I Make $1M/Year As An Introvert

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I Make $1M/Year As An Introvert

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Jun 15, 2024

This is the breakdown of how Marcos Ruiz makes over $1/year ghostwriting for people on the internet.

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This guy makes 1 million a year with a business model built for introverts ghost writing

And the best part is he did it all in just two years

I've never been a sales guy

I'm an introvert which is why I became a writer

I drove out to Miami Florida to ask him exactly how it works how he got started and the

framework he used to go from zero to 65 000 a month in just one year

What I followed was called the framework

When he first started Marcos was trying every business model under the sun but he was barely

making any money

Then he stumbled upon ghost writing and learned a secret that would change everything

The main thing that people were talking about in ghost writing is you're going to get people

followers

And then I quickly realized there's a much better way to do it

If I just In

In this video Marcos shares his exact blueprints on how to find close and retain clients

to build a million dollar per year ghost writing business from scratch

I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story

Marcos

Pleasure

Thanks for having me

Tell me about who you are and what you built

Yeah I'm Marcos

I'm CEO of The Birdhouse

We're a Twitter ghost writing agency and we essentially write the tweets the threads

We repurpose clients videos and we put them on Twitter so that they can obviously go viral

get views and make sales

And we went zero to 65K a month in one year

looking to scale up to over a million this year so 100K a month

Explain to me what the hell is ghost writing

Yeah

When I discovered ghost writing through Twitter I basically just realized that founders CEOs

business owners even influencers a lot of these guys have ghost writers on the internet

internet because they just don't have time to do it

So we go and help people outsource that

And what I ultimately landed on was coaches consultants and education companies because

these are the people that can actually help monetize faster

We'll go and repurpose viral clips and viral videos or even full videos and full podcasts

We have long form posts which is a new thing

We have articles replies

You can do spaces

You can help set up spaces

There's really so much that goes into it now

And certain niches have different formats of content that are going to perform the best

So depending on the client we're going to put out a majority of those different kinds

of content threads posts long forms articles et cetera

All right

right So give me a timeline of your backstory and how you get into this

Yeah

So when I was 19 I was at basic training for the army and my friend actually showed

me like day trading on his cell phone

And this was kind of my first introduction to internet money

So I go from there and I'm trying pretty much every business opportunity under the sun

Drop shipping affiliate marketing crypto day trading blogging you name it I've done

done it

And then from there I quickly realized that I'm a little introvert

I play video games

I've had a blog

I did marketing in college and I've done a little bit of writing

I've actually been on Twitter since 2011

So when I chose copywriting I probably had like two thousand bucks to my name

It was it was pretty it was a challenging time but I'm the kind of person that kind

of I always knew that I would make more money

Like I always had that mindset

I bought a course back then was like 50 bucks a month and it kind of taught me the ins and

outs of the ghostwriting thing

It gave me an offer

And after I signed my first client for one thousand bucks and I found a second one for

thousand bucks I reinvested all two thousand into a bigger course that cost me two thousand

bucks per month

So it's actually a twelve thousand dollar course

Nice

So I spent all of my money that I didn't have and it came back and I had signed a three

thousand dollar per month client

So now two thousand dollar a month course three thousand dollar a month client

I had like just enough money to live the rest of history from there

That's amazing

Yeah

My favorite part about Marcos's story is that he chose one idea and stuck with it until

he hit a million dollars a year

But it was never easy

It required having the right idea and studying other businesses that paved the way before

him

If you want to do something similar to Marcos but you don't have an idea or you don't know

exactly where to start you can download our free report of 50 plus real world product

high services

In this report you'll learn exactly how 50 founders got their ideas how they grew how

they got customers and lots more

And then if you're really serious about starting something then consider joining the starter

story community with thousands of people building businesses that will change their lives

Just head to the first link in the description and you can download the report one hundred

percent free

All right

right Let's get back to how Marcos got his first customers

Let's talk about how you got your first client and how you scale it to 10K a month specifically

How did you do it

Yeah

My first ever clients were from Upwork

From there I always say you have to kind of stack your case studies and stack your

testimonials

So I took that job and used it as social proof for my Twitter DMs

And I was sending out 100 200 DMs a day had it all in my notion following up

And that took about a few weeks before I kind of really landed some interest

And I was able to sign my first 1K a month client

I didn't get the best results at the time

But what I did get was he sent me a message and it said like I got seven free trial subscribers

and I was like I got testimonial

So then I'm using that in my DMs to other software founders

And eventually I landed my first 3K a month client which was a big deal for me

And that was a coach and we crushed it for him

This was the first time I really crushed it for someone viral every week

And not only that what I realized is it drove sales

And I was like okay he's paying me 3K a month

And this thread probably made him like 20 30K

So it's like okay well he just made enough money to pay me for 10 months

So from there it was like referrals and inbound

I just focused on getting my clients good results

So the referrals would come in

My audience was building at the time

I think at the time I was going 3K 5K followers I think I had 10K followers after like eight

months in business

And then from there it's just been compounding ever since

Yeah

You talked a lot about how to get leads but how to actually close clients

Yeah this is a tough one because I've never been a sales guy

I'm an introvert which is why I became a writer

And I'm sure a lot of people watching are introverts and that's why they do these

of introverted businesses right

So what I follow is called the closer framework

What it allowed me to do is have a framework to follow hey why are you on this call and

kind of take them through a little bit of a journey on the call

But ultimately what I've really come down to is if you can just get on a call tell

tell someone how you actually are going to help them and be honest and be a human

Most people actually vibe with that

And if they don't vibe with that you probably don't want to work with them anyway

Sales is really just about conviction

So if you actually believe in what you're doing you can actually help someone make

more money

It's pretty easy to sell

Yeah

You grew this super fast

It went from like 1k to almost 15k really fast

How can someone else who's watching do something similar

Yeah

So this is what I was doing and this is also what I actually have clients do or their teams

It's cold warm and hot

Like I said I was sending 100 to 200 cold DMs a day

So that's number one

And that's really just saying hey giving them a compliment based on checking out their

profile giving them your offer and then saying hey if you're interested let me know

If not you're good

Don't even answer

You don't want to be kind of too pushy

And then what's called warm DMs is just essentially DMing people who are following you engaging

engaging with your content etc

It all starts with kind of creating content on your Twitter

You always want to practice what you preach

And then what's called hot DMs which is the people who are already interested

They're DMing you first

They're saying hey I'm interested

Right

So using those three and having a happy balance that's how you can really accelerate the clients

that you land

So it all starts with making content sending cold and warm DMs and getting the inbound

leads

And it compounds very fast

It's like 100 DMs 200 DMs a day two to three tweets a day including like a thread and

you're golden from there

So you're doing well

You got like 10 000 15 000 a month and then you go to 50 000 a month

How did you do that

Yeah

So it's really two big things

Number one is having kind of a mindset shift from tactic hunting to actually implementing

So tactic hunting especially what we just talked about would be you're trying to plan

plan out what am I going to write

How am I going to send DMs

What's going to be my script

The implementing is actually going out and doing it and doing it not just once not just

for a week but for six months 12 months straight and doing it every single day

That's the implementing piece that really helps it compound because in the back end

you're actually delivering your servicing like I said getting referrals and getting

leads inbound but then also doing the outbound and when you combine those you kind of create

a flywheel

And then honestly after 10 20K a month I'd say every business has kind of a different

point where you have to ask yourself do I want to be a solopreneur or do I want to

be an entrepreneur

And that's when I decided to start hiring team members and building a real business

under a real business name

Now we're doing about 70K a month and our margins are about 60

We have two senior writers one junior writer

I have an ops manager who was my real employee

Number one she was my assistant now my ops manager

And then I have a sales representative as well

So a team of five six if you include me

All right well let's talk about building a good team how to hire good people so that

you don't have to work on the business all day

Right

So what I did is I put out a tweet I'm looking for my first writer to join the team and help

me out

And I essentially gave four or five different people a prompt and I was like write a thread

write a Twitter thread

And I just picked the best one

And then from there I'm like you're on board

I also kind of picked the person who vibed with me the best from a culture perspective

So who am I going to vibe with who actually has the talent and really thinking of them

as a partner and not an employee

All right let's talk about tools

What tools do you use to run this business

Yeah so I use all the basic stuff obviously Google Docs Google Sheets

But further than that I use Canva for design

We use Twitter of course we use Hemingway is a really great app that'll actually help

you with your writing

It'll show you which level grade you're writing at and help you dumb it down and make it simpler

We use a tool called Hypefury to go and schedule all the tweets and we can schedule them there

for clients

And you can actually have client account access without actually being in the client's account

And then we also use Notion which is where we have kind of our company dashboard CRMs

client hubs everything like that

So I'd say those are really the main tools

All right let's talk about competition

Starting a ghostwriting business is seemingly easy

How do you differentiate from your competitors

When I started the main thing that people were talking about in ghostwriting is you're going

going to get people followers

And then I quickly realized there's a much better way to do it

If I just make somebody more money than they pay me then I'll have a client forever

I differentiated my offer to I'll help you not only grow on Twitter but the growth

is more of a byproduct

I'm actually going to help you monetize with Twitter

So it's a done for you monetization service

If you just learn business principles and then you learn writing you can kind of offer

that to anybody

Yeah

So a lot of people love the idea of ghostwriting can kind of sit behind your computer and write

for a living

How would you recommend someone to get started with ghostwriting

Yeah

So there's really two ways to do it

There's the I have no money way and there's the I have money way

The I have no money way is actually go on Twitter and be a user start to follow people

that are going viral and follow people that are actually writing great content study

what they're doing do it for yourself use yourself as the case study and then use that

to do the DMs

The paid way would be to buy a course

And I always say this when you buy a course just copy exactly what they tell you

The most important thing is to do it yourself and actually build yourself a bit of a personal

brand

Because what I quickly found out is if I was reaching out to somebody with more followers

than me they'd be like well I have more followers than you

Why would I hire you

So you have to do it for yourself and then you can do it for other people

Yeah

So we're here in your beautiful Miami apartment

Tell me about what a day in the life like is for a ghostwriting business owner

Yeah

So I guess I theme my days

I kind of stole that from I think it's like Jeff Bezos

If it's like a Monday I stack my meetings I usually have between 12 and 15 meetings

on a Monday

So I'll go straight from 7am to 5pm and just meetings for those days

And then I'll go to Jiu Jitsu at night or something

And then Tuesdays I like to have just like a blank calendar

And those are usually the days where I'm going to sit down and edit some client content because

I'm still acting as chief editor or I'll go out and maybe source some new clients or I'll

talk to the team or work on the business

Wednesday again it's usually a call day slash content day

And now as I'm stepping out more as a CEO I try to spend a lot more time thinking

I try to go on walks and stuff like that

But yeah again I say a majority of my time is either in or on the business and I don't

really do a ton else

I know we live in Miami but I don't really go out

I don't really party or anything like that

So I'm usually just either working in or on my business or I'm going to like go to Jiu

Jitsu at the gym watch TV play video games do something basic

I'm pretty chill dude

Have you experienced any struggles building a business becoming an entrepreneur

Yeah I'd say the biggest struggle was shiny object syndrome like being online and you

see people flexing Rolexes and Lambos and you just feel so inadequate

And just seeing everybody do something new and you're always just peeking out

That might be better

But what I ultimately learned was once you can finally shut that out and stick to one

thing and actually fail through it and keep going find your itty bitty bits of success

and again continue to shut out the noise because again even at 2K a month 3K a month

5K a month 10K a month you're still seeing all that stuff

It's not like it just goes away

Ultimately being able to have the self confidence to stick through the trials and tribulations

I think that's the ultimate

That's the ultimate thing

Okay last question that we ask to all the founders we interview

If you could have any advice for young Marcos getting started out or anyone getting started

out on a business what would it be

I think the number one thing I would tell my younger self is play to your strengths

and have the discipline to just stick it out

Because I think especially at first being an introvert and I used to play video games

and stuff like that I used to try to do things I wasn't good at sales video streaming

I tried all of it

If I played to my strengths which is more introverted writing stuff like this I think

that would have been a huge help

And then again sticking to one thing having the discipline to focus and stick out all

the failures that'd be my number one advice

I would have succeeded five years earlier

That's amazing

Well congrats on all your success man

Appreciate it

it Yeah

Thank you

You're crushing it

Yeah

You as well

Follow this advice and you'll have a million dollar ghostwriting business

Peace

Hey everyone

Pat here

Thank you guys so much for watching

I really hope Marcos story inspires and motivates some of you to get started on your own thing

If you're curious about doing something similar but you're still looking for an idea well

you can download that Deep Dive Productized Services report for free

It breaks down over 50 service based business ideas and tons of other stuff you'd want to know

Just click the first link in the description

And if you're serious about actually building something then consider joining Starter Story

and we will help you do that

Much love and I'll see you guys in the next one

Peace

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