26yo digital degenerate.

[Chocolope]

Love your story and transparency.

It's these kind of threads that make this forum one of the best.

 

[mindeswx]

It has been a while
​

Thank's to everyone for the support! Drug-free ever since and moving forward.
You probably thought that I got locked up or sent to rehab already, but fortunately, everything is going well, and let's get straight to the point or I might get carried away..

Stuff that everyone is interested in -

Live broadcasts - 500$/month
It's not a whole lot and it takes away a few days of the week, but since it's quarantine, and we are all locked it's a great way to go on a trip and spend some time watching basketball.


Facebook group - 4.7k
Etsy banned 10k+ accounts I was using to send DMs, and somehow strengthened their security, tried sending images instead of text (horrible ROI), shortened/cloaked links - they are still getting banned.
I have only pinned a video of my script for etsy at the top, and sold a few copies of it ever since, that's the only monetization for now.
Assigned a couple of active members 'moderators' rights, and they are keeping the group clean, it's growing very slowly at the moment, and just waiting there to be grown, but I really like the idea, and I'm sure I will come back to it.




Shopify designs shop -
It was bringing in 30$/day~ at it's peak, then it got banned due to multiple copyright complains, as expected. Honestly not getting back into it ( at least not in a BH way)
Lessons learned from it - It's way way harded to grow a facebook group where you just share free designs.



4G proxies - 3100$/m~
Spent a lot of time creating an Instagram scraping setup, basically, something like a back connect proxy where IP changes on each request, but instead our backed monitors if a modem is able to scrape and only redirects client requests through those modems which can scrape, and changes IPs on modems that can't scrape. It wasn't a cost-effective thing to do, but that's what I do - keep the client happy always. And as someone in the thread has asked "how do you get proxy clients" - all of them are our former customers.

Started to build a website for it, you can check out my awesome wordpress skills here - https://www.4gproxy.net/ and shame me in the comments if it's not finished within a week of this post. (please remove or notify me if it's against the forum rules)




New project(s?)
I really want to keep myself busy with work, because I know myself well enough - if I get too much free time I will get lazy and depressed.

While scraping etsy for my facebook growth project I have noticed these "Spotify glass art" posters or whatever you'd call them
if you have visited instagram in the past half-year there's a high chance you've already seen these in one shape or form-


People are basically using their "cricut" or "sillhouete" cutting machines (look it up) to cut out letters, printing a photo, sticking it on the (acrylic)glass and selling it for 20-50$+
The buyer can choose his song and a photo.
Always being an online hustler I really wanted to try something "real", something you can touch, pack into a box, put a sticker on it and send it out.
I understand that it might seem like a step back from being a digital nomad, but I really want and need to get my ass up from the monitor sometimes.

I'm not interested in growing this as a business, but I'm trying to see the bigger picture, the idea is to learn a formula how to create profitable micro-businesses quick, that's a term I just made up but I hope that you get the idea.
When there's the next 'fidget spinner', a need for medical masks, the black toothpaste, or whatever it's going to be, I want to know how to get up and running in days.


Here's how far I got with it so far ( BH strategy included)
Creating websites is what I hate the most, lack of creativity, chasing perfection, and lack of experience is a recipe for a disaster.
Opening up several similar pages and copying their designs, few weeks and voila, it's alive! - octogift.com
Lessons learned - don't translate the whole Shopify, there are translations already shared for most languages for free.

Gathered shops that sold this thing on etsy and scraped their "reviews" section for images and text, took one old instagram account, removed all posts, and shoved 600+ posts to good 'ol Jarvee , it should be good for a while, here's how it looks - https://www.instagram.com/octogift_official/
Posting using local hashtags and locations, posts engagement is basically dead, but that's okay as we are only using it for social proof, more about that later.

Time to get some clients

​

This attempt was a complete failure, so I'll keep it short, got old Facebook accounts, warmed them up, started sharing to 30~ groups daily - basically nothing, nada, just a couple lurkers asking stuff but not purchasing, as this is pretty damn BH and hard to scale (facebook changing policies one day/banning accounts etc.) decided to just leave it aside.

Over the years I have spent quite a bit of money on paid advertising, see how I said spent and not earned?
This was no exception, running Facebook ads got me exactly 0 purchases after 200$+ spent maybe it will work after the pixel is warmed up better, maybe I just suck at it who knows. FB/google ads to me seem like the most sustainable/straightforward way of advertising so I will have to learn it sooner or later, but for now, let's move on to what works.

The money machine
This product is more like a gift, something cool people would be willing to share so I decided to try influencer marketing.
Just gathered a list of all the countries largets instagram accounts, made a script to scrape their followers to a database, it's constantly scraping.
Another part of the script is taking accounts with 10k+ followers and decent engagement and sending them a DM from out main instagram account that has good social proof numbers, message is something like this -

" Hey, would you be interested in a gift in exchange for your honest opinion? You can check the awesome products we make on our @ and if you're up for it just go to our page and place the order, as usual, just use the discount code - [victimsUsername] and you'll get it for free!"

At the same time script goes to Shopify and creates a one-time discount code with the client's Instagram handle. It looks much less like an automated message because of the personalized discount code, and about 3/10 people agree to collaborate.

Each evening I'm checking the orders manually, creating the images using a photoshop template, and sending them over to the printing company.
It took time and effort to find the best printing company as well, their rates vary A LOT, also it depends on the quantity you're ordering. Wanted to rent or even buy the printer for it, but their price starts at around 7K$~ and no one is renting them.

I will update the stats for this after at least one month has passed by, but it's positive as the only expenses were the Shopify plan and a theme.
What am I going to do after I ran out of influencers in our small country? Expand to other countries? Retry to pitch the influencers? Try facebook again? - No frickin idea

Honestly, It already starts bogging me, and there's already this new amazing, shiny product with a 1500% profit margin (it's cheap). I believe it would sell amazingly with fb ads...
I just don't want to jump from one thing to another, so I've told myself - once the glass thingy won't require more than couple hours of my time per week I can move on to the next one.
What would you do? Just grow the numbers on Shopify and sell it on the marketplace? Dump it all together?


Now that became a longer post than expected, but If you reached all the way down here I hope at least you found something useful, not just gibberish.

A few things that improved my work/life -
A frickin' notebook, I can't believe that being a 26yo I haven't used a notebook till now. Being as unorganized as myself isn't easy, I just hoard files on my PC, and once one hard drive fills up, just add another one. I have tried it all, google calendar, asana, mind maps,ClickUp, all sorts of teamwork planners, notes, sticky notes, whiteboards you name it - it just made things worse.
Got myself a "Rocketbook" it's basically a notebook that you can write in, and clean with a cloth and it does hit different, I don't know what it is but it just helps to physically write down your thoughts.

Jazz music, call me old, but I'm tired of listening to rap, DnB, even minimal, or lofi( that shit gets depressing). Tried listening to "lounge music" type of stuff while working, but it's just a little too slow. Jazz music is what does it for me right now, medium tempo, good vibes, and not too distracting.

What type of music works best for you?

 

[arpitagarwal82]

Long story man....
As Mr Johnnie Walker said: "Keep Walking"
You will get there.
May God bless you.

 

[Sweetrevenge]

Wow, you turned great just in a few months. Keep up the hustle

As for the music I listen to when I'm focusing on my to-do list, I really enjoy deep house chill compilation and those sounds on Youtube especially made for studying. They keep me in the focus mode long enough.

Yes, there is something special in writing down what you intend to do. I do the same for my goals and read them regularly or even rewrite them to remind me why do I do all of this.

 

[lucky.sparks]

Love your way of story telling!

Hope to hear interesting updates soon!

It seems I see E5377 modems, a man of culture!

For music - try out whiskey blues on youtube. Love them.

What hardware would you recommend for switch/router to handle modems?

 

[DarrellTreyTrey]

This thread probably saved my life tonight. will bookmark it and read it often. I needed the motivation to get started.

 

[Madjid13013]

Okay I won’t do proxies

 

[akki1212]

Great story brother!

 

[Cactus11]

Hey, i'm his ex wife that he mentioned in this story.
Even worse is to be in the debt? Most of this is just a nice bullshit. If everyone would know the true this wouldn't be the motivational story. First of all this "men" forgot to mention that he has 3 years old boy and he doesn't look after him at all. I'm raising this boy all by myself and my family. That's why he doesn't deserve to be called men. Having your own family and kids is the life goal isn't it? Apparently not for this fucker. This dude have no values nor priorities. Most of this story is just made up bullshit like i told you before. He does not work 24/7 trust me on this one, otherwise he would have way more than he does now. The only thing what he did 24/7 were the drugs. You guys are the sorry people and he is the "king" . He loves to get sympathy from others but he not deserve it.

Moral of the story - do not "make" kids if you dont wanna look after them.

 

[CPANathan]

...What even are you...

You're a beast, keep it up.

 

[azteeg]

dayuum, what a ride. More luck on you bro!
will continue to follow your story

 

[sboganx]

omg

 

[WoyThe2nd]

Great catch, that was probably the biggest downfall, the inability to adapt.
We were selling Shared proxies, where you would connect through our load balancer and your account would use the modem with the least accounts on it.
It seemed so smart, and I was just trying to push it, instead of just renting each modem privately.
There are many things I would(and I will) do differently in business. For example not using Paypal, charging clients more to provide better services, don't just blindly trust people, and most importantly never do it just for money, but try to perfect something and money will come.

@Chaffrey Thank you for the kind words, even If I don't ever succeed, I choose to try.

CHARGE WITH BITCOIN OR CRYPTO. Nothing beats a non-refundable payment option. Less clients? Sure, but they WILL NEVER CHARGEBACK

 

[DeathbyMercy]

Moral of the sorty kids - don't do proxies.

I would think moral of the story is don't do drugs or get endless prostitutes. Clearly there is a pattern here and your failure was/is not proxies.

 

[MilkyBoobs]

This is damn interesting journey. IM is interesting when you meet like minded people share stories.

 

[mindeswx]

You thought I failed didn't you bastards
JK, love you guys
A short update, from my last post there were too many failed projects to to even begin writing, so let's focus on what new and fresh.
Proxies are still going strong, but I think it is no longer my main focus so there won't be any more updates on that.
The main priority at the moment is a GMB automation related project, but that is more like a real business and I don't want to make this look like a sales thread, so nothing about that either .


"What are you going to tell us about then you fucker?!"

There are 50 important "to-do's" waiting to be done , so the only logical coping mechanism my brain is able to come up with - is starting a new "project". That's a project in quotes for a reason, read and you will find out why.

Recently while lurking BHW a thread named something like 'Youtube shorts journey" caught my attention, because a long time ago I also had stable income from youtube videos so it still has that special place in my heart.

Hastily skipping through the journeys pages I was baffled by the authors achievements, millions and millions of views ( not earnings of course, but that's we care about - the ego feeding bragging rights of a multi-million views youtube channel owner)

The method itself is pretty basic, no need to buy views, comments, or spend time actually editing a video like a peasant, why do all that when you can just borrow(ᶠᵒʳ ᵖᵒˢˢⁱᵇˡᵉ ᵇᵘᵗ ⁿᵒᵗ ᵍᵘᵃʳᵃⁿᵗᵉᵉᵈ ᶜᵒᵐᵐᵉʳᶜⁱᵃˡ ᵘˢᵉ) it from our gen Z's most beloved platform - TikTok.
Do some ffmpeg spells and you have yourself a real youtube #shorts video!

Sure we could smack some #short watermark to get those sweet clicks to our CPA offer, but that's not our main goal at least for now.

I will try keeping it really transparent, as this will be more like a case study so to speak, so feel free to ask anything.

Tools I will be using:
- Good ol' zennoposter
- 4G proxies, duh.

Plan of attack:
- Scrape content ( sexy women/ borderline NSFW)
- Create the uploader
- Buy google accounts
- Upload the videos..?

Sounds pretty damn boring now that I wrote that down, but let's give it a go and maybe we'll learn something from it!

 

[mindeswx]

Issue #1
TikTok, unlike instagram doesn't allow us to get the newest posts for a hashtag it only displays the content you 'should' like, so how the hell do we keep a steady flow of fresh content?

Let's do some


Let's say we would like to run 1k accounts, uploading 10 shorts per day, that's 10k shorts/day
1 short would consist of 3 TT videos, means we need 30k TT videos/day

A quick google search shows us that you should upload 2-3 videos if you want to become popular, but obviously not all users are going to do that, so let's just pretend that each user is uploading 1 video per day.




Means that we should monitor 30k TT accounts every day and download their videos, why not huh?

IMO with shorts the video quality plays a huge role, so having videos of kittens in a hot girls compilation would not be acceptable, the source channels should all be checked.

Getting the source channels​

Step 1 - we manually create a source of 'sexy' tags to scrape like 'sexy' , 'bikini' , 'thightok' ,'thottok' (this was a good one) etc.
We are left with a decent list of accounts.
Step 2 - Scrape all the accounts from step 1 to gather their most used sounds and hashtags
Step 3 - We scrape all the sounds and hashtags for users - we have a large list of accounts
Step 4 - We scrape each accounts tiktok page getting some useful information like followers count, likes count, 10 last videos thumbnails and most importantly uploaded videos count
Step 5 - We discard the accounts that have uploaded less than 50 videos ( don't want to waste resources on monitoring half dead accounts) and
Step 6 - We download a pre-trained NSFW classifier https://github.com/notAI-tech/NudeNet and run the 10 images we have downloaded for all accounts through it,
Then we get the average tendency of images being 'sexy' and the number of NSFW videos per account ( from the 10 scraped earlier)




Step 7 - Now we could pretty accurately guess if the account is NSFW or not by NSFW count alone, let's say we would only take the accounts that have 4 NSFW videos, because we want quality and consistency, not someone who uploads one twerking video once in a while

Step 8 - Finally we have some source accounts we can use, although when going through some of the accounts I noticed some, let's say, not so appealing ones.
- Sometimes there's a guy in a video
- Sometimes the girl is ugly
- Sometimes the videos are inconsistant, for exmple, some videos are just a still image, and that's not what we need.

It is complicated to solve such problems programmatically because each of us understands beauty differently, so it's hard for the machine as well.
So I decided the last moderation step should be manual, the script takes one account ( that has 50+ videos and at least 4NSFW videos of last 10), opens the page and allows the user to do scroll the feed and decide manually if the account is worth to be used as a source.

Going through only several hundred of accounts made me realize that it is going to take way too long and I am just too lazy, so the script was sent to the VA, hopefully he has the same taste as I do in women

Next..​

Set up a db, create a scraper that monitors all accounts every day, downloads new videos and creates the compilations.

 

[Deleted member 731332]

Effort on this scale will pay off. Impressive. And a very good use case for zennoposter.

 

[Aniqu]

Keep it going brother !

 

[Misterpossible]

Impressive story glad you are still pushing through.