How I Came Up: Faith, 100-Hour Weeks, and the Road to ClipMe

This one is not about the product. People keep asking how I got here, so I want to tell it straight — where I came from, what it cost, and the thing underneath all of it that most founders will not say out loud.

I came up with a camera in my hand. As a kid I was the one filming everything, and by the time I actually knew what I was doing I was shooting celebrities and some of the biggest business minds in the world. That was my classroom. Nobody handed me a framework — I learned what actually moves people by pointing a lens at the people who move rooms, and paying attention harder than everyone else in the building.

That became a marketing agency, The Social Agents. Over about five years I generated more than $20 million in sales revenue for clients and managed over half a million dollars in ad spend, and I did it serving demanding, high-class clients — the kind who do not accept excuses and should not have to. I am grateful for every one of them, because demanding clients are the best teachers alive. They burned the guessing out of me. They taught me that data is a gift, that insights and analytics are the whole race, and that respect is earned in results, never in promises.

Here is the part I do not hide: my soul put me on this journey. I believe God has been moving the needle through me — not as a nice saying, as the actual engine of the entire thing. Every door that opened at exactly the right moment, every idea that arrived when I had nothing left in the tank, I did not manufacture that. My job was to stay a clean enough channel for it to come through, and to work hard enough to deserve carrying it.

And the work is real. I have been averaging somewhere between 85 and 100 hours a week — on the startup, on ClipMe, and still carrying those demanding clients at the same time. I am not romanticizing the grind; it is heavy, and it takes things from you that you do not get back. I do it because I genuinely believe I was put here to change this ecosystem, and you cannot change something you are only half inside of.

ClipMe is where all of it converges — the camera kid who studied what moves people, the agency owner who learned that guessing is the enemy, and the conviction that I was supposed to build this specific thing. The whole reason it exists is that I could not keep watching talented creators fly blind when I knew, in my bones, that the data to fix it was sitting right there in front of us. Somebody had to put it in their hands. I decided it was going to be me.

So if you are reading this in the middle of your own grind, wondering whether the hours are worth it: study your craft like the champions do, treat your data like the gift it is, and stay close to whatever put you on your path in the first place. That is the whole method. The rest is just showing up, every single day, until the thing you were made for finally fits in the palm of your hand.