Your First 30 Days Online: Why the Beginning Is Harder Than Everything After It
You’ve put in real hours already. Trainings watched, a blog started, an ad or two run that didn’t do much of anything, and the number at the end of the month still refuses to hold still. One month it’s decent. The next it’s back to almost nothing, and you’re left wondering whether you’re actually capable of this or whether that one good week was a fluke you can’t repeat.
Here’s the part nobody tells you going in. The stretch you’re in right now, the slow, uneven, doesn’t-make-sense climb toward your first real month online, is the hardest work you will ever do in this business. Not the month you cross six figures. This one, right here. Once you understand why, the rest of the timeline actually starts moving faster than you’d expect.
Dave Wood taught this exact lesson from the stage at a live Empower Network retreat, pulling people up in front of the room and asking them what their numbers were before and after they broke through. Not projections. Actual months, actual figures, actual timelines. What came out of it is one of the clearest breakdowns of why the beginning of an online income is disproportionately hard, and what to actually do about your own first 30 days because of it.
Why is the gap between $0 and your first real month harder than the gap after it?
One of the guests Dave called up that day had been in network marketing for 21 years. He started as a personal trainer, selling to his own clients until he ran out of clients, then moved to cold-calling strangers straight out of the white pages, telling them he’d pulled their name off a list of people looking to make money. When he finally got online, he was still running his traditional MLM business at the same time, so he was building two businesses at once, not one.
It took him four months of that split attention to hit his first five-figure month. Today the number is many times that. So Dave asked him the obvious question, in exactly these words: “Was it harder to make that first $10,000 or is it harder to make $90,000?”
As he put it in the Classic Masters Course, describing that opening stretch: “It was the first 90 days online. I mean, we’re obsessive, compulsive freaks. So, we were putting in 15 to 18 hours. I mean, we did in our first 90 days what most people wouldn’t do in 90 years, literally.”
Every story Dave pulled onto that stage followed the identical shape. As Dave Wood summed up the pattern directly in the Classic Masters Course: “Here’s a common thing that you’re going to find, okay, is that it’s much harder to go from $0 to $10,000 a month. Okay. Than to go from $10,000 to $100,000 a month. Right? It’s much more difficult.” Categorically harder, because the first climb has to build four things that every climb after it just gets to reuse: belief that the thing is even possible, a process that actually works, an audience, and proof that you personally can do this. Once those four exist, adding a zero is mostly repetition. Building them the first time is the whole fight.
Why does throwing money at the problem make the early stretch worse, not better?
Part of why that first climb is so brutal has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with capital. When you’re at zero, you usually don’t have much to spend on ads. So you spend what little you have, it doesn’t work, you tweak it, and now you don’t have anything left to test the next version. That’s not a discipline failure. That’s just the mechanics of starting with an empty account, and it’s the reason so many people cycle back to ground zero before anything holds.
The instinct at that point is to look for a shortcut around the grind, a system somebody swears skips the hard part. There isn’t one. The people Dave brought up on that stage didn’t find a shortcut. They found the willingness to keep spending the one resource they had plenty of, time, until it worked.
What actually changes between a bad month and a breakthrough month?
Another guest on stage that day, working out of Costa Rica, had never made more than a few thousand dollars a month in years online. Then one month everything moved at once. Dave recapped the jump from the stage: “7,000 was your best month ever, and you went from 7,000 to 42,000.” Same person, same offer, roughly the same list. Dave asked him directly what was different about the way he worked during those 30 days.
His answer wasn’t a new traffic source or a better script. It was that he stopped treating the eight core commitments of the program as optional, something he admitted onstage in one long, unbroken answer:
I put my ego aside, and I just started following the eight core commitments. As silly as that sounds, I was doing everything to avoid the eight core commitments because I thought there had to be a way. There had to be a better way. It sounds silly, right? But I just started blogging every day. I still don’t read every day, but I do watch something educational. But following my core commitments, meaning get to the event, which was the biggest breakthrough, going to the event and experiencing regular people making a lot of money, because I knew they weren’t different, we’re all the same. You know what I mean?
He’d spent months quietly avoiding those commitments, convinced there had to be a faster, cleverer way in, before finally admitting there wasn’t. Once he started blogging every single day and actually showed up to the event instead of watching from a distance, the income moved in a month what it hadn’t moved in years.
That’s the internal conflict sitting underneath almost every stalled income story: not a lack of information, but a quiet refusal to do the boring, repeatable thing because some part of you is still hoping the easier version exists. It doesn’t. The commitments aren’t clever. They’re just the ones nobody sticks to long enough to see them work.
Why does belief collapse the timeline faster than tactics do?
A third man Dave called up had been marketing online since 2007, four years before he found Empower Network, and his income during all that time went up and down like a heart monitor, one strong month followed by a crash, never consistent enough to plan a life around. At a retreat, he told Dave flat out that he didn’t know if he could sustain a family on income that unpredictable, or whether a serious monthly number, working part time as an engineer, was even realistic. A little over a year later he stood on that stage saying, “I don’t think I’ve made less than $50,000 this year in any month”, with his first real estate investment property already bought.
Nothing about his skill set changed in that year. What changed was that he stopped negotiating with the number in his head before he’d even tried to hit it.
The same pattern showed up a fourth time. One guest had negative money to his name, literally nothing, when, as Dave tells it, he “put $495 on a credit card to get into the course” that became the foundation for everything being taught from that stage. His wife told him she’d support whatever he decided. When Dave asked what actually changed after that purchase, his answer was one sentence: the belief that he could do it. The next month, in his own words, “I made over $4,000 in one luxury cruise.” And his best single month since matches what used to be his best year, total.
Belief isn’t a soft word here. It’s the difference between a person who spends 30 days testing whether something is possible and a person who spends 30 days executing on something they’ve already decided is true.
So what should your own first 30 days actually look like?
Set one outcome before you do anything else. Not a vague hope to “do better,” a specific line you intend to cross in the next 30 days, written down before you take a single other action. Dave’s instruction to the room was direct: figure out exactly what you need to cross over, and commit to doing whatever that requires inside the next 30 days, starting now, not once conditions improve.
Then stop waiting to feel ready before you move. The 21-year veteran described his own approach as firing before aiming, taking the shot before the target was fully worked out, and letting what happened next teach him what to adjust. That’s the opposite of the instinct most people default to, researching and rehearsing until the risk of failure feels smaller. It never gets smaller sitting still. It only gets smaller after you’ve already taken the swing.
- Pick one specific outcome for the next 30 days and write it down today, not a vague direction.
- Show up daily on the basics, whatever your version of blogging every day and attending the event actually is, instead of sampling them when it’s convenient.
- Take the action before you’ve fully worked out the plan, and let the results correct your aim.
- Expect the first climb to cost more effort than any climb after it, so you don’t quit right when the compounding is about to start.
None of the four people Dave brought onto that stage were smarter, better connected, or better capitalized than you are. One was cold-calling the white pages a few years earlier. One had negative money to his name. What changed wasn’t their talent. It was that they stopped hoping the first 30 days would be easy and just did the work those 30 days actually required.
The complete lesson goes well past what’s above, the full breakdown Dave gives of the core commitments themselves, the live back-and-forth with each guest on stage, and the specific instruction for what to focus on for the rest of that retreat. That full video and the complete transcript are part of the Classic Masters Course. The entire Classic Masters Course, including this lesson and everything built on top of it, is available for $99 through the Classic Masters Course.
Get the course, watch the rest of this lesson, and set the one outcome you’re going to cross in your next 30 days.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
To people, where I was — I was like, hey, you got this great thing, super cool, you know, whatever the pitch was at the time, you know, it's just like, you know, Amway but better than Amway, it was really cool. You know, I call this person, they said, "You're that guy in the video." I was like, "Yeah," and they're like, "That's awesome you called me, I can't believe you called, I've been sitting here waiting for your call, right? You know, I didn't think you'd call me, you're famous, I saw your video on YouTube." I was like, right now, here's the thing.
This person — I told the story the other day — a guy named Dan, right? He got it. Now, Dan blogged every day and wrote articles and stuff for like a month or two or three. He was in college, and then he quit, right? But his first couple of weeks he sponsored a guy named Paul Hutchings. How many people know Paul? Who knows Paul? Is Justin Roger in here? Justin, is he — hey, Justin, can you come, can you come down, can you come down real quick? By the way, so he sponsors a guy named Paul Hutchings. Now, Paul still makes me a thousand dollars a month, and that's — he's, you know, two levels down, still makes me a thousand a month. This is like two and a half years later, right? Still, he sponsored last year 300 people into his MLM company, right? He got in Empower Network, hasn't really done a lot. However, he sponsored Justin Varengia in Empower Network. Now, Justin has been on the internet for years, lived in Costa Rica. We never knew each other, and had never made more than a few thousand a month. Last month, what'd you make? 26,000. And in Empower plus another 16,000 with affiliate stuff. I used the Empower Network blog to create good income.
First guy I got in, who quit, got in a guy who I got in, a guy who quit, got in a guy who quit, got in a guy who quit, got in a guy who quit, got in a guy I taught to sponsor 300 people in a year, who lived in a trailer, right, who met another guy in Costa Rica on the internet, who he sponsored into his primary company and also got an Empower Network, who today, last month, made 26,000, right, because I just took action. Pretty cool, isn't it? You know what I'm saying? It's like, well, people say, "Well, how much did you — you know, how much did you make from your first sale?" I don't know, because it's still paying me, right? It's still paying me today. Isn't that cool? Isn't that cool story? Real quick, in a moment your life can change. In a moment your life could change.
Now, here's what I want to talk about — events for a second, okay? You came to an event in Atlanta. How much were you making the month before? Seven thousand. Within Empower, the month of the event and the month before the event? Five thousand and seven thousand was your best month ever, right? Yes. So you went from seven thousand to twenty-six and thirty days — in thirty days? Because of the event. Because of the event. So you went from five to seven, which was your best month ever. How long you been on the internet? Too long. Too long, right? A long time, right, around 2008. Making UFO videos. UFO videos, they're pretty cool. He's standing there, UFO flies by, all over YouTube. But okay, so you went from five to seven to twenty-six thousand in how long? Within, I guess, sixty days. Sixty days. Yeah, so from 5 to 7, and this is just in Empower income, but 5, 7, 26 — which really is like 40, because you're making other money too. 42 last month, yeah. 42,000. So 7,000 was your best month ever, and you went from 7,000 to 42,000.
Yeah. In how long? 30 days. In 30 days. Yeah.
In a moment your life could change. Now, what you were doing to go from 7 to 42,000 was slightly different when you were earning weenie-ass horseshit, wasn't it? Yes, I always worked very hard, like put my all in, but I could never break through. I think it was probably psychological. A little bit psychological, a little bit intent, right?
What was it that you think you changed? What was your opinion? I mean, we can dig deeper this weekend, but — maybe go from 7 to 42,000? I put my ego aside, and I just started following the eight core commitments. As silly as that sounds, I was doing everything to avoid the eight core commitments because I thought there had to be a way.
There had to be a better way. It sounds silly, right? But I just started blogging every day. I still don't read every day, but I do watch something educational. But following my core commitments, meaning get to the event, which was the biggest breakthrough — going to the event and experiencing regular people making a lot of money, because I knew they weren't different, we're all the same.
You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, some of us are a little different. I mean, you've got longer, sexier hair. You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, yeah. I'm actually — I was a little drunk one night, and then I went to give myself a little trim, and I was like, "Shit." Because what I did was I cut it back there, and then it was like this V thing, like this. Yeah, it didn't look so hot. Anyways, you rock.
Give him a hand. Give him a hand. Thanks. So I'm all in. Now, some of you guys need to go from zero to 7,000, right?
It's okay. But who's okay with going from 7,000 to 42,000 in 30 days? That's phenomenal, isn't it? But did you know — now, here's the thing, I bet you — now, Justin, you just yell out, was it harder or easier to make 42,000 than 7,000?
It's easier to make more money. It's easier to make more. Now, Lawrence, here, come up here real quick. Good, Lawrence, can you give him a hand? Now, David, when I talk about this now, he came to our first event out here, right?
I did this retreat. I invited him out, and he came out. Now, we were talking about this a little bit earlier. We were with the leaders. But at that retreat, you had a hard time believing you were going to make a certain amount of money.
How much were you having a hard time believing you could make? I thought 12 as a part-time engineer, or building a business part-time as an engineer, would be just too hard. You know, he's doing this part-time. And he'd been doing it — how long have you been marketing?
Since 2007 online. 2007 you were marketing online. And it would take you from 2007 to 2000 — it was 2011, so it was four years. So four years.
What was your best month ever? Maybe 12, one year. It would be 12, and the next month it would be like four. Right. You spike, and then you come back.
It would go like this, like this, and it was never consistent. Yeah. It was never consistent. So he came to the event. Now, a couple months later, we launch.
Now, how much do you make less? Almost 60. Almost 60. $60? $60,000.
$60,000, right? So this — how long ago was that event, that last event? A little over a year. A couple of things changed. And now he doesn't have a job, of course, because he got fired, but it didn't matter because he was making five times the income.
$60,000. So $60,000. So tiny changes in a moment, right? In a moment. Look, that's a year, guys.
That would be annualized. He didn't believe it was. And I remember a conversation where we were sitting there, and you said, "I just don't know if it's possible." Remember that? Yeah, it was just the belief of having so many yo-yo months.
I mean, I don't know if I can sustain a family on that type of income. Yeah, he was having a hard time believing it was possible. It's not hard. You remember that? Yeah, I was laughing.
I was sitting there, and I was like staring at you. I was like, "Lawrence, now listen to me, it's not very hard." Remember that? I do remember that.
Right? And now, what do you think? Do you think it's actually just as easy as I said it was? How's your business now? You just bought a first real estate investment property.
Yeah, I did. Right? Yeah, yeah. Right? I mean, this is ridiculous, isn't it?
Folks, it's a moment, right? Hey, Chris, come up here real quick. Hey, give Lawrence a hand. Now, guys, it's not a big leap, but Lawrence isn't any smarter than he was last year.
Now, he's a little sexier because he makes more money, but he's not smarter, right? Now, this guy here, right — now, funny, I use him all the time. You guys know Chris.
It's a story, and there's probably stories in here I don't even know, right? But how much money do you have to your name? I mean, not to your name — I'm not talking about your wife here, but your name.
How much money do you have to your name when you bought that original course from me that you went through? Well, I guess it was last year or something, right? Negative. I had no money. How'd you come up with the money?
It was $409,500. Credit card. So you got a credit card. I had a credit card. So you had it, and you asked your wife, right, permission to buy it, and she told you she'd support you, right?
Yeah, yeah. She said it. Your wife didn't listen. I probably shouldn't, but whatever I decided, she'd support me. You probably shouldn't do it, but whatever you decide.
Right? You're supportive. You're supportive, isn't she? Now, she's a bad-ass wife. She's tall, too.
She is. She is. And sexy. Now, here's the thing. Sexy, too.
Yeah. So anyways, anyways — this guy, I'm getting distracted there. But I'm getting distracted by that shiny bald head I just had. No, I just want to touch it.
Now, here's the thing. Yeah, see, that she won't mind. Now, he put $495 on a credit card to get into the course. Now, something new changed in that course. What changed?
Just the belief that I could do it. The belief he could do it. Now, I remember a conversation he had with him where we did this course, and he said that you never need another course. Yeah, absolutely. Now, you bought stuff on the internet before?
Yeah. You bought stuff offline before. You'd gotten good schemes. Right. A few deals here and there.
You got your grandma in once or twice, right? A couple times. Your mom. Yeah, your family. You got the deal.
Now, you came out of that. How much did you make? It was like the next month — one luxury cruise. Now, what's your best month ever now?
I'm just curious, I don't actually know. I don't actually know either. My wife handles all the finances. What if you're going to guess?
Or round it out. Probably $30,000. $30,000. And how long ago was this? Shoot.
It was like 10 months? Yeah. 11 months? Yeah. Right.
Maybe a month or two. A couple months before Empower. Yeah. A couple months before Empower Network. So we're talking about a year now.
About a year. Right. About a year ago, he didn't have money to put on a credit card. Now, what's the most you've ever made? A month, outside and other jobs and stuff.
Just most ever. And in the next year — the next year, his best month is what? What was your best month? $30,000? Yeah.
So in a year, right, his best month is his previous best year. Right. See, it doesn't take a lot of time, folks. It's a moment. Now, is it easier or harder to make more than less?
What do you think? Once you're making money, it's much easier to scale up and make more money. It's much easier to make more money. It's much easier to make more than make less, isn't it? Now, that first $4,000 was probably the hardest work you ever did, wasn't it?
Right, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. No, man, give him a hand.
Give him a hand. Hey, Eric, come up here. I don't actually know his story, and I can't take credit for this, but I'm just going to pick his brain for a second here because I'm guessing it's kind of a similar thing. Now, I have no idea how much money you make. A million dollars a second.
You know what I mean? I look at him, and money just pours out, right? Now, you've been in network marketing a long time, right? 21 years. 21 years.
Now, did you get started selling expensive stuff on the internet, or were you kind of wandering around hitting people up? Where'd you get started? Yeah, I actually was a personal trainer, so I started selling product to my clients, and when I ran out of all three of them, I started going to the white pages. So, hey, tell us that line that you used to use, because it — try us out, I mean, if you want. I used to call people out of the white pages, and I would say, you know, "Hey, this is Aaron, I got your name from the largest list of people in the history of the world looking for some new ways to make money, is that you?"
So you were just calling random people? Yeah, I was just calling people out of the white pages because that was the list of leads. Now, do you do that now? I'm just curious. No.
What was the most you ever made in a month doing that stuff? Probably maybe about $1,500 or so. $1,500 to $2,000? Oh, yeah, that was a grind. That was a struggle.
Around what do you make a month now? It goes up and down. Anywhere between $70,000 to $90,000. $70,000, not dollars, right? Oh, hell yeah.
Now, real quick, I'm just curious, right? Now, I don't know, because I actually haven't ever heard you talk about your store. So I space out — you know, I haven't listened to your webinars and stuff, right? So what did you do on the internet when you first got in?
We got online about a little over four years ago. And it took us, I think, until our fourth month. We were part-time because we still had our traditional multi-level marketing business. So we were kind of burning the candle on both ends. And it took us about until our fourth month, because we're also in a top-tier product.
So it takes much fewer sales to make the bigger money. So we had a couple of good sales in our fourth month. Yeah. All right. Oh.
It was the first 90 days online. I mean, we're obsessive, compulsive freaks. So we were putting in 15 to 18 hours. I mean, we did in our first 90 days what most people wouldn't do in 90 years, literally. But we grinded it out.
We figured it out for the first few months. And it was not easy, but we were committed. Now, I'm guessing — just what he says, "grinding out" — what I guess he means is he did every webinar. He took a lot of notes. He was going to school, right?
Just learning all day, never taking any action. Or did you take more action than learning? I'm just curious. No, we're more like you.
We're more about the, you know, fire, aim, ready. You know, we fired first and we kind of failed our way to success. That's it. Give him a hand, guys. Give him a hand.
Okay, guys. Okay. Right? It's much more difficult. And the reason it's more difficult is because sometimes you don't have lots of money to put in ads or whatever, like me, you know.
Or you do have money and then you waste it all on some stupid ad. How many of you have done that? You know, at least five times, right? And then, you know, maybe you do some stupid advertising and then you need to tweak it, but then you don't have any money for more ads. So then it's back to like kind of ground zero, right?
So the reality is it's harder to just start, right? And then you've got to keep believing it's going to work as you're doing it. So here's what happened to me — I got started. Now, I had already gone through the pain that I went through. And we're going to talk about this through the weekend, starting on Saturday.
Tomorrow, and I'm going to talk about this, whatever it should be focused on. Let me take this. All right. Let me tell you first what you guys need to do this weekend. Everybody here needs to set a goal or an outcome.
Right now, of what you need to get out of this weekend or this course, if you're watching the videos, right? And you need to set it right now, okay? Because if you have a clear intention of what you want to accomplish, you're going to find what you need to know. If you don't have a clear intention, you're just here to just sit around and learn, right? I can't promise you'll find what you need to know.
But if you have a clear intention, a clear outcome, right, then you'll find it. Okay? Now, some of you just need to figure out — some of you just need to set a goal right now.
Now, I'm telling you something, I don't care if you live in a dumpster. I just don't care who you are. I don't care if you're old or young. I don't care if you smell bad.
And you look funny, you know what I mean? Right? Chris Daugherty looks funny too. Okay.
So set a very clear outcome. Tomorrow, we're going to be spending the day — we rented a couple of cattle grounds, right? I think we're leaving at like 10 in the morning. But I don't know.
So check the schedule, right? There's a schedule. I don't know when we're leaving. So Dave Sharp will wake me up.
Call me up. We're already doing this early, you know? Going on some boats. Now, we're going to be hanging out.
And there will be leaders on here, right? And there's a lot of people here who make good money, right? A lot of people here who make good money.
There's a lot of people here who make good money, right? We're where you are, right? Does that make sense to everybody on here?
The best value you guys can get who are here is go around and meet people and just have a conversation. Have a conversation, right? And ask them how to get to the next level. And you could have a conversation with somebody tomorrow.
Right? And one thing somebody says could just — you'll say, "That's it?" Right? For a year.
Right? Right? Doesn't matter where you are. It's actually, I think, easier. And it is.
I mean, it's not very difficult. You just got to have the right energy and the right focus, right? And know what to do. So we're going to talk about how to get...
Right? That's about as far as we can trade, maybe until next year. Right? So we're going to go through that whole process.
But you guys need to find your outcome. Because if you try to do what maybe Aaron does right now, and you try to skip over the first three months when he just went through the pain of it and just worked his butt off, you can't do it. Do you guys know that it's slightly different when you have money than when you don't? And when you know what you're doing than when you don't, right?
Who here knows that? You know that already. So what you need to do is you need to do what he did his first 90 days.
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