When the tax year ends on the 5th of April, valuable tax allowances may be lost simply because people left things too late. Thankfully Vanguard is here to help you make well-considered decisions, not rushed ones. Their tax year-end hub is full of clear guidance, helpful tools and timely reminders to help you understand your allowances and give your investments the best chance to grow. Search Vanguard Investor to learn more. When investing, your capital is at risk. Tax rules apply. Bowser is back! Ha ha! Bowser! Bowser! Yeah! Everyone calm down! The Super Mario Brothers can take care of the kingdom. Let's go! On April 1st... Toad pack our things. Woohoo! The galaxy... Whoa! ...is waiting. Who is this? Special! So some cool dinosaur just shows up and he's now part of the group. Cool. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Only in Cinema's April 1st. Alright, what's your story? Six years ago, I started a business. Today, that business makes over a million dollars a year. But what nobody knows is that I built it inside of a Starbucks. At the time, I was working a full-time job. I'm still working my nine to five job right here. And that left me with only two hours a day to build the business of my dreams. But there was still one problem. I was suffocating by self-doubt. I didn't believe I could do it. Then, I found something that would change my life forever. Today, I'm going to tell you that story. I'm Pat Walls, and this is my Starter Story. Alright, this is me in the summer of 2017. I'm 26 years old. I've got a great job. I'm making six figures in New York City. And by all accounts, living the life of my dreams. But deep down, I know that something isn't right. Every day, I go to work and do the same shit. Clock in, a few Zoom meetings, eat lunch, write a few lines of code, and clock out. This work leaves me feeling empty every day. I know this isn't what I'm meant to do. I know there's something missing. See, here's the truth. And it might be something you felt at some point too. Secretly, in the back of my head, I dream about the idea of quitting my job and starting my own business. In my free time, I'm reading business books and romanticizing about being able to wake up and work on whatever I want. But I keep running into the same problem. I have no idea where to start. How do I find a good idea? How do I know it can make money? How do I take the first step? I couldn't find this information anywhere online. And that's when I had my light bulb moment. I can turn these questions into a product. I'll just research successful businesses, write about my findings on a blog, and share them with others who also want to learn. And I didn't think this was going to be a big thing. I was just genuinely interested in this stuff. So this is the beginning of the idea, but it's not all peaches and cream from there. This idea, it nags at me for months. Every single day, I tell myself I'll get started on it, but I never do. And this is where Starbucks comes into play. So let me pull up a map and show you. This is New York City. This is where I live. This is where I work. And this is the Starbucks. Every day, I walk home from work and I walk by the Starbucks. And every day, I tell myself I'll stop in there, order a drink, sit down, and get started on this idea. But every single day, I walk by that Starbucks, take one hard look at it, proceed to not go inside, walk home, and watch six hours of Netflix, and then go to bed. And I do this every day for months. This Starbucks, it represents the unknown. And it's too scary for me to confront it. But everything changes when I come across this book. It's called Deep Work by Cal Newport, and Deep Work is a state of focus that you must learn if you want to do hard things. After reading this book, I realized that I'm completely lacking focus. So I put together a contract with myself. In this contract, I write down and I visualize. Tomorrow, I'm going to walk in that Starbucks. I'm going to order a coffee. I'm going to sit down. I'm going to set a timer for two hours, and I'm going to just focus. That's the contract. The next day, day one, I walk in that Starbucks. I sit down, I set my timer, and I get started. All of a sudden, the timer goes off. I look up and think, holy shit, that was two hours? That flew by. I was in flow state. I was actually doing deep work. Day two, I walk in the Starbucks and do it again. And day three, I do it again. And I don't stop. Every single day, I get off work, walk into that Starbucks, and do my two hours of deep work. I even start waking up at six in the morning and getting my deep work in before my full-time job even starts. I'm doing it every day and it feels effortless. In the progress, it starts to happen. After one month, I've come up with a name and concept for my idea. I'm going to call it Starter Story, and I land the domain StarterStory.com for $12 a year. I launch it with a few stories and a few hundred people visit the website. After two months, I've published dozens of stories and I'm starting to find a routine. The business isn't making any money, but I'm starting to build a tiny audience. I then start a newsletter and get my first hundred subscribers. After four months, I start working on marketing and I get my first big break. One of my stories goes viral on Reddit and thousands of people crash my site and join the newsletter. Now, I'm starting to feel like my idea is validated. After six months, I start thinking about monetization and how I can make my first dollar. I monetize the newsletter with a sponsorship and I start making some money from affiliate revenue. Now, I'm starting to feel more confident like I actually kind of get how this stuff works. And I'm having fun in the process. So this whole thing starts out as a project that I didn't really expect would go anywhere. But then it gets traction and now I'm left with a new problem. I need to figure out how this thing can make money. But everything on the internet is about how VC-backed tech giants raised $100 million. When I just want to figure out how I can go from $0 a month to $5 or $10,000 a month. How do I figure this out? By reading case studies about businesses that are just a few steps ahead of me. And that's what Starter Story is. We have over 4,000 case studies and business breakdowns on successful online businesses that were started by people like you and me. In these case studies, you can see exactly how much these businesses make and exactly how they got started. So if you're curious on what it takes to build a business to $5 or $10,000 a month or even a million dollar online business, check out StarterStory.com or click the first link in the description. We're running a special right now for the YouTube family. So how does this turn into a business? Well, I'm reading case studies about businesses similar to mine and I realize that most of them make their money through sponsorships. Then something amazing happens. I get an email. It's from the CEO of a company called Clavio. They're a huge company now, but at the time they were smaller. The email says, Hi Pat, I love Starter Story and what you're doing. Both the stories and sharing your progress. Keep crushing it. A, B. It's a nice email to get, but I don't really think too much of it. But as the conversation goes on, we start to talk about the potential of Clavio sponsoring the newsletter. And then he comes to me with a number. $12,000. When I see this, I don't believe it. At the time, I was basically living paycheck to paycheck. So $12,000 was more money than I'd ever seen in my life. I send in my bank details and sure enough, a few days later, the money hits my account. I get the notification while I'm at Starbucks and my heart starts beating out of my chest. I get up, leave the Starbucks and just take a walk around the block. My head is swirling with emotions. This is crazy. I got $12,000 deposited into my bank account because of something that I built. I felt like I'd just become a millionaire. All those days of waking up at six in the morning, going to Starbucks and putting in those two hours of deep work. This money was the direct result of that. I felt like I was on top of the world. But these emotions of excitement, of bliss, it quickly turned to fear. I thought, was this email some sort of accident? Did I just get lucky? This $12,000, it represented a decision that I had to make in my life. Should I keep playing it safe and keep my full-time job? Or was this $12,000 validation that I should go all in? On one side, the devil on my shoulder was saying, go all in. And the angel was saying, no, keep playing it safe. And I sat on the fence for months. But then I remembered why I started this thing in the first place. I wanted to build something for myself and not someone else's dream. I realized that if I don't make this decision right now, I might never do it. I might get old, look back and wonder, what if? And that was the moment that I walked into work and I handed in my resignation. I quit my job, decided to go all in on Starter Story and the rest is history. All right, fast forward five years. And that was the last time I had a regular job, the last time I ever got a paycheck. After that, I never looked back. I never stopped building. And I ended up building Starter Story into a million-dollar business. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that it was all easy or predictable from there. I failed a ton. But when I look back, the most important thing that I did was just going inside that Starbucks, getting to work and taking action. Every single day, I was giving myself a chance to become lucky. And it took me a few months to get there. But when it did, when that email came through, when that $12,000 came through, I decided to go all in after that. And that is really what made the difference. That's the story of how I built a million-dollar business from inside of Starbucks. And I would like to thank Starbucks for sponsoring this video. Just kidding. Okay. Thank you.
