- My name's Davie and this is my story
how I went from $500 to 500 million.
I was a very insecure kid.
I was slightly pudgy.
And now I'm on the Australian financial rich list
under Margot Robbie.
I have bought my dream home,
bought my girlfriend her dream car.
I don't actually like telling these stories.
Sometimes I feel like they come off very, very arrogant,
especially, for people that don't know me,
and I'm slightly introverted.
But it is a really, really good story
for young entrepreneurs to hear
and there's lots of lessons.
So here it is.
This is my story from $500 to 500 million
in just five years.
So I was born in a, not a huge city in Australia,
it's called Adelaide.
I was a very insecure kid.
I was the kid that went to the beach
and just wouldn't take their shirt off.
I would have to swim in my shirt.
I had a very supportive family when I was young.
They, you know, supported me both emotionally,
but they also worked incredibly hard
to support me financially.
After school, I would go and watch them sell furniture.
They had a small furniture business in Adelaide
and I would just get to watch them constantly,
just, you know, working really, really hard
to put me through school.
School was difficult for me for a very long time.
I was told that I was stupid at a very young age,
especially, through primary school, and I believed it.
It was probably exacerbating my insecurities
and I just never tried.
Constantly arguing with teachers,
constantly getting detentions.
And everything was just felt like it was going downhill.
I had a parent-teacher interview, I think it was grade 10,
all of my five teachers just said that I was failing
and I was incredibly difficult to teach.
After that, my parents pretty much had enough.
They gave me an ultimatum to either start working hard,
or they're going to find another school,
or even just stop supporting me overall.
I felt a deep feeling of shame at that point.
I knew that there was something within me.
I knew that I wasn't stupid
and I had a decent amount of intelligence,
enough to make a good life for myself.
But it wasn't until I was scrolling through YouTube.
I used to watch mind numbing viral videos Charlie bit me.
And I came across all of the old Nike commercials.
These were so, so exhilarating in every single way.
You would watch them
and you could just feel like you could run through a wall.
I watched the Jordan commercial where he talks
about how many game-winning shots that he's taken
and he's lost.
After that moment, I started to pick up
that all greatness was, was just a willingness
to work hard and fail.
So I knew I needed a plan.
I needed to get better grades.
I needed to get a job and I needed to go to university
to make money.
Well, I thought university was the right path at that time.
This was the path that I could feel better about myself
and maybe achieve greatness,
which I didn't actually really know what it was then,
but I knew I wanted to do something awesome.
The first job, I was moving things around in a warehouse
and I was getting minimum wage,
which I think was about $16 an hour even back then.
Then I used that money to go to the gym.
I started to get absolutely obsessed with the gym,
which made me feel so much better
and was kind of the first lesson
that small bits of compounded effort
can actually improve over time
and just help your mental and physical health.
Then I got a tutor as well to help me with the subjects
that I was struggling with.
I enrolled in difficult subjects like math,
physics, chemistry.
I knew it was working when one year
after I decided to change, I had a parent-teacher interview.
I only had one teacher that was the same as previously.
He said in my career I've never seen a child
turn their life around as much as David has this year.
Which really cemented that I was on the right track.
And ended up finishing school on pretty good grades
and getting into mining engineering.
I just chose mining engineering
because I thought it sounded cool
and you could go straight into a six-figure job,
which sounded also cool.
On my first day of mining engineering,
I walked into this giant amphitheater in Adelaide University
and I couldn't even see the lecturer.
He was so far away.
He was on a big screen.
And he said, "You are all used to being
the smartest in your class.
Look to the left, look to the right.
Only one of you is going to pass this class."
And turns out I was not one of those people.
I hated university.
I didn't like the subject.
I was only doing it because I got told
that I could get six figures out of it
and it sounded cool.
And because there is no structured
or forced way of turning up, I, you know,
didn't rock up at all and ended up failing.
I'd say one of the main reasons why I failed university
was because I was just so passionate about business
and I just was constantly launching new things.
I was trying to sell singlets and hats.
And I actually started making a fair bit of money
on Instagram.
I started an Instagram where I would go into
supplement stores and take photos of the supplements,
and write reviews, what's good about them.
Then I was able to sell advertising on those Instagrams
to, you know, fitness tea brands and that kind of stuff.
It started off small, make $5 here, $10 here.
I'd be out on a night out during, you know,
young party stage and I couldn't afford drinks.
But then I would sell a shout out and then we'd all cheer
because I'd be able to actually buy the drinks.
It started to grow really quickly.
I created lots of different verticals of accounts.
I created them in workouts, in nutrition.
I was doing cooking recipes and putting those up.
It probably got to a point where I was making
the six figures that I wanted from mining engineering
just from Instagram.
Which felt huge compared to, you know,
having minimum wage just previously.
Then I decided to do personal training because I thought,
you know, I could get more into the fitness industry,
learn more about it.
During the day, I would have six burner phones on the bench.
People thought I was a drug dealer.
I think dad thought I was a drug dealer for a very long time
because they would all have different accounts on them.
I'd sell shout outs during the day,
train my clients in the morning and the night,
working 16-hour days.
And I remember, yeah, checking my bank account.
I had about $100,000.
Then it all kind of probably went to my head
and things went very, very downhill.
I decided to take a lot of the money
that I made from personal training
to try to build a huge food franchise.
I was really into Vietnamese rolls at that stage
and I thought that there could be a big franchise of that,
which there now is.
It's called Roll'd in Australia.
So I stopped personal training and I took a lot of the money
and I set up a shop in my local area
where there wasn't really a shop before.
5:00 a.m. I would wake up, and I would go get bread rolls.
And then I would cook pork in the morning,
and then I would just basically work nonstop.
I'd still do my Instagrams during the day,
wash dishes at 5:00 p.m., and head home, and just reset.
I wasn't seeing my friends at all.
Food businesses are actually really really difficult
to make work.
I was losing money.
Lucky, I did still have my Instagram business.
It kind of evolved.
I was flipping Instagram so I'd buy them
and then sell them to other people
for a bit of a higher price.
I would also just grow them a little bit in the meantime
and that was working really well,
until I ended up buying an Instagram from someone.
It was probably my biggest buy ever.
It cost $40,000.
Bought the Instagram, got all the access to it,
everything was all sweet.
Then it turns out that, that was actually hacked.
The original owner was like, this is hacked.
Instagram gave the account back to the original owner.
The scammer already had my $40,000
and I was just left with nothing.
That was almost all of my money at the time
so I couldn't buy any more Instagrams to flip them.
My Vietnamese roll shop business was pretty much
going down the drain and I got into a very, very dark place.
I remember completely being disorientated in the bathroom,
mentally just not even there with a lot of bad thoughts.
And it was a really good moment to.
For my family, completely lifted me up out of that.
I was constantly drinking at that time as well
so my family taught me a really good lesson.
I remember dad put a rock in my shoe
and he made me walk down the driveway
with the rock on the shoe.
And it was poking me and hurting me.
And then he took the rock out of the shoe
and then put it on again and said,
walk down the track.
Obviously, it stopped hurting.
And he said, these mistakes if you carry them with you,
they're just going to hurt you.
Just learn from them and move on.
So I knew I needed a new plan.
I packed up, basically gave the shop away.
I was gonna move to Melbourne,
surround myself with great people,
learn as much as I can about e-commerce, and launch a brand.
Hopefully this brand would make me a millionaire
and make me financially free.
I was working at the 5TH WATCHES doing Instagram management,
influencer management.
Also learning photography, videography,
Facebook Ads, Google Ads.
It was an amazing time.
I learned so much.
I never gave up on launching my own business.
At that time, I remember I launched a seasoning business
while I was over there.
I ordered six kilograms of parsley
and delivered it to my house back in Adelaide.
I remember getting a text from dad when I was flying back.
And he said, "Why are all of these herbs on my doorstep?"
I think that mixed with the six burner phones,
he definitely thought I was a drug dealer
for a very, very long time
because none of those businesses ended up working
and I was constantly flying back from Adelaide to Melbourne
'cause I missed my friends.
And my girlfriend ended up spending all of my savings
that I'd made.
I remember checking my bank account, I was back at $0.
It felt like I was back at square one.
I had $0, I was back living with my parents.
But my mind and the knowledge that I had
was just invaluable.
All I needed now was a product
that was just gonna change my life.
I was looking for products everywhere, testing everything.
And then I came across an article on Facebook
around how weighted blankets can help people
with sensory disorders or insomnia.
Naturally, I wanted to test it out,
got every single blanket in the house,
was on the couch, piled them up.
While that didn't really feel that good
because it was maybe 400 degrees under the blanket,
I did keep looking into it.
And there were so many glowing reviews on forums.
And there wasn't that many products out there,
especially, in Australia that was selling the product.
So I had decided to commit to it.
I decided this was gonna be the product.
It was helping people.
It could really make a difference
and I definitely thought it was going to work.
So I ended up ordering some stock from China.
I got one sample, initially.
Got my girlfriend and my neighbors.
She was about 11 at the time
and I did a photo shoot in the house.
I had so many skills from all of those past failures
that I could launch the store from scratch.
I could launch the Facebook Ads, launch the Google Ads,
I could do everything from scratch.
So I really didn't need any money to get it started.
I had about $500 at that stage that I saved up
from doing weddings and other videography shoots.
To get the cash for the business,
I decided to sell on pre-sell.
Which is where you sell stock
that isn't actually in the country yet.
You are making a promise that you're gonna ship it
at this, this date.
So I would take the order, buy the stock,
and bring it in.
Because I had no idea what I was doing.
They were sending me paperwork to sign.
I had no idea it'd actually get caught
in a customs border hold.
But the Australian Federal Police, they scan the product,
especially, if it's the first time
that you're bringing in stock.
And I remember it was just absolutely devastating.
The stock was about five weeks delayed
and I had about 400 customers.
My first 400 customers for my big business
were waiting five weeks to get their stock.
I almost thought, I'm gonna throw away
this huge opportunity.
Ended up getting the email that they cleared finally
after just constant emails between border security.
And it was just the most ecstatic feeling.
I was just off from there.
I did about $200 in the first day.
$1,000 in the first week.
$10,000 in the second month.
Ended up scaling to doing $1.5 million profit
in its first year.
From there I started spending the money as you do.
I bought my Range Rover that I was,
was always a goal for me as a kid.
Remember getting and driving it out of the yard.
People thinking that I was pretty young to be buying it.
And I just couldn't stop smiling with it.
Was able to buy my girlfriend her car.
Bought my house that I love.
I'm currently looking for a beach house.
I get to travel the world
because we've just got so many American Express points.
So after launching Calming Blankets, I launched the Oodie,
which took me from earning millions to tens of millions.
We have millions of happy customers.
All of the team, the 60 people that work there,
love the brand.
We are inclusive, fun, happy.
We make people feel very comfortable in their own home.
It's a brand that I'm incredibly proud of.
When I look back at myself in school,
watching those Nike commercials
and how amazing that brand made people feel,
couldn't have imagined that I'd create
something like Oodie that has a very similar effect
on certain types of people.
There was always times that I doubted myself
through the journey, but the main thing
is to just never give up.
Constantly, keep learning and just really,
at least try to enjoy the process as well.
Enjoy the process of learning.
If I can give one piece of advice as well
through this video is you're not too stupid.
You are in a position to make a change in the world
and just, yeah, enjoy the process.
Don't forget to like and subscribe.
Thanks.
(inspiring music)