How I Went from $500 to Half a Billion in 5 Years

Summary

Davie recounts his journey from a struggling, insecure teenager to a multi-millionaire entrepreneur. After years of failing at various business ventures, he launched a weighted blanket company with just $500. Through perseverance and skills gained from past failures, he grew it into a hugely successful brand. He stresses the importance of never giving up, constantly learning, and trying to enjoy the process of building something impactful.

Takeaways

• 😢 I was an insecure, struggling kid who was told I was stupid
• 👨‍🏫 My parents and teachers gave me an ultimatum that inspired me to work harder
• 🏋️‍♂️ I built confidence through small improvements at the gym and with a tutor
• 💡 I realized greatness comes from working hard and failing
• 💰 I made money on social media and with personal training
• 🍽️ My food business failed despite working 16 hour days
• 😔 I lost $40k and hit rock bottom before rebuilding with my family's support
• 🛏️ I found success selling weighted blankets I imported from China
• 💵 I earned $1.5 million profit in the first year and bought my dream car and house
• 🤗 My brand Oodie grew to make tens of millions by making people comfortable at home

Q & A

What was the turning point that motivated David to improve himself?

Watching old Nike commercials on YouTube and being inspired by their message that greatness comes from a willingness to work hard and fail. This gave David the realization he needed to create a plan to improve his grades, get a job, and go to university.

Why did David's first business ventures like selling supplements on Instagram and personal training fail?

David got distracted from running those businesses properly because he was overly passionate about constantly starting new business ideas. He took money he earned from personal training and invested it all into starting a failed Vietnamese roll shop franchise.

What major setback caused David to hit rock bottom?

David spent $40,000 to buy an Instagram account that turned out to be hacked. The account was returned to its original owner by Instagram, leaving David with nothing. This wiped out almost all of his money at the time.

How did David's family help him recover from his failures?

His dad taught him an important lesson - to learn from mistakes and move on instead of dwelling on them. His family's emotional and financial support lifted him out of a dark place and motivated him to keep pursuing his dreams.

What key skills did David gain from his job in Melbourne that allowed him to later succeed?

While working at 5TH Watches, David learned critical skills like Instagram and influencer management, photography, videography, and online advertising with Facebook and Google Ads. This gave him the expertise to later build his successful weighted blanket business from scratch.

Why did David decide that selling weighted blankets was a promising business idea?

He came across many positive reviews about how weighted blankets help people with sensory disorders and insomnia. There weren't many weighted blanket companies selling to the Australian market at the time, so he saw a great opportunity.

What obstacle almost destroyed David's weighted blanket business right as he was starting it?

The first shipment of inventory from China got held up in Australian customs and border control for 5 weeks, leaving his first 400 customers waiting extremely long to receive their orders. This could have permanently damaged his business's reputation.

How much profit did David's weighted blanket company make in its first full year of business?

$1.5 million profit in the first year by aggressively scaling up sales and marketing.

What lessons did David learn on his journey that he wants to pass on to others?

Never give up pursuing your goals no matter how many setbacks you face. Constantly keep learning and trying to enjoy the overall process of building a business. And don't think you are too incapable to make a positive difference in the world.

What was David's next hugely successful company after weighted blankets called?

David launched a company called Oodie that sells wearable blankets. It enabled him to grow his earnings from millions to tens of millions of dollars thanks to millions of happy customers.

Outlines

00:00

😞 Struggled with insecurity and learning difficulties in childhood

Davie describes his difficult childhood where he struggled with insecurity about his weight and being labelled as stupid at school. He performed poorly academically, argued with teachers constantly and felt his life was going downhill. A parent-teacher interview where all his teachers said he was failing proved to be a turning point.

05:02

😊 Found purpose through Instagram business and personal training venture

Davie started finding purpose and making money by creating Instagram accounts reviewing supplements and selling advertising. He then got into personal training while still growing his Instagram business. At one point he was making six figures from Instagram alone, which was huge for him at the time.

10:02

😟 Failed food franchise attempt and Instagram business collapse pushed to dark place

Flushed with cash from his Instagram success, Davie tried to build a large food franchise around Vietnamese rolls. The difficult food business lost money, and simultaneously his Instagram business collapsed when a $40K account purchase turned out to be hacked. The failures financially ruined him and mentally took him to a very dark place.

😀 Launched weighted blanket business off $500 and grew it to $1.5M profit in 1st year

After recovering, Davie stumbled upon weighted blankets as a viable product. He launched a weighted blanket store with just $500 and skills picked up from past failures. Using pre-sell and Facebook/Google ads, he rapidly grew the business to $1.5M profit in its first year.

😎 Grew million dollar blanket business into a blockbuster with 'Oodie' - his proudest achievement

Building on his weighted blanket success, Davie launched 'Oodie' which took his earnings from the millions into the tens of millions. With millions of happy customers and a fun, inclusive team of 60, Oodie makes Davie incredibly proud as a brand.

Keywords

💡Insecurity

Insecurity refers to the narrator's lack of self-confidence and self-doubts, especially in his childhood and teen years. This is a major theme, as overcoming insecurity and self-belief is key to his later success. Examples of insecurity appear when he discusses being overweight, not taking his shirt off at the beach, and being called 'stupid' at school.

💡Work ethic

Work ethic refers to the importance of working persistently and diligently, even through difficulties, which is crucial to the narrator's later success. Examples include when his parents work tirelessly to support him, when he starts going to the gym obsessively, and when he later works 16 hour days on his businesses.

💡Failure

Failing at business ventures and learning from those failures is a repeated theme. Examples include failing classes at university, his Vietnamese roll shop losing money, having an Instagram account hacked and losing $40,000, and early business ventures like the seasoning business not succeeding. However, failures provide learning opportunities.

💡Family support

The support and guidance of the narrator's family plays a pivotal role when he faces difficulties. Examples include them working to pay for his schooling, giving him an ultimatum when he was struggling at school, lifting his spirits when he lost money on the hacked Instagram account, and providing advice about learning from failures.

💡Financial freedom

Achieving extreme financial success and freedom becomes a major motivator, as he wants to earn enough money to have luxuries like buying expensive cars and houses. The businesses he starts, especially Calming Blankets and Oodie, are expressly intended to make him financially independent.

💡E-commerce

The narrator builds expertise in e-commerce platforms, online advertising, and other digital skills which allow him to successfully build online businesses selling physical products. His time at 5TH Watches provided this knowledge, which he applies to launch Calming Blankets.

💡Weighted blankets

Weighted blankets become the breakthrough product for the narrator. Discovering their potential health benefits for sensory disorders and sleep inspires him to start Calming Blankets selling them. This scales into a hugely profitable business and platform for subsequent ventures.

💡Pre-selling

Pre-selling products by taking customer orders before stock arrives from suppliers is a pivotal strategy the narrator uses to minimize upfront costs and risks when starting his weighted blanket business with limited funds.

💡Scaling a business

The video charts how the weighted blanket business sales and profit scale massively within months as marketing and operations are refined. This enables capital to be reinvested to fuel further growth on an accelerating trajectory.

💡Enjoying the process

At the end, the narrator reflects that it's important to enjoy the learning process even through inevitable difficulties when starting a business. Passion and positivity sustain persistence.

Highlights

I was a very insecure kid who was slightly pudgy.

I knew I wasn't stupid and I had a decent amount of intelligence to make a good life for myself.

All greatness was was just a willingness to work hard and fail.

I needed to get better grades, get a job, go to university, and make money.

Small bits of compounded effort can actually improve over time and help your mental and physical health.

I was constantly launching new business ideas while failing university.

I was making six figures from Instagram while studying mining engineering.

I took personal training clients while running multiple Instagram accounts from six burner phones.

My attempt to build a large Vietnamese roll franchise failed and I lost most of my money.

A $40,000 Instagram account I bought got hacked, wiping out most of my money.

My family lifted me up when I was in a dark place and taught me to learn from mistakes.

I moved to Melbourne to surround myself with great people and learn ecommerce to launch a million dollar brand.

I launched a weighted blanket business with $500 saved up, doing $1.5 million in year one.

My next business, Oodie, took me from millions to tens of millions in revenue.

My dream was to create a feeling in customers like Nike ads gave me, and I did it with Oodie.

Transcripts

- My name's Davie and this is my story

how I went from $500 to 500 million.

I was a very insecure kid.

I was slightly pudgy.

And now I'm on the Australian financial rich list

under Margot Robbie.

I have bought my dream home,

bought my girlfriend her dream car.

I don't actually like telling these stories.

Sometimes I feel like they come off very, very arrogant,

especially, for people that don't know me,

and I'm slightly introverted.

But it is a really, really good story

for young entrepreneurs to hear

and there's lots of lessons.

So here it is.

This is my story from $500 to 500 million

in just five years.

So I was born in a, not a huge city in Australia,

it's called Adelaide.

I was a very insecure kid.

I was the kid that went to the beach

and just wouldn't take their shirt off.

I would have to swim in my shirt.

I had a very supportive family when I was young.

They, you know, supported me both emotionally,

but they also worked incredibly hard

to support me financially.

After school, I would go and watch them sell furniture.

They had a small furniture business in Adelaide

and I would just get to watch them constantly,

just, you know, working really, really hard

to put me through school.

School was difficult for me for a very long time.

I was told that I was stupid at a very young age,

especially, through primary school, and I believed it.

It was probably exacerbating my insecurities

and I just never tried.

Constantly arguing with teachers,

constantly getting detentions.

And everything was just felt like it was going downhill.

I had a parent-teacher interview, I think it was grade 10,

all of my five teachers just said that I was failing

and I was incredibly difficult to teach.

After that, my parents pretty much had enough.

They gave me an ultimatum to either start working hard,

or they're going to find another school,

or even just stop supporting me overall.

I felt a deep feeling of shame at that point.

I knew that there was something within me.

I knew that I wasn't stupid

and I had a decent amount of intelligence,

enough to make a good life for myself.

But it wasn't until I was scrolling through YouTube.

I used to watch mind numbing viral videos Charlie bit me.

And I came across all of the old Nike commercials.

These were so, so exhilarating in every single way.

You would watch them

and you could just feel like you could run through a wall.

I watched the Jordan commercial where he talks

about how many game-winning shots that he's taken

and he's lost.

After that moment, I started to pick up

that all greatness was, was just a willingness

to work hard and fail.

So I knew I needed a plan.

I needed to get better grades.

I needed to get a job and I needed to go to university

to make money.

Well, I thought university was the right path at that time.

This was the path that I could feel better about myself

and maybe achieve greatness,

which I didn't actually really know what it was then,

but I knew I wanted to do something awesome.

The first job, I was moving things around in a warehouse

and I was getting minimum wage,

which I think was about $16 an hour even back then.

Then I used that money to go to the gym.

I started to get absolutely obsessed with the gym,

which made me feel so much better

and was kind of the first lesson

that small bits of compounded effort

can actually improve over time

and just help your mental and physical health.

Then I got a tutor as well to help me with the subjects

that I was struggling with.

I enrolled in difficult subjects like math,

physics, chemistry.

I knew it was working when one year

after I decided to change, I had a parent-teacher interview.

I only had one teacher that was the same as previously.

He said in my career I've never seen a child

turn their life around as much as David has this year.

Which really cemented that I was on the right track.

And ended up finishing school on pretty good grades

and getting into mining engineering.

I just chose mining engineering

because I thought it sounded cool

and you could go straight into a six-figure job,

which sounded also cool.

On my first day of mining engineering,

I walked into this giant amphitheater in Adelaide University

and I couldn't even see the lecturer.

He was so far away.

He was on a big screen.

And he said, "You are all used to being

the smartest in your class.

Look to the left, look to the right.

Only one of you is going to pass this class."

And turns out I was not one of those people.

I hated university.

I didn't like the subject.

I was only doing it because I got told

that I could get six figures out of it

and it sounded cool.

And because there is no structured

or forced way of turning up, I, you know,

didn't rock up at all and ended up failing.

I'd say one of the main reasons why I failed university

was because I was just so passionate about business

and I just was constantly launching new things.

I was trying to sell singlets and hats.

And I actually started making a fair bit of money

on Instagram.

I started an Instagram where I would go into

supplement stores and take photos of the supplements,

and write reviews, what's good about them.

Then I was able to sell advertising on those Instagrams

to, you know, fitness tea brands and that kind of stuff.

It started off small, make $5 here, $10 here.

I'd be out on a night out during, you know,

young party stage and I couldn't afford drinks.

But then I would sell a shout out and then we'd all cheer

because I'd be able to actually buy the drinks.

It started to grow really quickly.

I created lots of different verticals of accounts.

I created them in workouts, in nutrition.

I was doing cooking recipes and putting those up.

It probably got to a point where I was making

the six figures that I wanted from mining engineering

just from Instagram.

Which felt huge compared to, you know,

having minimum wage just previously.

Then I decided to do personal training because I thought,

you know, I could get more into the fitness industry,

learn more about it.

During the day, I would have six burner phones on the bench.

People thought I was a drug dealer.

I think dad thought I was a drug dealer for a very long time

because they would all have different accounts on them.

I'd sell shout outs during the day,

train my clients in the morning and the night,

working 16-hour days.

And I remember, yeah, checking my bank account.

I had about $100,000.

Then it all kind of probably went to my head

and things went very, very downhill.

I decided to take a lot of the money

that I made from personal training

to try to build a huge food franchise.

I was really into Vietnamese rolls at that stage

and I thought that there could be a big franchise of that,

which there now is.

It's called Roll'd in Australia.

So I stopped personal training and I took a lot of the money

and I set up a shop in my local area

where there wasn't really a shop before.

5:00 a.m. I would wake up, and I would go get bread rolls.

And then I would cook pork in the morning,

and then I would just basically work nonstop.

I'd still do my Instagrams during the day,

wash dishes at 5:00 p.m., and head home, and just reset.

I wasn't seeing my friends at all.

Food businesses are actually really really difficult

to make work.

I was losing money.

Lucky, I did still have my Instagram business.

It kind of evolved.

I was flipping Instagram so I'd buy them

and then sell them to other people

for a bit of a higher price.

I would also just grow them a little bit in the meantime

and that was working really well,

until I ended up buying an Instagram from someone.

It was probably my biggest buy ever.

It cost $40,000.

Bought the Instagram, got all the access to it,

everything was all sweet.

Then it turns out that, that was actually hacked.

The original owner was like, this is hacked.

Instagram gave the account back to the original owner.

The scammer already had my $40,000

and I was just left with nothing.

That was almost all of my money at the time

so I couldn't buy any more Instagrams to flip them.

My Vietnamese roll shop business was pretty much

going down the drain and I got into a very, very dark place.

I remember completely being disorientated in the bathroom,

mentally just not even there with a lot of bad thoughts.

And it was a really good moment to.

For my family, completely lifted me up out of that.

I was constantly drinking at that time as well

so my family taught me a really good lesson.

I remember dad put a rock in my shoe

and he made me walk down the driveway

with the rock on the shoe.

And it was poking me and hurting me.

And then he took the rock out of the shoe

and then put it on again and said,

walk down the track.

Obviously, it stopped hurting.

And he said, these mistakes if you carry them with you,

they're just going to hurt you.

Just learn from them and move on.

So I knew I needed a new plan.

I packed up, basically gave the shop away.

I was gonna move to Melbourne,

surround myself with great people,

learn as much as I can about e-commerce, and launch a brand.

Hopefully this brand would make me a millionaire

and make me financially free.

I was working at the 5TH WATCHES doing Instagram management,

influencer management.

Also learning photography, videography,

Facebook Ads, Google Ads.

It was an amazing time.

I learned so much.

I never gave up on launching my own business.

At that time, I remember I launched a seasoning business

while I was over there.

I ordered six kilograms of parsley

and delivered it to my house back in Adelaide.

I remember getting a text from dad when I was flying back.

And he said, "Why are all of these herbs on my doorstep?"

I think that mixed with the six burner phones,

he definitely thought I was a drug dealer

for a very, very long time

because none of those businesses ended up working

and I was constantly flying back from Adelaide to Melbourne

'cause I missed my friends.

And my girlfriend ended up spending all of my savings

that I'd made.

I remember checking my bank account, I was back at $0.

It felt like I was back at square one.

I had $0, I was back living with my parents.

But my mind and the knowledge that I had

was just invaluable.

All I needed now was a product

that was just gonna change my life.

I was looking for products everywhere, testing everything.

And then I came across an article on Facebook

around how weighted blankets can help people

with sensory disorders or insomnia.

Naturally, I wanted to test it out,

got every single blanket in the house,

was on the couch, piled them up.

While that didn't really feel that good

because it was maybe 400 degrees under the blanket,

I did keep looking into it.

And there were so many glowing reviews on forums.

And there wasn't that many products out there,

especially, in Australia that was selling the product.

So I had decided to commit to it.

I decided this was gonna be the product.

It was helping people.

It could really make a difference

and I definitely thought it was going to work.

So I ended up ordering some stock from China.

I got one sample, initially.

Got my girlfriend and my neighbors.

She was about 11 at the time

and I did a photo shoot in the house.

I had so many skills from all of those past failures

that I could launch the store from scratch.

I could launch the Facebook Ads, launch the Google Ads,

I could do everything from scratch.

So I really didn't need any money to get it started.

I had about $500 at that stage that I saved up

from doing weddings and other videography shoots.

To get the cash for the business,

I decided to sell on pre-sell.

Which is where you sell stock

that isn't actually in the country yet.

You are making a promise that you're gonna ship it

at this, this date.

So I would take the order, buy the stock,

and bring it in.

Because I had no idea what I was doing.

They were sending me paperwork to sign.

I had no idea it'd actually get caught

in a customs border hold.

But the Australian Federal Police, they scan the product,

especially, if it's the first time

that you're bringing in stock.

And I remember it was just absolutely devastating.

The stock was about five weeks delayed

and I had about 400 customers.

My first 400 customers for my big business

were waiting five weeks to get their stock.

I almost thought, I'm gonna throw away

this huge opportunity.

Ended up getting the email that they cleared finally

after just constant emails between border security.

And it was just the most ecstatic feeling.

I was just off from there.

I did about $200 in the first day.

$1,000 in the first week.

$10,000 in the second month.

Ended up scaling to doing $1.5 million profit

in its first year.

From there I started spending the money as you do.

I bought my Range Rover that I was,

was always a goal for me as a kid.

Remember getting and driving it out of the yard.

People thinking that I was pretty young to be buying it.

And I just couldn't stop smiling with it.

Was able to buy my girlfriend her car.

Bought my house that I love.

I'm currently looking for a beach house.

I get to travel the world

because we've just got so many American Express points.

So after launching Calming Blankets, I launched the Oodie,

which took me from earning millions to tens of millions.

We have millions of happy customers.

All of the team, the 60 people that work there,

love the brand.

We are inclusive, fun, happy.

We make people feel very comfortable in their own home.

It's a brand that I'm incredibly proud of.

When I look back at myself in school,

watching those Nike commercials

and how amazing that brand made people feel,

couldn't have imagined that I'd create

something like Oodie that has a very similar effect

on certain types of people.

There was always times that I doubted myself

through the journey, but the main thing

is to just never give up.

Constantly, keep learning and just really,

at least try to enjoy the process as well.

Enjoy the process of learning.

If I can give one piece of advice as well

through this video is you're not too stupid.

You are in a position to make a change in the world

and just, yeah, enjoy the process.

Don't forget to like and subscribe.

Thanks.

(inspiring music)