters or daycare or anything like that. So I would literally just sleep in the back of the coffee shop while my mom worked. And then when I was with my dad, one of my early formative memories was we'd go to the soup kitchen for food. We didn't have enough money for food. And I just remember feeling this immense sense of shame every time we went there. It felt like we were just getting this handout, like we weren't good enough to, you know. earn our own money, make our own food. This early feeling of, you know, not feeling enough, not feeling worthy is something that would actually stick with me. most of my life and really drive me to where I ended up. Now eventually my mom moved from New York to South Carolina and I went down to live with her. And of course because we didn't have any money, we didn't live in the best neighborhood, we basically lived in what I would call a swamp. South Carolina is on the coast and so you have beautiful nice beaches but just a little bit in you have swampland, marshland, and that's where our home was. So it wasn't very nice. But just like a 10-15 minute drive away you could actually get to the beach. And this was my first time really encountering what I would consider wealthy people. I would go there and I would see these like four-story houses that had the balcony overlooking the ocean and multiple cars out front and it really sort of painted this picture of like okay here's where we are in our sort of like small cramped house in a swamp and here's how other people live. A lot of success stories start by people saying oh I saw that house I saw this amazing mansion or I saw this lifestyle and I knew that was gonna be me one day. That's not the reaction I had. I saw those people and I was like wow, like they live on a different stratosphere. There's clearly like different classes, different types of people, and I'm just not one of them. And I never actually thought that I would get there. You know, to me, dreaming that I could one day achieve what I've achieved now or, you know, have that home on the beach or anything is about as realistic as dreaming that one day I'd wake up as the prime minister of China. It just like wasn't even... impossible for me to think that thought and dream those dreams at that young age. And it really would take me many, many years to even start to believe that I could achieve more than I was born into. Now, as I grew up, school was always rough for me. One, because I just hated class. I hated going to class. I hated doing the homework. I hated the tests. But also, we moved around a lot. You see, as my mom started to build skills and earn a little bit more income, basically every year or two, we would move to a new home. We were moving from like the worst and cheapest homes to like slightly, slightly nicer homes. But as a result of moving around so often and being a shy kid, I didn't really have a lot of friends. And so my escape became video games. And I didn't realize it then, but this obsession actually with technology and computers would one day lead to so much success in my life. You know, I think early on, these small things that happen in your life, it's really hard to see the domino effect 10 years, 20 years out. But this was one of those things. And as a result, I started to dream maybe a little bit more than just, you know, what I was born into. I said, wow, it would be amazing if I could get a degree in... computer science, actually learn programming, maybe I'll get a job at like a company on the East Coast and I'll make $60,000 a year. For me, oh, that would be the dream back then. I'll have all my bills paid, I won't have massive credit card debt, maybe I can go on like a vacation or two a year. Now as I grew up a little bit more, I realized I could actually try to make money online. And the reason for this was not because I was some like teenage entrepreneur or a whiz kid, it was because I was addicted to an online game called RuneScape. And what I'd noticed is that in the game RuneScape, you could make gold and you could sell this gold on ebay people were starting to talk about it because i was so addicted to games i really wanted a new gaming pc and that was going to cost like a thousand dollars and i was like it's still going to take me forever to make enough for this gaming pc so i started just like thinking how could I speed this up? How could I do this better? And I came across this program that basically allowed you to program RuneScape bots. So the bots would actually play the game for you. So I could actually just go hang out with my friends and all day the bot would go around, mine the gold, store it. And at the end of the day, I might have a million, two million gold. Now I just needed to set up my eBay account. Unfortunately, I was 12 years old and you needed to be 18 years old to set up an eBay account or PayPal or anything like that. But... As any good entrepreneur will tell you, sometimes you have to bend the rules a little bit. So I just lied. I actually set up this eBay account, set up my PayPal account and started my gold selling operation. I still literally have this eBay account today. And to everyone's surprise, including my parents, it actually worked. I was able to make basically that full thousand dollars in like a week and a half. Now, sadly, RuneScape did ban me because it was clear that I was just botting this game, but I was as happy as could be. And I was able to buy. my dream spec PC. I was the first person that I knew that I'd ever heard of that had even an LCD monitor. We were still on those big fat CRTs. But that experience also taught me one of the most valuable lessons of my life. You see, I had this idea that I could do something and without manual labor, without slaving my butt off, I just turned that idea into money. It was like this modern alchemy to me where I could literally just come up with an idea, implement it, and get money and that would become one of the driving forces of my life. Now, as luck would have it, just a month after I graduated high school, a book came out that would change my life forever. It was called The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. And I don't know how or why I stumbled upon it, but it changed my life for three very specific reasons. First, it gave me a sense and desire for adventure. You know, Tim had all these incredible stories, kickboxing in China and winning the championship or tango dancing in Argentina. You know, he had lived this like amazing, incredible life. He had lived this life that I had never even dreamed of. And I was like, man, when I grow up, I just want to be Tim Ferriss. Like his life sounds amazing. Second, I became obsessed with the idea of passive income. At the time, I had just started a job selling cameras at the local Circuit City for $7.25 an hour minimum wage. It sucked. I had to work all day and I could barely make enough money to like buy myself dinner at the end of the day. And so Tim unlocked this idea that, man, I could make money and not even lift a finger. Passive income is the dream. And I could travel and do all these amazing things. And the third thing it really did for me, I started to believe in a bigger vision for my life. Tim Ferriss just like unlocked something deep inside me that I hadn't allowed myself to dream before. I started to believe I really could achieve anything. And as I started to believe this, it kind of felt like this, I had been living in this box that was sort of lifted off my head. And for the first time, I started to look around and see this like infinite horizon of possibility. And so when I entered college, I didn't actually commit myself to, you know, getting good grades or anything like that. I just became obsessed with two things, starting a business that could make passive income and learning the skills that I could use to level up my life. So I didn't party, I didn't drink, I didn't hang out with tons of friends. You would literally find me in my dorm, basically 24-7, either reading a book on how to level up, how to learn sales, how to learn marketing, how to learn self-confidence, or getting my first business off the ground. Now, the first business didn't go very far. It was just an info product of me selling DVDs of myself teaching self-defense online, if you can believe that. But it did, you know, teach me a lot about business. And I started to see that, yeah, just like, you know, in middle school, when I had had that idea and turned it to money, I filmed these DVDs, had that idea and was able to sell them online and again, start making money. So after college, I ended up shutting that business down and starting a new business because I'd really fell in love with the idea of marketing. I started a marketing company that was really designed to help large corporations get more clients. it was sort of like affiliate marketing, but we were doing more specific deals where we would actually really hand off a very warmed up lead. And it was my job to go find those leads and my payout for a lead. varied from $5 on the low end up to like $300 depending on how qualified the lead was, how serious they were about buying and so on. And I would just run these websites, try to funnel traffic to them. And this was my first sort of taste of success. You know, this started really working and I started to live that Tim Ferriss life. You know, I spent a couple of weeks in China. I spent two months in Thailand. I spent a month in Japan and I would literally just go on these crazy adventures all day, go home at night. open my laptop, sit on my bed and just, you know, sort of write the emails, catch up on work, things like that. It was so cool. I felt like I'd finally unlocked the secret to life. And it was like a video game all over again. Like it was so fun and energetic. And my favorite thing to do at that time was to open up my earnings dashboard. So I had this dashboard that had a live update to the minute. on how much money I had made that day. It was always like an adrenaline jolt. And I would say, oh, $50 already, it's only 11 a.m., 70 bucks. Some days it would go up to $1,000 a day. And then one day I was refreshing and it said zero. And I refreshed again, zero. And by the afternoon, zero. And I knew something was horribly wrong. But when I got home, it was worse than I could have ever imagined. See, my businesses mostly relied on ranking for different keywords. I had literally ranked for thousands of keywords on Google across all my different websites. And it wasn't because I was doing illegal or shady things at the time. It was just I was using different tactics to rank for these websites and Google decided they didn't like that. So they just banned them. I had no way to complain, no one to contact. My success in my business was just wiped out overnight while I was extremely mad at the time. It taught me two extremely valuable lessons in business. The first was never build a business that has a single point of failure. You see, my entire business just relied on Google search rankings. And as soon as Google took that away, I actually didn't have a business. And business is just too unpredictable, too risky to have that where you're just one step away from ruin. The other thing it taught me was passive income, which is what I thought I had, is not a way to support a lifestyle. Yes, you can live off passive income for a certain amount of time, but at some point, competitors will come in, the rules of the game will change, and your passive income can go away. And when it goes away, it often takes very long to build a backup. And in the meantime, you have no income, therefore you really have no life. Like I couldn't do anything. I was just flat out broke. Now, thankfully around this time, I'd also stumbled on a different way to build wealth. It was called FIRE. The FIRE movement stands for Financial Independence Retire Early. And the idea was rather than trying to build this like basic passive income stream that would allow you to just live off that earnings forever, you wanted to build essentially a money machine, an investment portfolio that prints money for you 24 seven while you do zero hours of work. And I realized that this was actually what I was missing. I didn't want passive income. I wanted just income without working. And so right then I committed not to try to build another passive income business. I wanted to build a business that could actually build a large nest egg for myself that I could invest and then live off of. forever. And as I studied different ways to do this, I saw this really incredible thing happening in SF. You know, these young kids had just sold Instagram for a billion dollars. Snapchat had just turned down four billion dollars from Facebook. And then WhatsApp got bought for 16 billion dollars by Facebook. And I was like, what the heck am I doing over here building my little agency? I should be building a SaaS business. That is how I can actually build something that I can sell, make enough money. to build that nest egg and hit the fire goal of financial independence, retire early. So I literally just packed up all my stuff and moved out to San Francisco. I was like, that's where the magic is happening. I just need to be in this environment. And when I got there, I wrote out. all of my goals. This is how much money I want to be making. These are the friends that I want to have. These are the apartments that I want to live in. These are the cars I want to drive. I figured out how much all it would cost and I came up with a number at the time that I thought was five million dollars. I was like if I can make five million bucks, six percent of that year is three hundred thousand dollars. I'll be set for life. I started looking at like what business can I build? I looked at food delivery. I looked at like software for farms and nursing homes. I looked at e-commerce businesses. I looked at all these different style businesses and ultimately came up with the idea. I want to build software for car dealerships. And the reason being was simple. Car dealerships are really old, but they sell more than a trillion dollars of cars every year. So I figured if I build something in that space, it shouldn't be that hard to get to $5 million. Like it's such a massive market. And so as I was going through these ideas, my best friend and ultimately someone who became my first advisor in the business, his name was Ralph, said, listen, man, you've got to get a co-founder if you want to take this seriously. So I started looking for a co-founder, ultimately settled on a friend of mine. His name was Marty. And together we started this company that we'd eventually call Prodigy. The idea early on was pretty simple. Car dealerships sell a ton of cars and they run all these ads to find people to buy cars, but they're doing it blindly. So what if we could build software that helps them run ads more effectively? I think there's something in there. I think they'd pay us some good money. So we went all in on this idea. We both had about $45,000 saved up, which in San Francisco doesn't get you very far, but we were committed to making this work. And thankfully, because we didn't have enough time or money to actually build the full platform and then try to sell it, we started going out to dealerships and selling it before we ever built a thing. And that was so valuable because no one bought it. No one wanted what we were building. There were other solutions in the market that we had just completely ignored because we were bad at this and we didn't realize that like, yeah, the dealerships pay a lot of money for advertising, but they're generally already kind of happy with what they're doing. They don't think that there's a massive problem. So we had basically started this company that no one wanted. Okay, they don't want to buy that, but it's still a big market. They must want something. So we went back to the dealerships and we said, hey, like if you could wave a magic wand and change anything in your business, what would it be? And this theme started to emerge where they were saying like, well, what if people could just buy their cars online? You know, I have all these sales staff and finance managers and so on. It'd be nice if customers could just buy the cars online. It would cut my costs down. Customers would be happier. So we went out and started selling again this idea. We can help you sell cars online. We showed them screenshots. We didn't build anything. Lo and behold, we actually ended up getting 22 dealerships to pay us roughly $1,000 a month for this software. We started spending the team. We actually raised a million dollars. We had these 22 customers paying us $1,000 a month. life was great and then it wasn't. As is typical in most success stories, we hit another massive roadblock. All of our customers ended up canceling and so we went from $22,000 a month in revenue to zero. basically overnight. With that crushing blow, I actually had to go in and lay off most of the team and start from scratch. But we did keep pushing forward. You know, I had this very clear vision of what I came to San Francisco to do. And over time, eventually things started to actually click. We started selling more software, fixing the issues that made customers leave and started building a real business. But it wasn't an easy journey. I mean, some days were so soul crushingly hard. I just wanted to quit. We had so many ups and downs, you know, competitors copying our product. A key employee once literally left in the middle of me trying to raise capital to start a competing company to me and I had to go explain that to my investors. It was so often just an absolute nightmare. Still, one of my worst moments of building the company was one week we were down to just three weeks left in cash and I went out on a roadshow trying to get investors and managed to pull off the miracle. I signed a $1.1 million contract for an investor to invest in our company. The next day I went to the office, told everybody, hey, Good news, your paychecks are secured. Everything's good. We went out and we celebrated and that was a Friday. And then Monday, the investor called me and said, you know what? Actually, we changed our mind. We're going to void the contract. We're not investing. And I just remember sitting on my couch in that moment, just crying, being like, what am I doing? How do I tell the team? whose paychecks I just promised were secure, that now we have like two and a half excess of cash. One of the things that kept me going was my wife helped me put up these pictures of all the things we were working for. Above our bed we had these photos of multiple homes around the world, vacations that we would go on. I even had my dream car, my white Porsche 911 up there and it was literally the first thing I would see when I woke up and the last thing I would see before I went to bed and so it became sort of this like reminder of why all the pain was going to be worth it one day. Now eventually things started clicking and we grew that business from just an idea that me and Marty had to a nationally recognized business that had deals with some of the largest dealership groups in the country, as well as OEMs like Toyota, Lexus, Kia, Mitsubishi, Subaru. And we were processing about a billion dollars a quarter in car sales. So we started to build a real business here. And around that time. Upstart, a publicly traded fintech company, actually came to us and said, hey, we'd be interested in buying you. And I can still remember so vividly the moment that we got that offer in writing for $110 million for our business. I showed my wife and she just burst into tears crying with joy because we knew that at that moment that we would get all those things on the wall. Honestly, when I look back on like that shy poor kid that I was growing up who didn't believe in himself, didn't believe he could achieve anything, it's still so hard for me to believe. where I am today. And if you're in that place where you're not happy with your life and you want to make a change, I also just filmed a video on how to completely reinvent yourself in 30 days. I'll put the link over here, so just click that and I'll see you in that video.

Watch this next: https://youtu.be/y5ks4FhoGfQ

If you're new here my name's Michia (Muh-ky-uh). I'm a serial entrepreneur and investor. Since selling my last startup for 9 figures, I'm investing my own money into the next wave of founders at my VC firm, L7V. 

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