Here’s Why I’m Selling Everything and Traveling The World
What’s up bros!
Chase here…
Normally I’d make a video sharing with you what’s been going on but after doing 3,000+ videos in the last few years, I think I’m starting to feel a bit burnt out, shocker right?
So instead, I decided to write it all out.
I’m hoping that some of my writing will resonate with you and help you make decisions at whatever stage you’re in with your business or life.
Now, if you’re strapped for time, here’s the long story short:
My landlord asked me for an additional deposit of $7,000, so I decided I’d sell my stuff and travel instead.
Here’s the longer version:
About 9 months ago we decided to move from a 3 bedroom apartment ($4,000 per month) to a 4 bedroom house ($6,500 a month) here in Santa Barbara, California.
While living here we adopted a puppy named Bubba.
To our surprise, Bubba grew into a 150 lb dog at the ripe age of 1.
Bubba had an even bigger problem.
He was an escape artist.
Bubba loved running away in search of hugs and snacks from our neighbors.
While Bubba was ecstatic to see our neighbors, they weren’t exactly thrilled to see him.
We tried what seemed like everything to get Bubba to stop escaping and eventually we even built a $1,500 fence for him out of chicken wire.
While we did finally find a way to keep him in, by the time we did, our neighbors complained so much to our landlord that we were told to ship him off along with my other dog Bella.
We had to choose between the dogs or the humans, so we chose the dogs.
We cried for weeks while searching for a way to ship our dogs off.
Bubba now lives in Kansas with my girlfriend's mom while my other dog, Bella lives with her past mother.
Shortly after the dog fiasco, our landlord began asking us for an additional deposit because the dogs “likely” caused more than $7,000 in damages.
At that point, as a family, we decided it was time to go.
We had the choice to either stay in Santa Barbara and find another $7,000 per month small house for rent, or travel.
We are currently selling all of our possessions and will be traveling around the US while we wait for our passports.
Our goal is to end up staying a month two in Costa Rica this summer.
Lessons I Learned Along The Way
Over the last 9 months since living here, I have been focusing MEGA hard on building my SEO software called, “Shine Ranker.”
Building software has been a huge pivot from doing services and courses for me.
Why? Because software takes A LOT OF TIME and PATIENCE.
Here’s a funny story about how I fell into it all:
When I first moved to this house I was actually asked to pay $45,000 up front for six months’ rent because I didn’t have any credit.
It was a tough decision to make but we were running out of time and needed somewhere to move from the apartment we were living in.
A few weeks earlier I had paid someone to create a script for me that ran on a tool called Jasper.
The script let you create unlimited content with Jasper and basically just ran all day.
After the script was made, I pressed the live button on Youtube and saw comments flooding in with people begging to send me money for the script.
So, I said okay sure, send me $300 and the script is yours with the one caveat that the payment is non-refundable since I had no idea how long it would work.
About a week later, the Jasper app had completely crashed and their whole group was going nuts asking what had happened.
It turns out that so many people had been running the script that it crashed their tool.
They told me that I needed to stop selling the script, and so I did.
If they wouldn’t have shut me down I could have probably pulled a few hundred thousand dollars easily.
However, after the sales, I had enough to be able to afford to move into the house with a 45k check.
Here’s What I Realized
I realized that I needed to keep creating software and tools so that I wouldn’t ever get shut down again and I’d regain full control.
Now, I wanted to build another tool like Jasper but I didn’t have access to the technology they were using called GPT-3 so I decided to build an SEO audit tool instead.
I started by going on Fiverr and asking if someone could build me a simple script that would run and just gather pages from a website.
Soon enough we had built what looked like a bare-bones version of a tool called Screaming Frog.
The problem with building desktop software is that your users usually get a ton of issues around installing the software, updating it, etc.
So, I knew I needed to take the tool to the cloud.
In Conclusion
I don’t want to bore you with all the details but I do want you to know that no matter what stage you’re at in life there is ALWAYS going to be new challenges.
I actually think life was A LOT harder when I began doing SEO as a career and was living out of a dirty garage with no bathroom or windows.
But, the problems I had seemed to affect me a lot less because I was doing something that I was EXTREMELY passionate about.
These days, SEO has been something that I’ve covered SO MUCH that I’ve honestly been SO bored with talking about it, I feel like I’ve said everything that I could say probably 100x over.
What I actually decided to do was to separate my Shine Ranker tool, Youtube channel, and Facebook group into one entity while moving Chase Reiner to it’s own.
I’m thinking that I’m going to start hiring people to collaborate with making videos and posts under Shine Ranker while I turn my Chase Reiner assets into more of a lifestyle / motivational / money type of brand where I’m free to talk about whatever I want.
Feel free to join the new Chase Reiner focused group I’m building here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/776825639318919
I’d be interested in hearing what you think, feel free to leave a comment below or email me at im@chasereiner.com
I always love hearing from you.
Let me know if you’d like me to keep posting about what’s going on…
See you later,
-Chase R
