$103.6K in 30 Days

July 21, 2014. Thirty days after I put my last $50 into ads, JMJK Sports Collectibles had done $103.6K. I know the date because I posted about it on Facebook the same day, which turned out to be the only bookkeeping from that period I still trust.

JMJK is my initials. Johnathon Michael Jordan Kane. The middle name I chose for myself at ten, in front of my whole family, because I intended to be the best at something. Ten years later it was on the paperwork of a company doing six figures in a month.

It kept going. Over the next eighteen months JMJK did a little over $3M in sales and I pocketed about $1.5M of it. I was twenty years old. I had failed out of college, been thrown off a team, been pushed out of a company, and thrown a microphone at a wall, and the ledger did not care about any of it.

A coach once told me I would never make more money than he made. I thought about him that month. I have barely thought about him since, which is what answering something like that actually does to it. It stops being a thing I was proving and turns into a thing I already did.

I am not going to pretend I handled it well. A twenty-year-old with $1.5M and no idea what discipline costs is a specific kind of accident waiting to happen, and I was on schedule for it. The number was real and the date is on a public post. The kid who got told he had a ceiling had just put $103.6K through a store in thirty days.