My Story & This Blog
Welcome!
Hello! My name is Sam Priestley and this is my blog. I’m 31 years old and have spent the last ten years working for myself and on myself. Trying my hand at as many different things as possible.
The Short Version
Short attention span eh? Me too.
I started out as a professional gambler and got pretty darn good at it, making enough money to retire. Eventually I got tired and bored to do something more fulfilling, so took my winnings and went off and spent the next few years travelling and trying starting businesses.
I’ve had some successes. A table tennis business. A tech startup that went from idea to sale in under a year. A coffee shop that won best new coffee shop in London 2014. A viral YouTube video with over 12 million views.. And most recently a craft gin brand that is winning awards for its unique flavoured gins. I got married, became a part-time policeman, got a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and spent almost three years travelling.
And had plenty more failures. I lost a bunch of money trying to become a property developer. That coffee shop never made any money. I had a car dealership that went nowhere.
In March 2020 I got really interested in cryptocurrency and have been focusing on it full-time ever since.
I write about what I’m up to on this website.
Contents
The Long Version
How It All Started
That is me on my honeymoon in 2017. 10 years after it all began…
I remember the exact moment when I decided not to get a job. I was sitting at my laptop with a graduate scheme application form open in front of me. I had just gotten to a question asking me to explain in 200 words why I wanted to work at that specific bank rather than any other. I couldn’t face it.
I was in my second year of university and started to work my ass off looking for alternative ways to earn a living. The first thing to work was matched betting. A way to earn money from online bookies and casinos by taking advantage of the free bets they offer to new customers.
It led me deep into the rabbit hole of professional gambling and not only did I get out of my overdraft but by the time I graduated I was earning enough to justify not getting a job.
I got better and better at gambling and it turned into a big business. But I was always worried of regulation and didn’t think of it as a ‘real business’.
Seeing The Light
In 2012 I decided to get into the big leagues. I wanted to be rich and the best way to do that would be to launch a technology startup. For the next
And it was horrendous. I became an entrepreneur in order to avoid having to get a job, and now I had done the opposite. Created myself a job where I had to arrive earlier and stay later than everyone else. I had all the stress of entrepreneurship and all the inconvenience of
We eventually sold the business. I won’t ruin the story for you, read about it here. But the experience had a big impact on me. It made me realise that I didn’t want to be rich, rather I wanted my time to be own. To be able to choose what I do. So I changed my focus and decided to build only scalable outsourceable businesses.
The experience with my tech startup made me view professional gambling with new eyes. I had returned to it because the money was good and I had commitments to my business partners, but I had no passion for it. I had made enough money to last me a few years, so I quit.
Self-Improvement & Retirement
Over the next few years I tried my hand at everything and anything.
For a year I spent every day training table tennis in an attempt to become one of the best in the country. We called project Expert in a Year, I spectacularly failed. But despite that, the video of my year went viral (it now has over 8 million views) and my love of self-improvement and continuous learning was kindled.
To help give me more confidence and improve my soft-skills I became a volunteer policeman. Working weekends on what was called the rowdy bus. We were sent to any fights or gang trouble where they thought a bus full of amateur bobbies would help. If I could deal with that then no confrontation in a boardroom would ever be an issue again.
I devoured podcasts and books and was inspired to launch this blog. In my
I wrote a couple of books, started training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and started a table tennis brands heavily with the help of Amazon FBA (the warehouse and fulfilment network run by Amazon). I even launched a coffee shop which went on to win best new coffee shop in London.
Hitting The Road & Digital Nomading
All this time I had been living in central London, but in 2016 I got itchy feet. I gave up my flat, sold 90% of my stuff and armed with just a suitcase headed off to South America to live the life as a ‘digital nomad’. Someone who can live anywhere because they can earn an income through their computer and the internet.
I had convinced my girlfriend to quit her job and come with me. She left the UK with just her savings and while travelling managed to build a profitable business doing freelance marketing.
For the next 18 months, I didn’t do much work. There was too much to experience as we travelled from country to country living in AirBnBs. In 2016 the only new business I started was a consultancy, A very simple business built off the back of this blog, which by then had got really popular.
Instead, I focused on growing my table tennis businesses. Which by the end of 2016 had grown to be bigger and more profitable than gambling ever was.
In July 2017 I got married and shortly after launched Pipehouse Gin with my new wife Emma. In 2018 we launched a podcast. The next few years chugged along happily. Lots of travelling and enjoying life. Until the pandemic came.
The Pandemic & Crypto
In 2020 the pandemic hit which brought to a halt a lot of things in my life. We returned to the UK and in March things were looking pretty bleak. My businesses ground to a halt and the stock market started tanking taking a lot of my investments with it.
I did a big reassessment which is summed up in my coronavirus series of blog posts. The end result being that I started to look for opportunities to start earning money again, which got me in cryptocurrency.
Since March I have been focusing on crypto full-time. It took me a few months to find my feet, but in June I got into Ethereum and decentralised finance.
I learned solidity (the Ethereum programming language) and made a good living in the ‘dark forest‘ doing arbitrage.
In October I started working with Yearn.finance helping them write strategies and increase their security. Which bring us up to today.
Keen To Dive Into The Blog?
Check out some of my favourite posts.
Amazon FBA
Amazon FBA is an awesome service provided by Amazon that allows one man band brand owners like myself run multi-national physical product businesses. It is the building blocks that I use for my most profitable businesses. Here are some of the best articles about it:
- How to start an Amazon FBA business. My most popular article ever. A deep dive, that requires no previous knowledge, in to exactly how to start an Amazon FBA business.
- Retail Arbitrage – Flipping Products With Amazon FBA. Can’t afford to start a proper Amazon FBA business? Wet your toes with retail arbitrage.
- How To Find The Best Products To Sell On Amazon. Market research is key. Here’s how to do your homework.
- Pros & Cons Of The Three Types Of Amazon FBA Business. Should you start your own brand? Wholesale other peoples? Or do retail arbitrage?
- Tips And Tricks For Marketing Your Amazon FBA Business. A beast of a post covering everything I know.
- You Don’t Need To Pay For Lots Of Software. The biggest excuse I hear for not starting an Amazon FBA business is that you need lots of expensive software. Nonsense.
Matched Betting
How to make some easy money by taking advantage of the sign up offers that bookies give to new customers. It won’t make you rich but it is low-risk and will earn you a few thousand pounds to help start something else. Matched betting is what gave me the initial funding to not get a job and become an entrepreneur.
- Matched betting – risk free, tax free profit. Making money from online gambling- turned out to be remarkably easy.
- The Best Matched Betting Subscription Services. There are loads of services that will find good bonuses for you. Here are the best ones.
- The Best Sports Arbing Software. The best
oddsfinders and odds comparison sites on the market. - How to Make Money From Online Casino Bonuses. So you’re making good money from bookies
ehh ? Here’s how to do the same with casino bonuses. - How To Make Money Arbing And Avoid Getting Your Accounts Closed. Arbing is easy. Keeping your accounts is hard.
Blogging
- What It Takes To Create A Successful Blog – The 3 Crucial Aspects. Content, marketing and monetisation. I go through everything I did to make this site a success.
- Start A Blog In Under An Hour – A Step-By-Step Guide. Starting a blog is really really easy (it’s making it good that’s hard).
- Supercharging My Blog – A New Theme & A New Host. Once I hit 30,000 visitors a month it was time to upgrade.
Craft Gin
In late 2017 I started a new business. A craft gin brand! And I am documenting exactly what I’m up to in real time:
- Episode One – The First Two Weeks
- Episode Two – Creating The Recipe & Branding
- Episode Three – Delays & Legal Schmeagols
The Rest
- Step-by-step guide to creating and selling a physical product. A look into our most profitable business, a table tennis brand.
- High stakes entrepreneurship. A roller-coaster of a time when we started and eventually sold a tech-startup.
- How & why to start a coffee shop. Top tip – don’t do it. Online business is much easier.
- How to write and publish a book in 3 Days. An experiment in self-publishing. Have now published two books including a best-seller.
- How to make money buying and selling cars. An import-export business.
- The maths behind my London property investment. More reasons why I don’t like property.
- This is how much we made from our viral YouTube video. TLDR: not very much.
- Daily ideas. For most of 2015 I tried to come up with 10 ideas a day. Now there are over 10,000 ideas there.
- The Lazy Entrepreneur – Embrace Your Laziness. Kind of my whole philosophy.
- Becoming a digital nomad. I am currently travelling the world working remotely.
- Get out of your comfort zone. And why I work as part-time as a policeman.
- My year playing table tennis every day. And how I failed to achieve my goals.
- Never stop learning. Why your education shouldn’t end with
university . - What is financial independence? And why it should be your goal.
- What happens when your YouTube video goes viral. My five minutes of fame.
Want To Get In Touch?
I get hundreds of emails a week (literally) so if you have something urgent you need my help for then I recommend hiring me as a consulting. I charge $200 an hour and you can book a call with me here.
Or if it is less urgent you can send me an email for free and I will try and read it!