Deep in debt, making little income, and with a new born on the way, Dustin was up against a wall. He was working 40 hours a week with me on a software startup that was making $0 money.
He was stressed out, overworked and had to find a way to make some income on the side. He didn’t have the luxury of creating a business plan or testing a lot of ideas.
Pressure and necessity forced him to:
- Focus only on what got results.
- Use the skills he already had.
- Make something work with very little time.
Dustin found a way to start selling photoshop actions and design templates on Creative Market. His first month brought in a “whopping” $800. But since then he’s made $117,000 in the last year selling his digital design goods.
This is the first time that Dustin has been interviewed about his crazy success, and I’m super excited to share his interview with you below.
Get out a notepad, a pen and take notes. If you implement even one thing from this interview, I guarantee you, you will see massive results.
Download to listen in the car or at the gym:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/173037009″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]
A Closer Look at Dustin’s First Months of RetroSupply.co
His Keys to Success
#1. Be ruthless with your time.
Dustin was working 40 hours a week and had a newborn baby.
He could have just made excuses like everyone else.
Instead he woke up at 5:30am every day and devoted two hours to working on his side business before everyone else in his family was awake.
Whatever your situation, make sure to carve out time for your business.
#2. Try > Plan
Plans are a dime a dozen. Instead of focusing on complicated plans and strategies, he just had an idea, tried it and continually did more of what works.
Your success can be as simple as this. Get out of your head and get feedback on your ideas. You won’t know if it’s any good until you get it out there.
Your challenge: implement one idea this week that will make you money, even if it’s imperfect.
#3. Create a community.
“When you’re a lone wolf you’re not sure if you’re going down the wrong path or not.”
Surround himself with other successful entrepreneurs and modeling others was a huge key to Dustin’s success.
This can be something as simple as investing in a coaching program, or creating your own mastermind. I’ll be giving you highly detailed instructions for creating your own powerful mastermind group in the next post.
How to implement this: contact someone you know and ask them to be your business accountability partner.
#4. Focus on quality.
The more proud you are of what you create, the more likely you are to want to promote the hell out of it and believe in how much it can help people.
We all have our doubts in our value, but the more you pour your heart and soul into something and get feedback, the likelier you are to overcome those worries.
Your mission: identify three things that will make your product great and incorporate them this week.
Links mentioned in this interview:
- RetroSupply.co — high quality retro design goods for designers.
- The Alchemist — Dustin’s favorite book for staying inspired.
- Creative Market
- DustinLee.co
Great interview Jonathan. Thanks Dustin. I take my hat off to design guys. My first intro into the world of making money online was through software. Outsourcing development of PC software and WordPress plugins, then turning it for a profit by leveraging the WordPress platform ( give limited version away for free, upgrade to paid one ) as well as internet marketing forums for the software. Still remains one of the fastest ways to make passive income without being to caught up in the actual guts of it. Anything where you can make it once, then sell it over and over again tends to work well. The key I found was to keep your eyes and ears open to a gap in the market, or an existing product or service that folks are excited about but is limited in someway ( i.e only a service exists, not a product, or the other way around ). Anyway, cheers.
Great story Dustin and more importantly congrats on the little one.
Love this interview (only 4 minutes in and I’m already inspired). Thanks for sharing this story here Dustin! Glad you did this interview, Jonathan!