How a College Dropout Went From $500 to Half a Billion in 5 Years

Davie Fogarty's story is extremely inspiring, to say the least! The self-made millionaire from Adelaide, Australia, went from having only $500 to building close to $500 million in just half a decade. Fogarty was an insecure kid growing up and often struggled with getting good grades. "I was a kid who went to the beach and just wouldn't take their shirt off," he says in his YouTube video titled, "How I Went from $500 to Half a Billion in 5 Years." However, with the help of his supportive family and hard work, Fogarty achieved success and surpassed his own expectations.

Fogarty struggled for a while and felt a "deep feeling of shame" when he was simply not working hard enough and doing well. Things were made worse by his school teacher who had deemed him "stupid" from a young age. "I was told that I was difficult to teach," he says in the video. Soon, after this, his parents gave him an ultimatum that if he didn't start working hard, they would find another school or even stop supporting him.

"I knew there was something within me, I knew that I wasn't stupid, and I had a decent amount of intelligence," continued Fogarty. He soon stumbled upon YouTube, where he came across "old Nike commercials." "They were so exhilarating, in every single way," he says in the video. This is when he decided to chalk out a plan for himself. "I needed to get better grades, I needed to get a job, and I needed to go to university," he says. Even though Fogarty didn't have an idea what he was doing, he had a feeling that he wanted to do "something awesome."

After this point in life, he bagged his first job at a warehouse as an assistant which paid him $16 an hour. He later used this money to join the gym. "I started to get obsessed with the gym, which made me feel so much better," he said. He also got a tutor for himself, who helped him with all the subjects he struggled with. 

He talked about how this was the time he started receiving positive reinforcement from his teachers. One of them said that he had never seen anybody turn their lives around as much as Fogarty had done in that year. "This cemented that I was on the right track," he adds. Fogarty soon finished school with pretty good grades and got into mining engineering. 

He admits that he only chose mining engineering because it "sounded cool" only to realize that it wasn't enough. "I hated university," he says. He realized that he was going to university because he was "told that he could get six figures out of it." Soon, it all came to an end when he decided he needed to drop out.

Despite the failure, he kept pushing his boundaries and soon started making money on Instagram by selling advertising to fitness tea brands and supplement stores. He soon became popular on the platform, and created many accounts, where he created content related to fitness. "I started an Instagram page, where I would write reviews about supplements and recommend what's good. I was able to sell advertising on Instagram," he said. This was the time he also got into personal training and made a lot of money off it.

After this, he decided to build a huge food franchise but started losing money. "So, I stopped personal training and I took a lot of the money and set up a shop in the local area." 

Thankfully, he still had his Instagram business up and running. He soon started flipping Instagram. "I would buy accounts and sell them to other people for a bit of a higher price," he said. However, this all came to an end when he got scammed out of $40,000 leaving him penniless at the time.

After this, he thought of moving to Melbourne in search of new opportunities. He learned skills like website building and started selling supplements through an e-commerce platform. He found that he could make way more money by directly selling the items to the consumers. This is where he found such success. He knew that at this point all he needed was a product for his big business. This was the time that he saw a few forums push the product, weighted blankets. He decided to give it a try and ordered his first stock from China. After a few hindrances, his new business, Calming Blankets blew up. "I did about $200 in the first day, $1,000 in the first week, $10,000 in the second month, and ended up scaling to doing $1.5 million profit."

Now, Davie is a successful entrepreneur who has managed to make his parents and his girlfriend proud. He has also been able to get his hand on his dream car, a Range Rover. "I was also able to buy my girlfriend her dream car and also bought the house that I love."