I’m humbled that I get to introduce myself to you properly and share my journey with you…
I’m sure we have a lot more in common than we both realize and I want to go through what I dealt with to become a successful agency owner in 3 years in the hopes that I can pass what I have learned onto you…
This is a story about a kid from a small town, in a tiny country, that wanted to be a rockstar and discovered a passion for design, business and WordPress.
Music, business and websites
I built my first website 21 years ago on GeoCities when I was 14 years old, it was scrappy and extremely bright coloured. I made it for my skateboarding crew with my friends from school.
I remember how exciting it was to simply go online.
Back then, whenever we connected to the internet it would take over the land line for the entire family, so I was only allowed to connect for just 1 hour per day.
So I spent the days fiddling with Front Page, just waiting for my 1 hour to upload the code and share the updates with my MIRC friends (kinda like a Stone Age version of Slack).
That’s about the time I also picked up a guitar for the first time.
I borrowed a cheap electric guitar from a friend to learn on my own and impress a girl I liked.
But that first day was so inspiring I ended up sleeping with the guitar next to me in bed. It was love at first chord.
I was obsessed and quickly became pretty good (for a kid), formed a band with some friends and started performing at school and local events.
For the next decade, I focused on becoming the best rock musician I could.
I realised that a band is a business and being kind of a niche band, I knew it was up to me to do it, so I started researching entrepreneurship, marketing and design.
I read every book I could buy on the subject, got certified as a business and digital consultant, and learned WordPress and the entire Adobe suite. All while attending music college and performing in venues across the country on the weekends, AND holding a job as the youngest top guitar salesman at the biggest music shop in the country.
These years were fun but tough and despite all my efforts, the band wasn’t doing very well. After all that study, I thought I’d have my own episode on MTV Cribs already!
We decided the band needed a change.
We rebranded, wrote new stuff, this time in English to maximise our reach, and did an online launch using everything I learned.
Within a month of the launch, my local band from a small town in Israel was signed to release an album worldwide through a British label.
We were stoked!
We decided to drop everything, come to the UK and start touring Europe. And so we did!
Starting from scratch, we began building our audience at small venues and pubs, while really pumping things up online.
We went from playing to sometimes less than 10 people to hundreds, then thousands. Playing with some of the artists we grew up listening to.
It was pretty amazing, but I was still broke!