Everyone thought he was crazy. No funding, no support
— just one idea and relentless drive.
Today, that same idea is a $20 million success story. How did he prove everyone wrong?
What’s the secret behind this insane growth? In this video, we break down how he went from ignored to unstoppable — and how you can apply the same playbook to your business or side hustle.
This is the kind of story you’ll want to watch till the end.
#EntrepreneurSuccess
#StartupStory
#BusinessInspiration
#MillionDollarIdea
#FromZeroToHero
#StartupSuccess
#HighCPM
#FinanceTips
#MotivationMonday
#Tier1Traffic
#USAStartup
#UKEntrepreneurs
#CanadaBusiness
#AustraliaStartup
#GermanyTech
This $20M story started with zero support…
Don’t scroll past this — it might change how you think
— just one idea and relentless drive.
Today, that same idea is a $20 million success story. How did he prove everyone wrong?
What’s the secret behind this insane growth? In this video, we break down how he went from ignored to unstoppable — and how you can apply the same playbook to your business or side hustle.
This is the kind of story you’ll want to watch till the end.
#EntrepreneurSuccess
#StartupStory
#BusinessInspiration
#MillionDollarIdea
#FromZeroToHero
#StartupSuccess
#HighCPM
#FinanceTips
#MotivationMonday
#Tier1Traffic
#USAStartup
#UKEntrepreneurs
#CanadaBusiness
#AustraliaStartup
#GermanyTech
This $20M story started with zero support…
Don’t scroll past this — it might change how you think
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00You got your first year in business, and you made how much in the first year?
00:03Nothing. It was like $30K. It was tiny.
00:04Second year?
00:05Like $180K.
00:07Third year?
00:08$650K.
00:09Fourth year?
00:10$2 million.
00:11Okay.
00:11$6 million.
00:12Sick.
00:12This was when COVID happened. I think we shot up to $15K.
00:15Seven?
00:15$21, $22K.
00:18This is Michael, and this story is all about how he quit his job
00:22to build this company that now does $20 million a year,
00:25but he started with just a few thousand dollars,
00:27living in his parents' basement, and turning it eventually into a real business.
00:32Putting your entire life savings at $27 into this company.
00:35Before I quit my job, there's one of the boxes I needed to check, which is...
00:40Ooh, that is really good.
00:43I think there are 10 steps from having a business idea,
00:46actually starting it, and then scaling up to multi-millions.
00:49Let's see if those 10 steps are the same as yours.
00:52So step one for you was you came up with a brilliant idea, which happened where?
00:55I was in Malibu, California.
00:57I went out there with a buddy of mine, took a couple weeks off of work.
01:00I had thought about starting a dropship business.
01:02I was like, let me find something that has high revenue, decent margins,
01:06and that, like, don't do any of the ops myself,
01:08and just use that margin for ads to work.
01:11And funny enough, like, the idea for Atlas came from that coffee shop,
01:14but didn't turn out to be a dropship business at all.
01:16I love it.
01:17Coffee company at a coffee shop. You're a genius.
01:19So at that coffee shop where I had the idea, I wasn't a coffee snob at the time.
01:23I hated coffee.
01:24I thought the coffee was, like, because I'd only ever had, like, Starbucks or my grandpa's Folgers or whatever,
01:29and it's just like, I'm like, this is clearly something that everyone has got an acquired taste for,
01:34but no one really, like, really likes it.
01:35But I had this coffee that was really fruity and, like, really, really tasty.
01:40The barista at the time, it was a natural process coffee that I was drinking,
01:44so how they take the coffee bean from the cherry actually can have a huge difference on what you taste.
01:50So coffee's a fruit. Didn't know that.
01:51In certain countries, they don't have enough rain,
01:54and so instead of washing the fruit off to get to the bean,
01:58they let it set out on these raised beds,
02:00and kind of, like, the fruit kind of shrivels over the bean like a sun-dried tomato,
02:03and so it imparts that fruit flavor on the bean.
02:06So I'm, like, learning all these things,
02:07and from there, I was like, oh, shit, like, let me collect all these nuggets,
02:11and then that's where kind of the idea, like, oh, coffee comes from over 50 countries.
02:15There's so many things about each of these places that make it taste different.
02:18Like, let's tell that story.
02:20You can't just sell coffee, right?
02:22You can't just be like, hey, it's roasted strong.
02:25I mean, you can build a brand on anything, right?
02:27People do lifestyle brands with coffee all the time,
02:29but ours actually had something to do with the product.
02:32Step two was you reached out to a friend, right?
02:35So you both would do it together.
02:37Yeah, he was actually, he was there with me.
02:38Ah, he was at the coffee shop together.
02:39Yeah, he was just one of my best friends from high school.
02:41Step three, you come up with a name.
02:43Atlas Coffee, because Atlas, it's, like, from around the world,
02:45and the club is, we wanted to build this community around people
02:48who were getting to taste all these different things.
02:50Then you obviously do the next thing, which is, like, check all the domain names,
02:53make sure you could actually get them the social media accounts.
02:55Yep, yep.
02:55Actually, I think we were slow to get the social media accounts,
02:57but luckily it was so long ago that, like, they didn't get snagged.
03:02Mmm.
03:03God damn, Jimmy.
03:05That's some serious gourmation.
03:07Next, for me, five would be landing page for pre-sales,
03:10or what you call the pay-to-door strategy.
03:11Pay-to-door test.
03:12Yeah, it's like, here's a product, buy it.
03:13Oh, sorry, hey, we're low on stock.
03:15But you get the data you need to confirm the validation
03:18that it's something people want.
03:19Yeah, that would be the smart idea.
03:20Yeah, it would have been.
03:21But not what you did.
03:22Your next step was what?
03:24Getting a supplier for coffee?
03:26Luckily, that part wasn't too crazy.
03:28And when you go to buy coffee, there's kind of, like, two types of markets.
03:30There's a spot market, which is, like, okay, like, I see that you have this.
03:33Send me a sample.
03:33I want that.
03:34Super easy.
03:35Like, you can go from, I see a coffee, I've tried it,
03:39and get it in-house in, like, 10 days.
03:40And then where we are now, we do contract buying.
03:42So we'll work with the farm six months before harvest and say,
03:46okay, we're going to buy two containers worth.
03:48It's a well-oiled machine at this point.
03:49I remember I invested in one CPG company.
03:52And we called it, like, the Great Tahini Disaster.
03:54It was basically, like, we used a bunch of tahini in one product,
03:57and it was really expensive, and they dropped it all over the warehouse
04:01and ruined this entire shipment.
04:03And so I think it was, like, $50,000 lost or something like that.
04:06Did you, have you ever had a container drop it in the middle of the sea
04:09that you had already bought and, like, contracted for?
04:11We had some stuff get stuck a long time.
04:13Remember when the container got stuck in that port, like,
04:16turned sideways and got stuck?
04:17Yeah.
04:18And they weren't, like, we had.
04:19In Panama.
04:19Yeah, we had some stuff get affected by that, which is not fun.
04:22You just have to swap out something else and say, like,
04:25hey, you're not going to bill us until we get it, you know?
04:27Yeah.
04:27So cash flow didn't hurt us, but we just swapped in another country.
04:29So part of the game that sounds like it's a skill set of yours is basically being, like,
04:33X is happening.
04:34That sucks.
04:35Now we're going to negotiate and figure this out.
04:37And so it's really just having the gravitas to call these people and sort of negotiate
04:43and make changes to something that's going to have to be fluid.
04:46One of the only people who did what we were setting out to do in the space at the time,
04:51they didn't sell their own coffee.
04:52They used other people to sell their coffee.
04:54So we were like, okay, so other companies are comfortable sending coffee on behalf of
04:58another company.
04:58So we called, I don't know, 20 different ones.
05:01Found the one with, like, the best pricing and the most options, and it turned out to
05:04be pretty turnkey.
05:06And the next step is you need a way to ship and have boxes.
05:10We provided them kind of our branding and our packaging, and they took care of all the
05:13downstream stuff.
05:14So before you actually even had the supplier for your coffee and your boxes, you had branding.
05:19That was, like, really important to you guys.
05:20It turned out to be really important later, and our whole thing was, like, we want to
05:24show the outline of the country, remind people that coffee doesn't come from here.
05:28In every business, you've got to have the math.
05:30The numbers have to work.
05:31But if you pair that with the magic, you have a lasting business.
05:35It seems like you have three magic moments.
05:36The first magic moment I see is basically this.
05:40Yeah, this is our postcard that we send with every shipment.
05:42Other than kind of educating them about the country and where their coffee comes from,
05:45it's just a visual reminder that this thing you're about to consume doesn't come from here.
05:49But one of our mottos is to take people there, take them there.
05:52And so right when you open the box, it's kind of like you're being teleported to Costa Rica.
05:57Then you also have this.
05:59Yeah, so this is our tasting card or coffee card.
06:01So this is more about, like, the specific coffee that you're trying.
06:04So what are the tasting notes to look for?
06:06How is it roasted?
06:08A little fun fact, coffee has over 800 aromatic and flavor compounds, which is more than wine.
06:13So as you're sipping your coffee, you get to have this moment where you associate the story with taste.
06:18And any time you can get multi-senses involved, you have a longer-lasting memory.
06:23So you know how they say that smell is our most powerful memory?
06:26Well, you actually have that with coffee.
06:28And then you've paired smell with taste with a story.
06:32So you're kind of having this assault on the essences, which creates this lasting magical moment.
06:36And the third magical moment I see is that every single month, you have a different country that you give people to.
06:43Tell them why and how you came up with this crazy statistic I didn't even know of all the places coffee came from.
06:48The most fun kind of fact was that coffee comes from over 50 different countries.
06:52And honestly, people collect these.
06:54Like, people, like, love the patterns, love getting something new.
06:57It definitely keeps our designer on his toes because there's so many ones to design.
07:01But this one's our Indonesia box, and that one's a coffee from Uganda.
07:04Remember when you were a little kid, and if you were like me, you got those National Geographics.
07:08And every single month, you got the National Geographic in your hand, and you kept up.
07:11Like, you kept the images.
07:12Or even if you were a super nerd, like I was, you had those binders.
07:15Did you ever have those full of all the animals?
07:17I had zoo books.
07:18Yeah, that was it.
07:19Zoo books was awesome.
07:20And then, yeah, I collected cards.
07:22And why would somebody do that when you have the internet and you could have these things all online?
07:26Why would you do that if you could go see a tiger and you could see it live in India?
07:31Well, it's because you can't always do that.
07:32When you're a little kid, you're not going to get to go to Uganda.
07:34You're not going to get to go to Indonesia.
07:35And probably a lot of people that get coffee shipped to them aren't going to get to go to these places and taste the coffee firsthand.
07:41But you get to send them a country and an experience in a box.
07:44That is a beautiful magic moment that when they think about the price of this coffee, they aren't thinking about bean-to-bean price comparison.
07:52You have taken pricing out of the equation because you are delivering a travel experience to another part of the world, not a cup of coffee.
07:59Now, for you guys to get clients, you did something else.
08:04You went to friends and family, but then, maybe because you are a data scientist, a more data-based way.
08:11Before I quit my job is one of the boxes I needed to check, which is, okay, we've got kind of like a 1.0 version of the branding.
08:17We've got kind of the framing, right? We've talked to our friends and family, and they, you know, we eyes light up when we talk about it to humans.
08:23Let's run some paid ads towards it.
08:25And at the time, Facebook was pretty new, and I actually had experience with Google AdWords.
08:30You can choose kind of which, what someone searches, what you want to bid on.
08:33So people who search for Coffee of the Month Club or Coffee Subscription, that's like the prime audience.
08:39And if those people weren't converting at a certain rate at a cost per conversion of a certain range, like, I didn't know how we were going to make this thing work.
08:47And so that was ultimately, like, the real test.
08:49It's really hard to figure out how to charge for things and how to decide if you're making money.
08:53What is one formula you use to simplify that?
08:56Yeah, so we, for a subscription business, is kind of the North Star financial metric is your lifetime value of a customer,
09:02so how much profit you make over the life of a customer, divided by your cost to acquire that customer.
09:08So a lifetime value is just your average order value per month times your gross margin on that product
09:13times your number of months that someone stays.
09:17So if you're a business that sells a $20 product and you have 50% gross margins and people stay for 10 months,
09:23your LTV would be $100.
09:25And so then you come up with what you can pay per customer based on this.
09:29And so there's, like, kind of different health eating ratios.
09:32As a bootstrap company, we had to have a really aggressive one.
09:34So we needed an LTV to CADC and grade it in five.
09:38In this math, that means we needed to pay $20 or less for a customer.
09:42What we just saw here is how to charge for your products in order to make money.
09:46We got average order value, a.k.a. how much money somebody spends with you.
09:49We've got gross margins, a.k.a. how much money you keep from that.
09:53Then we've got how many months they stay with you before they churn or you lose the customer.
09:56That equals the lifetime value.
09:58That's your North Star, how much money the customer is to you as a company.
10:01You divide that by how much money it takes for you to acquire a customer.
10:05So can you go out and buy ads for X dollar amount?
10:08This leads to a ratio that of this company needs to be five or greater.
10:12Are you telling us absolutely everything?
10:15Not exactly.
10:16We're also out of coffee.
10:21So then you are getting your customers through this one strategy, but you overlaid another one, PR,
10:27which I typically, like, never tell startups to do or never do in mine.
10:31I wouldn't have thought it was going to work as well as it did for us.
10:33But it worked for you guys.
10:33How and why?
10:34And so we got really good at pitching press and ultimately you stack it up with those backlinks up
10:40and then you start ranking organically for those same search words that you're bidding on paid.
10:44We didn't have to infuse a ton into paid because organic was cutting our cost per acquisition down.
10:49Like our paid ads were still profitable, but our organic really bolstered that.
10:54Most businesses overall fail.
10:55They never make it.
10:56They're a wreck.
10:57And the difference between the businesses that make it and that fail is often SOPs and a level of detail to the systems and processes you have in your business.
11:06Whether it's coffee ratio or otherwise, are there original SOPs or to do lists that you used in your business that you thought were really important?
11:15I think you're 100% right.
11:16It's like if you can simplify running a business to just the repeatable processes that drive things and you can communicate them to other people and you can't hand it to someone until you can communicate it clearly.
11:28Like it's fewer things done better to the nth degree that actually causes a business to win.
11:33One of my favorite quotes is most businesses die from indigestion and not starvation.
11:37They're trying to do too much instead of like the few things that they need to better play playing the right games and playing them better.
11:42Even though you might be truly the best person doing a thing like that's not a strength over time.
11:48Like you have to be able to codify what you do and hand it down and even maybe accept that it's not going to be done to the same standard.
11:55But that's okay because you can't scale otherwise.
11:58One of the realizations we had when we grew really quickly was that we just didn't have enough good managers.
12:03And like understanding the value of that.
12:05And they're the people who understand.
12:06Like they're the people who have managed people before and they know like hey if there is a bad performer on the team here's kind of how this is going to play out in like a behavioral psychology way on the team.
12:15It's not good.
12:16Like for me it's like we eventually got to a phase where I knew that even if I could manage all those things there was just too much.
12:25What was the final step there?
12:28As soon as we saw actually that those paid ads were converting in a way where people wouldn't have to retain for that long to make it pay off.
12:35Yeah.
12:35It was actually a conversation with my dad that got me kind of over the edge.
12:39And he said you're 27.
12:41There's never going to be a more risk-free time to do this.
12:44If you're ever going to take a risk in your life the soil is fertile for now.
12:48That's so fascinating because I think that's one of the reasons I love YouTube and you guys should also subscribe.
12:54I'm so excited to finally remind them to subscribe because I forget every time.
12:58Every time.
12:59I'll just keep saying it.
13:00Smash the subscribe button.
13:01Don't forget.
13:02Don't forget.
13:03Every time.
13:04Let's give away three year long subscriptions to Atlas.
13:07We'll do it.
13:08I was going to pay for it but you can pay for it too.
13:10Oh we'll do it.
13:10Okay great.
13:10As long as they subscribe.
13:11They got to subscribe.
13:12That's right.
13:13I'm here for it.
13:14You're daily less.
13:15I'm here for it.
13:15I can't believe I haven't asked this.
13:17Do you want some coffee?
13:18Totally.
13:18Let's go get some coffee.
13:21We're ready to do some tasting notes?
13:22Let's do it.
13:23Okay.
13:24Do we cheers?
13:24We have to.
13:25Okay.
13:28Oh that is really good.
13:30We have a tasting wheel.
13:31This is how we decide what we taste.
13:33Oh good because I have no idea what I'm doing.
13:35So when you're trying to identify a taste the first rung is kind of like all right is what I'm tasting
13:38fruity?
13:39Is what I'm tasting sweet?
13:40Is it more like chocolate?
13:42And then from there it's like okay you tell your brain okay it's in the fruity camp.
13:45Is it more like a berry fruit or like a citrus fruit?
13:48And then okay it's berry.
13:49It's in the berry family.
13:51So eventually you kind of just train your brain to kind of say okay not only is it fruity
13:54this is more berry than citrus.
13:56I definitely taste some spices.
13:58Okay yeah.
13:59Yeah.
13:59There are spices in there.
14:00Yeah.
14:00I mean we don't add any spices but that's why it's on the thing.
14:04Is this?
14:04Like cinnamon.
14:05Like what do you think?
14:05Like cinnamon baking spice?
14:06Oh yeah yeah yeah.
14:07Yeah.
14:08Actually.
14:08That's actually like a pretty common taste descriptor baking spice.
14:11Is it?
14:12Yeah.
14:12Interesting.
14:12And this is a lighter roast so it's going to be a little bit more acidic than like a
14:17darker roast so you're going to get a little bit more of kind of the like it's going to
14:20light up your tongue a little bit.
14:21Yeah.
14:23I've just learned that I'm very bad at coffee tasting.
14:26On a wine I might be able to tell you which tells you something about me.
14:32What are you doing?
14:33I told you I need a drink so I'm going to help myself.
14:35Okay pal?
14:35There's you the entrepreneur, right?
14:38And then there's the 472 different things that you could do as an entrepreneur to drive
14:44this one thing you actually want.
14:46The problem is as the entrepreneur you are sad because you can't figure out which of these
14:52leads to more of this.
14:54So what do you do?
14:55You think about okay if my North Star is I want more money.
14:58You could do option one, increase price, right?
15:04You could do option two, start social media.
15:08You could do option three, make better product in order to option four, decrease churn for
15:16customers leaving.
15:17If those are only the four options and there's never four, there's always four million, then
15:21what you're trying to get to is which of these leads to more of this?
15:24And you as a data scientist have a background where you're like, huh, I want to figure out
15:30if I touch number one, if I just give it a little poke, how sensitive is number one to
15:37distributing me more dollars?
15:38Number one maybe equals $2.
15:40Number two...
15:41The unintuitive thing is some of these have outside impacts.
15:45So even after you prioritize it in this way, one of these could be five times more important
15:49than the rest.
15:50Well, exactly.
15:50So number one may lead to $4 and number one will only lead to $2.
15:55And then you would get way more complex and you could say, well, number one not only leads
15:59to $4, but it also takes, you know, four times the work as opposed to, that's a clock
16:06in case you're aware, as opposed to this one only takes, so this one takes four and this
16:12one takes two.
16:13So this one makes more money, but it takes more time.
16:16Quick wins versus big investments.
16:18Right.
16:18And so the cool part about you and like your unfair advantage is that you're always trying
16:23to figure out where do I drive this because it drives this with less this.
16:29And that's some version of play the right games, win the right prizes.
16:33Mm-hmm.
16:34Shall we play a game?
16:36Oh.
16:38You start with one product, a coffee subscription box, and then what happens?
16:42So at a certain scale with just one product, you sell a set number of subscribers and a set
16:48number of leave.
16:48And to continue that growth, you either have to pump more into acquisition, sometimes unprofitably,
16:53or you can use your same infrastructure, your same warehouse, your same marketing technology,
16:57and launch new products where it makes sense.
16:59And so tea was kind of that next evolution for us.
17:02So we started Atlas Tea Club, tea from different countries around the world.
17:05You look cool.
17:06You can either have one customer and try to get a ton more of them, right?
17:11Or you can have one customer and try to get that one customer to buy a bunch more stuff.
17:15If you can just treat your first customer like it's your only one and you can make them never
17:19want to leave you and be so obsessed with you that they bring a bunch of friends, then
17:23your business is a lot more profitable.
17:25But that doesn't talk about that next step, which is how do you get a lot of debt from
17:29people in your business?
17:30Yeah.
17:30And so basically, now you can cross-sell your entire lifts.
17:33And it's a new market.
17:34So you're right.
17:35It's a combination of you have an existing audience who loves to try things from around
17:38the world.
17:38Yep.
17:39Hey, now we do tea.
17:40Maybe one day we'll do chocolate, right?
17:41But then you also have a net new market of tea lovers who are like, hey, this is a cool
17:45concept.
17:45I've never heard of that.
17:46Yeah.
17:46And they could even maybe reverse sell into your coffee.
17:49I feel they might.
17:50Yeah.
17:50So.
17:51Brilliant.
17:51It's great.
17:51It's like an ecosystem around the brand narrative.
17:54So you can sleep in your parents' basement and run a company like this.
17:58You can also do what he did and have a soft off-ramp four months in his job before he took
18:03the huge plunge.
18:04My point isn't to tell you there's one way to do a startup and one way to get rich.
18:08It's to show you that you can, that normal humans just like you and me are doing this
18:12every day.
18:13So hit that subscribe button because maybe you are the one that's going to make it with
18:16that next $20 million company.
18:18Or hell, just six figures.
Comments