From Zero to Quitting W-2

Level 3 - DeFi Virgin Analyst

Welcome Avatar! Another jungle member has escaped making multiples of W-2. This is entirely a guest post written by Matt (BowTedKobra)

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Intro

I'll keep the intro brief. I'm Matt (Kobra). Sports medicine background. I wrote a guest post here back in July 2024 about the pre-sale launch of Morning Would. This one is about the other business, the one that got me out of the W2 entirely.

Fifteen dollars

November 2022. I was out with my family doing some Christmas thing with decorations and lights at a local farm with the kid. Someone paid me $15 for a groin rehab protocol I threw together while I was pushing the stroller to the ticket booth.

Fifteen dollars. I've made a lot more since. Nothing has hit like that notification. A complete stranger on the internet paid me for something I knew. I still remember exactly where I was standing. I would argue that that $15 was likely a top 5 most important thing to happen to me ever.

At that point I had a hospital job, one toddler, and no clue what I was doing

Rewind to 2021

I had a good job on paper. Sports medicine program in a hospital system, good benefits, stable - until Covid.

Then the vaccine mandates rolled through a year after forced furloughs and I learned that a stable W2 is stable right up until someone above you decides it isn't. It came down to a 2nd round of appeals to end up with an exemption or I was getting fired. Ended up being the only person in my department to get one.

I “won” but I knew I had to get out. At that point I made a decision that nobody would ever again have the power to impact my ability to provide for my family.

I made an anon BowTied account because the jungle was the only place I saw people actually building exits and I wanted a part. And I couldn't exactly have a public side business while working.

I knew nothing about emails or offers or funnels. I was good at literally one thing. People get hurt and have pain and I was pretty good at getting them out of it. If you read the Morning Would post you already know ecom wasn't in there either. Then I sat on the account for the better part of a year doing nothing with it.

I became a consultant by accident

I never planned to consult or work with people virtually. Coming from my world that didn’t even exist as an option.

I genuinely didn’t even know what a consult was at the time. I just posted about rehab because it was the only subject where I was somewhat of an expert. Hurt people started showing up in my DMs. Eventually people asked if I did consults, I said yes, then went and figured out how to actually do that.

At some point in 2023 a professional soccer player in Europe with turf toe DMed me. He had run out of options and somehow his last resort was a cartoon snake. We got him back on the field and it kind of went from there.

Jan 2024, the mortgage

About 15 months after that first $15, the side business paid my mortgage for the first time. And then it happened again. Rehab money from strangers on the internet covered my biggest bill.

That’s when something got rewired and I realized I could actually make it out on some unofficial timeline. That January was when I stopped treating it like a hobby that made money and started treating it like the thing I was building my exit on and went fully in.

Meanwhile, the beaver

All of this was happening while HTD and I were building Morning Would on nights and weekends with what little time we already had. That full story is in the July 2024 post so I won't mention much more:

The update since then: 7 figure revenue in our first full year from launch and still growing fast. We still have not taken a single investment penny.

Aug 2024, going to work started losing me money

In August 2024 the side income for the first time was a 2x my monthly W2 salary. That was the first time it had even matched it. The next several months were in the ballpark of my salary or a little more. But it matched it the remainder of that year.

That did something to my head. I was making more from the side business than from the hospital. Every shift at the hospital was time pulled away from something that scaled. Meanwhile my merit increases couldn’t even keep up with inflation. Why would I bust my balls to exceed expectations to get 5% when I could coast and get 3% but funnel more time to what mattered?

Going to work was actually losing me money. Strange realization when you've spent your whole adult life treating the paycheck as safe and always trying to be the good employee.

I quit about 6 months before I quit

I'd already made the decision in July 2025.

In my head I was gone. I stayed anyway because we were expecting our third kid, and hospital insurance meant that baby arrived essentially free. I definitely played the benefits game and milked every last thing I possibly could on the way out. Bull has said it before. But it’s truly insane how much you can get away with by mailing it in and doing the bare minimum.

I used to feel guilty about things like that. Then I remembered they would have fired me over not getting a shot. So I rode it out, we had the kid, and I left shortly after with the consulting business running at 4x my old W2. Those last months were odd.

Sitting in a job I'd already left in my mind, watching the side income keep growing, pretending to do enough to not get fired, waiting on a due date.

The kids part

I did all of this with kids. One 2 year old when I started, a second right as I started to figure out the wifi money, then a third right as things began to scale quick. Two rounds of newborn sleep while holding down the W2 and 2 businesses. The eyebags are permanent at this point.

Work happened wherever it fit. Lot of sleepless nights, early mornings, giving up on weekends, calling in sick on work zooms to onboard clients.

On going semi anon

I was BT Kobra for years. Only recently did the slight rebrand to Matt, Kobra Sports Med. At some point it’s hard to grow a consulting business when people have no idea who I am. It’s actually insane people used to hire me after a Google Meet call with just a black screen.

I was anon as long as necessary while building on the side of the W2. About a year before I left the W2, clients started seeing my face. That was the point where the black screen was costing me more business than the hospital finding out would have cost me.

Thanks again

All in all I went from essentially 0 to being able to exit my W2 in about 2.5 years. For the record this is and was by no means easy. Juggling and scaling 2 businesses with a W2 and 3 kids is by far the hardest thing I have ever done by far. None of it happens without making that account and a $10/mo Substack subscription. Not the consulting, not Morning Would, not the exit.

Thanks to Bull and everyone in the jungle who answered my dumb questions along the way. If you wanna follow me on X, kobrasportsmed.

If you wanna check out Morning Would, head over to getmorningwould.shop

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BTB Notes By Us

There are a lot of interesting things here if you read between the lines:

1. Not only did he escape the W-2 he did so while already having kids/juggling a pregnancy

2. In addition, he did BOTH wifi money and the side business of consulting. You have no clue which one scales first but in a wild set up both did well. This is rare, usually one hits one doesn’t but doing 2 at once and both successful is quite an accomplishment

3. Matt realized the same thing we did years ago, if you just mail it in and do the minimum, you still get decent raises and don’t even get fired. It makes no sense to give it 110% when you can make 2, 3, 4, 5x what you make at W-2 by yourself as either a supplement biz (MorningWould), consultant or other SaaS/E-com

4. His weird vibe the last 6 months tracks. We’re guessing it was health care related and some benefits. You just end up biding your time and collecting. This is how it feels when you are truly checked out

5. He did it ultra conservative, most wait for 2x but he did a 4x. Pretty insane considering MorningWould was also doing 7 figures in revs. Goes to show how much your risk tolerance drops after becoming a parent!

That’s the main jist.

If you plan on quitting the W-2, our next post on Wednesday is going to be related to E-com.

You’ll learn exactly how to test demand, what good metrics are: Conversion rates, AOV, META ROAS, GOOGL ROAS, Gross Margin and Net Margin

This way you can test your ideas for a whopping $5K and once you find one that hits, you’ll likely be in the same shoes at Matt soon enough.

As always, Equal Opportunity, Unequal Results

Stay Toon’d

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

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