MDC Update #5 Part 1: Crossroads

Ahh… it finally arrived. The long awaited MDC update #5 after hitting a massive milestone in August.

And yes, I am very much behind updating things and there are a few reasons why.

But, let’s start with the best part shall we?

In about 32 days starting from August 01 up to September 2nd, I crossed the the 50K mark and made 51K out of a million.

And here are some of major events that happened, and a few failures:

LaunchPad ($275 MRR)

Whilst the website is still a WIP (somewhat), I managed to add actual MRR to the challenge. 

LaunchPad consists currently of 4 paying members and took advantage of early-bird subscription prices which has now increased.

Current MRR (counting one person that paid for an entire year) is at $275/monthly.

I would say, that’s a win since I got out of the one-time pays within a month and the MRR will help me to obtain stability against riskier endeavors.

At the moment, I am capping the spots at 10 people max for LaunchPad to secure optimal attention for each person.

Good news is: 3 out of 4 people are building already and made insane progress in the last few weeks.

Whilst LaunchPad’ structure and website is not 100% complete, it shows I don’t need an entirely finished product or website to get MRR.

Things I need to do:

• Improve layout
• Expand internal knowledge base for LaunchPad members
• Upload a few Podcasts I recorded for them about specific topics
• Hire an editor that can turn my content into a course structure

But, excited to build this up and productize my knowledge for a select group of people.

Wall Street Bust ($0 MRR)

Whilst this is a late addition to the game, it will count heavily (I hope down the line) for a portion of ongoing revenue

During the MDC, I started day trading with some significant gains. 

Day trading implies lots of risk but is also a solid vehicle for me to obtain liquidity on a weekly basis.

After getting a few DMs and some people interested going back into the game of day trading or investing in assets (any type) I decided to build Wall Street Bust with Zach.

It’s a shared partnership with him (and is allowed for the MDC).

Purpose

After doing some research, most of the Discord channels or courses focus on technicals only and leave the rest out. And that’s where I will differentiate this channel and content.

Wall Street Bust will include:

• Evergreen courses for beginner and expert traders
• Macro Economic outlooks for equities
• Help others gain perspective
• Think less as a retail trader, more as an institutional one regardless of the size of your bankroll/account
• 1:1 mental game coaching upon request
• Insights on equities
• Weekly stock picks
• Trading futures and options
• and so on

The entire thing is still a WIP, but I found a few people already to join soon enough.

One of the main reasons I partner up with Zach for this, is that he’s very into TA and charting, whilst I am more on the macro side and deep level findings about the economy.

We decided to combine both brains and build a space where it’s purpose to find edges and beat market efficiencies on a day or swing trade basis.

More info will be shared soon, but the price tag is $99 a month.

Online Poker ($9.6K earnings)

What started as a $145 bankroll, I managed to grow this significantly into a large pile of Gs in a month.

For people that don’t know it: I am a cash game PLO player and a live tournament NLHE player.

Most money made is in PLO, but comes with huge variance (as in downswings and upswings).

During the challenge, I started playing PLO and pushing limits on stakes I am not supposed to play.

But for some miracle (or skill, or both?) I skyrocketed my $145 to about $9600 in earnings in the span of 35 days or so.

In the Discord channel, I posted the key hands and pots and I had a decision to face:

Keep going or taking a break on the higher stakes?

I decided to take a ‘break’. As in not playing on a daily basis anymore.

Reasoning

I am shifting goals and objectives. Which was always the plan.

To sum up my key reasonings:

• I can always go back into it (more actively) once the dust settles in other things
• I want to prepare a monthly or bi-weekly stream where I play live PLO or NLHE tournaments
• I netted about $9600, which is a ridiculous amount and the smartest way to use this cash now is for acquisitions or other expenses
• I could buy a 0MRR business for 10K and it would have cost me nothing to acquire

Especially the last reason. Freerolling an acquisition or buy a bigger one with less actual spent allows me to take on bigger bets in acquisitions.

You need to realize that I started with:

• $145 bankroll in poker
• Cashed out before a portion and turned into a free bankroll
• Cashed out now $9600 in total
• If I were to buy a 20K business, I only paid half of it
• If I were to buy a 10K business, I only paid $400 extra

Which leads me to: Acquisitions

Micro Acquisitions

If you remember I wrote up a surprise for OosCapX contributors then it’s with reason.

I want to make this entire challenge memorable for myself but also for followers and contributors.

I ‘raised’ for Flagship fund V1 and V2 and both, I will apply the same principle for the contributors.

I decided to create a #contributors channel because they have the privilege to witness it first hand and I will provide them more detailed insights and access to Notion about my findings before I slim/trim down a public announcement of the strategy or approach.

Whilst I have been hunting on market places for a few weeks now on some MOAT findings, the road to acquiring one is harder atm.

I witnessed plenty of garbage of projects built on top of startups. 

I witnessed too many AI wrappers that are taped together with templates and built on a stack that is locked into vendors. Which implies too hard for me to move away if needed.

I talked to a few people that were selling their ‘startup’ with 0MRR but have this insane GOD complex thinking it’s worth unicorn status whilst the project itself is just cheaper to build when there is no MRR.

However, that isn’t preventing me from finding the right ones.

Luckily, I have two goals in acquisitions set.

• One 5-10K business with little to no MRR
• One 25-40K business with max 1K MRR if we respect the 35x multiple.

And this is primarily the reason why I am shifting focus from online poker to a bigger bet but where I control the outcome more than getting bad beats on the river on a 2 outer.

Well, that would imply a huge chunk of money earned in August with longer timeframes right?

Yes.

But here is how I am going to tackle the big spend.

Day trading and Crypto fund

Crypto Fund ($100K)

I made that announcement a few days back in my Discord channel.

I secretly raised 100K in crypto assets to trade it as a fund and decided to go for it.

The fund is operated like a normal hedge fund and just like I would trade futures or CFDs in equities or day trades, it’s the same MO.

PS: It’s currently at 100K, but there is a chance it will be 105K. Because of reasons I have not mentioned yet.

Plus that once I closed it, there was a large group of people disappointed they could not participate so I might consider a secondary smaller one. But that’s dependent on the growth and acquisitions.

The 100K does NOT count as actual gains for the MDC, but the profits made will be. 

Reasoning

I made this move because I saw it fit to do so. 

Why?

Liquidity and elevate my game in a field I know I can stack the deck.

As in: having an edge.

This 100K raise opens up new levels of possibilities and can accelerate the road to a million. But will most likely not stop at a million anymore.

For every dollar earned, I can pocket 20% of it. Just like a regular fund. 

So it’s obviously in my best interest to make as much as possible.

What is coming:

• I will start officially trading from next week on and firstly report in channels or here about the PnL
• I hired someone to build me a basic dashboard first where all contributors can log in and track assets more accurate. (cost of hiring is counted as an expense and will provide details later) The dashboard development will take a while, but I will need it long term anyway for different reasons

And here is where I faced another decision/crossroad.

Branding and name.

Future of OosCapX

I always drill on brand equity and positioning. And here is no difference.

When I am looking at the entire picture, including stuff I have NOT mentioned yet during the million dollar challenge, I fail to recognize the actual future of OosCapX.

Not what it does, but the brand name.

The more I read it, the less appealing I find it and the more reason I see to change the name into something more serious that I can build out.

Even after the challenge.

After all, my goal is to leverage this into my own goals afterwards which is being a Tiger Global style PE fund/asset management firm. And that made me think I should rebrand.

2 weeks now, I try to come up with something new. And I am failing on it.

It’s urgent, but I would prefer to find something sooner than later where I can put my full weight behind it and market it as a micro PE fund with different types of investment vehicles.

Which brings me to other struggles I currently have:

Niche Blogs ($0 Revenue)

I failed so far to meet my own goals of setting up 10 niche blogs in total by the end of September. 

Well it’s only the first half of September but I suspect I will fail on setting up 10 niche blogs.

My plan was:

• Buy 10 domains
• Install WordPress
• Upload theme / demo content
• Prepare 3-5 articles per niche blog
• Publish
• Rotate through them
• Let them sink in search results and GSC
• Iterate and add more content
• Repeat

I struggle finding the right niches at the moment but I that’s easily solvable.

Since I took a break from poker and shift more on acquisitions.

I am going to give myself a huge sprint in September to still reach the goal and setting up at least the basics and demo content on all 10 blogs.

It took me longer than expected and I faced so many challenges in the last 2 weeks that forced my hand taking actions.

Crossroads and situations

In case some of you missed it, but a while back my wife was diagnosed with Thyroid cancer that left traces in her body and cancer has spread (still thin) to her body.

Whilst there is so far nothing to be afraid of, she always has to stay a few days or a week in the hospital for performing tests and diff treatments.

Which recently has been the case in the last few weeks and even today.

It often means I need to sway between places because she doesn’t like to be alone.

She’s sensitive to tests and some work, others provide horrible effects.

So what most people don’t know is that I often go overnight to the hospital (I can access anytime, day or night) and stay with her.

Leave in the morning, take a nap and go back at at it and take more naps in the day time.

Not only that, but recently my mother-in law had a car accident and required surgery in her leg which is fine but sometimes I gotta take care of errands for her as well since the rest of the family more often than not is taking care of their family business

Luckily the errands are small but it still requires my attention at the moment.

To top things off, earlier this week, I was supposed to fly to HK but that didn’t pan out.

In my other private Discord, FocusX, I screenshotted a government warning of an upcoming earthquake.

Which was not significant as in only 4.5 magnitude, it caused an insane disaster for one of our friends.

One of the buildings next to them, collapsed partially and the roof pretty much dunked into their home.

Leaving the house in rubble and is not suitable for living.

Not to mention, that typhoons in SEA region now are very much active and mix that with earthquakes, you might just run out of luck.

After a distressing phone call from our friends, I went to pick them up and placed them in a hotel for a month and gave them cash and credit cards until they’re settled.

This unforeseen event added up in an already packed schedule, but is now under control and nobody got hurt.

Priorities

Regardless of what happens in my personal life or my wife, there are responsibilities and I have set priorities.

Priorities being people that paid, pre-paid me for coaching, consulting and LaunchPad members come first.

And I can guarantee you that all those clients or members never seen a single time of disruption. 

You can ask some of them in Discord and they will vouch for that.

But it’s one of the reasons I lacked some updates on the challenge and my perspective is:

• People hired me to do a job.
• I set to honor that agreement and I can prioritize them over other things
• I know was a crossroads where I start shifting my focus on long-term and short-term gains.
• It’s not a matter of no time, it’s just a matter of priority
• I also like working with the same people on a longer term basis for months or even a year so I can streamline that process without going through dozens of new cases

Unless my entire house is on fire or in extreme situations I will cancel my priorities.

What else?

Well, this blog post requires two parts, but here are some things I want to mention:

• I am working on conceptualizing Kinsey AI. As in putting it on paper and then hire someone to develop the initial build. 
• I am working on a surprise for the top contributors/engagers in the Land of Oos channel
• Working on a model how to display a public stock portfolio with money invested into equities and ETFs to hedge my risk during the MDC
• Mapping out a blog post about current day trading stats, and activities and how I plan to document it better
• Working on an SEO guide for LaunchPad members

In part 2 of this major update, I am aiming to set some records straights on earnings and total costs. Because I fell behind on documenting everything

During these few weeks, I faced quite some challenges, but I see a bright future with the needed pivots.