Tactical shovels, ebooks, then an automation agency.
I was 18, selling tactical shovels on an ecomm store. Meta had classified the niche as "risky" so I couldn't run a single ad. The only path forward was organic. That constraint turned out to be the gift — it forced me to learn distribution before I had any money to throw at it.
At 19 I switched to selling ebooks for women. Wrote text captions, dropped them on top of trendy TikTok songs, watched sales come in. First real marketing wins. But I had no systems behind it. Couldn't scale past my own hands.
In 2020 I tried the marketing agency playbook — emailed video audits to local businesses after watching Iman Gadzhi, tried selling them websites. My close rate was awful. But it was the most I'd made from a business at that point (the only two before it were shovels and ebooks), which told me the model was real even if I was still bad at running it. I quit it anyway and went back to studies + day jobs in 2021 to bank real capital in Melbourne.
"Stop chasing the next idea. Wait until you have ammo, then go in with systems first."
In 2022 I went in. Influencer marketing agency this time. The difference: I used the day-job capital to build systems first, hire offshore teams, and only then went looking for clients. Signing the first client was the breakthrough because the delivery system was already running.
Then the compounding kicked in. 2024: launched 1ABEL, a premium minimalist clothing brand. 2025: shipped ShadowPhone.io and Seology.ai as live software projects built with Claude.
2026 is AI influencers at scale. Standalone synthetic creators, UGC pipelines, and generated content are part of the active operating system now taught through IImagined.ai.
That's why I launched iimagined.ai. Not theory. Not a deck I lectured into a microphone four years ago and forgot. It's the operating manual for exactly what I actually use and run myself — the Instagram strategies I deploy on my own brands this week, the Claude API patterns that shipped Seology last quarter, the AI-influencer playbooks the studio runs right now.