This is the wild story of how I made $1,036,175 during the COVID lockdowns by rapidly creating a new physical product in 7 days.

In April 2020, during the lockdowns I created 2 things that changed my life:

1. I launched Shepherd (eventually renamed Somewhere[dot]com). 4 years later we sold it for $52,000,000.

2. I created a new physical product that made us $1,036,175 in 60 days.

This is the story of #2. The world shut down March 2020 in a panic. My wife and I had just found out she was pregnant with our first child. Now all of a sudden I was worried about my e-commerce and hotel business surviving the lock downs.

Every day I sat at my desk watching tens of thousands in hotel cancellations come in.

These were the businesses I used to support my family. All of a sudden everything was falling apart. As a soon-to-be father, I was scared.

Instead of sitting on my hands, I got busy creating.

While most people were watching Netflix in their PJs, I was working more than I ever had before. I look back on that time as the most creative period of my career.

I was making over $500k per month personally before I sold my business.

Some months? $600K+.

Profits were growing. Compounding fast.

Then the acquisition offers started rolling in.

And I found myself facing one of the hardest decisions of my life. $500K/month is life-changing cash flow.

That kind of money, invested well, turns into generational wealth.

So why would I even consider selling?

Because I realized there were two types of regret I could face:

1. Regret of Greed – "I sold too early, and this could have been a billion-dollar company."

2. Regret of Loss – "I held on too long, and the business went to zero."

Which would hurt more?

2024 Year In Review – The Year I Made Life Changing Money

This year was full of big life changes!

🤑Sold my business for $52,000,000
🌲Decided to move to NC
🏠Bought land / designed home
💪Got super fit
🔫Home invasion in Spain

Here's what went well and what didn't 👇 What Went Well in Business

A big theme for me this year was "deloading".

I sold 3 of my businesses. I did this purposefully to give myself a break after 15 years of starting/running my own stuff.

I called it “retirement”, but it’s really been a sabbatical. New biz coming!

I ran an iPhone case company for 10+ years.

Every year we had new case designs ready to ship to customers for the next iPhone... BEFORE that year’s new iPhone was ever announced at the Apple Keynote.

We made millions using this strategy.

Here's how we did it 👇 First, here’s some proof:

This is an instagram photo I took of our fake iPhone 7 models on August 31, 2016.

The iPhone 7 wasn’t announced by Apple until September 7, 2016.

Why I'm Leaving Texas + What's Next

My wife and I have decided to leave Dallas, Texas. After considering many cities we decided on Raleigh, North Carolina!

We’ve purchased ~1.5 acres in the city and are in the thick of designing a custom home (more on that soon). We’ll be here in Texas until it’s ready late next year.

But why leave?

Below is the 18 month journey we went on to find the right place for us. It’s about how we decided where to go, what we considered, our values, where we’re moving, and why.

How we got here:
I was born in Texas and lived here until I was 19. Then life took me to St. Louis, South America, Canada, and even a stint of nomadic life in Europe + Asia. When it was time to settle and start our family, I convinced Jaimie (my wife) we should move to North Texas.

We moved back in the middle of 2019. It was the right decision for our family at the time.

Fast forward to 2023... we started discussing the idea of not living in Texas forever.

We have a house, a cabin, 2 kids, friends, family, routines, school, and commitments here. This was not a choice taken lightly.

What we don’t like about Texas:
Let me start by saying Texas has a lot of great things going for it. People that live here will cite more personal freedoms, no state income tax, and lots of jobs / opportunities. That’s all true!

However, there’s a lot of stuff that bothers us:

1. It used to be extremely affordable. Now it’s pretty comparable to most of the USA.

2. Insane heat that seems to last for 7+ months out of the year. We’ll clock 50+ days over 100 degrees this year with tons more in the high 90s. You do not live outside in Texas.

3. The lack of trees and nature. It’s flat and things struggle to grow due to the climate. Grass in most of Texas is actually a weed. It’s not soft. People put turf in their backyards now. Overall the nature here is pretty ugly and brown.

4. Horrible traffic! It’s not rare for it to take us 30 minutes to go 3 miles if there’s bad congestion. It’s 2+hrs to get across the metroplex.

5. Constant construction — the roads are always being widened, which means they're really narrowed until it's done. There’s work trucks throwing rocks everywhere. Driving in Texas is a constant battle and detour.

6. Crazy spring hail storms and wind. Here’s a not-so-fun fact: Dallas is a windier city than Chicago aka “The Windy City”. This year about 1/3rd of our neighborhood had to have their roof replaced from hail damage. The homes are all less than 4 years old!

7. Unsustainable population growth — this brings a slew of issues. Things are more expensive here. Homes are being thrown together, Inflation is not the same everywhere in the country. I’ve noticed food bills and drink bills being noticeably cheaper in other cities than a nice restaurant in DFW.

8. Lack of charm in buildings and homes. DFW isn’t very old, so there’s little character. Lots of strip malls and thrown together homes. There’s just not a lot of historic charm.

9. There’s a pride in being Texan that when taken too far is just off-putting. Texas acts like it’s shit don’t stink.

Sitting in traffic is soul sucking.

Deciding what's important to u
First and foremost, we decided we needed to get out of the suburbs. We wanted to be closer inside a city, but likely needed to be in a smaller city. We needed to be in a place that had better nature and more moderate temperatures throughout the year.

Jaimie and I had countless conversations about what we valued, what we wanted our days to look like, how we wanted to raise our kids, what we wanted to avoid, and what we would be wiling to sacrifice.

No city is perfect, but below is a list of things that mattered to us.

1. Trees!
Sometimes you forget how NOT seeing large trees and greenery daily affects you. We want to play outside with our kids and enjoy nature. The more trees the better.

2. Be able to spend time outside
After 5 years in the Texas suburbs, we realized this was taking its toll on us in a really negative way. For 6-7 months of the year, everyone just stays inside unless you’re in a pool. Being inside so much isn’t good for you.

3. Income tax & property tax
Not paying additional income tax was a big concern of mine. Your money goes so much further just by choosing where you live. I am already paying 37% tax on our income. I didn’t want to increase that to 50% by moving to a place like California or New York.

4. Beautiful homes
Having a beautiful home has always been important to us, so we needed to choose somewhere we liked the architecture. If you spend enough time looking at Zillow, you’ll notice home design is very different in various parts of the country. We wanted a city with an abundance of great design.

5. Family & Friends nearby?
This was admittedly a factor we knew we’d likely have to give up, at least initially. Moving would mean leaving family and making new friends. (side note: it turns out I know a lot of cool people in the cities we considered!)

6. Good Vibes
This may sound stupid, but hear me out. Some cities just have a good vibe and others are off-putting. We were very aware of how different cities made us feel. Every city whispers something. Cities like LA whisper that status and fame are important. Others feel like family values are cherished. And others feel like sports and beer are life.

A big part of this feeling is the industry and makeup of the population. Is it a banking city? Is it an agriculture city? Do families live there or only young people? Is there only a few big employers? This are the types of things that affect the culture of a city.

7. Airport
We love to travel so living somewhere with an international airport is important. Too small of an airport and travel becomes annoying multi-stop flights. If we could, we wanted the closest airport to have a lot of direct flights to places we frequented.

8. Restaurants
Some cities have great restaurants and others just have burgers, bar food, and fast food chains everywhere. We like to eat out at nice places and try to eat healthy, so a city's food scene was important to consider.

9. Schools
The quality of our kid's education is important to us. To get that education, can they go to public school or do we have to do private? We knew some cities and neighborhoods would require us to send them exclusively to private school. Others had 10/10 public schools. It was something to consider during our search and the cost of living.

10. Traffic
I know traffic will always exist in city's, but how bad it can get in a city is very different in one vs another. Does going 10 miles take 1 hour during rush hour, or does it go from 10 minutes to 20 minutes? We wanted to be aware of how bad traffic was in each place we considered. The less the better.

11. Proximity to other places
In Texas if we want to go somewhere, we have to fly unless we're visiting Austin. However other places (particularly east & west coast cities) have a lot of great places to visit within driving distance. I loved the idea of being able to take short road trips to other cities, the mountains, or the ocean.

...so with those values in mind, we decided to go on a hunt for a place that checked as many boxes as possible.

When you can live anywhere, how do you choose?
When we agreed we should consider leaving Texas, everywhere became an option.

Being able to choose from any city is a luxury, but it's also overwhelming. To help narrow things down, we setup some initial criteria.

1. No extremely harsh winters

2. No extremely high state income taxes.

I decided around 5-6% additional state income tax (on top of federal) was the max I wanted to deal with. Remember, I'm paying 0% state income tax in Texas. This removed places like California (13.3%), New York State (10.9%), and Hawaii (11%) to name a few. It’s hard to justify paying $200k-$500k more per year in taxes.

I then spent a ton of time looking at Zillow and reading about the lifestyle and weather of various cities. From that we made a short list of places to consider.

Some of the many places we considered:
- Raleigh, NC
- Charlotte, NC
- Nashville, TN
- Ladue, Missouri
- Kansas City
- Atlanta, Georgia
- Salt Lake City
- Multiple cities in Tennessee
- Multiple cities in Washington
- Multiple cities in Colorado
- Multiple cities in Florida

The city scoring spreadsheet:
With the above criteria in mind, we began visiting and scoring various cities based on the values we outlined. Some we ruled out very quickly based on quick research.

Jaimie and I are well traveled so we had been to a lot of the cities we considered.

Ultimately I got nerdy with it and started a scoring system in a spreadsheet. Staying and just moving closer into the city was always an option, so I kept 3 nearby cities in DFW we liked to score others against.

(👇link to the spreadsheet in the next tweet )

We would rate each based on 15 things that were important to us. Each thing got a score of 1-10 (very bad to very good). For example: if property income taxes were 0% (you can't get better than that) we'd give that a 10. If there was a ton of traffic in that city, that category would get a 1. Everything was scored relative to the other cities.

Note: a more advanced way to do this would have been to give greater weight to things that are of more importance to you. For example, we value great nature way more than good shopping, but still want to consider both.

Choosing Raleigh, North Carolina
The Nashville area and Raleigh were our top 2 contenders. Ultimately we decided on Raleigh, North Carolina!

Raleigh stole our hear from the beginning. It had most of what we were looking for and a charming vibe we couldn’t explain. We found ourselves missing it after visits.

There’s so much to love. There's tall trees everywhere! Aside from the city itself, it has great proximity to the beach and mountains. You can get to the mountains in ~3hrs and the beach in 2hrs. There’s even direct flights to Europe.

It just felt right.

...but where in Raleigh?
Once we decided on a city, deciding WHERE in that city to live is a whole additional journey.

To figure that out, we took many trips, viewed houses, neighborhoods, and stayed in different parts of the city. We generally drove around a ton to get a feel for everywhere.

We ended up purchasing ~1.5 acres in the north side of the city where we can get to most places in 10-15 minutes or less.

Today
We’re now in the thick of designing a custom home. We’ll be here in Texas until it’s ready next year. We're working with an amazing team of architects, interior designers, landscape designers, and one impressive builder.

I’ll be sharing more about the process designing the home soon. For now, here’s a sketch of the front elevation.

Consider where you live
I’m so excited to change things up and optimize around the things we value. Our environment has a huge impact on how we feel day to day.

Is your environment right for you? Does it affect you positively or negatively? Are you doing what you say you value?

Maybe you should move somewhere else too. You only get one life. Live it well.


🤓 Here's a copy of that city scoring spreadsheet. Feel free to make a copy of it and fill in your own scores / cities.

👇
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

This is the wild story of how I made $1,036,175 during the COVID lockdowns by rapidly creating a new physical product in 7 days.

In April 2020, during the lockdowns I created 2 things that changed my life:

1. – I launched Shepherd (eventually renamed Somewhere[dot]com). 4 years later we sold it for $52,000,000.
2. – I created a new physical product that made us $1,036,175 in 60 days.

This is the untold story of #2. The world shut down March 2020 in a panic. My wife and I had just found out she was pregnant with our first child. Now all of a sudden I was worried about my e-commerce and hotel business surviving the lock downs.

These were the businesses I used to support my family. All of a sudden everything was uncertain. As a soon-to-be father, I was scared.

Instead of sitting on my hands, I got busy creating.

While most people were watching Netflix in their PJs, I was working more than I ever had before. I look back on that time as the most creative period of my career.

8 weeks ago I hired a personal chef for my family. 👨‍🍳

It's been the best thing I've delegated recently.

- Healthy meals all week
- Saved time (no more cooking or deciding what to eat)
- Improved quality of life

Here's how much it all cost: Our chef comes Tuesdays and does a full day of cooking in our kitchen.

Average cost so far to have a personal chef:
~$260/week in labor
~$250/week in groceries

Total cost = $2,147 per month to have a personal chef!

With a recession looming, smart founders get proactive.

Here’s a few things to do 👇 1) Double down on your marketing.

Recessions are when the next generation of great companies lay the foundation to gain market share.

This recession will pass. Come out the other side stronger.

Here's how I made $51,365 of side income in 60 days: Years ago my business was struggling.

We came up with some crazy product ideas to keep us afloat during that time.

The craziest?

Halloween Emoji Masks that went VIRAL

🔥The term “Virtual Assistant” needs to die.

It undersells the talent available in the Philippines!

Here are 10 impressive roles you can hire in the Philippines👇 Basic support is commonly outsourced, but you can do so much more! We’ve hired over 1,000+ talented people in the Philippines for our client’s small businesses.

These are some of my favorite unique roles we’ve hired for:

🌲 We’ve finally finished The Oslo cabin! View some of my favorite architectural details inside & out. 👇

(professional photos coming soon) All the natural light

10 years ago I started a bootstrapped startup studio.
Since then...

• I've had products fail + companies acquired
• Delegated everything so I no longer have a daily role
• Generated millions in annual profits

Here's a breakdown of all my businesses and how they got started: First, I don't have any formal training.
I've winged it ever since dropping out of college.

• I started as a architectural drafter for $15/hr
• Moved to Chile for a grant to fund my first startup.
• Spent time working at MetaLab

I poured every dollar I had into my own ideas.

This is the story of how 2 strangers from across the world met to build a fully remote business with 100+ employees generating 7-figures in annual profits.

👇 I live in Texas. The is my co-founder Joemer. He lives in the Philippines.

This is us sharing a beer in the Philippines during one of the first times we met in person.

The business we created together is called Shepherd.

Last week I did a "Dopamine Detox" for 7 days after my friend @awilkinson raved about it.

Here's what I did:

- No social media (deleted apps)
- No email on iPhone
- No TV
- No podcasts or music
- No iPhone when with wife & kid
- Left iPhone in other room when working @awilkinson The result:

The little things were just much more enjoyable again.

- I was laser focused all week and 100% present
- There was literally nothing left to distract me!
- I read a ton
- I felt less anxious

I scaled my bootstrapped agency from 0 to 100+ employees in 24 months.

📈 Here’s 10 things we did to scale fast: My agency is called Shepherd — we’re a headhunter agency for finding
top overseas talent for your company.

Here’s our growth: We’ll do 7-figures of profit in our 2nd year.

The holy grail for many entrepreneurs is delegating their way out of a role in their company — to own a business that grows and runs WITHOUT the founder.

- How does that happen?
- How do you get there?
- Where do you start?

A thread about delegation for entrepreneurs 👇 I recently finished delegated my way out of a day-to-day role in all 3 of my companies. I now have General Manager for each business that’s in charge of running them.

How did I get here? I embraced delegation for many years.

How I Sent Over 10,000 Personal Thank You Videos To My Customers in 2 Months

- Example video
- Customer response
- How I did it
- Stats & results
- How you can do this too

🧵 👇 Every business owner wishes they could clone themselves. This is how I cloned myself to scale a personalized experience.

To be clear, when I say a personalized video, I mean a video of me, on camera, thanking each customer by name.

📖 Time for a story:

The backstory to Shepherd, my new company:

A few years ago my business was struggling. We needed to lean up and lower our costs. I started cancelling unnecessary services. However some things couldn’t be eliminated, so we looked for alternatives. As far back as 2009 I hired some great people in the Philippines. So I decided we should try that again for some roles. Through trial and error, we ended up hiring several amazing people to join our global team.

💳🤓 I just figured out how to pay my apartment rent 100% with credit card points. At a solid redemption value too!

After doing the nomad thing for a while, I’m more excited about this than free travel. I’m a homebody now. 👴🏻 1/ Okay here’s how

👨🏼‍🏫 First, points accumulation:

I got the Bank of America Travel Rewards card for business. Most people get AMEX, Chase, etc. I have those too and like them.

This card is amazing for its flexibility though.

😃 Life update: I’ve decided to stop doing the “digital nomad” thing.

For the last 5 month my wife and I got to see some beautiful places around the world. We had planned to do this for all of 2019.

However, we decided to stop for a few reasons... 1/ Lack of routine — the constant moving takes its toll on you. Basic things like figuring out where to eat breakfast becomes a time consuming task with each new place.

Staying in 1 place longer helps though.