Jerry Banfield with EDUfyre – Creativity Productivity Challenge: Starting Over

In 2005 while I was in college at the University of South Carolina, I tried to start working online. I signed up for an MLM program and a survey website. A month later, I had refunds from both and figured working online was not possible because everything was a scam. The truth was I was afraid to fail again.

In 2011, I moved in with my wife and launched an online business focusing on video game addiction in an attempt to avoid dealing with any of my other problems. In a few months, I changed my business to selling shirts because I realized there was no money in video game addiction. A year after starting my business, I dropped out of my criminology PHD program at the University of South Florida to run my business full time which by then had changed to helping clients with Facebook and Google ads based on my experience failing to do them successfully for myself.

In 2013, I starting sharing everything I knew for free on YouTube because I hoped it would help me get more clients. By April 2014, I was nearly bankrupt after failing at 15+ different business models. I was also nearly dead from trying to drink the pain away and fortunately the fear of death motivated me to get into recovery. Being in recovery motivated me to focus more on being of true service to others and less on what I would get out of it. I started making courses online with Udemy which soon turned into my first real business. I partnered with as many talented instructors as I could and learned from top instructors how to get my courses the most sales.

In 2015, I tried making some inspirational videos sharing what I learned in recovery and got an amazing response on YouTube. To make the background on my videos more interesting, I started making the inspirational videos while playing video games. To make a more helpful website, I hired a freelancer to convert the videos into blog posts including this about page originally.