2001 - Kicked out of @michiganstateu
2005 - Went broke as a poker pro in Vegas
2009 - Gave up on my music career (after accumulating 120k in student debt)
2010 - Started @seo.direct and learned digital marketing
2020 - Started @trueclassic
2025 - 5M+ customers, 30M+ shirts sold and $1B+ in rev
The rest is history. The takeaway should be that everything you do in life ladders up to something bigger. Music built my creative muscle, poker built my risk tolerance, and building other people's businesses for a decade helped sharpen my digital marketing skillset for what was to come.
Hope you guys enjoy my founder story. 🚀
Following my dreams led me into 100K of student debt and living life as a broke musician.
What I didn’t know at the time was that developing my creativity through music would single-handedly be the most important building block to separating myself in the business world in the years to come.
Stay patient.
Everything you’re doing now is setting you up for the future. You just don’t know it yet.
