In this blog, we’ll go over our interview with The Art of Purpose on Twitter and analyze how he created his brand, released his products, reached success as an entrepreneur, and much more. Just for background, he has amassed over 300k followers on Twitter and his following only continues to grow.
He started a community called Masterclass 24/7 that has reached nearly 500 members and has done over 1.2 million in sales with his products on his Gumroad store. He gave such quality insights on his experience with business that this article is worth every second of the 3-minute read. Some of the pointers he gives throughout his answers are extremely valuable, actionable pieces of advice, so let’s get into it.
First, we will go through his story, what advice he gave throughout his answers, and how he made it to where he is today, and wrap up at the end with his best advice. He started his business and brand on Twitter entirely because of covid, not because he was thinking of starting a business or because he had a pool of ideas. Sometimes it just falls into place depending on what you’re good at, and he found that he was great at building an audience on Twitter.
See, he was a public school teacher and a band coach before covid. When covid hit he could no longer run his classroom and therefore had no income from his main job. He said he had two options:
- Play video games and do nothing with his life
- Get up and do something about his situation
In his situation, he had the ability to build a brand on Twitter, so that’s what he did. As he grew such a large following in such little time, he started to get requests from his followers asking him to build a Twitter growth guide or some form of product to help them grow on Twitter. This is when he created his first product.
One of his biggest tips he said throughout the whole interview was to work on your network. Without his network of high-value individuals, he would have never achieved what he did. Building a network doesn’t come from actually networking. The best way to actually network is to provide some type of value to individuals you want to build a network with. Most people aren’t going to give up their time to talk to you and give you advice for nothing in return, so remember that. Back to his story:
Once he launched his product and it sold about $2,000 in a week, he mentioned to a few people that it had been doing well. One of the people in his network heard it was doing well and asked if it had hit 10k yet.
This was a turning point for him, and something worth thinking about: This person was half his age and had 5x the expectations he did. That put in perspective his scale of success and how his own belief was holding him back. When you think you’re doing good in business, someone will always humble you. He had been so humbled and his expectations had changed so much, that he took the product down and worked on relaunching it from a different position. With different positioning of his brand, the product, and how he sold it, he was able to achieve a much better launch and actually reached that 10k mark in a week. To show the scale, to this day that same product has done over 200k in sales. Check that product out here:
All the time in business, it isn’t about what you’re doing (Almost everything has been proven to work), it’s how you’re doing it. This is a lesson he learned in this process and a lesson that can push you from a beginner entrepreneur to a million-dollar entrepreneur. Just look at how he went from doing $2,000 with a product, to doing over $200,000 with the same product.
The second question we asked him was: Why wouldn’t you go through with the other idea you had for a company? In his case, he didn’t have a second company! He had an opportunity and built the right circle of people around him in order to generate his success as an entrepreneur. One of his greatest pieces of advice he gave during this response: The biggest thing that defines success is sticking to what you say you’ll do and don’t stop working towards it until you’ve succeeded. When he thought of creating a Twitter brand, He did. When he had the opportunity to sell a product, he did. When he could sell the product more, he did. When he wanted to create a community, he did.
Entrepreneurship usually isn’t about getting lucky or having the right idea (There are those cases once in a blue moon), it’s often about how hard you work for something and how long you’ll stick with it. If you stick to doing one thing for long enough and work hard enough every day you cannot possibly fail.
Next, we asked him if he thinks any current business models are over-rated or overhyped. Most of the time, if a business model is hyped up, it’s probably because it can make money. Although he said this, he also mentioned some of his thoughts about AI. He says he sees too many people use AI to get out of hard work instead of doing it the hard way and actually putting the work in. AI often can get good results, but the problem is that it leaves you checked out and you don’t do the work. Especially in the beginning. You learn the most about entrepreneurship and business by actually trying to build a business, close clients, or sell products.
He used a perfect example of how driving and directions used to be, versus how they are now. When directions used to be given, you’d be told to turn at the gas station, or turn after the brown and white fence, etc. Until you get to your destination. Nowadays, you just plug in the place on your phone and you brainlessly follow the blue line until you reach where you want to go.
His problem with AI isn’t that it’s overrated or overhyped. It can definitely help you speed things up and get tedious tasks done quicker. The problem is that it makes it really hard to actually use your brain and learn the most about business when you’re starting your entrepreneurship journey. If you ask any successful entrepreneur about their experience starting out, they will tell you the most they learned was when they struggled with the hard work in the beginning.
All in all, the biggest takeaways from his experience are doing the hard work, networking with the right people, having high expectations, and doing what you say you’ll do. With this advice, you can take action today to build a business and a network of people to reach your first million or more as an entrepreneur.
