the continuation - a reward for those who sticked long enough
This is a long overdue continuation of my journey, and a little reward for those who stuck around long enough to see what happened to that 18-year-old doing dumb shit on eBay, trying every money-making method under the sun just to scrape together a few dollars. Some of you have been following since the very beginning, and I genuinely appreciate that. A lot has happened since my last update, and I figured it's about time I get back to journaling this whole thing. So let's put the situation in the present.
august - october 2026
During this period, I got introduced to the ecom space by a friend, who we'll call M. She was an editor who eventually transitioned into creative strategy, and she was willing to teach me editing so I could get into the industry. Prior to speaking with her, whenever I heard the word editing, the first thing that came to mind was those flashy MrBeast or Iman Gadzhi-style videos, with all the motion graphics, crazy transitions, and a fuckton of effects every two seconds. Funny thing, I later discovered that these types of editors are the WORST when it comes to the kind of ads we make. They are rarely hired. And I'll explain why in a few.
Basically, in ecom, brands are constantly running advertisements on platforms like Facebook and Instagram to get people to purchase their products. And there's a whole industry built around producing these advertisements, where editors, creative strategists, media buyers, and brand owners work together to make ads that actually bring in money. The type of editing I got into is called
direct response editing, which is essentially making videos with the objective of getting someone to take action, usually purchasing a product. Every second matters, from the first few seconds that catch someone's attention to the story that keeps them watching and eventually convinces them to buy.
One of the most popular formats is UGC, which stands for user-generated content. You've probably seen these ads before, where some random person is sitting in their bedroom talking about a product they recently discovered, or a mother casually explaining how something helped her kids. These videos tend to look like ordinary content you'd come across while scrolling, which is exactly why they can work so well. People are already exposed to thousands of advertisements, so getting them to actually stop and listen to what you're selling is a whole skill in itself.
And with how quickly AI has been developing, a lot of this content can now be generated. We're talking realistic people, realistic environments, product demonstrations, pretty much entire advertisements made through AI. The biggest challenge is making all of that look as human as possible. The way somebody speaks, their facial expressions, their movements, the little imperfections you'd normally see in a real recording. Sometimes you could spend an hour generating a few seconds of footage because the person keeps moving their hands like an alien.
In our workflow, I'd say around 80% of the work goes into prompting and generating realistic footage, while the remaining 20% is the actual editing, which mostly consists of stitching everything together, adjusting the pacing, adding captions, music, and making sure the whole thing feels natural. There's a lot of trial and error involved, especially when you're working with AI models that seem to have a mind of their own. You can give them the most detailed instructions possible and they'll still find a way to fuck something up.
Now, here's where the money comes in. Direct response editors can earn considerably more than regular editors, especially when they understand what makes an advertisement convert. Brands are constantly testing new creatives, because an ad that performs well can generate thousands of dollars in revenue, sometimes way more depending on the scale of the business. And that's why having someone who understands the psychology behind these ads is valuable. It's a skill that directly contributes to how much money a business makes.
So for me, this was a great opportunity. I could learn a skill, get paid by working with established brands, and potentially build a source of recurring income. And given my history of trying every random money-making method imaginable, you can probably understand why that sounded appealing to me, lol.
But here's where things get interesting. I decided to bring
eight of my friends into the journey. Yes. Eight fucking people.
I figured that if I had stumbled upon a good opportunity, I might as well share it with the people around me. Most of us had little to no experience with this industry, so I set up a little bootcamp where we'd learn everything together and hopefully become good enough to start working with brands before the end of the year. And I was rigid as fuck about it. We'd wake up at 9 AM, and everybody had to put in at least four hours of actual work, at the bare minimum. Learning the tools, practicing prompts, generating ads, reviewing each other's work, and repeating the whole thing until we started getting decent at it.
I wanted everyone to take it seriously because I knew how easy it was to waste months consuming tutorials and convincing yourself you're making progress. We needed to produce actual work, make mistakes, and improve. And surprisingly, the whole thing worked out wonderfully.
M eventually brought three of us, including me, into the brand she was working with, while the rest of the guys managed to get opportunities with other brand owners through her referrals. Which was pretty fucking satisfying to see, considering that just a few weeks earlier, most of us barely knew what direct response editing even meant. Suddenly, everyone was getting introduced to actual businesses and had an opportunity to make some money out of a skill we'd just started learning.
Unfortunately, during my trial period with M, I went through one of the worst periods of my personal life. I won't deep dive into what happened, because there's a lot of personal stuff involved, but it genuinely affected my ability to work. I was struggling to keep up with the weekly KPIs, which are basically the targets you're expected to hit in terms of production and performance. And despite M trying her absolute best to drag me along with her, I kept falling short.
Eventually, she had to offboard me. Can't blame her really. She gave me an opportunity, invested her time into teaching me, and tried to help me get back on track. At the end of the day, I wasn't delivering what was expected of me, and a business still has work that needs to get done regardless of whatever somebody is going through personally. It was unfortunate, especially considering how much I wanted to make it work, but that's how things go sometimes.
Luckily, I ended up getting another opportunity with a brand owner, who we'll call OM.
OM is a super great dude, and from the beginning he trusted me with a lot of responsibilities. I instantly linked back up with some of the old friends I'd brought into the industry, and this time I found myself working in something close to a lead editor role. I was editing my own ads, helping and training upcoming editors, reviewing their work, and setting up systems that would make the whole workflow run as smoothly as possible.
For context, when you've got multiple editors working on different advertisements, things can get messy pretty quickly. You've got briefs coming in, scripts that need to be followed, footage that needs to be generated, revisions from brand owners, deadlines, and a bunch of other moving parts. And when everybody has their own way of doing things, you end up wasting a ridiculous amount of time on problems that could've been avoided with a proper system. So a good part of my responsibilities involved figuring out ways to organize the workflow, make instructions clearer, help the editors improve, and keep production moving.
I actually enjoyed that part quite a lot. I've always liked organizing stuff, managing people, figuring out how things work and finding ways to make them more efficient. It's something I started noticing about myself throughout the different businesses and random ventures I'd gotten involved in.
And being super honest, editing was never really my thing. I could do the work, and I was definitely learning a lot from it, but I never had that genuine passion for sitting in front of a timeline and spending hours fixing little details. Sometimes I'd find myself more interested in understanding why the ad was being made a certain way, what made the script convincing, and how the brand decided which angles to test.
Funny enough, M had already noticed that in me. She told me a while back that I should eventually move into another role where my skills could be put to better use, and she specifically suggested creative strategy. At the time, I didn't fully understand what that involved, but the more I got exposed to the industry, the more it started making sense.
Which brings us to November.
This month is where I'm planning to make the transition into
creative strategy, and I'm genuinely looking forward to it. For those unfamiliar with the role, a creative strategist is essentially responsible for coming up with the ideas behind the advertisements. That includes researching the market, understanding the product, studying the customers, identifying their problems and desires, writing scripts, analyzing competitors, and figuring out what kind of messaging is most likely to get someone to purchase.
There's a whole psychology behind it that I'm only starting to understand. You could have two people buying the exact same product for completely different reasons, and your job is to identify these motivations and build advertisements around them. A mother purchasing a children's book might be concerned about her kid's confidence, while another might be worried about their academic performance. Same product, different problems, different approaches. And you'd be surprised how much the way you present something can affect whether somebody decides to buy it.
Then you've got the testing side of things. You write a script, the editors turn it into an advertisement, the media buyers run it, and you analyze the results. Sometimes an ad performs wonderfully, sometimes it gets absolutely demolished, and you have to go back and figure out what went wrong. A winning ad is basically one that performs well enough for the brand to keep spending money on it profitably, and finding those winners is where a lot of the work goes.
The learning curve is fucking massive, because you're getting into consumer psychology, marketing, copywriting, research, and understanding how businesses acquire customers. You also have to develop a good sense of what makes people stop scrolling, what makes a story interesting, and what gets someone to actually trust what they're watching. And considering that I've been involved in different businesses myself, I'm quite interested in learning these things and eventually applying them to my own ventures.
The pay is also better, which is obviously a nice bonus. But there's something particularly appealing about developing a skill that involves understanding how to sell products and grow businesses. It's knowledge that can be applied to pretty much anything you decide to build later on, and that's where I see the biggest long-term value.
I'm still very much a beginner in this field, and I've got a fuckton of things to learn. Writing scripts that actually convert, understanding why certain ads become winners, learning how to properly analyze performance, all of that comes with experience. I'm expecting to fuck up plenty of times along the way, as I usually do whenever I get into something new, lol.
What's funny is how randomly this whole thing came together. A few months ago, I barely knew anything about ecom direct response advertising, and now I'm working with brands, helping manage editors, experimenting with AI video generation, and preparing to get into creative strategy. All because a friend introduced me to an opportunity that I probably would've never discovered on my own.
And looking back at the whole journey, from eBay to random freelancing gigs, reselling digital products, building the educational business, and now getting involved in ecom, I keep noticing how the skills you pick up from one thing eventually end up being useful somewhere else. Even the dumb shit I used to do taught me something, whether it was dealing with customers, finding suppliers, selling services, managing people, or just figuring out how to make money with whatever resources I had available.
I guess that's why I've always been willing to try different things, even when I barely know what I'm getting myself into. You never really know where an opportunity might lead you, and sometimes it takes getting involved in something to discover what you're actually good at.
Anyway, that's pretty much where things stand right now. November is going to be focused on learning creative strategy, writing a fuckton of scripts, understanding what makes winning advertisements, and hopefully getting good enough to bring some serious value to the brands I'm working with.
There's still a long way to go financially, the 1k goal we had to accomplish is something I make on a regular. and I definitely haven't reached the level of financial freedom I want to be at. But compared to where I was when I started this whole journey, I'm pretty satisfied with the progress so far, despite the occasional fuckups and setbacks.
We'll see where this takes us.
See you next update, fellas.
