A Story I've Never Told

October 1st, 2024, I’m beginning Q4 off of what’s been a pretty hot year for me, in January I had bought my dream car, my development agency was ripping, it was a good year.

On October 1st, I paid my quarterly taxes (a pretty hefty amount) a few days later, I get a fraudulent chargeback on a software build we had ALREADY handed off

a $18,000 chargeback, which I had already paid my team $11,000 to fulfill, and then, stripe decides to shut down my account, and lock up $40,000 with no one I can contact

Annoying? Sure. The end of the world? Not at all. I had lost money before, and I keep a lot of operating expenses, and I move on.

At this time, I get the idea for Payd, and pay a development team $20,000 to begin building it, November was whatever, December I get the most sick I’ve ever been (with mono) and I’m like alright, the worst of it is over, going to launch Payd in 2025 and it’s going to be a monster year

First week of January, 2025, I wake up, I’m going through my emails sitting on my couch, and I see an email about a class action lawsuit against me

gulp

I call my lawyer and I’m like….. uhhhhhh how bad is this?

He’s like I’ve seen this a million times (it was over something very dumb, maybe I’ll share another day) but he was like definitely something we need to handle

So I wire him five figures to represent me as my GC and to hopefully resolve this, meanwhile, I had shut down my dev agency (to focus on Payd) and Payd’s development was behind schedule

so at this point, I am down 6 figures, sitting on my hands for Payd to launch, and I have no idea what is going to happen with this lawsuit

I am also paying two rents (one in Miami and one in Ohio), but I did still have solid income from contract work, affiliate income, and some brand deals.

But at this point, for the first time ever, I was pretty anxious, because I did not know if this lawsuit was going to be like a slap on the wrist, or something very bad.

With that being said, I knew at that moment I had two decisions I could make:

1. Feel sorry for myself about the last 3-4 months, complain, and let anxiety consume me

2. Lean into it, bunker down, and use it as fuel.

I chose the ladder, I built a giant waitlist for brands for Payd while development was delayed, 12 hours of outreach per day

I hit up every contact I had made that I thought could help me grow it and refer business

It reminded me of the way I felt building my first business out of my college dorm in 2020, just pure hustle and oddly enough, it was one of the more fond times of my life looking back

I ended up settling the lawsuit in March for another chunk of change in March, ending the anxiety of what was going to happen.

when Payd finally launched, we hit a 6 figure run rate in our first month, we worked with giant brands, and grew to 1,000 new downloads a day very quickly

I cracked a viral format to acquire creators and ran the videos as spark ads, I was crushing brand acquisition through outbound

and just a few short months later, Payd was Acqui-hired in the end of April.

I was reflecting on this last week on my birthday, I recently turned 25, and I came off a very good start to this January/Feb financially and I was reflecting on how I started last year down 6 figs

and how grateful that I am for it happening, because it reminded me of what I’m capable of, and grew my confidence to levels I’d never experienced before

now I was never worried about paying bills or anything like that, luckily I had a lot of savings, not to say I didn’t feel losing 6 figures lol

but I thought I’d share this story as to if anyone is feeling like they’re at rock bottom right now, it can actually be a very peaceful place to be

because the only way to go is up!

Rooting for you,

Alex