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What’s your backstory?
I’m an international personal branding and storytelling coach for entrepreneurs and I’m on a mission to help people find their purpose, share their message and make the world a better place.
As a kid I was always an outsider, even though I was socially extroverted I never felt like I belonged anywhere. I had this weird desire to always become more, achieve more and experience more.
I went on to turn down job titles and promotions, dropped out of business university and started from zero, built my own business through social media and that’s where I made my first $100,000 following my passion and sharing my message.
I’ve so far helped 1000’s of impact-driven entrepreneurs and business owners scale ethically using social media. That’s when I realised all you need is to master ONE thing and find a problem you can solve within that industry.
Can you tell me the story of your prior successes, challenges, and major responsibilities?
I remember the morning when my wife woke me up, 6 am and she told me she was pregnant. That we were going to be parents.
My entire life stopped. My world shooked. And my perspective on life has never been the save again since then.
I had quit my job, dropped out of university and started my business helping local businesses with social media just months earlier.
At this point we were barely getting by. I was making $400/month and my wife had to pay rent, bills, food and everyday life essentials.
Me? I was reinvesting my $400 every month into personal development, books, courses and things of that nature. I was dead-serious of becoming successful and I had two things driving me.
Call me crazy but even at the times where we couldn’t afford food or paying the rent I still borrowed money from my two younger brothers to invest in a mentor and business coach to get me on the right path.
Basically, two things drove me:
I wanted freedom through making my passion a living. Which was social media marketing.
Second, I wanted my life to have an impact over others and help make the world a better place.
Anyways. Long story short: I ended going from making $400 to hitting my first 1k/month to 10k/month and 10k/week. The following 12 months I ended up making over $100,000 using social media.
In this article, I want to share why your story matters and better yet, the 3 secrets that helped me go from broke and almost homeless with a pregnant wife to making over 6 figures online, helping 1000’s of entrepreneurs start & scale their online business around their passion and overall together with an amazing community make the world a better place.
Which was the goal since day 1.
Can you tell me about a time when you almost gave up, how you felt about that, and what you did instead of giving up?
I remember it so clearly…
My wife walked up to me as I was working on clients social media marketing campaigns.
I can still remember the feeling that went through my body when she told me the following:
“That’s it, Gusten.”
“We either have to move to my parents house or you need to go back to a job.”
That night I couldn’t sleep. At all.
I had anxiety. I was depressed. I had lost my hope.
For a moment I thought about giving up…
I called a local place where I knew they needed an employee.
It was one of those jobs I had swore to never work at. For some reason I felt like that was the step back to square 1.
The step that would make all doubters and haters right.
I couldn’t imagine the feeling of being the “talker” and not a “doer”.
So I decided to do something about it.
I started going all in on social media, providing value and becoming the expert in the industry.
Instead of 8h workdays at a job I hated I went 8h youtubing videos about social media marketing.
I remember signing my first $1,000/month client a couple of weeks later.
At that moment I knew my life would never be the same.
Instead of giving up and going back to a 9-5 I had found a way to turn something I was truly passionate about into a business.
From now on it was just doing the same thing over and over again to get more clients.
I scaled from 1k/month to 10k/month and 20k/month and so on.
Here’s the 3 secrets how you can do the same thing and turn your passion into a business using social media:
- Write down all the things you’re really good at. But only if it’s something you really love doing. Pick a niche. Look at the marketplace and ask yourself what pain-points or problems people have within your niche. Now find a solution to those problems and you have a business around your passion.
- Use social media to provide valuable content, sharing your story and documenting your journey in order to get clients. The buyers process any customer has to go through is they have to know you, like you and trust you in order to buy from you.
- Secret #3 is what I call the offer creation formula. People don’t buy products or services, but when you create an irresistible offer that solves very specific problems and covers pain-points they don’t want to deal with, now you have a winner.
Remember: People buy when perceived value exceeds price. Don’t compete on price, but on value.
I’ve learned so much on this journey so far, but most of all what I want to share is that no matter who’s supporting you or not, make sure you never quit.
Make sure you focus on your future, on what you love doing and never care what other people think about you in the process.
How do you do this? You remember your why. Your purpose. The goal, which hopefully in a way or another is to make the world a better place. Then everything else becomes irrelevant.
If you could travel back in time to before you started, what 3 tips would you give yourself and why?
Great question!
- Always follow your passion before the money
This was the single reason I had the patience to hustle for 9 months studying, reading books, watching how-to videos on youtube and sacrificing everything else, giving up my free-time for my vision, because I loved what I was doing.
- Failure is a good thing
I’ve never learned as much as when going through tough times. There are so many lessons in “failure” which is why I barely want to call it failures. If you want to succeed, in anything in life, just go out there, try things and never be afraid to fail 90% of the times to succeed 10% of the time. As time goes on, you’ll get better and better and as long as you’re hungry for growth you’ll always find a way at last.
- Get a mentor
Find someone who’s done what you’re trying to do, model after him and implement what he’s teaching you. By doing that, you can cut the learning curve and get results up to 10X faster than if you had to do it all by yourself. Knowledge and mentors are the only “shortcuts” to success.
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