I owned a two story 4-bedroom house, yet the mortgage felt like donating a monthly organ...

I outperformed all 800 sales people in my department at Apple, yet my debit card would get declined when I took my family to lunch. The waitress would return with a very uncomfortable look on her face.

“Uhhhh, the card got declined. Something about insufficient funds?”

"Oh yeah,” I said to my wife. “We forgot to transfer funds, didn't we honey?"

My insufferable excuse just made the situation worse. It was the walk of death, through the restaurant, out to my beat-up minivan to get my checkbook.

I'll never forget the feeling of my heart sinking when my wife called me from the grocery store, "Hey Seth, our debit card just got declined, and I'm standing in front of a line of 15 people."

This started to happen so regularly my wife began to dread grocery shopping.

So, I worked harder to prove myself. It seemed to work because within one week two different departments at the trillion dollar company sent me an offer letter.

I knew this would change everything. Now was my big moment! So I chose the manager role for a tech support team across the US.

Funny thing, the freedom I thought I was gaining became less.

I was needed constantly, yet that need did not transfer to my bank account. Living the American dream, I spent my days building someone else's dream. I worked my heart out year round and received annual raises just big enough to buy a few extra bags of coffee every month to medicate my stress with caffeine. And my $24,000 credit card debt was growing. 
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I'll never forget the day my boss told me to create a tracker for a tracker of my daily tasks that needed to be tracked. It was tracker inception!

When I wanted to go on vacation I had to request it. If I wanted a day off with my kids, I had to earn it. If I went over my allotted time away, I got in trouble.

Apple owned me.

While my death-by-paycheck 9 to 5 slowly sucked the life out of me, the one house we owned—a beautiful four bed 3 bath home foreclosed. 

So guess what I did. I tried harder. Maybe—just maybe—if I prove my worth, I'll get some respect that translates into freedom. I led my team to draft an avant-garde solution (well, I thought so anyway) for our customers' biggest pain points.

This would prove my worth.

I began my presentation. But 10% into this long-awaited moment, my boss cut me off, “No offense but you’re wasting my time.” My heart turned to wet sand.

I never sat well with the unspoken but all-knowing corporate games of butt-kissing and flattery required to get promoted or noticed. I thought my presentation would cut through that BS. Instead, it cut through my heart.

My sense of pointlessness began to leak onto the people I loved most. My marriage was hurting. I was short and curt with my kids. Even my wife's dog didn't like me.

I’ll never forget the day my oldest child, who was just 11 years old at the time, said, “Pop, you look really sad.” I walked out of the room and wept. 

Little did I know that just a few months later, everything would change…starting with me. 

The final blow was when my boss shamed me in front of my own subordinate. Driven by fear of getting in trouble with HR, she made me the scapegoat.

We were meeting over video chat (I was in my home office) and I remember feeling so humiliated I had to move an application window over the video of my boss' face. Feeling too sick to even answer I just nodded numbly, waiting for the meeting to end

The meeting finished, I turned to my wife, and said,

"That's it. I'm done. I don't care how brutal or hellish the path may be. I'm building a new life for our family."

I honored Apple from day one and often made them more cash in one day than they paid me in an entire year. This didn't bother me. But when I saw my honor sacrificed for the sake of company politics, my heart was already gone.

I dove into Dave Ramsey's teachings on how to crush your debt and one day grabbed a paint can and spray painted on the wall in front of my desk: "Live like no one else..."‍ I didn't have enough room for the second half of that quote: "...so that some day, you can live like no one else."

I poured my heart into learning ecommerce. I devoured every blog and book I could find on how to build multiple income streams. 

One day, I noticed the coins sitting in my beat-up mini van's ash tray. An insane idea entered my head.

I picked up a dime. "How many times would I have to double this to reach $100,000?" I grabbed a calculator. Twenty times. "That can't be true!" I re-did the math. Yes. Double a dime 20 times and it explodes to exactly $104,857.60.

Suddenly I knew what I needed to do.

Armed with a single dime, the most valuable US coin for its little size, I walked downtown and approached random people, sharing my vision and asking them to double my dime.

Some said “yes” and others laughed.

Slowly but surely, my dime turned into $400 just for asking.

How ecommerce worked was still a big cloud in my head so I came up with this not-so-fun idea. I found a list of over 10,000 suppliers, chained myself to my desk, and refused to get up until I had called 70 of them. Every. Single. Day.

I asked them all the same thing: "What are the three top products on the market today?" I recorded my results in a spreadsheet and within a few weeks the overwhelming winner was "vapes and e-cigarettes."

I found a supplier who could dropship the vapes, meaning I don't have to buy inventory until a customer pays for the product. I launched MountainVapes.com and texted every single person in my phone to either buy a vape or talk to a friend who needed one. 

Sales came in. Slowly. My biggest month was a little over $400 in sales. Four hundred G's would not pay off $24,000 of credit card debt, let alone support a family of six.

So I started driving for Lyft and Uber. I’d get up before the sun to work on my vape business. Then work for Apple all day. Then head to downtown Austin and drive until 3-4 a.m. I’ll never forget getting home, feeling deader than a zombie, and my dog Dakota would always be there to cheerfully greet me. 

Every deposit I received from Lyft and Uber went straight to our credit card debt. But I knew I could not sustain this routine forever. 

So I grabbed my envelope of $400, the love child of me and my original dime, and decided to use the cash to buy stuff to sell on eBay.

I researched the health and fitness market on eBay and concluded that every other person on the planet and in every alternate universe had all decided simultaneously to sell in the health and fitness market.

With Pat Flynn's advice echoing in my head, "The riches are in the niches," I clicked on the "Everything Else" eBay category and happened upon "Funeral and Cemetery." One hour later I discovered that tiny cremation urns hanging from silver necklaces were selling like popcorn at a baseball game.

I found a supplier on DH Gate, purchased inventory, and posted it on eBay. Nothing happened for days.

Then one sale came in.

A few days later, another sale came in.

Was I doing something wrong?

I decided to try Amazon so I created my first listing for the cremation urns.

While waiting to see if Amazon would do anything, my wife and I stripped our house of everything we didn't need and sold it on Craigslist, eBay, and Facebook marketplaces. A coffee Keurig machine. An old Skilsaw from my dad. Creepy teddy bears in the closet. A weed eater. Mountains of clothing and shoes we didn't need.

When the products wouldn’t sell, I put them in a bag and walked door to door, selling them to our neighbors. Sometimes when Atalie, my younger daughter, needed to do a fundraiser for her school band, she’d join me and we’d do a double offer at each house. I dreaded knocking on our neighbors’ doors during dinnertime. But this forced me to get over my fear and learn how to sell right on the spot. Looking back, I wouldn’t trade this hands-on training and memories with my daughter for anything. 

One day I got a notification from Amazon. "Sold!" Wow. I packed it up and shipped it in. The next day two. The next day five. Within a few weeks the cremation urns were selling 10 times a day around $10 profit a pop. This was big money to me.

I used all the profits to buy more inventory. All the cash we received for turning our house into a ghost town we used to launch another product on Amazon. 

Our Amazon store began to grow. I launched another product. And another.

In the meantime, I decided to cash out big on my vape store. Maybe it'd pay off our house!

I sold it for $35 on eBay. 😩

I built another ecommerce store on Shopify and built up an organic following of 2,000 people. I sold it for $500. 😁

Every penny I made I put right back into launching more products. The store grew like a bamboo tree on steroids. I began to learn how eBay works and within a few months we had a new stream of money coming in from eBay.

In my overconfidence I skipped one small step to save me $250—getting a product inspection on a refill order.

That shortcut cost me over $20,000.

I got back up and kept going. Within months of learning, trying, failing, and re-learning, my single dime had burst through the $100,000 goal.

When my monthly income doubled what Apple paid me, I fired my boss.

I printed a piece of paper that showed the remaining $182,000 we owed on our mortgage and taped it to our fridge door. Every time I had more cash than needed for new inventory, I threw it at our mortgage and then wrote down on the paper what we paid and what we still owed on our house. And then the day came: I paid the final chunk. Our house was paid off in cash! We celebrated as a family enjoying an expensive dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in Austin. 

One evening, after a getaway with my wife at an AirBnB, I noticed the owner was subleasing his condo as a short term rental to pay his monthly lease. Brilliant. I took a chunk of our growing cash pool and began renting condos, only to turn around and sublease them out on AirBnB. At one point we had seven condos going at the same time. In our first year we did $90,000 net profit from short term rentals alone.

My wife sensed my new drive and our marriage began to flourish. We laughed more and argued less. We took petty things less personally and our sex life became more frequent and creative. We started eating healthier, working out more frequently, and had more energy.

It wasn't the money. It was the purpose, the joy, the feeling of building a dream together.

Perhaps the biggest drive was the sense of gratitude. I felt so much grace in my life, I was overwhelmed, and people sensed that and wanted it too. People who previously thought I was crazy started to ask me how I was doing it.

So I helped them. I showed them how to do what I did. Then their friends asked and I taught them too.

The number of requests grew so I started to charge for coaching. The number kept growing until my passive income was not so passive anymore. From morning 'til night I was running my online stores and teaching people how to do it. 

So one night my son and I locked ourselves inside Dominican Joe's Coffee shop (now Bennu Coffee) in Austin, TX and refused to go home until we had a full-fledged plan for teaching people how to sell on Amazon. The teaching had to accomplish three goals:

1. It had to be extremely thorough.

2. It had to be step-by-step.

3. It had to be holistic.

Lots of people get excited about making tons of money but don't have a healthy understanding of how to run a business and handle obstacles they will inevitably encounter.

We didn't want to pawn off some outdated course. We wanted to help people succeed. 

That night, pouring over our scrappy notes in the coffee shop, we realized what we were meant to do: build people.

A flame in my heart burned to teach entrepreneurs around the world how to build a new life that gave them freedom and margin to do the things they love with the people they love.

As we drafted our first outline for the training, I remember a deep sense of joy and almost trepidation, pondering that a single dime had turned into multi-millions. 

That night at the coffee shop, Just One Dime was born.

Within our first year some of our students broke $100,000 a month. One year later, we celebrated our first student who became a millionaire. Today, we have trained many more millionaires, and many other students in over 100 countries are doing $5,000, $50,000 or $500,000 a month.

And then Amazon started to notice. They flew me to their headquarters to consult with me on improving their third party platform. A business partner of Kevin Harrington from the Shark Tank TV series asked me to run his Amazon and ecommerce division. One of our fashion brands was invited to walk the fashion runway in New York City. I began to get invited to speak at world class conferences all around the globe. A world renowned car brand asked us to be the exclusive distributor of their car accessories on Amazon. We now run a full time sourcing team in China and also partner with experts who know how to get your Amazon products into big box stores like Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Home Depot. We were humbled when two different countries asked us to train their top businesses.

If I could start with a single dime, so could you.