#CreatorStories showcases the honest personal experiences of digital creators who monetize their knowledge of a skill and sell it on Selar. We share these stories every week to inspire you to create and sell a product out of your wealth of knowledge and be a part of the digital creator economy.

This week, we turn the lights on Fortune Nnamdi, popularly known to be aggressive, blunt, and unfriendly with his sales, marketing, and masculinity messages.

After failing consistently with selling digital products, Fortune finally found a fortune 😉 that has earned him seven figures monthly in selling digital products.

Can we meet Fortune Nnamdi?

I am many things anyway and whichever part of me you see, is the part of me you see, (laughs) but one thing that cuts across everything that I am is that just like you said, I’m a very blunt person. Everything I do revolves around three things. I talk about money, when I say money, I mean sales, marketing, and business.  Although a whole lot of people know me for sales. But I would prefer to say that I talk about money. That’s one. Two I talk about masculinity. So I talk about money, I talk about masculinity. Number three, I share bitter truths about life. What other people are scared of sharing is what I choose to share. I’m a very controversial human being and to know more about me anyway, my social media handles are there, you can go search me out and a whole lot of things about me. Anything you are going to see on social media about me revolves around money, masculinity, and the bitter truths about life. Although most people prefer to know me as a salesperson or a sales strategist. Whichever one you know, I’m just that guy that does many things anyway. I can’t limit myself to one thing (laughs).

Tell us about your upbringing, what you studied in school, and how growing up was like for you. 

(Laughs) Okay, I like talking about my childhood. I like talking about my upbringing. But then I’ve not always been like this. And funny enough, many years ago, the hardest thing for me to tell a person around me was no. I was a people pleaser. I wanted to please everyone around me. You tell me to do something, I do it because I don’t want to tell you no. But then I discovered that, well, there’s no point because I don’t want to start doing things I’m going to regret on my deathbed. I’ve always been this rebel. I don’t like following rules. I like breaking them personally and it got me into a whole lot of trouble. In University, it got me into trouble. In secondary school, I was expelled four times in two months.

Are you serious? 

(Laughs) Yes.

Every Wednesday between 11:35 and 12:10 pm, my secondary school principal would always come to the assembly ground to tell us that Jesus Christ loves everybody. Your sin is never too big for God not to forgive. And then many months after I graduated from secondary school, I gave my life to Christ. I came back to evangelize to the students and that same man told me that I can’t give my life to Christ because of what I did in secondary school. So I’ve always been this stubborn person. I think you can’t be stubborn without having a difficult mind. But when I began to go through life, I discovered it was a disadvantage for me to always be pleasing people. 

What was your career journey like before becoming a digital creator and sales and marketing enthusiast?

I am a University of Benin student. Most people don’t know this. And I’m in my fourth year studying quantity surveying, which is not really what I’m doing now anyway (laughs). Quantity Surveying is about buildings, those guys who look at a hotel and then tell you the amount you’d spend to erect it in another place. They are into the estimation of properties, carrying out contracts, and acting as consultants to people who want to erect quality buildings. So that’s what the course is about. But in real life, I’m this sales guy. I rolled out a challenge. Thank God this interview is by Selar and on Selar, I rolled out the challenge – the One million Naira Challenge. I simply wrote it out from a place of pain because I struggled to sell online.

Tell us about your journey to selling online since you struggled with it a lot.

I joined Facebook in February 2013, I made my first money online, I think in 2020. I became intentional online on 16 November 2016. And that was when I began to revamp my account. If you check my Twitter, it was created in 2016. My Instagram was created in 2016. But my Facebook was created in 2013. I tried a lot of things. Many people think I started in clarity. No, I started as a very confused human being. And I began the online space as a leadership coach. People are not aware of that. In 2016, I held a one-week leadership conference on WhatsApp. It was terrible but we give God all the glory(Laughs). I did that conference with a Gionee 2G device phone and it was so stressful to the point that whenever I sent a message to the WhatsApp group, people received it minutes after I sent it. And then I drifted into mind therapy. I was helping people come out of depression. When I was doing it, I helped several persons come out of suicide cases. They were on the verge of taking their own lives and after much talking, I was able to bring them back. There was this particular guy that boarded a vehicle, got to Onitsha head bridge, and was on the verge of jumping down. His friend called me and said, this person wants to commit suicide. I had to reach out to the person immediately and for some weird reason, the person did not jump and is doing well. This person now has clarity and has learned to monetize what he’s doing. So I moved from leadership to mind therapy and that was the first time I hosted a course for eight months at 35k and no one paid me. Not one human being paid me, not one. I rolled it out everywhere, social media, Facebook. And for eight months nobody paid me. 

How did you deal with the failure?

I’m the guy that has failed a lot. I love failing. And I believe that I have time. I created eight Facebook groups with about 16 products for affiliates that failed. I had lots of affiliates on WhatsApp with over 1000 views but it still crashed. I had a good offer but nobody was paying for it. I’m a very young guy, I have time. If I fail for the next seven years of my life, I’m still early. And I believe that you should have this mentality of failing and failing fast because there’s still time. I have time to write my mistakes, I have time to learn what is correct, I have time to change some of my belief systems and all that. Also, when I attended John C. Maxwell’s certification program, there was something we were taught by Owen Fernandes. He said that failure is an event, failure is not you. He made us see reasons why we should never beat ourselves too much because we failed at doing a thing. According to him, every successful man was once a failure. I mean, every successful man failed several times. And as a matter of fact, failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is a part of success. Failure is a subset of success. And success is failure turned inside out. For a man to be successful, he must make mistakes. The man must fail. You don’t learn to run when you’ve not learned how to walk. And most times, even when you learn how to walk, you fall several times.

True. So how did you make your first money online?

I drifted from leadership to mind therapy and then I moved into public speaking. I did public speaking in 2020. 2020 was the first time I held a three-month webinar. It was a three-month public speaking training on WhatsApp. I taught every day for three months except for a few days when I didn’t teach. That was the first time I became very consistent. I did a free class on public speaking. Over 90 people registered and I taught them for three months but I didn’t know how to monetize the class. I taught them for three months and began to ask myself “You are booked, teaching for three months and you’re not making money from it?” Some of the times I had to teach, some people shared their hotspots with me. So it was not as if I had excess data to teach with. I started asking myself how I could monetize the training. Because I believe that if we think long enough, we are going to come up with solutions. The reason why people are poor is that they don’t think. They are lazy. They procrastinate a lot and they are undisciplined. Poverty stems from all that. While thinking about a way to monetize the training, I remembered that Nigerians are obsessed with certificates. So I used that and told my students to pay 1500 to get a certificate for the training. To my greatest surprise, eight people paid that night. I was surprised because eight human beings paying me 1500 then was a lot to me. It was surreal because that was the first money I got from selling something online.

How did you feel about such a feat? 

Eight people paid me 1500 and I was happy. You needed to see the excitement on my face. The next day I gave them one week to pay and more people started paying me money. I was like, whoa, this thing works(lol). The next thing, someone volunteered to transcribe because I taught them using text and voice notes. I compiled it into a book. My three months of teaching were compiled into a book. The book is titled “How to speak to sell yourself.” I think that was my first book online that I did not write. I just transcribed my WhatsApp training and people started paying for it.

Nice. So what’s your idea about sales and marketing?

In my pinned tweet on Twitter, I said, everything you are doing for free, someone else is getting paid for it. I see it as an act of service to sell. For every product you don’t sell, somebody is suffering because you are not selling that product. Now, selling is basically, I see a problem. I have a solution to the problem, and I am recommending the solution to you because I’m interested in your well-being. Many years ago, I couldn’t charge 50K for one on one. But when I began to understand that selling is more of a mutual relationship, I began to charge more.

Now, when it comes to sales and marketing, I explain it to people as the BMS formula. BMS stands for Branding, Marketing, and Sales. I’m going to explain it using this bottle of Predator. For you to be a brand, a brand is a promise and marketing is how you advertise that promise. Selling is fulfilling the promise you have advertised. This is the concept. You cannot advertise a product that does not exist. And it is almost impossible to sell a product that has not been advertised. This is why many top companies keep spending a whole lot on advertising. Everybody’s running ads today. When you open your Facebook, lots of things are popping into your face. That’s marketing. So when it comes to the issue of selling, selling is fulfilling a promise. That promise can be a solution that is aimed to solve a problem. So the first thing I tell people is before you sell any product, what problem are you solving? That’s one. Next, the problem you are solving, is it something that people can pay money immediately for, or is it something that they have an alternative to? Because when people have alternatives to your solution, they have no reason to pay you because the objections are high. What makes people pay you is when there’s no alternative to your solution or when the alternatives are very few. So all that happens is that value is relative. The rarer a product is, the more value it has attached to it. This is why gold is valuable. Many years ago, I could not charge 50K for one on one. Now the least I do is one million Naira. Because what I now understand is that this is me coming to help you become better, understanding business and then selling from that angle.

You once hosted a class about WhatsApp marketing, right?

Yeah.

So how did you start with social media marketing?

Okay, first of all, I struggled to sell on WhatsApp and over time I was able to learn a whole lot of things about WhatsApp marketing and I didn’t want to create a product that I don’t have results from. So I only rolled out that video when I was able to do over 2000 daily WhatsApp views. When I did my first eight million Naira selling through my WhatsApp status, I discovered that WhatsApp was working and lots of people were struggling to sell so I was like, okay, why not? Why not just create a video course and roll it out for people to learn from? This thought gave rise to the video course I created around WhatsApp marketing. It’s a video course anyway where people get to pay $100 to gain access to it. When it’s updated, they have it. 

Tell us about the WhatsApp marketing video.

The WhatsApp marketing video is just a course that can teach anybody how WhatsApp works. In the course you’re going to learn everything about WhatsApp WhatsApp marketing, and what you will watch out for before you run an ad on a WhatsApp TV. How I was able to charge 21,000 Naira for people to advertise on my WhatsApp status, How I got big guys like Ronald Nzimora and Emeka Nobis to advertise on my WhatsApp status too, and all that. I was just able to compile my experiences, the mistakes I made, and how I feel people can maneuver stuff like this to do much more. I came up with a six-step formula for selling on WhatsApp. And I think that’s the major thing in the WhatsApp marketing starter kit. There are two major courses there; Six-Step formula for Selling on WhatsApp and Offer Creation – How to Create Irresistible Offers that people cannot say no to. 

Sounds interesting. Can you do a recap on the six-step formula?

Yes. The first step is lead generation. If you are not generating new leads every day, you are losing out on a whole lot of money. I generate leads every single day. There’s no day I don’t generate leads. There was a time I did a free webinar on WhatsApp. I think that’s almost two years now. I was able to generate 1504 leads in two days, in less than three days. So between two and three days without spending ten Naira on ads, purely organic. The second step is Nurturing. Nurturing is educating your audience without the intention of selling. It’s just my audience coming to know me, trying to understand me so they know who I am and fall in love with my brand, and then get to trust me. The third step is Priming. Priming is educating them with the intention of selling. Number four is selling. And this is where people get it wrong. People jump to number four when they have not done number one. Everybody wants to sell. Nobody wants to generate leads, nobody wants to nurture, and nobody wants to prime. And I tell people that the reason why your offer is not selling is that you just wake up one morning and you drop your flyer on your WhatsApp status. For crying out loud, why should I pay you? The major reason why people don’t pay is that they are confused.

One of the biggest sales strategies you will ever see in life is educating your clients, making them gain clarity, and showing empathy. People are not buying your courses because they are still confused. The moment you clear their doubts by educating them, they can go the extra mile to borrow money to pay for your course. The next one I talked about was Upselling. You are going to make more money from Upselling than you will make from selling if done properly. And even Selar has a function they call order bump and cross-selling where you order for this particular course and then they recommend another course to you. So for instance, persons who purchased my Twitter growth monetization course through Selar were upsold with my One Million Naira challenge course. So that’s you killing two birds with one stone. When it comes to selling, there are three things. We have Upselling, we have cross-selling and then we have down selling. Now, the concept of upselling is after buying a product, I am pitching a more expensive product to you. Down selling means after buying an expensive product, I am pitching a less expensive product to you. For instance, what’s the point of buying an iPhone for 850k and not buying a phone pouch for less? Then cross-selling is recommending another product that is related to or around the same price as a particular product.

So my Twitter growth and monetization course is $20. Where I told people how I grew my Twitter from 2500 followers to over 18,000 that it is now without running an ad. The one million naira challenge course is $20. So if you check, they are both the same amount of money. The concept of cross-selling is that I am pitching a related product revolving around the same price to you.  Now if anybody’s going to make lots of money in this period online, you will need to pay attention to community building. That’s where the money is. You need to have a tribe of firm believers in your brand. And most people who are thriving today own one community or the other. A group of loyalists and followers. The WhatsApp Marketing Starter kit was where I broke down these six formulas.

Wow! Moving forward, we think that part of your strategy is being blunt and aggressive. Is that a sales strategy or it’s part of who you are?

It’s part of who I am. And then I got to add it to my sales strategy. Now, this is what I tell people, your personality has a lot of influence on whatever you do online.  And I was never like this. As I said, I grew into becoming whoever I am. I grew into learning to tell people no, I grew into learning to become blunt. I always tell people that a poor man cannot be blunt. And I’m going to give you reasons why. Poverty comes with a free subscription plan called Humility. Every poor man is humble by default. When you see a poor and proud man, then there is a problem. My dad used to say one of the reasons why you should never be poor is that a poor man’s greeting is mistaken for begging. So I became very blunt when I began to see the need to not please people and when I began to make little money online. 

How did you add being blunt and aggressive to your sales strategy?

One thing that helped me was defining my target audience. You don’t sell to people the way you want to sell to them. You sell to them the way they want to be sold. This is why I tell people to always carry out market research and surveys. I’m somebody that likes to know why something is working and why it’s not working. For every course I sell, I have a sales target. So whenever any of my courses do not sell, I ask why. I always check my analytics to know people who are interested in what I have to offer. I also discovered that the majority of them are guys and they stay in Lagos. So I began to study how Lagosians live their life. And I discovered that an average Lagosian is always in a hurry, is always aggressive, and that’s the best way to sell to them. As I said, you don’t decide how to sell to your clients, they tell you how you should sell to them.

What’s one thing you’ve learned about sales from your experience?

You cannot trick people into buying your product. The highest you can do is to trick them once.

What’s one personality trait about you that people find weird?

I don’t get to do more than three major things a day. I list out everything I need to do and I focus on the top three only. Also, I am extremely time conscious. If I tell a person, let’s meet at 03:00 p.m, and the person meets me at 3:15 pm, I might never meet with that person again. I consider you wasting my time as the biggest insult I’m ever going to get from a person.

Why?

Because I’ve come to understand that time is life. Life is measured in time. When we say a man lived 70 years, that’s time speaking. That year can be broken into months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Seconds is the measurement of time. So life is time. When a guy wastes 1 hour of my time every week, he has succeeded in wasting 52 hours of my life, which means I gave that guy close to three days of my life to kill. So everybody that wastes your time is killing you. The person is killing a fraction of you. Time is life. Life is a game of energy.

How do you maintain focus while doing these three things?

There’s something called operant conditioning. I call it the punishment-reward system. I have a to-do list every day. And whenever I do those things, I reward myself. Whenever I don’t do them, I punish myself. I’m a gamer. I love playing games. I love to watch movies. So what I tell myself is that if I don’t do this stuff, I’m not going to play a game today or watch this movie. Now, because I want to watch the movie, I have to do what I need to do. Whenever I do what I need to do. Whenever I achieve something I’ve been wanting to achieve, I reward myself.

Right now, I think I just need to say this before you roll out your next question.

I think people need to stop overworking themselves. I tell people every time online that not sleeping is not an achievement. It’s proof that you don’t know how to manage your time. It is not about not sleeping. What makes you productive is what you are doing while you are not sleeping. I woke up one particular day and I told people on Twitter, I said to focus on the money-making activities, and delegate the rest.

What’s the average amount you make from selling digital products now?

Seven figures every month.

Okay, so what’s your sales strategy? Do you have any special jazz or mojo?

I’m just myself. My sincerity is my sales strategy. I won’t lie to you to sell to you. I tell you the truth. Also, I think one thing that helps me the most is community building. I have communities. So most times I don’t get to spend money on ads because I have communities that people are in. Now, this is one thing people get wrong. When you want to sell a product, you don’t just come up with a sales copy that is screaming buy me. No, you come up with a sales copy that addresses a serious problem in their life. Give them a solution and then recommend yours as an added benefit. What do I mean? Give people the why and the what for free, then sell the how to them. There are a lot of people that buy my course when I announce it, even when they don’t need it, because they feel “obligated” to pay me. There are people that if they roll out a course today, I am going to pay for the course because I like them, I trust them, I love their personalities and I feel like I’m going to need the course, if not today, but tomorrow.

Another thing is that I focus so much on community building. I’m a community-building guy. I love building communities. I focus so much on giving out value. As we speak I have already done lots of videos that I’m going to edit and roll out. I’ve created content, lots of content that I’m going to roll out to my community. They all revolve around giving out free values and I move people to a community where I begin to upsell to them. So I believe so much in lead generation. Why should I spend a lot of money running ads every day when I can give value to my community, move them somewhere and keep upselling to them?

Interesting. What advice would you give to digital creators in Africa and all around the world to help them boost the sales of their digital products?

Okay, my advice is very simple. If you buy every day, you should be selling every day. Otherwise, you are going to be in large debt. Two, make sure you make four times what you spend every day. I don’t know how you’re going to sell. Go and buy a sales course. Go and learn how to sell on YouTube. Go and do whatever you want to do. But make sure that if you are spending money every day, you should be making money every day. That’s the best way to live your life.

You have a one million naira challenge that is ongoing on Twitter. What is that about?

The One Million Naira Challenge is very simple. It is me teaching people how to make at least a million Naira every month, selling what they have been selling before. Now, why I said every month is because most people stumble on success, but they don’t know how to remain in success. So I’m not teaching you how to make 1 million in January and then you go broke in February. I’m teaching you how to make 1 million at least every month of the year and then scale up from there. I just teach you to sell what you have been selling but you didn’t know how to sell.

So, for people who are in the community, we teach them how to create digital products if they don’t have them. We also teach them how to generate leads and how to make sure that these people keep paying them over and over again. Now, for people who don’t have digital products that they can sell, we have products they can affiliate for. As soon as a person becomes the One Million Naira challenge student, they have every right to apply to become an affiliate for the twitter growth and monetization course. But only the best sellers in the community affiliate for the One Million Naira Challenge. So the point is, whether you have a course or not, there is something you can sell. If you have a course, we teach you how to sell it right. Also, what makes the One Million Naira Challenge very special and intriguing is the fact that we have taught lots of people how to make their first sale online. There was a 16-year-old girl we had a conversation with and as soon as we were done with the call, she made her first sale within the next 24 hours.

There was a girl who was struggling to sell her entire life, she registered for an affiliate platform, I’m not going to mention the name. And for over four months she had never made any sales. She joined the One Million Naira challenge and in four days, she was able to make her first sale. Every week we have testimonials of people who are making their first sale without running ads.

There was this guy who came to the challenge very confused. He had less than 300 WhatsApp views and at the time he joined the challenge, he could not even close a million Naira deal. But when this guy implemented what we thought, he was able to make 2.9 million Naira in two days. And this guy is just a 23-year-old boy. So the point is, whatever you are selling, so long it’s something you can sell, we teach you how to make at least a million naira from it every month.

For the person who wants to jump into the one million Naira challenge now, all you need to do is go to my Twitter, click on the link in my bio, and hit the One Millionaire Challenge. It’s just $20. If you are a guy especially and you cannot risk $20 to learn how to change your finances, then you deserve to be poor. And I’m not kidding about it. I also have a free telegram community. No matter how broke you are, you are not so broke that you can click on the button, right?

What’s next for Fortune Nnamdi?

One beautiful thing about life is that you get it figured out as you move through life. If anybody had told me that I’d do marketing, I would never have believed it because I’ve always hated to sell. If anybody had told me that I was going to talk about Masculinity, I would never have believed because I was a people pleaser. So I don’t know what I’m going to do in the next 15 years, but one thing is certain, I’m going to keep impacting life in the next 15 years. But how I’m going to do that is what I don’t know. But I’m going to impact lives, certainly, I will.

Any words for your community and new audience?

Okay, let me just quickly say this. Whoever is reading through this blog post, everything you need to succeed, everything you need to know about me is on my Twitter. All you need to do is go to my Twitter, follow the account, and turn on notifications so that whenever I tweet, you don’t miss it. But that’s not the exciting part. The exciting part is I want you to go to the link in my bio, every single link there is for you. Afterward, just live your best life. There’s no point pleasing anybody. Life is already short so why please people?

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Being a student doesn’t limit you from creating and selling digital products. Remember, one of the advantages of digital products is that once created, you can sell them forever. No daily check-ins required! So you have time to face your books and live your best life.

Do something different today. Join creators like Fortune making money from selling his personal experiences in sales and marketing.

Selar is here to help you. All you need to do is;

• Sign up on Selar.
• Set up your online store and bank details.
• Upload your product.
• Share store link with customers and start selling.

Who says life has to be hard?