Thread by @iamwillcannon

How I went from going bankrupt in the real estate crisis to building an 8 figure SaaS business.

A story thread on how to win in any market:

The story starts in the mid-2000s.

I was in real estate,

Specifically n the mortgage industry.

At this time - real estate was booming.

Everyone was purchasing and refinancing their home. Money was everywhere and I was young, dumb + naive.

I thought it would last forever.

I was doing pretty well and looking for ways to start investing & growing my net worth.

>Property values were going crazy
>I didn't know about stocks
>All the investments I knew were real estate (crypto didn't exist back then)

Plus,

I had some friends in real estate.

I was only a couple years out of high school at this time.

I didn't have money growing up.

My thinking at the time was like,

"I got money now - I can buy real estate"

After all, the real estate market is a 'safe' place to invest your money...

Right?

So - I bought two houses in Arizona and two in Texas.

I wasn't buying them for cash flow...

I bought them for pure speculation,

Hoping they would increase their value in two years.

...little did I know that I purchased them at the absolute peak...

...before they spiraled.

Right after I invested my money,

The mortgage estate crisis came.

And within 6 months?

My properties lost half their value.

My $1M property was now worth $500k.

On top of that, I had no tenants...

So I had 4 mortgages to pay for.

My revenue went from a lot to basically nothing (in the span of a month).

And on top of that?

I had a lot of personal expenses with my wife.

So long story short...

I had to file bankruptcy.

My car - a Mercedes S 500 - got repossessed.

I had to hand the keys to a random guy that came for it.

Case in point:

This was not a fun time for me.

After this experience,

I didn't think much of real estate:

I knew that I wanted recurring revenue.

With mortgages, you

>do a deal
>get the money
>then you have to go & make a new deal to keep the money coming

It wasn't subscription revenue.

I wanted customers to pay me every month,

And a diversified base of customers at that (not a few house owners but thousands of subscription buyers).

Plus, I wanted the security of not relying on just one industry.

I didn't want to niche down - just a diversified customer base.

Also,

I knew that I wanted to diversify my marketing channels.

I didn't just want to rely on SEO (I knew Google could f*ck me overnight).

So,

SaaS was a perfect choice.

It gave me

>recurring revenue
>a diversified customer base (in a bunch of different industries)
>and it could be marketed across a number of different channels to build a brand

The perfect business model.

I knew I wanted to build a SaaS,

So I found a dev team on Elance (which was Upwork).

The team was overseas - I sent them 10k to get to work.

Basically,

They ended up not being able to build my SaaS...

So that didn't work out.

But,

I had the idea for Uplead now.

I kept looking for ways to build the idea out into a functional & well-designed SaaS...

And I did.

It's been a rocky road but it worked out:

UpLead is now an 8 figure business (and growing!)

So,

If I had to summarize this thread into one actionable lesson?

Just try and keep trying.

Luck doesn't run out - you create luck,

And you create it by trying things for long time.

One day, somehow, someway, it will click...

And that's the story of my bankruptcy.

Thanks for reading!

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