The Opportunity Strategy That Took Us From 0 to 35 Million Followers

Business Is the Game of Opportunity

How did I get to where I'm at today? It was all completely driven by sets of circumstances that made it possible for me to accomplish a goal. That's the definition of opportunity. The game of business is all about how much attention you can capture and how you can service that attention, and attention flows to the people who spot opportunities early.

You have to be constantly obsessed with the game of opportunity. What are these circumstances, ever changing in this landscape, that are going to open up the door for you to accomplish your goals? Because here's the hard truth: all of these opportunities eventually will be gone. The window closes. The question is whether you were riding the wave or watching it from the beach.

A Great Asset Is Worthless Without Distribution

In 2010, my father had written a book, The Power of Your Metabolism. It was a bestseller in Puerto Rico. In the US, nobody knew it. Today we have it in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, you name it. But back then, I needed to get that book seen by people, because it was a really good book.

So I found a book distributor, and they started helping us get the book out there. That was an opportunity right there. But here's the lesson underneath it: the book itself was an important asset, but that asset without being promoted correctly is worthless. It doesn't matter how good the book is. If you don't know how to get it out there into the world, it's not going to have a lot of value. A book is only as valuable as it can be seen and read by people. That's true of every asset you own.

YouTube: Feeding the Algorithm When Nobody Was Watching

In 2012, the most important opportunity of the entire journey occurred: YouTube. For the first year, nobody paid attention. Nobody was watching. But we were feeding the algorithm. We were consistent. We were persistent with our content, putting it out there, believing in the long-term view. We just kept on going.

Today that channel has 9.3 million subscribers, growing fast, producing 20 to 25 million views a month. All of it without spending a penny to promote that channel. It brings us phone calls and business all day long. It's a legacy channel, because my father passed away almost four years ago, and that content is still producing 90,000 to 120,000 new subscribers a month. Even though he's gone, he's changing lives every single day and helping his company generate attention, make the phones ring, and make sales occur at all times.

Around 2013, we started taking my father's content and blasting it all over social media. Facebook and Instagram were just getting started. In 2014, I launched the Amazon channel for NaturalSlim, another major opportunity: a growing platform bringing in third-party sellers and giving them access to its audiences in exchange for great quality products. I jumped all over that. In 2015, we went deep into the live content era, some of the first ever YouTube Live and Facebook Live broadcasts. If I don't ride that opportunity wave, I miss it.

The Phone Call That Changed Our Volume

In 2016, a new client of mine was producing 14 videos a week. My father was doing four. I called him up in Puerto Rico and said, "Dad, he's doing 14. You're doing four. We need to step up. It's not enough. I want us to grow faster." He agreed. We started doing seven videos a week.

That was an important moment. If I don't have that conversation right then and there, instead of having 2,700 videos, I would have 1,600 videos today. That's a big deal, because I'm using those videos to continue to expand his legacy, to make him immortal in this world, to impact the lives of people. Our content now reaches 70 to 80 million people every single month.

That same year we sat in Gary Vaynerchuk's office, and he gave us advice I'll never forget: figure out the minimum amount of money you want to take home, the lowest number, and spend every other dollar on Facebook. Take as little money as possible to your pockets. Invest every single penny on Facebook, because you've got about 36 months before it's gone. Why was he saying that? Because it was so cheap to advertise on Facebook in that year. We took that advice and went all in. Facebook advertising from 2016 to 2019 was the opportunity that catapulted us, got us a lot more attention, and let us double year after year after year.

5 Million to 35 Million: The Short-Form Wave

In 2018, we went heavy on our own Shopify e-commerce. We had so much attention, so many audiences, that we decided to bring our own traffic to our own store, because Amazon keeps a large amount of that topline revenue. We wanted to control the traffic. Another opportunity.

Then came the biggest one. From 2020 to 2024, we went from 5 million followers to 35 million followers, with my father no longer producing content. Why? A set of circumstances opened the door: short-form content. Facebook Reels, Instagram Reels, later YouTube Shorts, and the one that got it all started, TikTok. It became the era of one-minute, 90-second videos, and we started taking off in a big way.

The entire journey of the NaturalSlim world, the MetabolismoTV world, the Frank Suarez world, is built on opportunity riding: discovering what opportunities are present and jumping all over them. Because all these opportunities eventually will be gone. The next one is opening right now. Are you obsessed enough to see it?