Why I Left My $4,500 Apartment to Move Back Home (At 27)

0:00In three days, I turned 27 years old. On paper, I should be at the peak of my life. Last year, I was running a creator agency doing close to six figures a month. I lived in a luxury high-rise, the best one in downtown Tampa. I had good social status. I had some money. I kind of had the dream life on paper. But last month, I packed it all into a storage unit, refused to renew my lease, and moved in with my mom. Why? Because I realized I was climbing the wrong mountain. I don't want a six-figure a month lifestyle. I want a billion-dollar business. And to build that, I had to

0:29burn everything else down. To understand why I got here, you have to understand that I've never been good with normal. It started way back in the day playing video games. I could only enjoy playing video games to compete and be the very best. I played junior college basketball. I broke my back and I went back to gaming and became a pro. I became a professional Fortnite player in 2018, competing in my first professional event, WSOE3, in Roondo Beach, California. I ended up tying last for my first pro event, which is okay by me because I got to be a pro. But once I was done being a pro, then it was, okay,

1:00well, I got to finish college and I guess get a job. And that's when reality hit because I didn't have a job that would actually transition to the corporate world so well at all. I had a sales job after graduating, but that didn't make me happy. I didn't love it, and it wasn't even making me that much money. So, I thought back to my friends that made a career off of Fortnite, and a lot of them actually went to become streamers or content creators more than they did gaming. So, in 2022, when I graduated college, I ended up spending that entire year posting three times a

1:26day on TikTok and got about 10,000 followers, which wasn't a lot, but in early 2023, I signed my first UGC deal, which is basically me as a creator making ads for a company. And the company pays me $750 per video that I would make. That company was called Whoop, and Whoop ended up paying me $3,750 for five videos a month for 6 months straight. And then I signed deals with Cane Footwear, Credawear, and a bunch of other athletic brands. These deals pushed me to about $10,000 a month. And then I ended up doing the creator rewards program on TikTok and that pushed me from 15 to $18,000 per month

1:57as a creator. At this time, I was growing my following. I was dating an influencer and I felt like things were good. I was making good money. I was able to leave my job and do social media full-time. But what you don't know in the moment is that Tik Tok and these brands are the ones paying you. Meaning they have the leverage. At any time that well can dry up. And Tik Tok ended up kind of getting away with their creator rewards program and drastically nerfed how much money you could make from making videos on Tik Tok. So, I started

2:22making less money, which added stress. And then my ex at the time and I, we ended up breaking up. And then I was hated on social media, which made me not want to post at all on social media. So, that forward motion is not always a straight line. Often times, it's really up and down. I went from the good guy creating dating or relationship content to getting hate every time I open TikTok. And honestly, like it just wasn't worth it for me anymore because 10 20k a month is not even that much money. It essentially ruined content for me, but not before I achieved my goal of

2:51having 100,000 followers on TikTok. So after I did that, I pivoted and I ended up managing creators for companies instead of just being the creator myself. And my income tripled or quadrupled. I was able to do 50 to 60k profit running my creator agency, working with founded apps, and managing UGC creators for them. And after having a pretty good amount of success with all of these creators and brands that we were working with, we actually ran out of good creators. So I launched my own content circle, which is my creator community that helps creators get better at content and actually land brand deals. Content Circle now has 350 plus

3:24creators. It's a paid community and all of these creators are relatively damn good at content. The highest gross revenue month that we had in Content Circle was around $76,000 per month, which I know is not a ton in the grand scheme of things, but in theory, living in downtown Tampa, you're doing pretty well. So, I got a new apartment. I upgraded to a $4,600 a month, two bed,

3:46two bath at the Heron in downtown Tampa. I was spending a lot of money, easily 10 to 15K a month, and not really knowing where that money was going. I was in good shape. My girlfriend and I were going steady for like a year. But deep down, I didn't feel like I was winning. I felt like I was losing because I was building something that ultimately I didn't want to be in long term because every new creator that I would sell came with more responsibility and pressure to deliver for them. And all of these people stack. It's not like, oh, it's just a little bit more pressure. If

4:12you're dealing with a 100 people, it's a lot of pressure, but 300, it's a lot more. And ultimately, I am responsible for how well they do because they paid into content circle. Again, who pays you is who has leverage over you. So, I ran into the same problem as before where yes, this is money coming in, but I wasn't in control, which basically made it feel like a very high-paying job, but not a scalable business. Meanwhile, because I had been working with so many different founders, giving them creators, and giving them advice on how to use content to grow, I ended up making a lot of friends, people like

4:41Blake Anderson. Blake is the founder of Cali. Cali has done four to five million a month in the app store. I had other friends from different companies doing six figures a month profit, seven figures a month profit. And it was driving me nuts that those guys, no one knew about them. They didn't have to post on social media and they were just absolutely crushing. And I realized that I was playing a game with a capped upside and they were playing for billions of dollars. So in early 2025, Blake actually invited me to be co-founder of an app called Neuro. And so they gave me 10% equity in exchange

5:12for me managing creators and influencers for the app. And this is where I was able to learn everything about growing an app and running a team and what that actually looks like instead of just running a creator agency. They're completely different. And so a few months later, I ended up leaving Neuro and I launched my first app with my co-founder Andrew. That app was called Covenant. And it was a Bible app to help Christians actually find very specific answers in the Bible. And I poured a lot of money into paying creators and making

5:36it work. And it just didn't really work. And the big reason why Covenant didn't succeed is because we looked at our competition as apps that were doing thousands and thousands of downloads a day. Absolutely crushing. But those apps grew with influencers, which was not really my strongest skill set at the time. Nor did I personally have the funds to pay $5,000 for a video with an app that I wasn't sure if it was going to work yet. So, I was trying to do UGC for Christian content. And that content

6:03ended up getting throttled by Tik Tok. And this really bothered me. And after a few months, it became clear that Covenant was not going to grow unless we put in a ton of cash behind it. And ultimately, it wasn't really my favorite project. And I love Andrew, the co-founder, but we were 50/50. And ultimately, I didn't have design decisions or ultimate decision-making power. And yay, I just wanted that. So, I ended up having Andrew buy me out of the company. And then I started working on my third app immediately, which was Rekch. So, in September of 2025, I got CJ Weber as my co-founder to begin

6:33building Rtech with the singular goal of helping new creators make better content so that they can make a living from social media. That is Rekch's core guiding principle is that we want creators to be able to do social media for a living. And we believe there's only going to be more opportunity for them to do that. And there's going to be a larger and larger influx of people looking to leave their corporate jobs to end up doing content as a career. By 2030, the content job market is expected to double. We started with just two UGC

7:01creators for Rtech. First one was Josh. Josh was from Content Circle, which is my creator community, and Josh was on a $2 flat CPM, and his fourth video ever went viral, and it took off. RTK got a 1,000 downloads basically its first week, and I knew that there was some potential here. And RTK was a very simple app at the start. It was a core

7:19feature where you can upload your video. RTK would analyze it. We've trained Rtech on both myself and CJ Weber's entire viral video categories. We've also personally gone in and added rules and all these different things to make sure that the app functioned as a really good content coach that people have paid CJ and I a lot of money for. And so with these influx of users, all of a sudden we learned how many things we have to change or improve with the app, which ended up costing more money. But for the first time, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Okay, wow, we have a

7:47thousand customers right now. Yes, they've paid me, but they don't own anything over me. Like, I have peace of mind. I I if I didn't want to, I didn't have to talk to any of these people at all. Now, obviously, you do want to do customer research and talk to as many people as you can, but for the first time ever, I was like, I can totally see how this is the business model that's going to work for me. So, we ended up adding more UGC creators. We went out and hired a full-time developer who's now our CTO. We've made new iterations of the app and 20 plus new updates to

8:17Apple. By the way, the name Rtech comes from Steve Jobs saying that you should build at the intersection of both art and technology. Rtech, art and technology. Get it? Uh, it was one of Steve's quotes that's like resonated with me very heavily. And I I love Apple. I think it's just the best company of all time. So, um, you know, I look up to that and I wanted to kind of pay tribute to it. And I think that's what art and technology is is is social media. Like you post, you create art through technology. There's no better name, art techch. But because I was still in Tampa, I ended up bleeding

8:48cash. I was again spending really high on my personal expenses every month. I no longer was trying to grow the content community. So my income came down a lot every month. And I was just like, why am I burning cash to live here if I'm not happy? And you know, the whole reason I was here was because of this essential high-paying job that I had. That's not me. So I had a choice. So option A was sign the lease, keep pretending I'm rich even though I just like cut my income by a ton so that I could focus on the app and my expenses went up. I could keep

9:16growing this community that ultimately is just adding more stress and responsibility to my life when I don't want to do that and I don't want that to be the end of my career. Or B, I could kill my ego, move back in with my mom, cut expenses a ton, have meals made for me occasionally, put everything in a storage unit, have a lot more peace of mind, be able to travel and live in Airbnbs with my co-founder, and ultimately just get super lean with what I'm spending on the decisions I'm making, and go allin on actually building a business. Like, how often do you actually go allin? I'm 26. I'm about

9:47to be 27. Things aren't are not funny anymore. like making a little bit of money is cool, but you know, do I want to be 35 with kids building this business? Not really. And so all these kind of factors came into play and I ultimately made the decision to choose option B. Kill my ego. Doesn't matter what people think of me or any of this stuff. I'm building a product that I believe in and I believe it'll have way higher returns than staying in Tampa, which means I'm making a long-term bet and I'm willing to live with that. Now,

10:15we're about three and a half months in. We're about to hit 20,000 users. About 10,000 of those are monthly active users. We're at about 10K MR, but we also have about 45Kish revenue now. And again, I was making way more doing the community in agency, but I know that this product makes me feel good about life, that I'm building it for other people, that I'm building it for creators, that I have less responsibility and stress, and ultimately it gets me closer to my end goal for my personal life, which is for me having a family, having more peace of mind, being a better person, and being

10:51able to do things selfishly that I want to do, whether that's take my girlfriend or wife on trips or go fly fishing or again just raise my kids. So, I'm living out of a suitcase, out of a storage unit, I should say. I don't have a penthouse. I don't live in some high-rise anymore with a lot of space and a huge balcony. But for the first

11:08time in years, I do have more freedom. And I think there's this misconception that people think to make a billion dollars, you have to add more to your life, more stress, more responsibility, all of those things. I don't believe that to be the case. I believe it's actually addition by subtraction. How much can you remove to only focus on the one thing you need to focus on? In our current digital era, everything is taking your attention away. All of society is built for other people to monetize on your attention. It's not about what you're willing to add. It's about what you're willing to subtract. I subtracted my ego. I subtracted our

11:39overhead costs. And now it's time to build. And with me turning 27 in 3 days, I am ready to build at levels I've never seen before. And if you want to get a look at our tech, there's a 7-day free trial right now. It's going to be a very pivotal app for creators. Our roadmap

11:54for 2026 is insane.