This is my final week of work. After a 17 month journey, I have accomplished one of my biggest dreams of my life, working for myself. The journey across these 17 months has been a mix of euphoria, stress, anxiety, happiness, pain, sleep deprivation, and satisfaction. I wouldn’t change any of it.

I don’t come from any money so I’ve always had to carve out my own path. My parents never gave me anything as a kid so I’ve had to work since I was 14 years old. If I wanted to go to the movies with a friend or buy a new Nintendo 64 game, I had to save up and buy it myself. This meant if I ever wanted to build my own business and work for myself I couldn’t just quit my job and build. I had no backstop. I needed to build my own business WHILE keeping my day job.

Over the past 10 years of my career I tried it all. I’ve built numerous websites. Started coding a million different SaaS products. Started 3 blogs and Twitter accounts. Stayed up until 3am months in a row building things that would never see the light of day.

Then, after 10 years of trying, failing, and trying again, I finally got a hit. In March 2021 I discovered NFTs. I’ve always been a nerd and gamer my entire life and when I discovered an article about an NFT project called The Sandbox I was blown away. The article described a digital world where you actually owned the assets in the world. You could build items and homes, discover loot and currency, and you actually owned it.

It seriously shifted my view of technology.

I was all in at this point. I was so energized by this discovery that I had an incredible urge to write about it. So I started a Twitter account and newsletter called NFT God. Every day after work I’d tweet and write a little about NFTs. At this point it was just a hobby. I just enjoyed writing and talking about the technology.

I sent 2 tweets a day, 2 threads a week, and multiple newsletters a week to very few people. It wasn’t about the attention or the audience, it was about the enjoyment I got when interacting with the NFT community.

Then something started happening. A few months in my audience started growing. I realized people actually wanted to hear my thoughts on the space and technology. So I started taking it a little more serious. I started buying and reading books on copywriting. I wanted to improve my skillsets so I could create the best product possible. I took great pride in my work.

I redesigned my website. I branded my Twitter account. Every day I wanted to improve my content and workflow by just a little bit.

All of a sudden a small hobby after work that took 15 minutes was now consuming every free second I had. I would work for 10 hours at my job then spend 6 hours writing and building my online presence.

Then in June 2022 I hit a tipping point. A thread I published on Twitter went viral. It got over 9,000 likes and a couple million impressions. My account grew from 5,000 followers to 15,000 followers over night.

I realized I had something special here. I realized all the work I was doing for months actually has led to something tangible. I wasn’t just writing into the ether. I had a group of people forming around me who was actually interested in what I had to say. This wasn’t just one of those thousand projects I started in my spare time that went nowhere over the past 10 years. This was something that had legs that I could potentially fulfill my dreams with.

It was time to double down.

I started pushing myself harder every day. I wanted to get really uncomfortable. The more uncomfortable I got creatively, the more I learned, the better my product would be. I pushed myself to get better in my writing, content, and personal life. I tried to learn as much as humanly possible. Everything I learned I shared with my audience.

I was now spending 10 hours a day at work then 8 hours a night working on NFT God. I was sacrificing EVERYTHING for this. I wasn’t going out anymore despite living in the most active city in the world. I wasn’t visiting or hanging out with friends as much as I used to. I was fully focused on building something incredible that could change my life.

After over a year of working on this project, I finally started seeing results from my hard work. When you first start building any sort of platform, you don’t see results for a long time. You don’t get a lot of feedback and it can feel like you’re doing work for no reason. But once you hit a tipping point that changes. I was actually getting eyes on my work and it was an addicting feeling.

In September 2022 I made my first dollar off NFT God. This was my first dollar I ever made from a side project I was building. It was one of the most amazing feelings in the world. I legit felt like crying. The work I was putting in for months and months and months was starting to pay off. All the sacrifices I made, all the sleep deprivation, lonely nights, plans cancelled, were all worth it for that first buck I just made.

So I doubled down again. Now every spare second I had, nights, days, weekends, were dedicated to NFT God. I’d take meetings at work during the day then spend an hour brainstorming my newsletter then take another work meeting then do a Twitter Space then do another work meeting then brainstorm tweets, then meet with my boss then take a writing course. It was nonstop. I was ultra determined to build something truly special here.

I was now sleeping between 4-6 hours a night every night. I was truly sacrificing EVERYTHING to make this dream a reality. For the first time in my life the dream felt tangible. It felt like it was right in front of me. It felt obtainable. It’s never been this way before. With all of my past side projects it was all a pipe dream. They were just a bunch of line of codes and that’s it. It never felt truly realistic that I could potentially quit my job and work for myself full time. With NFT God it was different. It felt like I was right on the door step of achieving the dream I’ve had my entire life.

It was December 2022. I set a goal for myself. I wanted to start making enough money to support my life by June 2023 so I could leave my job and turn this into a business. But then that all changed in January.