Karlo

Before any of this - before marketing, ecom, business - there was handball.

I originally started playing football as a kid, until I found out I'm allergic to grass. Dead serious lol.

So I switched to handball, and it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

I was good. Captain of my hometown club, we won the 2nd league around 2016. Then I started carrying the team in the 1st league, which caught eye of some bigger clubs who scouted me and when I was 16 years old I got called to play for the biggest handball club in Croatia at the time.

So I left my hometown. Switched high schools, moved to the capital of Croatia (Zagreb) and lived on my own at 16. I had to leave my family, all of my friends, it was a very big change in my life. And to be honest I was a bit scared (as probably any 16 year old would be lol). I had to fit in and make new friends in the new school, I had to make good first impressions in a new club, develop relationships with my teammates. It was a lot.

My daily routine was simple and brutal:

• Gym in the morning.
• School.
• Handball practice at night.
• Multiple matches through the week.

That's where I grew up.

Throughout those years, everyone I met kept telling me I was sharp, mature, way ahead of my age. And that period is the reason why. It taught me discipline. How to walk into a brand new environment alone and make it work. How to lead without ever being the loudest guy in the room.

Eventually a year after playing in Zagreb I got called up to Croatia's national team - it was the biggest achievement of my life. I trained next to some of the most talented players of my generation - a couple of them went pro. My dream was always to play handball for our national team, and I quite literally "made it" when I was 17 years old.

When I look back to these years, I am so so grateful it played out the way it did. If I didn't pursue handball so much, there is no way I would be as "successful" in other areas of life right now.

Because the trophies and the national team were never the real prize. The real prize was everything the sport quietly built in me before I even knew I'd need it.

It started with discipline. Training before school and again at night, every single day, whether I felt like it or not - and the patience to put in months of work before seeing a single result, trusting it would pay off later even when there was nothing to show for it yet.

Then there's everything it taught me about people. You don't win anything alone, so I learned to actually respect the guys next to me - to lean on them, to lead without being the loudest one in the room, to treat them like they mattered, because they did. That one carried straight into business, where everything I've built has been built with an incredible team of people.

And it taught me how to lose. Bad games, losses that genuinely wrecked me - the only thing that ever counted was showing up the next morning and working even harder than the day before.

By the time I walked away from handball, all of that was simply who I was. And it turned out to be exactly what I needed the moment I started from zero in business.

So if you take one thing from this part of my story, take this: whatever you want to be great at is built in the work no one sees. The early mornings, the boring reps, the months when it feels like nothing is happening. That's the part almost everyone quits on. Outlast it, and you're already ahead of nearly everyone chasing the same thing.

That's the foundation everything in my life was built on.

Then sometime mid 2020, COVID hit, and everything shut down.

No more handball. No matches, no practice, nothing. The one thing I'd built my entire life around was gone overnight.

So I moved back in with my parents and enrolled in uni. And honestly I got depressed. Handball wasn't just what I did, it was who I was. Take that away and I had nothing - no plan, no other skills. I was a cracked handball player and that was it.

And for a good few months, I genuinely just checked out. We were deep in lockdown, so my whole world shrank to my bedroom. I was technically enrolled in uni, but I barely showed up to any of it. Most days I was just side-questing - hopping on Discord with the boys and running Minecraft for hours on end.

That was basically my entire personality back then. I cared way more about making my setup look clean and aesthetic than about figuring out my actual life lol. No ambition, no direction, no real clue what I wanted to do with myself.

During this COVID period, one question started eating at me and wouldn't leave: how the hell am I supposed to provide for my family if we're all locked in the house?

The answer I got was making money online, so I don't even have to leave the house. Sounds pretty good, right?

First attempt I had was crypto day trading. I spent months learning technical analysis, convinced I was good at it, then did exactly what everyone does when they get into crypto - blew almost all the money I had. But it taught me one thing: to make crypto work, you need capital. So the real question became, how do I get capital?

My next brilliant idea was running Instagram theme pages. A dog page, a news page, whatever. Grow them organically, then sell promo on posts/stories to businesses. Made exactly zero dollars lol.

Then I had a friend who was deep in dropshipping - he built landing pages and websites for ecom stores. He started showing me bits of what he was doing, so I jumped in and helped him out for free, mostly just to be around it and soak up how everything actually worked.

That's honestly how I picked up the basics - not from some course, just by hanging around someone already doing the real thing.

Eventually, he showed me where he got all his clients: Upwork.

Upwork. Got it.

I made a profile that same day. The only real skill I had was making product pages, so that's what I put in my bio. Sent maybe three messages. Next day, one of them replied: "I really like your application, let's hop on a call." I genuinely didn't know what "hop on a call" even meant hahhah. It was the most stressful call of my life.

But he took a chance on me mostly because I was super honest about my situation.

I told him straight up: I'm just a student, 18 years old, with zero real experience. I just wanted to figure out how to make some money online - and I said I was happy to work for free until I got good enough that it actually made sense for him to pay me.

So for the first few weeks I did exactly that - worked for nothing while he taught me everything he knew. Once I was actually useful, we agreed on paid work.

Working with that guy taught me the basics of copywriting. Biggest lesson I learned at the time was - if you want to sell any products online, you shouldn't talk about the product itself, you should talk about what the product actually does for the person. These were my first real steps into direct response.

My workflow looked something like this:

• Got the product link on AliExpress from the guy
• Find good images / videos online, make them nicer
• Do some research and write copy about the product
• Build the product page
• We then tested that product by running some ads to it (I wasn't making the ads at the start)

And this was all before AI was a thing - crazy I even have to mention that now haha. So I was MANUALLY WRITING every word of about literally 100s of products, and editing every product photo by hand in Photoshop, for hours.

Eventually the guy I was working with saw I was good on the creative side and asked if I could make ads. Of course I said yes (I never made an ad in my life), and that's how I started making ads for the products too. At that point I was doing pretty much everything for almost every product we tested. (And I was doing all of this for like $10/hour btw haha, later I realized how ripped off I was xd)

One product started working really well and we scaled it to some good numbers. Eventually even built a branded store around it. It was working.

And then the store got shut down, and just like that I was back to zero. Guy just texted me one day saying "I don't have any more work for you."

I didn't even know you could lose a client like that lol.

But honestly I didn't care I was back to zero. Because I wasn't the same person who started. I had some experience and skills now.

And if you're reading this with zero experience online, that was me too.

Your lack of experience isn't the disadvantage you think it is. You've got the one thing most experienced people lost a long time ago: you're hungry, and you have nothing to protect. So walk in honest about it. Tell them you don't have the resume yet, but you'll outwork anyone they've got and do whatever it takes to actually be useful to them.

That's the entire reason I got my first shot. No skills, no proof, just a willingness to provide value before I ever asked for anything back. If you've got nothing else yet, lead with that - it's exactly what I'd tell anyone starting from zero.

By the start of 2022, things were actually starting to click.

I took everything I'd learned and went back to Upwork, this time with a real profile - all the copywriting, the ad results, every product I worked on. The outreach started landing. People were coming to me instead of me chasing them. For the first time since handball ended, it genuinely felt like I'd clawed my way back onto solid ground, like the plan was finally working and the worst was behind me.

And then my mom got very sick.

I stopped everything. Uni, the clients, the work, all of it - none of it mattered anymore, and I didn't think twice about it. The momentum I'd spent the last year building toward, gone in a moment. For almost the entire year I didn't touch a single thing I'd been building.

This was the hardest period of my life, and I'm not going to dress it up to make a nicer story out of it. It almost broke me. Genuinely almost the end of me.

To this day, almost nobody knows about this part of my life.

It's also the year I met God, and I don't think I would have made it through without Him.

Most of 2022 wasn't about building anything. It was just about surviving it. And as crazy as it sounds, looking back now I'm grateful it happened. The worst year of my life is the thing that shaped me into who I am.

It rearranged everything I cared about. When you almost lose the person who raised you, the money and the status stop meaning anything. What you're left with is the people who are actually in the room with you.

That's the year family became my real why, and it's been my why ever since. Everything I build, every hour in the trenches, is for them - my fiancée, my parents, the family I'll have one day. Without those people, grinding online by myself would be completely pointless. I've never done any of this to impress strangers on the internet.

If there's one thing I want you to take from this part, it's this: don't let materialism fool you. People online have convinced themselves that "making it" is a fast car, an expensive watch, a flashy lifestyle. It's not.

When you're broke, you think money fixes everything. The moment you actually have it, you realize the only thing that was ever truly valuable is your time, and the people you get to share it with. My mom doesn't want a Rolex, she wants to drink coffee with me in the morning. You can build a life that gives your family everything they need and still fail them by never being there. I never want to be the guy who "made it" but missed his own life.

I've got goals bigger than myself and I want to build huge things. But the point was never the things. It's the people I get to bring up with me on the way there.

Now you know this part of me too.

By 2023, things had finally stabilized in my personal life - thanks to God - and for the first time in what felt like forever, I could breathe again.

So I got back to work.

This time, though, I leaned hard into the part I actually loved: the creative side. Editing, design, making things look good. I've always had that tendency - the same way I obsessed over making my setup look clean back in lockdown, I just like making things look nice.

And ads turned out to be the perfect place to put that. Because a good ad isn't just a nice-looking video or image - it directly changes how much money a business makes. That combination clicked for me instantly: I get to express myself creatively, and that creativity has a real, measurable impact on a business. And I could get paid well for it. (To this day one of my favorite feelings is hitting a winning ad for a brand ngl)

It was the perfect fit for who I am. I had the creative side, sure, but handball had also left me with a serious competitive streak - I want to win, I want my work to outperform everyone else's. Ads scratched both itches at once. For lack of a better term, it was my zone of genius. So I went all in on one thing: making ads for ecom brands, doing every part of it myself.

And the timing was perfect. Brands everywhere needed fresh ads constantly - far more demand than there were people who could actually make good ones. I did genuinely good work for the brands I took on, added the results to my portfolio, and those clients started referring me to other brands they knew. Within a couple of months, more brands wanted to work with me than I could keep up with.

But editing is time-consuming. There's only so many ads one person can physically make in a day, and I hit that ceiling fast. So I did the obvious thing and messaged a bunch of my friends, asking if they wanted to make money online with me. 99% of them ignored me. Genuinely pissed me off at the time lol. But two of my best friends didn't: Lovro and Antonio. I taught them everything I knew, they became the first people on my team, and from there I started bringing on more editors to support me.

And just like that, I was running my own little creative agency. As the team grew, my role shifted - I focused on the strategy and the briefs, figuring out what each ad should actually say and look like, then writing it all out so my editors could build it. I still made a good chunk of the ads myself, but now I had help. (These days people call this "creative strategy." Back then we just called it writing scripts.)

There was one problem, though. I was doing all of this from home, and working from home was quietly killing my productivity. The same room where I relaxed was also where I was supposed to lock in, and my brain couldn't tell the two apart.

So me and Lovro made a slightly crazy decision. We lived close to each other, so we went and rented our own little office, just the two of us, somewhere we could actually lock in and build side by side.

At the time it was genuinely risky. We weren't making much money yet, and the rent was a real expense for us. But it turned out to be one of the best decisions I've ever made, and the return on it can't be measured in money.

Two reasons. First, the productivity was unreal. Any time I didn't feel like working, I'd look over and Lovro would be locked in right next to me - so what was I going to do, be weak and slack off? No. I'd get straight back to it.

Second, you build something way deeper with someone when you're in the trenches together every day, and it's just way more fun than grinding alone in your bedroom.

So a genuine recommendation: if you're trying to lock in, find one person who's as serious as you are and go build together. It'll make the work better, and it'll make the whole thing way more fun.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, I got my first real taste of something I'd never had before: time and location freedom.

I wasn't making crazy money yet, but I could work whenever I wanted, from wherever I wanted. No boss, no fixed hours, no commute. After a whole life of rigid handball schedules and then lockdowns stuck inside, that was honestly one of the most freeing feelings I'd ever had.

I could take a morning to go spend time out in nature. I could take my girl somewhere nice for a few days and just bring my laptop along. It was sick - and the wild part is, all it took to get there was a few months of really locking in on a skill.

Then one day, while doing my usual outreach on Upwork - basically just hunting for new clients, because in this game you always need fresh leads - I started talking to a guy named Spencer.

I had no idea at the time, but that one conversation would end up changing the entire course of my life for the next few years. Spencer is one of my business partners today.

His agency, Easy A Media, came on as a client. But it wasn't like my other clients. The moment I started working with them, I realized Spencer and his partner Shaun were running an operation way bigger than mine, with much bigger brands. They were clearly a few steps ahead of me.

I was really good at making ads, but that was all I did. I'd hand over the ads and my job was done. Spencer and Shaun understood the entire picture of how you actually scale an ecom brand - all the moving parts beyond the ads that I didn't have a clue about yet.

So I stopped seeing them as just another client. I started seeing them as the best chance I'd ever get to be in a room with people ahead of me.

And that's the biggest thing 2023 taught me, something I'd recommend to anyone trying to grow fast: the quickest way to get better is to put yourself around people who are already better than you, and then actually have the humility to learn from them.

It's brutal on the ego. I wanted to believe I already made it - I had my own agency, my own team, my own office. Admitting these guys were operating on a level I couldn't touch yet wasn't easy. But the truth was I'd barely scratched the surface, and they knew things that might've taken me years to figure out alone.

The people who actually grow aren't the ones protecting how far they've already come. They're the ones willing to be the dumbest person in the room, over and over, because that's the only place you really level up.

That decision quietly set up everything that came next.

At the start of 2024, me and Lovro moved into a new office. It was actually a bit of a downgrade in how nice the place was - but it was much closer to where we lived, which meant less time wasted commuting and more time actually in the office working. A purely tactical decision. We'd stopped caring about how it looked, we just wanted to be even more locked in.

And then I made the biggest bet of my life.

By this point I was actually making decent money on my own. More than $10K/month. But I dropped every single client I had and went all in with Spencer and Shaun full time at Easy A Media. I willingly took a pay cut and lowered my own income to do it.

Why would I do that?

Because I realized I could be so much better than I was. Spencer and Shaun were ahead of me, and being in their environment - learning from them, building alongside them every single day - was worth infinitely more than the money I was walking away from. On paper, dropping a $10K/month income to go make less made zero sense. But I wasn't betting on the money. I was betting on who I'd become. The money was never the point. Getting better was.

At first I was the only editor on the entire team. I was making ads for 8-9 brands completely by myself - and I mean ALL of it. My days looked like this:

• 2-3 video ads. Every day.
• 2-4 static ads. Every day.
• 12-15 hours locked in my office. Every single day.

I was a fucking menace lol.

Eventually, about halfway through the year, we started hiring people under me, and I went from doing ALL of it myself to actually leading a team.

And the moment hiring those editors freed up my time, I didn't ease off or start coasting. I funneled every bit of it straight back into getting better. I became a fiend for knowledge, working through book after book on marketing, psychology, copywriting, business - anything that would expand my skill set as far as it could go.

And if there's one book I'd tell anyone serious about marketing to read, it's Breakthrough Advertising. It's a literal blueprint for how to make ads that actually sell, and it's made us millions. I'm not exaggerating.

One specific thing that worked insanely well for me: I blocked off one to two hours every day, usually around midday, to just study. Phone in a completely different room, notebook and pen in front of me, nothing else. I did that for a couple of months straight, and honestly it taught me a shit ton - more about marketing than anything else I'd ever tried. I'm not saying the exact same thing will work for you, but if you want to learn fast, find a block of time, kill the distractions, and protect it.

I genuinely learned more in that one year than in the three before it combined.

In November of 2024 we scaled a brand to $700,000 in a SINGLE day, with me leading the strategy and ads.

$700K. In one day. I couldn't even imagine that number when I was making product pages for $10/hour two years earlier.

But 2024 wasn't just about business.

In August I proposed to my fiancé Marija in Zakynthos. I actually met her back in 2018, when I was still playing handball - we've basically been together since we were kids. Every single trench I've told you about, she was right there next to me.

And I genuinely wouldn't be the person I am today without her. Through every version of me - the kid who lost handball and had no clue what was next, the broke student writing product pages by hand, the guy locked in an office for 12 hours a day - she was right there. She kept me grounded when everything was falling apart, and pushed me to keep going every time I wanted to give up.

You hear a lot online about locking in and grinding alone. But having the right person beside you through all of it changes everything. She's part of every good thing that's happened to me, and none of it would mean much without her to build it with.

(I also graduated university in 2024 btw. Almost forgot to mention it, it's that irrelevant haha)

Around that same time, I ran into a problem that changed a lot of things from this point.

As we scaled our businesses, a big part of my job was hiring editors and creatives for the team. And good ones were almost impossible to find. It would take forever to hire even ONE person who was actually good.

So one day I thought: fuck it. If I can't find good marketers, I'll just build the place that creates them. Teach people how to make great ads myself, then hire the best ones straight out of it.

That idea was Ecom Talent, I'll tell more about it in the next section.

2024 was the biggest year of growth of my entire life, and all of it traces back to that one bet at the start of the year.

I stopped chasing money and just locked in on getting better - better skills, better results, bigger brands. And the wild part is, the money followed anyway. It always does.

So the lesson I'd hand you from this year is this: at some point you'll have to choose between the money you can make right now and how good you could become if you bet on yourself instead. Almost everyone takes the money. Take the growth. Put yourself wherever you'll improve the fastest, even when it costs you in the short term. The skill comes first, and the money chases it - never the other way around.

At the start of 2025, me, Spencer, and Shaun took off to Portugal together for almost three weeks. We rented a place, worked out of it every single day, and spent most of the time planning out exactly what 2025 was going to look like.

So we sat down and actually talked it through, in person. And we all landed on the same thing - Ecom Talent was an insane idea, and it made complete sense for me to go all in on building it. That became my full focus.

I'd already started tinkering with it back in November 2024, but Portugal is where it became real. From there I put my head down, started cooking, and we officially launched in March 2025.

Inside Ecom Talent, I teach you the actual skill - how to make ads that sell for real ecom brands. And once you have that skill, you can land real job opportunities directly inside the community.

But then something I didn't see coming happened.

More and more people kept joining. And more importantly, they started getting results.

I'll never forget the first messages I got. "Yo dude, thank you so much, you changed my life."

That hit me in a way I wasn't ready for. Scaling a brand to $700K in a day felt good, don't get me wrong. But it didn't come anywhere close to this. Helping someone completely change their life was 10x more fulfilling than any number on a dashboard ever was.

That's the moment it clicked. This wasn't just a way to hire editors anymore. This was the thing I actually wanted to do with my life. So I decided to stop treating it like a side thing and build it properly.

I wanted to give the people inside real opportunities - not just theory, but actual reps on real brands. And then it hit me. On one side, I was already working with a bunch of ecom brands that needed fresh ads constantly. On the other side, I had a whole community of students dying for a real chance to prove themselves.

So why not connect the two?

That's how ad bounties were born.

A brand drops a "bounty" for ads. The students inside make ads for that real brand. The brand tests them with their OWN money. And if a student's ad performs, they get paid a percentage of the revenue it brings in - for as long as it keeps running.

The students get real reps, real data, and real money. The brands get a flood of fresh creative. Everybody wins.

And honestly? It blew the fuck up.

Students started getting paid amounts I genuinely didn't expect. To put it in perspective - in Q4 2025 alone, we did over $6 million in revenue across just four brands on the ad bounty program. And in those same three months, we paid out close to $80,000 to students.

$80K. To beginners. In three months. For ads they made while they were still learning the skill.

But the numbers aren't the part that matters most to me. What matters most is watching this actually work on real people.

Someone shows up knowing nothing about marketing. They go through the 20+ hours of content that takes them from a complete beginner to someone who can genuinely make ads that sell. They sharpen up on real brands through the bounties, and then they hit the job board, where new deals get posted almost every single day, and suddenly they're landing actual clients of their own. I've watched people go from a 9-to-5 they couldn't stand to doing this full-time in the span of two or three months. Two or three months.

That still doesn't feel real to me sometimes.

And the part I never expected to love as much as I do is the community itself.

Every week we all hop on a call together, and it's genuinely one of my favorite things I do. It doesn't even feel like work - I'm just hanging out with a room full of incredible people who are all trying to get better at the same thing, pushing each other, sharing what's working. I'm honestly really proud of what it turned into.

By the end of 2025, Ecom Talent had grown to around 500 members - completely through word of mouth.

I wasn't running a single ad. No marketing. I wasn't even posting content on Instagram or YouTube. People joined for one reason: students inside were telling their friends "bro, you need to hop on this, it's an insane opportunity."

When I launched it back in March, I never imagined it would grow to a number like that. Not even close.

Behind all of that, the year itself was relentless. Ecom Talent was growing so fast that I spent most of it just putting out fires - hiring people, building teams to support students the moment they joined, putting systems in place so nothing broke at scale. The ad bounties alone needed a proper system built around them, which has now turned into basically its own piece of software. It was nonstop building and expanding, the entire year.

And it wasn't just Ecom Talent on my plate. The whole time, I was still leading creative strategy for the agency's brands too. For a big chunk of the year I was trying to balance both at once - 12 to 15 hour days in the office, every single day, absolutely trenching, and still stretched way too thin. Eventually I had to make a call: for the time being, I'd step back from the brand strategy and pour everything into Ecom Talent. The second I did, it got easier - I finally had my focus back.

Pulling that off was a trench of its own - we had to get the right people in place on the agency side first. And I'm genuinely blessed there, because we've got a team that executes at an absurdly high level. Without them, there's no chance I'd have the time to build Ecom Talent the way I have. These days my role on that side is light: I mostly just hop on our strategy calls, where I can still add the most value with ideas, feedback, and direction.

In between all of it, me and Lovro renovated a new office, I took a trip mid-year, and toward the end of the year Spencer and I flew out to Vegas. We actually spent a full day there with Alex Hormozi, getting his take on how to plan our next moves - and honestly, that day helped us more than I can put into words.

And that's exactly why, this year, we decided to build something way, way bigger.

Every January, Spencer, Shaun, and I take a trip to step back, reflect on the year that just passed, and plan the one ahead. Last year it was Portugal; this year, the mountains in Italy.

And somewhere up there, between all the planning, one idea kept coming back: it's time to take this to the next level.

That's when Ecom University was born.

But to explain what Ecom University actually is, I have to tell you what I genuinely believe.

I believe every single person has something special in them. A talent. A zone of genius.

For some people it's creative. For some it's analytical, or data-driven. Some are killers on camera, some are natural salesmen, some are obsessed with systems and numbers. It's different for everyone - but everyone has SOMETHING.

The problem is, most people never find their thing. And the ones who do almost never get a real chance to turn it into something valuable.

I know that feeling better than anyone. Because I was that person.

You've read my whole story by now. When handball ended, I had nothing - no skills, no direction, no clue what I was going to do with my life. I genuinely thought I was just average. Until I stumbled into the one skill that turned out to be my zone of genius - and it changed absolutely everything.

That's the whole point of Ecom University.

Ecom Talent - the thing I've been building this whole time - is now going to be just ONE community inside Ecom University. The one focused on editing and making ads. But that's just one path. One zone of genius.

Inside Ecom University, we're building a whole world of them:

• Editing & making ads (Ecom Talent)
• Creative strategy
• Copywriting
• Media buying
• CRO
• Systems & AI
• Content creation

Based on your personality and what you're naturally wired for, we point you toward the right path.

If you're analytical and love numbers and systems, you'll probably thrive in media buying or systems & AI. If you're more creative, you'll go toward editing, creative strategy, maybe copywriting. If you're a natural on camera, content creation might be your thing.

There's a path for everyone. The whole point is to help YOU find the one that fits who you actually are - and then go deep enough on it that brands will pay you real money for it.

Real skills. Real money. In a few months - instead of a 4-year degree that leaves you in debt with nothing to show for it.

Now, building something this big is not a one-man job. So one of my biggest goals this year is to surround myself with a genuinely world-class team. What I'm trying to build is way bigger than me - the only way it works is with the best people in the world building it alongside me.

Oh, and to show you how much we believe in all of this, we also got the domain ecomuniversity.com. It was originally listed for $600K. But there was NO WAY Shaun, our resident scaler, was paying that hahaha - so he worked his magic and got it down to $100K. We invested in it back in February.

And ever since, I've been completely heads-down in the trenches, laying the foundation for what Ecom University is going to be.

And I mean that literally. I spent almost three weeks writing our entire brand foundation by hand - everything we believe, who it's for, what we're building and exactly why. No AI, no team, just me and a blank page. If you actually want to see where all of this is headed, you can read the whole thing here.

And every now and then, something happens that reminds me exactly who I'm doing all of this for.

A month ago I hosted an Ecom Talent dinner. 50 people showed up - some of them flew in from across the world just to spend a few hours in the same room. Sitting at that table, looking around at everyone who'd come together because of something I built, was genuinely surreal.

And one of our members, a girl named Mia, did something that genuinely broke my brain - she got the Ecom Talent logo tattooed on her arm. A permanent tattoo, of a community I started. I still can't wrap my head around it.

I feel incredibly blessed to even be in a position where things like that happen. But more than that, it made me feel the weight of it. Seeing that tattoo made me want to lock in even harder, because I feel genuinely responsible now - for every single person who's put their trust in what we're building.

So that's where I'm at right now. And honestly, 2026 is shaping up to be another bet - a bigger one than 2024 ever was.

For the last six months, I've been pouring everything I have into Ecom University. I'm laying the entire foundation, setting up the communities inside it, and spearheading all of it. It's basically a full year of building something that doesn't exist yet, on nothing but faith that it'll work.

But we're building something that could genuinely change hundreds of thousands of lives. So a year of quiet, head-down building? That's the least I can do.

I've got a quote on my vision board that I read every day, and it sums up exactly why I do all of this:

"To whom much is given, much is required."

Whatever I've been given - the skills, the lessons, the people around me - I want to use every bit of it to bring as many people up with me as I can.

Because if I can take some random broke kid who thinks he's average, and help him find the thing he's actually great at...

That's the flex.

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And if you actually read all of this, all the way to the end... seriously, thank you. It genuinely means a lot to me that you took the time.

I really hope something in here motivated you, or helped you out in some way, even a little bit. That's honestly all I could ask for.

And since you made it all the way to the very end, there's one last thing - the biggest project I've got running behind the scenes.

This entire year you've just read about, I've been filming. Every single day since January 4th, I've been recording a Year in the Life. And I'm doing it for two reasons.

The first is that I genuinely can't stand the online guru space. The guys flexing rented Lambos and supercars and watches, selling everyone a dream. Every "day in the life" they post is the same flashy nonsense - the shopping trips, the cars, the views, none of the actual work. It honestly disgusts me. So I made it my mission to do the exact opposite: not a day in the life, but a whole year in the life of someone actually building something real. The grind, the boring parts, the losses and the wins. What it actually takes.

The second reason is stranger. Over New Year's I was in Paris, and I wandered into an old basilica up in Montmartre. Inside there was a statue of Jesus carved out of solid silver, and when I walked up to it I felt this wave of sadness out of nowhere - I almost teared up, which really isn't like me. Then I read the small inscription under it. The artist had made the whole thing to capture "the immense sadness of this heart, which has so loved men, and in return received only ingratitude."

And it floored me. This guy poured so much of himself into that statue that, more than a century later, a random person could walk up and actually feel it. I wanted to do that. Not with silver - with a year of my life.

So that's what the video is. The rawest, most honest record I could make of what a year of actually building this looks like - the wins, the losses, the lessons, all of it - captured the way that artist captured his.

My one real goal with it: to make you believe you've got something great in you too. Because you do.

It goes live on January 4th, 2027. I'll see you there.

- Karlo  ·  last updated 16 June 2026