Mark,

Do you have any advice for someone who wants to move full time into the dating/relationship advice industry? Reason being, it's practically non-existent & in my country (Malaysia) save a few matchmaking and speed dating sites. Not only do I think it's a great business opportunity but also it's something I feel strongly about pursuing as a career in the future.

I have a decent lifestyle and am pretty well calibrated. Anxieties are a problem for me but I'm working on it everyday. Things I'm doing right now include trying to experience as much possible with people, and sharing my thoughts on a blog.

Any advice? It'd also be really inspiring if you could share your own personal story.

Thanks.

Man, there's really no simple answer to that question. Building this business has been much, much, much harder and more complicated than I imagined when I started. It's also taken a lot longer than I thought it would.

Also, even if I did tell you everything I went through, Malaysia is most likely a much different market, and picking up girls there is probably far different as well.

Really don't know where to start.

Is there even a Malaysian community?
If not open one and make a name of yourself
Thats what most of the (here) famous gurus in germany did

It is different here, in the sense that there is a very homogeneous mix of different races/cultures and people tend to be more conservative especially about matters relating to sex/relationships. However what I've found is that for the more 'Globalized' (globalized = more exposed to foreign cultures) ones, the same principles generally apply. (e.g. Being too direct or aggressive here might end up scaring a girl, but being honest & a gentleman is universally attractive)

Mark, if you would share how you came to the final decision to pursue this full time, it would be great (you spoke briefly about how Tim Ferriss' book inspired you, but I couldn't find any more details other than that)

Thanks again, Thanks too Lycan for your advice

Basically, I had been coaching guys on the side in Boston in late 2007 and early 2008. It really came from nothing other than my reputation for pulling girls around Boston. It was fun and easy money at the time, nothing serious. In early 2008, I got a job with a big bank in Boston and began my whole 9-5 career thing.

I fucking hated it. Immediately.

I hated that place so much. I knew on the second day that I wanted to quit and switch careers. To what, I didn't know. Around that time, I had teamed up with another local guy who had started coaching (Doc, a couple of the VERY early articles on this site are actually his) and we began to make a bit of a name for ourselves locally and around some lairs and whatnot.

June of 2008, a full three months into my corporate career, I decided I couldn't take it anymore. Fuck it. I was 24 at the time, had some money saved up and at the time, it seemed like the coaching thing was just taking off. So I figured, only way to learn to swim is to jump into the deep end. I took my two weeks paid vacation and then immediately quit afterward. I was scared shitless, but it was the best decision I ever made. I've met a lot of guys who really just need to take the plunge and quit their day job and go for it, but are way too scared to do it. I don't blame them.

The coaching plateau'd out for a long time. It turned into a grind. Boston, LA, Chicago, NYC, Boston again, Austin, Orlando, back to Boston... every weekend it was somewhere else. My money ran out, we became broke and started sleeping on students' couches so we didn't have to get hotels. Doc quit in early 2009. This actually saved me because now I didn't have to split the income in half. If he hadn't left, we would have bottomed out. I was broke enough as it was for just about all of 2009 on my own.

Around this time, I realized that the only way to create a sustainable income out of this was to: 1) develop the blog into getting lots of traffic and having a lot of high value content and 2) putting out online products that guys really liked. It took about another year of 14-hour work days teaching myself about web design, copywriting, marketing, product design, etc. and I eventually got there. Beginning early last year, I finally reached a place of stable, decent income.

I've always been highly individualistic and hate people telling me what to do. My grandfather was a successful entrepreneur and my father is a successful entrepreneur as well. So it didn't seem like such a radical idea to me since I was brought up in a family where it was normal. Although I was intimidated as hell, it was a no-brainer then, and a no-brainer now.

I always tell guys to just go for it. When you have a business idea, no matter how much you research, you never know what you don't know. It's not until you jump in and start doing it that you realize how much you don't know and what you need to know. I always tell guys, success or failure, starting your own business will probably be one of the most educational experiences of your life, in many ways.

Although I do believe strongly that you don't have to have the best game to be a great coach, what IS more important is experience level. Everyone and their dog has started coaching in the last year or so and so many of these guys really have no idea what they're doing. They read a bunch of books, went out for a year, got laid 5-6 times and now think that they can take a newbie with all sorts of internal issues and help him. Often these guys are just peddling the same shit that they learned on other bootcamps and it actually isn't that useful.

Sinn and I used to say that the industry standard should be 30 lays before you can coach people. Not that lay counts are monumentally important, but it represents a level of experience. Until you've been with at least that many women from cold approach, there are just so many circumstances, personalities and situations you haven't experienced. Not that a guy with 200 lays will immediately be a great coach, but chances are, he's seen just about everything. A guy with 10 hasn't. Chances are he's only gotten some girls in a specific situation or gotten lucky a handful of times over the course of a year. And worst of all, he doesn't realize it.

Very interesting stuff Mark. You can't tell how much effort has gone into a business like yours from the outside. It all seems so simple when it's a finished product.

I have a bachelor degree in social psychology and want to do a Master in something that allows me to train/coach people. I'm currently doing a Minor in Entrepreneurship, where we have 6 months to form a team, generate a business idea, write a business plan and get our first sales. So in theory I should be learning what you know.
If there's one thing I've learned, it's that an *idea* for a business can seem very simple and very promising, but to make it REAL, you have to do a shitton of tiny stupid things, as well as big things, while success will never be certain.

Was Sinn a personal friend of yours? I mean, did you go out with him and stuff? Just curious.

Yeah, for a while. We had a bit of a falling out though. All's good though.

I studied business in school, and to be honest, I've used maybe like 2% of what I learned in college. My opinion on universities is that bachelor degrees are more or less just pieces of paper. Even a lot of grad degrees are too. Some times I get people telling me I should get my MBA. I did some research and just laughed my ass off... So wait, I should pay $30k a year so I can learn to do the same shit I'm already learning to do, and to hang out and "network" with a bunch of corporate bozos? OK, I'll get right on that.

I know what you're saying Mark; I realised I was wasting my time in college and so I sped up to graduate with a BA early. I don't think I'll go back any time soon. Seemed like such a waste of time afterwards, and I feel there are so many other productive things I could've done in that time.

On the other hand, I think we take a lot of what a tertiary education does for granted. Like DFW says in This Is Water, the power of a liberal arts degree is that it can open your eyes to the fact that we can choose not only what we think, but what we think about.

For me my BA was just an extension of high school, just with a little more freedom that I didn't use too well. But that extra 2.5 years doing the same damn essays as in high school, just a little deeper, and trying to force myself to learn a way that didn't really suit my personality actually taught me a lot. it gave me a whole set of guidelines and rules that I learnt that I could throw out the window. It taught me how to find a more unique narrative, by asking for a uniform approach to writing. It taught me that if you actually go for something with enough dedication, you'll figure out pretty quickly whether or not it fits with you.

College can work perfectly for those who know what they want, but it can also help provide some light for those who don't know what they want, as long as you're willing to learn your lesson. I took the first year Law paper twice (it's not a grad degree in my country), and failed to get through to second year twice. I had a friend who failed first year, redid it and made it through, then failed second year and is now redoing that. It's pretty obvious to nearly everyone but her that she actually doesn't want anything to do with Law, and is pushing it out of her own insecurities about intelligence. On the other hand, I learnt my lesson (the second time around) and can just admit that I didn't make it through because I don't care at all about anything a law degree could offer me.

It might seem stupid, but college can actually teach a lot by giving you what you DON'T want. My problem was that I took 2.5 years to accept what I could've learnt by the end of freshman.

On the other hand, a business degree seems a bit more useless when you look at the traits of the Trumps, Buffetts, and Ellisons of this world and realise that almost all their education came in 'the real world'.

Mark, I have a question.

You say you spent 14 hours a day working on webdesign, copywriting, marketing, etc. Why didn't you outsource some of this stuff? You could have spent time coaching, making a name for yourself, writing good material, getting better at PU yourself, but in stead you spent many hours acquiring new skills like designing websites. Did you consider the pros and cons of doing it yourself vs paying a company to do all these things? Was there simply not enough money?

Simply not enough money.