I Failed 7 Businesses Before Building ColdIQ to $7M ARR

I turned 31 this year. ColdIQ made $557,000 last month. But before any of that happened, I failed seven times in a row.

These were not small failures. Full commitments that went nowhere. Months of work with nothing to show for it. The kind of failures that make you question whether you should just go get a normal job.

Looking back, every one of those failures taught me a skill I now use every day to run ColdIQ. None of it was wasted. It all compounded.

Here is the full story.

1. The Facebook Ads Agency (2019)

I was 24 and convinced that running a Facebook ads agency was the fastest path to freedom. I watched every YouTube video, took every course, and launched the thing.

Three months later, I shut it down.

The problem was not that I could not do the work. I could. I just hated it. Running ads for other people's businesses felt like a job with extra steps. I was trading time for money with none of the upside.

I did not walk away empty-handed. Those three months forced me to learn paid acquisition from scratch. How to write ad copy. How to target audiences. How to think about customer acquisition cost. That knowledge shows up in everything we do at ColdIQ today. We run paid campaigns across LinkedIn, Meta, and Google. The foundation for all of that was laid in a failed agency when I was 24.

The lesson: paid acquisition fundamentals never expire.

2. The Clothing Brand (2020)

After the agency failed, I pivoted to something completely different. I wanted to build a clothing brand. I spent six months designing products, setting up a store, figuring out supply chains.

Total sales: zero.

Not one. Not even a pity purchase from a friend. Six months of work and literally nothing to show for it financially.

What I did walk away with was a deep understanding of branding. How to position a product. How to think about visual identity. How to tell a story that makes people care.

ColdIQ's brand did not happen by accident. The way we present ourselves, the consistency across LinkedIn and our website, the visual identity that people recognize. That all traces back to a clothing brand that never sold a single item.

The lesson: branding skills transfer to every business you will ever build.

3. The Online Lottery Comparison Site (2020)

This was the first venture that generated real revenue. I built an online lottery comparison site focused on sports betting in Belgium. The model was simple: rank the best options, drive traffic through SEO, and collect affiliate commissions.

It worked. I was generating 8,000 euros per month in passive income. For a 25-year-old, that felt like I had figured it out.

Then Belgium changed its gambling regulations. Overnight, my revenue went from 8,000 to zero. Not a gradual decline. A cliff.

That experience was brutal, but it taught me the single most important revenue lesson I carry today: affiliate monetization works. The model itself was sound. The mistake was building it on a single regulatory framework in a single country.

At ColdIQ, 20 to 40 percent of our revenue comes from tool partnerships with companies like Clay, Instantly, Expandi, and Prospeo. The affiliate model that failed in gambling became a core revenue stream in B2B SaaS. Same principle, different industry, better execution.

The lesson: a revenue model that fails in one market can thrive in another.

4. The Coding Bootcamp Project (2021)

I enrolled in a coding bootcamp and started building websites for clients. The work was decent. The pay was fine. I lasted three months before realizing I did not want to do client work building other people's websites.

But those three months gave me something invaluable: the ability to build things myself.

Today at ColdIQ, we build free mini-tools that drive SEO traffic and capture leads. We build internal automation workflows. We prototype ideas fast instead of waiting for a developer to become available.

That coding bootcamp was not a failed business. It was a three-month crash course in technical literacy that pays dividends every single week.

The lesson: knowing how to build gives you an edge in every future venture.

5. The Crypto Marketing Agency (2022)

Crypto was booming. Everyone needed marketing. I started a crypto marketing agency and it was making money.

Then the market crashed. Clients vanished. Budgets evaporated. The whole thing collapsed.

What survived the crash was everything I learned about client delivery. How to onboard. How to set expectations. How to manage multiple accounts without dropping balls. How to communicate with clients when things go sideways.

ColdIQ manages 30+ active clients at any given time. The delivery systems, the SOPs, the client communication cadence. All of that was stress-tested in a crypto agency during a market meltdown. When your clients are losing money and panicking, you learn client management fast.

The lesson: client delivery skills built under pressure hold up in any market condition.

6. The AI SaaS Product (2022)

I built an AI SaaS product. I spent months on the code, the design, the features. I launched it and waited for users.

Nobody came.

The product was technically fine. The problem was that I built what I thought was cool instead of what people needed. Classic builder mistake. No market validation. No conversations with potential users. Just assumptions dressed up as a business plan.

That failure rewired how I think about products entirely. At ColdIQ, we do not build anything unless a client or prospect has asked for it. Our mini-tools exist because people told us they needed them. Our service packages evolved based on what clients kept requesting.

That is when I learned to listen first and build second, and to walk away from any idea that did not come from a real conversation with a real user.

The lesson: build what people ask for, not what you think they need.

7. The SEO Affiliate Site for Cold Email Tools (2023)

After six failures, I started a simple SEO site reviewing cold email tools. The plan was to rank for tool-related keywords, write comparison articles, and earn affiliate commissions. Same model as the lottery site, just in a different industry.

The site started getting traffic. People were reading the reviews. And then something happened that changed everything.

A reader sent me a message: "Can you do this as a service?"

I said no at first. I had tried agencies twice before and did not want to go back. But the requests kept coming. People did not just want to read about cold email tools. They wanted someone to set up the tools, write the emails, build the lists, and run the campaigns.

I kept saying no until I needed the money. Then I said yes to one person. That one yes became ColdIQ.

The SEO site did not fail. It became the business. But it only became the business because of everything I had learned from the six failures before it.

The first ColdIQ campaigns ran on a stack I had built from all those failed ventures. Cold email, targeted lists, and verified contact data. If you want to run the same kind of outreach that turned my SEO site into a $7M ARR agency, you need real emails for real decision-makers.

You can find verified email addresses for your target accounts, for free:

Email Finder Tool

The lesson: sometimes the business finds you, but only if you have built the skills to recognize it.

8. How 7 Failures Compound Into 1 Success

When I look at ColdIQ today, I can trace every major capability back to a failure.

→ Paid acquisition knowledge from the Facebook ads agency

→ Brand thinking from the clothing brand

→ Affiliate revenue model from the lottery site

→ Technical ability from the coding bootcamp

→ Client delivery systems from the crypto agency

→ Product discipline from the AI SaaS

→ The actual business from the SEO site

None of these skills were useful in isolation. A failed clothing brand does not look like a stepping stone when you are in the middle of it. It looks like a waste of six months.

The compounding only becomes visible in hindsight. Every skill stacks on top of the previous ones. And when the right opportunity shows up, you have the full toolkit to execute on it.

If I had succeeded with the Facebook ads agency in 2019, ColdIQ would not exist. I would be running a mediocre ads agency instead of a $7M ARR outbound company. The failure was the prerequisite.

If you want to map out your own GTM strategy based on the skills you already have, a structured report can help you see what is missing and what to build next.

You can generate a full B2B SaaS GTM strategy for your business, for free:

GTM Reports Tool

9. What I Would Tell Anyone Stuck in the Failure Phase

If you are reading this and you are on your second or third or fifth failed business, here is what I want you to know.

You are not falling behind. You are building a skill stack that compounds in ways you cannot see yet. Every failed venture teaches you something that your future self will need.

The people who succeed in business are rarely the ones who got it right on the first try. They are the ones who failed enough times to accumulate the skills, the pattern recognition, and the scar tissue that make success possible.

The only thing that matters at that stage is learning speed. Stop trying to avoid failure and start trying to fail faster, because the compounding only works when you stack lessons quickly enough that the next attempt starts from a higher baseline.

I failed seven businesses in a row across four years. Then the eighth one hit $7M ARR. The seven failures were not the price of admission. They were the education.

10. Conclusion

Building ColdIQ to $7M ARR was not a straight line. It was seven wrong turns that each pointed me closer to the right direction.

The Facebook ads agency, the clothing brand, the lottery site, the coding bootcamp, the crypto agency, the AI SaaS, and the SEO site. Each one looked like a dead end at the time. In reality, each one was building a skill I would need later.

If there is one takeaway from this story, it is that entrepreneurial failure is not subtraction. It is addition. Every venture you attempt adds to your capability, even when it subtracts from your bank account.

I would not change a single failure.

---