How to Brute Force your way to $1 Million

Let's get something out of the way: $1 million is not what it used to be. Yeah, it's not going to be enough to live a lavish lifestyle for the rest of your life, but it will definitely make your life exponentially better than it is right now. Here's something 99% of the population doesn't know, which is why they're not in the 1% — you don't earn a million dollars, you make a million dollars. Yes, there's a super select few jobs that can get you there, like pro athlete, singer, or top-level software engineer, but for the rest of the jobs out there, you won't even come close. That's why you have to create value and exchange it for money.

By the end of this video, we'll show you how to brute force your way to $1 million. Welcome to Alux, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired. So, going from $0 to $1 million can take between 3 to 10 years, depending on your skills, technical know-how, relationships, and your ability to use the tools you have at your disposal. If you've got all of them unlocked, well, there's no reason why you can't brute force your way to $1 million in 3 years, even if you're starting from scratch. People are doing it every single day in a variety of industries.

Okay, calm down, calm down. We're not going to sell you some kind of day trading course, tell you about some hot crypto, or the latest AI super-secret tool. This video is about a handful of actions that you can do starting right now to build toward that million dollars. We want you to pay close attention to the following graph because this is based on both personal experience and data we've collected from several companies in which we're invested. They all follow the same pattern, and although your personal time frame might be slightly different, some might be able to do it in 3 years, while others will take a bit longer. The process is very similar for the majority of companies out there.

This graph applies to both your business and your net worth as an individual. If you look closely at it, you'll distinguish three very different stages of growth as follows: Phase One: Nothing happens. You're putting in so much effort, but it's all chaos. You don't know what to do, who to hire, what the customer wants, what to price it, what your business model is, and more. We call this the learn and build phase. This is the figuring out phase. You're dumb, and this phase fixes that. During this period, people will dismiss your efforts, laugh at your goals, and disregard anything you do. They'll tell you that you should do something else, and as you go through it, the worst thing is it feels like they're right. It's already been over a year, and still nothing to show for it.

This stage is where 90% of businesses quit. But you're not like them. You will put your head down, and you will keep building. Learn fast and build in silence. The quicker you're able to learn and implement newfound knowledge, the quicker you're going to be able to grow. This is why we built Learning Mastery. Learning how to learn is probably the most valuable skill to acquire if you're in the early stages of your growth. In Phase One, you are the one doing almost all the work on a shoestring budget. You've got a hand in everything, and you're mastering the skills required for you to evolve in Phase Two.

Now, Phase Two is very different compared to Phase One because now you're seeing some traction. Out of all the things you've learned in Phase One, some of them have found footing and are now picking up speed. You've put together a minimum viable team, you've got a few customers, and the business model has been proven. A few people have actually given you money. Now it's just a matter of doing it over and over again. We call Phase Two the optimized traction phase because if you look at the graph, it's almost linear. You start to tinker with the details, you train your people, and you hire more specific talent because this time, you know what you're hiring for.

You're still in complete control of your growth journey, and it feels like you've figured it all out. At this stage, you're able to understand what your competitors are doing and how they're moving. In the optimized traction phase, you're actively competing with everyone else in your space for customers' attention, followers, etc. You are growing, but you're not yet differentiated enough. You still haven't found your secret sauce. At this stage, all you want to do is streamline the entire process as much as possible, cut out the fat, build up systems, and hire people to take over some of the tasks you were previously in charge of.

It's only then that you'll be able to take a step back, zoom out, and look at the bigger picture. And that is when it happens: Phase Three. We call it the liftoff stage, so pay very close attention to this graph because over 90% of your wealth will be generated here in Phase Three. This is where something simply clicks. The liftoff stage usually happens when you figure out how to scale exponentially over time. So instead of building once and selling once, you figure out how to build once and sell a million times. Instead of picking one customer after another, your focus shifts to building the things that bring in customers on a consistent basis.

In Phase Three, you're no longer going after the client. Instead, you become a client magnet. Your brand becomes well-known, your funnel starts working, your ads have a positive ROI, and network effects are in play where customers recommend you to others through word of mouth. All of this puts you in a very peculiar situation. For the first time in your life, demand is higher than what you can deliver. Figure out how to fill in all that demand, and you win. These are the three phases of your financial journey. In order to be able to take advantage of exponential growth, you have to embrace asymmetric risk. Out of everything out there, it's the fastest way to build, and you can click in the top right corner because we have a video dedicated to asymmetric risk and how to apply it.

You can't have exponential growth as an employee. You need to incorporate and build a business. So how do you actually do that? How do you brute force your way to $1 million? Well, you might have noticed that on the graph we mentioned earlier, there are 10 distinct points labeled with the letters of the alphabet. Now we're going to walk you through these 10 stages so you can properly assess where you are on your own journey. You start in the left corner at zero; you have just an idea, but you don't know where to start. As you can see, it takes a while to get from the corner to the first A point. Now, the A point is where you make a decision to start. A is the first day you actually get to work on your business.

For example, you register a domain name, put together a website, list your first product, or somehow announce to the world that you're now doing this. At this stage, you're using money from your own pocket, and it feels like an incredible risk because you don't have much. For the sake of this video, let's say you're starting with under 100 bucks. Not a lot of money, but you do have a lot of time, so you're going to do everything yourself.

That's when you use all the technological advances that you can. Instagram is free, TikTok is free. If you go to alux.com/sell, you can have an online store with full functionality up and running before the end of the day, thanks to our friends at Shopify who are kind enough to support our platform.

Now, at the B point, you've been putting things together for a while. There has been some interest, but nothing much has changed yet. You're learning a lot, but you're kind of starting to lose faith. It's been almost a year since you thought about this idea, but it hasn't moved very much. This is the most common point where people quit. The B point is a test to see who's willing to stick with it. You're not making any money, but you are making progress. It's at this point where true determination and discipline break through tremendous amounts of rejection.

You have to do it the hard way. You'll have to send 100 DMS to get one reply, post 100 pictures on Instagram to get one order, and cold call 100 businesses until one of them allows you to pitch and maybe convert. But do it, do it 100 times, and then do it another 100 times, because what moves the needle at this stage is volume. You need a lot of volume. The B point is where you begin to understand how you can make money the hard way. If it takes 100 pitches to land a client, then do 500 pitches if you must. Remember why you started.

This was supposed to take care of you for the rest of your life. Are you really going to quit 6 months to one year into it? What's the matter with you? Focus, okay? You're here for the long game. All of that effort is what's going to get you to the C point. It ain't much, but it's honest work. You finally figured out how much effort it takes to land one client. This isn't your mom, okay? It's not your friend or someone feeling bad for you. A genuine interested party gave you money in exchange for your services or product. This is the game-changing moment for any business, the moment you realize that you can do this over and over again. Your product or service delivers; it's just a matter of keeping up with it.

The C point is a moment of transition between an idea that's being executed into reality. At this point, you're still doing almost all of it yourself. You are the designer, provider, you take care of shipping or services rendered, you are the tech support, and the sales agent. The moment that payment hits your account, it just validates your entire effort. Even if it's not very much, you know you have a business—a genuine business—so it's time you make it profitable.

Keep doing it. We know it's hard, okay? It is hard, but you just have to push through, and if you do, things will start to look better. That's when you land at the D Point. You're almost 2 years into this journey when things are slowly picking up speed. You've got a few satisfied clients, and the business is dripping a little bit of money. You've been super busy for a while now, and this is where you realize you need some help.

At the D Point, you're getting your first employee. Now, don't get us wrong, you still work at 100% of your own capacity, but there's someone else working alongside you. Just keep in mind they are not you. They will never be able to work just as hard or as thoroughly as you do, but because they earn their own bread and make your life just a bit easier, it allows you to focus more on growth. At this stage of the business, you're still not paying yourself, but you are paying this person. Basically, the money coming in goes toward paying your first employee.

But that's okay because you start to see that growth trajectory takes shape because of this newfound help. You're able to steadily increase the income of the business, which gets us to the E point. It might not look like much, but you're actually killing it right now. You found a sustainable way to linearly scale your business, and now you've got a way of hiring people. If you look at the graph, you're bringing in at least twice as much money as you did at the previous point. You already know what to do. Of course, you're not going to hit the club. Instead, you will reinvest every single dollar coming in.

You're still living way below your means, but this is a game of delayed gratification. You're eating now so you can eat whatever you want later on. So, you hire another person to help you increase sales even more, and guess what—it works. This is a crucial stage in your growth journey. You've made some progress, but you feel overwhelmed by the realization of just how much you don't know and have yet to learn. The highest cost you'll pay in life is on the things you don't know that you don't know.

So, as a side quest outside of your day-to-day business operations, you start learning. You spend days reading books, paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars going to business events, unsure if you'll be able to build a real network. But you buy courses and listen to hours of podcasts about business. It's not very efficient, but all of it helps. And we struggled with this because there wasn't one resource out there specifically built to fill in the gaps that we had, so we built it ourselves.

We spent millions of dollars getting the smartest people in the world to share with us exactly how to do it. We put all of it into an app called Alux, available to download for free at alux.com/app. It's the only app designed to accelerate your progress on this graph curve. Every morning, you'll get 15 minutes of coaching, handpicked to help you make measurable progress. It's not cheap, but most users say the app paid for itself in the first month alone. Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, just like you, use the Alux app as their guide and coach. We do not want you to be left out, so if you've got the app downloaded on your phone, scan the QR code on screen right now. You'll get 25% off your yearly membership as a gift for being an Alux subscriber.

Between the E point and the F Point, most people realize that their speed of growth is a knowledge problem. You don't know how to do it, so let our international experts help you out there. Because at the F point, you've already hired a few people, and the chart is already going up. So, you begin to think bigger, and now you're a bit more technical with your business because you know what works and what doesn't. Plus, for the first time, you're making a considerable amount of money compared to anything you've done before.

This is usually where you upgrade your infrastructure and the quality of your products or services. You invest in a new website, do a redesign of the products, and begin to buy raw materials in bulk because now you've got a predictable demand, so you can negotiate on costs and increase your profit margin. You're 3 years into the process, and for the first time, this is when you know exactly what you need to grow your business. So, you reinvest everything again and make a few changes while still keeping up with the grind, and it shows. You do it over and over again until you hit that G-spot.

You know, okay, that's a childish joke, but we're going to run with it. The G point—for the first time ever, your wealth is over $100,000, and you feel like you're on top of the world. You've got a good thing going. You understand the customer, you understand production, but there's one thing missing: wide distribution. You've got a good product that people are willing to pay for. This is the golden spot to be in. This is where you need to take your marketing seriously. You need a sustainable way to reach more people—a lot more people. Take some of the money that you're making and start experimenting.

But be very careful at this stage. A bunch of smaller companies will come knocking on your door, promising you the moon. Almost all of them are art artists. They don't care about your business; they don't understand your business. They just want your hard-earned money. So, don't trust them. First, try to do it yourself. This will teach you how to speak the language and how to distinguish between the pretenders and the real ones. Just giving you a heads up here—you will get burned a few times. It's inevitable. As with everything in life, you will have to kiss a few frogs until you find one that turns into a prince.

It's rarely going to be an agency. Instead, it's going to be someone you bring in full-time that is passionate about this space. This is usually the moment you have someone taking care of your marketing efforts full-time. It'll take them between 12 to 24 months until they get good at it. And then, boom—it happens. H Point—we've got takeoff.

Now, believe it or not, the H Point comes with a problem you never expected. The marketing part worked so well that you are now at capacity. At this point, you simply can't keep up with the demand. You're now turning down potential orders because you don't have the infrastructure to fulfill all of them. Your business doesn't scale. Turns out, there's more to building a well-oiled business machine than just sales. But don't panic, okay? This is an incredible position to find yourself in. Luckily for you, the business is cash-flowing, and as everyone in business knows, sales cure everything.

Use that money to hire more people, bring in new technology, and automate what you can in order to streamline production even more. At this stage of the business, you've got multiple employees taking care of different parts of the business. You've got people in production, people in sales, and people in marketing. And even more importantly, this is where you have a manager in place that keeps the business running from a day-to-day perspective. You used to be that manager. Now, you hire a manager to do what the title says: to manage.

Your focus is on business growth and the quality of the product or service that you offer. Be very careful at this stage because of the size of the business and the many people involved. The quality will inevitably suffer. Your manager isn't you, and although, in theory, you want them to be as obsessed with the business as you are, they're not. Remember, they don't care about the little things the same way that you do, so quality control is key. It was the little things and the attention to detail that people were rushing to buy from you in the first place, so do your best to keep those alive.

Now, lucky for you, after a couple of tweaks, your people are able to keep the machine running, and you can focus on your superpower: making the business bigger. All this effort, all of this attention you're getting, can now be monetized through the new structure, so flip the switch. The I Point: if you've been able to not only maintain but improve the quality of your offering and reach the desired customer audience through effective marketing, your business is now growing exponentially.

At this stage, you're likely doing between $1 and $5 million in revenue per year, and you're comfortable taking some money out of the company. You've earned it. Now, we know that most people might be shocked to hear $5 million in revenue but so little money for yourself. Well, these people don't understand product margins, what it takes to keep people on payroll, what advertising budgets are, and how to balance all of that for a positive return on investment.

Building a solid business is hard because there are so many moving pieces and parts that need to be accounted for. You are paying taxes, you're buying equipment, and almost all of that profit gets reinvested. You've been barely paying yourself anything up until now. At the I Point, it's the first time you begin to slowly increase the quality of your life. That's why it's called the I Point—it's about yourself. Until you get to this point, you have to train your brain to focus on growth instead of pleasure.

It doesn't mean you have to suffer, okay? But you have to be purposeful in your spending. It's a slippery slope that you need to check, and it's at this stage you can zoom out a bit and look at the business differently. It's at this stage you'll apply Pareto's Law to business development: 20% of your efforts generate 80% of the reward, so you focus all of your efforts on that 20%. You look for strategic partnerships or big business deals that will bring in value over longer periods of time. Instead of selling to one customer at a time, you sell in bulk to a wholesaler. Instead of hiring one person, you're outsourcing a segment to a full-on business.

It's this type of effort that will get the business to maintain that extraordinary growth momentum, eventually getting you to that J Point. J stands for Joy. You have to officially build a strong enough business that can take care of you and your family for the foreseeable future. At this stage, not only is your business profitable, but you can successfully pay yourself considerable dividends and end-of-year bonuses. The company you own is valued at over $10 million. You're joyful and proud that you've made it here. Job successfully done.

Now, it's up to you if you want to keep growing the business yourself, bring in a CEO to keep it going in your place, or maybe sell it off for a lump of cash. This kind of video is incredibly important for those of you who are actually building. We could have easily wrapped it up in a workshop or a seminar and charged people for this kind of info, but we're here giving it away all for free. All we ask in return is you subscribe to our channel and help this community grow so more and more people can benefit from our financial education.

Take a look at the three phases of growth and the 10 points scattered across the line. Where are you right now in your financial journey? Share it with the community in the comments and save this video for the future. Come back to it once in a while and give us an update on the progress that you've been making.

And as for those of you who took the time to watch this Sunday motivational video until the very end, here's a special bonus that we want to share with you. This is the excitement graph in your journey. You start out incredibly excited, peaking at the day you decide to launch. Then you figure out just how hard it all is and that you've got so much to learn and are missing a bunch of things. Most of you are probably right here in the dip.

This is called the valley of disappointment, and we'll make a detailed video on this in the near future. If you're in the valley of disappointment, Aluxer, please just keep on going, okay? We promise you it will get better, and it will get better fast. The surprising thing is that most accelerated excitement growth is in Phase Two. That's where the business starts picking up traction, and you can correlate your work to actual returns.

You'll find that you draw purpose from your work, and it's making you happy. Phase Two is what validates you as an individual. You are indeed able to build something of value. Although you'll make 80% of your wealth in Phase Three, the excitement slowly flatlines as you build your wealth.

Now, we already mentioned that the time frame might be different, so just adjust it to your own life, but we didn't choose the 5-year period randomly, okay? We've been in hundreds of meetings with serial entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and startups, and we've identified this pattern across the board. After 5 years, something needs to change. A new wave needs to come; the business needs to evolve every half a decade. 5 years in, and you no longer find the same business model sexy. You need to upgrade it, change, pivot, expand, or go after a different market to keep yourself interested and entertained.

From that point forward, it's no longer about the money until you realize you're actually pretty good at making money, so you begin to challenge yourself to see just how big you can get it. Now, since it's only the true Aluxers left here anyway, we can share a private and personal perspective with you guys.

It happened the very same way with Alux. It took roughly 4 and 1/2 years for us to completely dominate the blogging space, and we started to feel an itch for change. So we shifted into video. After almost a decade of building a community on YouTube, we had to evolve again, which is why a couple of years ago, we launched the Alux app. The same cycle applies. First, growth was slow, but we tweaked it, and we reinvested all the money we made into making that product more valuable for you, the users. 2 and 1/2 years in, and we're beginning to see that growth curve happen exactly as we outlined in the graph.

Even with our experience of building and investing in multiple companies, it still requires us to go through the cycle, and it'll probably be the same for you. But with every attempt, the reward has gotten a lot bigger. If Alux.com the website was Charmander and YouTube is Charmeleon, well, the app is proving to be the Charizard version of Alux. We want Alux to evolve, and in the process, help you to evolve. Let's do it together, my friend. If you're ready for it, write "evolution" in the comments. Let's see how many of you are ready for what comes next.