IMPROVISE, ADAPT & OVERCOME
Fully doxxing myself: Dwayne Campbell, CEO of Medallion XLN
“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination." - Albert Einstein
PROLOGUE:
There I was leaning on my boss’s 2005 BMW M5. Surrounded by the team leads at the Call Center I worked at. Some of them yelled, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” while others begged me and my Boss to back down. I have a habit of pissing people off. I turned 21 years old a few months before, and this was my 19th job since I graduated from High School. Really liked this job too...smh. Rumors were that my boss was a drug lord for the Columbian cartel, other rumors said that he chopped cars and sent them to the Dominican Republic. Everyone believed that the Call Center was a front for something else. Never the type to back down from a fight, I stare him down. “You can’t whoop me!” I’m scared out of my mind, thinking, “Is he going to have my family assassinated?” My friend is a team lead standing silently in the corner, I can’t look like a whimp in front of him, he’ll tell the squad. So I grill my Boss, “What’s up! You brought me here, let’s go!” My boss eventually realizes that I’m not backing down, not from him, not from anybody. So he gives me some speech about being careful who I offend, blah blah blah. I didn’t care what he had to say. I won! He tried to intimidate me and it backfired. That was the first day of the rest of my life.
CHAPTER 1: Starting My First Business
My mind was made up, I’m not working for anyone anymore. I drive to Best Buy with my friend and used my last paycheck to buy a Dell laptop. I have no idea what my business is going to be about, but I know I’m going to need spreadsheets and the ability to send emails and all that nerdy stuff. My friend and I sat in his car, brainstorming ideas on what the business is going to be. We could mow lawns, maybe wash cars, whatever the case, it would be me him and a laptop. 2 Bros. & A Laptop was the name of the company. I tried mowing my neighbor's lawn, but then the lawnmower got busted. I didn’t like the idea of being wet all day, so a car wash wasn’t an option. The friend I started the business with eventually quit on me, so I’m the only bro in 2 Bros. & A Laptop. The business cards were already made, and the company was filed as an LLC, so no turning back now. I had another friend who was always doing a Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scheme of some sort. This scheme was selling small businesses prebuilt websites where they could upload photos and change the text in a Content Management System (CMS). The CMS also gave the customers the option to order Business Cards & marketing materials. So I did that!
I’m cringing so hard watching this smh .... I apologize in advance. That was a regular day
I went door to door trying to sign up various businesses up for this MLM scheme. Eventually, I met a print shop, and we formed a partnership where instead of buying the marketing materials from the MLM site, I’ll order directly from the print shop. I continue door-knocking to acquire more customers. I start seeing more opportunities to grow my business. Instead of paying a $60 graphic design fee to the print shop, I watched YouTube and learned Photoshop. Now I could charge that fee for myself. My customer base was growing because it turns out that I was a good graphic designer. Now people are asking if I can make their websites. I learned Adobe Flash and HTML/CSS/JQuery then eventually got good at programming these animated websites. Who would’ve thought? I was just a knucklehead, now I’m learning all these technologies on the fly. I wanted to get every possible edge I could get, so I read every book possible. Books on philosophy, finance, programming, art history, design, marketing, advertising, building and scaling businesses. The Prince, The Art Of War, On War by Carl Von Clausewitz, Plato’s Republic, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and The Communist Manifesto for comparison. I even read Albert Einstein’s book on Relativity, I had no idea what any of it meant, but it sounded smart. Fight Club is my favorite book. The most books I read cover to cover in one year was thirty-three. I became a vacuum for information. As time goes by, my reputation grows for doing quality work. I’m walking to every plaza and converting at least one shop into my client every day. Eventually, I do all the printing and graphics for most Nail Salons, Kickboxing Gyms, Tattoo shops, Candy stores, Sushi restaurants, Boutiques, and Pizzerias. I felt like the main character in a movie doing a rise to power montage.
started from the very bottom
Chapter 2: The Great Facilitator
I was the only employee at 2 Bros. & A Laptop and my laptop was the only tool I needed, so I didn't pay any overhead. One of my friends worked the night shift at Dunkin’ Donuts, so I hung out with him most nights fulfilling orders. He fed me free donuts and coffee. I charged a $50 graphic design fee and made a $30-50 profit off each box of business cards or postcards I sold. I wish I understood pricing back then because I could have charged a lot more for my services. I did quality work and delivered within a short period of time, I was supposed to charge alot in that equation. Most of the time I could just have the print shop directly deliver the goods to the customer's business address. Commonplace now, but back in 2009 it was cutting edge. The websites were where I made the real money, gutting out WordPress websites and giving the business a brand that we both figured out together. They give me the vision and I brought it to reality. I could charge a large upfront fee and a monthly maintenance fee as well for websites so those were my favorite. 2012 was when things started taking off for me. I had 2 offices a block away from each other. One of them was a doctor’s office that had extra space, he just let me use it for free, and the other was a boutique that needed help with rent, so I pitched in $500/month. I noticed a trend where many Photographers were cropping up, and they were charging the same price I charged for a website to do a photoshoot *light bulb. I couldn't let the opportunity pass me by, even if I had no interest in doing photography myself. I could leverage the network of businesses I work with and provide them with photoshoots. I contract a group of girls who took photos for a Party Bus to be my photographers. Camera equipment is expensive, and I didn't need to take the pictures, I just needed to facilitate the event and invest in better lenses for them to produce higher quality images. I called my photographers, The Girl Scout Machine Gun Squadron. I was in my early 20s, and coming up with a business that had a quirky name was funny to me. At this point, I was connected to all the local businesses in my small town and knew most of the creatives. I noticed that my real talent was facilitating various entities together and leveraging my network to create great impact. By the end of that year, we did a photo event for a Sunglasses’ company that took over Facebook. At the time, the Facebook page for the Sunglass company had a few hundred Likes, we pumped it up to over 10,000 likes and doubled his sales. Everyone in the city knew the name 2 Bros. & A Laptop, even though it was just me. That’s when I realized that I was playing too small.
Chapter 3: The Bigger Vision
Shaolin Fried Rice movie streaming and Shinobi Underground Social Media
I started thinking, well I’m not going to be able to become a big time CEO with just 2 Bros. & A Laptop, making tiny margins. I needed a Tech company. Netflix was the biggest thing back then, and they had no competition at the time. I coded up a streaming app that focused on the movies Netflix didn’t have and named it Shaolin Fried Rice. Shaolin Fried Rice had Kung Fu, Anime, Monster, Grindhouse, Blaxploitation, Disaster and Japanese Pink movies. Japanese Pink movies were over the top gory insane movies, nothing pornographic, but it did have insane sex scenes. For example, in the movie Sex & Fury, Reiko Ike is attacked by robbers after winning a gambling game while taking a bath. She grabs her Katana, jumps out the bathtub fully nude and proceeds to murder 24 Yakuza men with swords. Famous Japanese Pink movies were Machine Gun Girl, Sex & Fury, Female Yakuza Tale, RoboGeisha, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and some really weird stuff. I figured that Shaolin Fried Rice could be known for the weird Cult Classics that you can’t find anywhere else. My social media app was called Shinobi Underground, it was way ahead of it’s time conceptually, even if I never got around to coding it. It was supposed to be an AR app that allowed the users to be ninjas. Throw Shurikens and sword fight in virtual swords. The Instagram account for Shinobi Underground ended up becoming extremely popular and influenced popular culture for a while. I was surprised how much impact I could create with my tiny little Instagram account. We had annual events such as Top 8 Most Fashionable, where every summer I would pick a fictional genre such as Comic books, Anime or Video games and list the Top 8 most fashionable characters in that genre.
Top 8 Most Fashionable Supervillian Edition: Android 17 & 18 won that year
The Great Debates would happen at the end of each Year, and we would debate both nonsense and serious topics. Fun times! A few days before Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, @shinobi_underground got banned from Instagram. I think it was because I had an elaborate scheme to defeat ******** as a prank, and it may have worked (Russian Bot Farms LOL) … I don’t know. Probably for the best, it took up too much of my time to maintain. I can’t help it, my ideas are powerful. In a future article, I will go into the many risks I took to promote Shaolin Fried Rice and Shinobi Underground in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland which led me to homelessness. Then I rose up from the ashes like a Phoenix and bought my first house. I will also go into how Medallion XLN solves the problems I faced when running Shaolin Fried Rice & Shinobi Underground. So there it is, I am fully doxxed. I’m a hustler who comes up with creative solutions, elaborate plans, and I can build and leverage networks. I’m extremely resourceful, plus you probably can’t whoop me in a fight lol.
Medallion XLN is built to strike at Big Tech’s achilles heel. All my experiences have been leading up to this moment. This was the first half of my story, the 2nd half will tell you what happened when I went to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco to promote Shaolin Fried Rice & Shinobi Underground. I hope this article illustrates what I’m capable of and gets the community excited to invest in Medallion XLN’s ICO.
Next entry in this series will discuss how I tried to build a user base for Shaolin Fried Rice & Shinobi Underground in the New York, Los Angeles & San Francisco markets
To be continued…
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Personal instagram: @dwaynekshrn
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DwayneCreates/
For my other company Shinobi International Clothing Co. (SICC). I recently did an unboxing for our Sour Gummi 22 Hi Tops. 10,000 NFT variation coming as soon as Medallion XLN launches.
Ask me anything!
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