Your Dreams. Your Goals. Your Way.

How I went from $0 to Over $3M Live Streaming

My favorite thing about live streaming is it's one of the few ways that you literally can earn a million dollars. All you need is your phone and your face and you can actually make money! It doesn't matter what platform you go live on. I’m going to share with you what equipment I use to live stream and what software you'll need. 

A lot of you feel like you have to have these full on amazing studios and ginormous backdrops. I want you to listen to me when I say this and this is whether you choose to live stream or not. If you're in here reading this, that means that you have a business or you desire to have a business or you are a side hustler. You're trying to create revenue for yourself. And I think now, more than ever a lot of people have realised how important it is to have secondary income. Our goal is to operate in excellence and not perfection -- you are allowed to grow. You are allowed to change, you are allowed to get better. That means our goal is to be the best that we can be and do the best that we can with what we have.

I did not start off with a lot of stuff. A lot of your favorite live streamers and broadcasters and You Tubers. We did not come out the gate with all of this stuff. We started right with what we have. For most of us it was a phone and our face, like real life. When I first started live streaming on Periscope, I literally just used my phone and an iPad.

That was all that I had. You can start with the same thing. I had $0 million. I was not running any ads to my Periscope account. Understand this. No paid ads. I did not have any lighting or any microphones. I would live stream from the island in my kitchen, because my apartment and kitchen were conjoined. It was a great room type field and I literally had two shoe boxes that I would stack up and prop a coffee cup on top and I would put my iPad or my phone right there on the counter. That's where I broadcasted for years.

I had no backdrop, I had no lighting, I had no OBS, no XSplit, no casters, nothing. There were already other people out there having high level productions. Do you think I let that stop me or intimidate me? NO! I did the best that I could, with what I had, and that is what I recommend for you to do. Get your jars, get your bases, get your shoe boxes. Sometimes I would even hold my device with my hand and my arm would get tired because I may have been on there for 90 minutes. Then I would put a pillow underneath my elbow and keep on talking. So if you're wondering what you need to start with as far as physical equipment, you just need a tablet or phone that gives you the capabilities to live stream. 

Now, the next thing that you want to have is a PayPal or Stripe link. You have to have some way that people can pay you. You have to have a digital product or a physical product, even if you're selling consultations, ebooks, whatever it is, you have to have something. So that people can put in their card information and buy from you. 

So as far as software, you need a PayPal or Stripe account. If you set up a PayPal business account, they are going to check your credit. If your credit is a little funny, then go to Stripe. Stripe does not check your credit. However, there are trade offs to the two. Okay. So with PayPal, if someone files a dispute against you, the resolution process is much faster and they'll give you an opportunity to submit evidence and prove that you actually delivered whatever it was. Stripe is not going to put your money in a reserve or anything like that, instead when there's a dispute, Stripe takes the money from you instantly. It can take up to 120 days for Stripe to give you your money back, this can be a problem. I feel like PayPal is better because when it gets into that area of disputes, they can resolve them much faster. A lot of your PayPal disputes can be resolved within a three to seven day window instead of it taking four months.

When I first started live streaming, my goal was $1,000 a month from live streaming. I went from a thousand dollars a month to doing a $1,000 every couple of weeks to then being able to do $1,000 a day. So you definitely can do it and you can do it quicker than you think. 

Next is, you need some type of fulfilment system. So your fulfilment system is how people actually get your product or notification for the services they purchase from you. For the lowest cost possible, I always recommend Google. Google business suite is only like $10 a month.

If you are not even ready for Google business suite you can use any Gmail account, you have to store files in Google drive. And a lot of people don't know that inside of your Google drive you have storage folders. So if you have like an ebook or you have like a video training or something like that, you literally can put it inside of your Google drive. And so what happens is when someone buys something from you on PayPal or on Stripe, you would redirect them over to the
Google drive folder. They would need to fill out a payment form that will take the payment and redirect them to Google drive. You can also giveaway freebies by setting up a form that
redirects them to Google drive once they put in their name and email to get access to that content. So there are definitely quick and easy ways to start making money online. I always
recommend Google drive start how I started. I use the paid account because I needed a lot of space and I was also using Dropbox and Gumroad to fulfill orders.

I still recommend Gumroad. I think they're amazing! Gumroad is like 10 or $15 a month. It's really inexpensive. What Gumroad does is if you have a course, ebook, swipe files, PDFs, anything that's digital, you can have it put on Gumroad. It will make a URLs for individual products so people can click it and buy your product.

That's what I started with. I had my phone, an iPad, two shoe boxes and a PayPal account. I was using Google drive and Gumroad to deliver my digital products and of course the email autoresponder was using MailChimp back then. I don't use MailChimp anymore. I actually like Convertkit a lot more than MailChimp because more emails actually land inside of my subscribers inbox. 

So for those of you that think that you need a bunch of fancy equipment to get started, now you know, you don't. Again, our goal is to operate in excellence and not perfection. Be the best that we can be and do the best that we can with what we have.