This Is My Last Stand. Again.
I survived the ICE immigration nightmare. The financial collapse comes next.
Dear Permission to be Powerful Reader,
This is my last stand.
Again.
Last time, I was on the verge of getting deported.
Kicked out of the country permanently.
I survived.
In spite of all the masked men going door to door…
Looking for FUCKING ME.
Took me a decade to get here.
I waited in limbo for three years.
That’s three years of having no future plans.
Can’t buy a house, or have a wife, or start a family…
Because ICE could rip me out of bed one night and send me packing…
Forever.
And yet, I got to stay.
By the skin of my teeth.
I am officially a lawful permanent resident.
The wait is finally over.
My naturalization process has begun.
By this time next year, I should have a US passport.
I can finally exhale.
I’m most fascinated with a tiny detail on the application form.
Just as a throwaway question, this comes up:
Would you like to change your name?
Wow.
These motherfuckers were serious when they said, “Start a new life.”
I’m 100% on board.
Couldn’t be happier, frankly.
Changing my name out of the blue has been one of the strangest experiments I’ve ever run.
Out of nowhere…
I’m Tony now. Deal with it.
Why?
Because I’ve got two wives in Alabama, that’s why.
And they both want child support.
But seriously, I’ve never seen anything like it.
Some people refuse to change.
The Anton Forever crowd.
Others switch immediately without hesitation.
Turns out most people will call you whatever you call yourself.
The prison was never as locked as I thought.
Call me extreme.
There’s nothing good about my old life that I want to preserve.
No past I’m desperate to cling to.
I wanted a fresh start anyway.
People treat me differently now, too.
I expected that.
And honestly?
I love it.
So now that I’m no longer waiting for masked men to drag me away in the middle of the night…
I should feel relieved.
I should feel safe.
But I don’t.
Because I’m riding too close to the flames right now.
Painfully close.
Two years ago, I was writing emails for Tony Robbins.
Two million readers.
The apex of my copywriting career.
I never imagined I’d end up working with a celebrity of that size.
And the craziest part?
I was good at it.
Very good.
And everybody knew it.
Unfortunately, I learned something the hard way:
Talent alone won’t protect you.
Leverage does.
Eventually, I got kicked out.
And after that, something inside me changed.
I was done freelancing.
That was it.
I had already watched my ex-wife spend years building her own audience through her romance business.
And I realized something terrifying:
She was safer than I was.
Not because she was more talented.
Because she owned the relationship with the audience.
No middlemen.
No gatekeepers.
No executives are deciding whether she gets to eat this month.
I knew I needed that for myself.
I’d always imagined that after 10 or 15 years of freelancing, eventually I’d build something real.
Something I owned.
Something nobody could take away from me.
Getting fired accelerated the timeline.
And honestly…
Where do you even go after Tony Robbins?
I couldn’t imagine spending another decade playing corporate psychological warfare with millionaire clients.
Especially while I was simultaneously convinced I might get deported anyway.
So I made a decision.
Go for broke.
Literally.
I locked myself in a room for a year and a half.
Seven days a week.
Nothing but building this business.
Building this list.
Obsessing over copy, funnels, deliverability, psychology, and systems.
That journey pushed me closer to the edge of my sanity than anything else I’ve ever done.
It rearranged my entire psyche.
Because I made a deal with myself early on:
I was willing to go broke for this.
And now?
I have.
Completely.
I’m down to my last few hundred dollars.
And, I racked up more credit card debt than I can repay.
I ask myself whether I’m insane almost every day.
Maybe.
But here’s the thing:
I now have a list of 128,000 people.
And I have paying customers.
Recurring revenue.
Not enough to support myself yet.
But enough to prove this thing is real.
Enough to prove the idea works.
The biggest challenge right now is infrastructure.
Managing a list this size became brutally expensive.
At one point, I was paying around $700 a month just to host my email list on platforms like Mailchimp.
And the more I dealt with these companies, the more frustrated I became.
Every month:
more subscriptions,
more fees,
more restrictions,
more dependence.
Worse, it felt like I was renting access to an audience I had already paid to build.
That drove me insane.
So I made another extreme decision:
I would host the entire operation myself.
Open-source infrastructure.
My own servers.
No middlemen.
No corporations deciding whether I’m allowed to contact my own audience.
Turns out that’s a lot harder than it sounds.
Because when you start sending hundreds of thousands of emails, you enter an entirely different world.
Complaint rates.
Bounce management.
List hygiene.
Deliverability systems.
Tiny technical mistakes can get your entire operation shut down overnight.
Which happened to me.
More than once.
I had to learn all of this in real time while already operating under extreme financial pressure.
And paying programmers to help me rebuild the system properly.
But finally…
After months of setbacks…
The list is about to come back online.
And that’s the insane part.
Even while barely being able to contact the full audience…
Even while only reaching tiny fractions of the list at a time…
People were still buying.
The business kept breathing.
That’s why I haven’t quit.
Because buried underneath all the chaos, I can see the shape of something real forming.
I have 128,000 people.
I have recurring revenue.
I have proof of concept.
I have customers.
What I don’t have right now…
Is margin for error.
I spent everything building this.
Every dollar.
Every ounce of energy.
Every backup plan.
And now I’m standing at the point where this either stabilizes…
Or it burns me alive.
That’s the truth.
And strangely enough?
I still believe it’s going to work.
Tony V.
Editor-in-Chief
