My Story - Part 3

Grand rising everyone and welcome to the final part of the “My Story” series. I’ve really enjoyed writing these articles and sharing a little bit more about who I am and where I come from with all of you. In case you haven’t already, you can read part 1 here and part 2 here (highly recommend you read both before continuing with this article).

In the second part of this series I talked a little bit about my life straight after college, how and why I started the Simple Men project, and how I grew my Instagram account to 10.000 followers. In this article I’ll go a bit more into how this project became a business, and how my life has changed since.

Making Money in Mexico

In June of 2022, I was living in Mexico City. I had been sent there by the company I was working with, since they were opening up operations there and needed someone to lead the project. They chose me for that purpose, and I found myself in this huge, vibrant central-american city, on my own, excited for the challenge. At that time, Simple Men was just an IG page with around 8.000 followers, where I shared motivational content. I had made no money with it, and had never seriously tried to turn it into a business.

My office was located in the 40th floor of a massive building in the center of Mexico City, with a big window overlooking the city. This was a huge upgrade from where I worked back home, and it was inspiring to feel I was moving up in the world. Even though I was committed to doing my very best for the company I was working for, the Mexican work culture meant processes where slow and tedious, and very often all we could do to move forward with the project was be patient and wait. This left me with a lot of time on my hands, where I just sat by that massive window and didn’t have too much to do.

So I started writing “my masterplan”. I took a notebook, and wrote exactly what I expected to happen each year for the next 5 years, across all areas of my life. I detailed what position I would have in the company, how big Simple Men would be, what belt I’d be in JiuJitsu, where I’d live, how much money I’d be making, my net worth, etc.

2 months after this, the whole masterplan changed —you know, man plans and God laughs—, but writing it down served a very key purpose in my life at that time: it motivated me to start taking Simple Men more seriously and try to make it a business. That decision changed my entire life for the better, as you’ll see later.

And so I decided, for the time I was going to be in Mexico, I would try my very best to make money online, through the Simple Men project. I didn’t know how, so the first thing I did, was buy an amazing program that, while focused on how to grow on Twitter, still has key concepts that are applicable to any online business: The Art of Twitter.

I read the full guide in a few days, and as I read through it, an idea came to mind: I was to write and publish the most complete self-improvement guide for men available online. As you know from this series of articles, at this point I’d been doing the self-improvement thing for years, and I had so much valuable advice to offer that I felt compelled to summarize it into a clear roadmap, an easy-to-follow guide that could help men change their lives and develop holistically into the best versions of themselves.

I wrote like a madman, stayed up late, woke up early, and finally completed and launched The Super Man program. This was at the time the culmination of years of hard work, and I was very happy when upon release, it sold very well, and I got many messages from young men successfully following the program.

So, for the first time ever, I had had a taste of being in control of my own income. For the first 2 months after releasing the program, I out-earned my salary from the company, and that’s when everything shifted.

The Masterplan Changes

My eyes had been opened, and I realized I had a huge opportunity to take a leap of faith and try to go my own way and find that elusive financial freedom so many of us are looking for. Around this time, July 2022, I decided to take a month of vacations, since I hadn’t for nearly two years, and my family had been wanting to do a family trip to Spain.

Even while traveling, I managed to make some decent income from Simple Men, and it was while in Spain, in a beautiful coastal town of white houses in Andalucía, that I decided I was going to quit my job and do the online thing full-time. I had stock options in the company I was working for, and I did feel it was a very big risk to renounce the possibility of a stable, financially secure career, but my heart was clearly pointing in a different direction.

At this time, while I considered myself a Catholic, I hadn’t truly surrendered my whole life to Christ, and my page was mostly secular masculinity advice, but I still felt compelled to take that leap of faith and try to make money independently, as this was something I had always wanted.

So I went back home, had a talk with my former boss, and told him I wanted to move to Spain and do my own thing. I told him I had no rush to leave and that I would give them enough time to find a replacement. On that note, some advice: always leave like a gentleman.

He was very supportive and he thanked me for not leaving them hanging. We agreed I’d work for them for 2 more months, and I left his office feeling like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders, and excited as I could be for the future.

A New Opportunity Arises

In the 2 months following my official notice that I would be quitting my job, a few interesting things happened: I wrote a new program explaining how I had managed to replace my 9 to 5 income with online income, called Escaping The Matrix, and I got presented with a new opportunity. I went out to dinner with some old friends, and one of them, when I told them I’d be quitting my job, took me aside and told me he was thinking about founding a startup in the health sector, and he wanted me to be his cofounder.

It took me by surprise, and my mind was already set on going to Spain, so I wasn’t sure whether or not I should accept his offer, since that would mean staying home indefinitely and postponing my dream of moving to Europe and trying to do my own thing with this blog and whatever business came out of it.

I talked it over with my family, I prayed on it, and eventually I decided it was the right choice. So I accepted his offer, and together with our third cofounder, we launched the new business. I won’t go too much into detail regarding what that other company does, but it’s growing nicely, we have a team of 8 people already, and have raised some decent money in funding.

Looking back, I’m very grateful I accepted the offer and didn’t just detach from the modern professional world. I feel like having the startup as well as this business helped me stay grounded in reality, make great connections in the world of tech and business, and learn a lot of things. It was definitely the right choice. Being 100% nomadic in my endeavors, I know now, wouldn’t have been ideal.

Fast Forward

I’ll summarize this part of the story because I don’t want this article to be too long. After accepting my now cofounder’s offer of building the startup together in November 2022, we launched the platform in February 2023, and throughout 2023, focused on growing the business and finishing our pre-seed round. Simultaneously, I kept working on Simple Men, but to be perfectly honest, very much lost my focus and my love for it, since I started seeing it as just a source of income and not a project that I engaged with genuinely.

My focus shifted from just writing honest content, to bringing in more cash, and because of that, I stopped posting the content I wanted and posted more of the content I thought would hit the Instagram algorithm. This in an effort to grow more and more.

What this meant was that all content started being short-form, and I stopped doing what I really liked doing: writing. As you know from parts 1 and 2 of this series, I’ve always wanted to be a writer. It’s my chosen form of art. It’s what brings peace to my soul. But I let myself be led astray by the business side of things, and as a consequence, I stopped putting my heart into Simple Men fully, and lost some of the interest in what I was doing. Simple Men essentially lost its soul.

Which is why I restructured the whole thing and went back to what this was in the beginning: A writing project to share valuable advice and experiences I've learnt, in an effort to help young men, specifically Christian men, find a place and a direction in this world.

So I gave up the income that I was receiving from selling courses, programs and doing coaching in order to create content from the heart and try to monetize on Substack through writing, which is what I love. This was a difficult decision but I know it’s the right one. There’s no point in making great money if your soul is not in it.

2023 came and went like this, and towards the end of the year, the startup was more established, we had a team to support us, and we could afford to pay us a salary. Throughout the whole year though, Spain was on my mind.

Making Moves

So, finally, towards the end of last year I made the decision to go to Spain for a few months. When I accepted my cofounders offer, I did so with a condition: that I could work remotely if I wanted to, from whenever I wanted. He accepted, and while I chose to stay in the initial stages of the business, it has now grown to a point where I can do my role remotely. I’m really happy I put that condition in place from the get go, and never lost track of my intention to gain location freedom.

Long story short, I’m now in Spain, growing both this project, and the startup, meeting incredible people, training hard every day, boxing, training jiujitsu, traveling and just feeling incredibly blessed. Looking back, every single decision I’ve made, even those that might have felt wrong at the time, brought me to this point, which is precisely where I need to be, and I get up every morning with a grateful heart. I thank God for bringing me here and for all the blessings he’s given me. I am learning a lot still, and I have a long ways to go to become the man I know I can be, but I’m getting there.

What Does The Future Entail?

As for what comes next for me: A whole lot of writing. A deeper connection with God and a sincere effort to spread the message of Christian masculinity. I’m excited for the future, and I want to take a moment to thank you for being part of this project. It means the world to me that you read and support Simple Men.

One very exciting announcement before I say goodbye for now:

Christian Vitality launches worldwide April 6th!

I’ll be sharing more information about it as we move closer to the launch date, but it’s a book for the modern Christian man who wants to reconcile his ambition and his desire to accomplish great things in the world with his efforts to hold God at the center of his life. It’s a book through which you’ll understand how it’s possible to be both very successful materially, while remaining true to the teachings of God.

As always, premium subscribers get the book early and for a discounted price, and in this case, they will also get the Kindle/Digital version for free. You can upgrade your subscription and access the book early and also all the premium articles + the subscriber group chat in the button below.

I hope you enjoyed this series of articles, and as time moves on, circumstances change, and there’s more of my story to be told, I might continue writing these. For now, let me know what you think of this series in the comments below.

Thanks for reading and being here supporting and God bless you always!

Simple Man