In this VIP Case Study, we feature Vadim Moda – a multimillionaire entrepreneur who has built multiple thriving online communities under the “Moda” brand.
Vadim’s communities are essentially a network or club for entrepreneurs, dealers, traders, collectors, and hustlers in the luxury assets niche. Moda communities primarily operate via private Facebook groups and chats, which makes their accomplishments that much more intriguing.
In our opinion, the most impressive thing about The Moda Club is that many of its members are multimillionaires (and a few are low-key billionaires), and the Moda brand has a cult-like loyal following consisting of an elite crowd!
So, how did Vadim Moda do it? How was a seemingly regular guy able to bring hundreds of thousands of people together and convert them into loyal members of his brand tribe?
We asked Vadim a series of questions about the marketing strategies he implemented in his journey, and we shared his insightful responses to each of our questions in the following sections of this exclusive VIP Case Study.
Enjoy this epic edition of Vavoza Insider Plus!
– Team Vavoza
How did you earn your initial full-time income as an entrepreneur?
I got married, and my wife and I both had full-time jobs. Six months into our marriage, I just quit my job out of the blue, and I was like, “I can definitely run a business.”
So, I quit my job cold turkey, and I didn’t really have a plan. I sold my cars, and I think I had 30-35 grand to get me by. This was in April 2017.
The first thing I tried was an online women’s boutique – that failed pretty epically. Then, I found out this thing where I could build up a brand on Poshmark. I realized that Poshmark gave you 3 days to ship, and Amazon would get it to you in two days. So, I’d find cool products on Amazon, list them as my own, and put better descriptions with better SEO.
Poshmark had one flat fee for shipping. If you were to buy shoes on eBay, for instance, shipping would be like $20, whereas on Poshmark, it was like $5. So there was an opportunity there, even with the fees, to sell it on Poshmark, even if you bought it somewhere else.
And all you had to do was repackage it, make it look nice, and ship it off so it didn’t look like it came from China.
So, I was doing a “hybrid dropshipping” model.
I wouldn’t say that was my first full-time income, but that was after about six months and losing almost all my money buying inventory that didn’t work, and that’s why I had to pivot to the hybrid dropshipping model.
My first full-time income came from using the audience I built on Poshmark. I started buying and selling cheap/older Louis Vuitton bags, and later, I went to MCM bags. That was my first real full-time income. That was how I made my first $10,000 in a month.
The boutique made me like three grand in a month one time. That’s as much as I got, and that was shipping like 20 packages a day – it wasn’t sustainable. But buying and selling cheap wallets, belts, small bags, etc. – that ended up making me my first ten grand a month.
But the thing is, the moment I made my first ten grand a month, I just shut it all off. I was like so down at that point. I took half the money to try to live on, and the other half, I went and bought my first Rolex to flip. And that is how it started.
– Vadim Moda
What marketing strategies took you to a six-figure annual income as an entrepreneur?
I started utilizing my personal Facebook page and organic Facebook reach. I did networking the hard way.
I would go into random Facebook groups and anything that I might know something about (in this case, it was watches) I would answer people’s questions in a way that went so much farther than anyone else would. And I did it for no reason besides them being like, “Okay, this guy knows something; I’m gonna check out his profile…” or whatever.
I joined a whole bunch of Facebook groups. I didn’t try poaching – I didn’t try telling people to do something. All I did was help as many people as possible and put out a lot of valuable content that would get people to follow me.
I also got into a dealer-to-dealer watch group, and all I would do was just buy watches from them and sell them back to them. I wasn’t really making money there; I was just building a community of people who like watches and highly qualified watch collectors.
The way the first $100,000 happened was I basically made a post on my Facebook profile saying, “I am creating a FB group, and I’m putting everyone I’ve ever bought from and sold to and vice versa into one place. I’m cutting myself out, and my only request is you do things on these terms: [and I had extremely strict rules].”
At first, I made zero money for three months, but then I learned that people were so thankful that they were just giving me the best watch deals, and I would just sell them back in the group for a profit.
The group had a lot of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) at the time because I was only accepting people I had done business with before. Eventually, we opened it up, and it just continued growing.
So, my first six-figure-a-year income came 100% from flipping watches.
– Vadim Moda
What marketing strategies took you to a seven-figure annual income as an entrepreneur?
For seven figures, I really had to learn how to leverage virtually everything. So, seven figures came from subscription groups, advertising, and things of that nature.
I had to leverage absolutely everybody – I had to leverage people to make more content because the more content is made, the more people engage with it. The more people engage with it, the more people know about it. And more people add in more people, and that’s how it grows.
How did you leverage people to post more content?
I like to find the arbitrage opportunities where there is something missing.
So, what is the missing link between a dealer, a watch trader, and a watch collector? If the collector wants a better deal, they have to do it way faster, ask fewer questions, and know what they’re buying without dealing with all these other things.
The way we did it was by simply being very strict with our rules and what posts we approved and didn’t approve.
- For instance, if you’re selling your watch, we are not going to approve it unless it’s priced right. And a lot of people want to sell their watch, but they are also like, “Well, this watch is going for $30,000 online” – no one is actually paying that amount.
If we know that the real number a particular watch buys and sells for is $25,000, we’re not going to approve that post unless it’s priced at $25K.
Now, someone who knows watches knows the watch is worth $25K, but the chance of them finding one for sale somewhere for $25K is not going to happen unless it was in our group.
As a result, people were just like, “Wow! The guy listed it, and it sold 30 seconds later – I want that! And I don’t care about trying to make an extra thousand bucks; I’d rather have that safe deal from someone I know and trust.”
So that’s how we built the trust via the transactions and how we built transactions via the content.
The reason why we are successful is that we brought so much liquidity to the watch market. We have all the dealers; virtually anyone who is a watch dealer in the country is part of one of our communities – there are very few who are not. And that gives you an insanely qualified buyer pool that is willing to write a check or send a wire for any amount, as long as it’s priced right.
So, you combine that with retail parties who don’t have an avenue. Say you live in a random small town – you can’t just Google “local watch dealer” because all these people are hidden, and they only work with people they know.
So, you have this situation where, say, you have a $20,000 Rolex – where are you going to sell it?
If you need money, you go to a pawn shop, and they’ll give you what, like 8-10 grand? Or you go to a Rolex AD, and they might be like, “Well, we’ll buy it for $12K,” when you can sell it in our group for $18K – and it will be gone in 30 seconds.
How did you convert people from a free group into a paid group?
The best way to explain how to get people from a free to a paid group is you make the free group so damn good that people are like, “If we buy something from them, it’s got to be epic.”
That’s the way we did it.
To get the subscription groups growing, I made them so cheap in the beginning that the people who made a fortune off me for free paid to join (just because). So, we ended up getting this really, really high-quality customer base.
And by cheap, I mean the first 150 people got in at like 10 or 20 bucks a month for a product that, a Lifetime Membership we don’t sell anymore, is now going for like $5,500 on the resale market – you can only get it from someone who already has it.
– Vadim Moda
What strategies did you focus on in 2023, and what are you focusing on in 2024?
In 2023, we pivoted from going small and wide (like a cheap product) to a very niche-specific and extremely expensive product.
Instead of trying to get, say, a dollar from 500,000 people, we put our focus on getting a big chunk from a small number of people, but now we can dedicate all our time to just helping that small group of people. So, we started an advertising program.
That was our big pivot last year.
We also made a cheaper group that is more accessible but still has premium benefits because some of our other groups have gotten so expensive that they’re out of reach unless you’re really into that niche.
The new group is a little bit of everything – it gives you a lot of the perks that our other paid groups have, but it’s almost a tenth of the price of some of our groups.
In 2024, we are really doubling down on what worked in 2023. So, we’re spending way more time on the really high-ticket items. We are also spending more time on really low-end items because the middle section is growing very consistently, and I don’t like to touch things unless they’re broken.
– Vadim Moda
What advice would you give to someone who is just getting started as an entrepreneur?
The thing that people get wrong is they get an idea, and that’s it; they think that’s “the thing” that will work for them. Anyone I’ve ever talked to who is super successful has done a thousand things in the beginning and failed.
The way I did it was I didn’t try to make something big happen. I would try three new things that could potentially make money every single day until something worked. And I was very religious about that.
I heard this quote: “It takes 10 years of work to become an overnight success.” But you can put in those 10 years’ worth of work in a year, or you can put in 10 years’ worth of work over 60 years, and you won’t see success until you put in that work.
So, I figured if I did three new ideas every single day, eventually, something would stick. The moment one thing stuck, I just did more of it and continued trying more things.
Now I’m at the point where if I can do one idea a month, I’m good. But back then it was three every single day like clockwork. “Grinding it out” is a very easy way of saying it – as you probably know, it’s torture.
Money-mindset advice:
I believe that people have the wrong sense of how much money you need to make to have any kind of impact on your lifestyle. Everyone compares it to a W-2 job where you are guaranteed a paycheck, and you’re clocking out after work.
Say someone is making $60,000 a year now. They think, “If I make $100,000 for myself, I get to keep a hundred thousand.”
In real life, at a $100,000 income as a sole proprietor, if you are the owner and operator of the business, you are still working for a minimum wage. If you break down how many hours you put into it, at $100K, you are earning below the minimum wage.
What you really need to focus on is getting to that first $250,000 a year – that’s kind of where you get some breathing room.
Then, for instance, if you’re a single male without any crazy vices or expenses, your life becomes noticeably betterafter about $350,000 a year. And if you have kids and a wife, chances are you need to make $550-600,000 a year to get there.
Now, for the people who just made their first $100K, hearing the “million dollars a year” thing gets so out of whack that it seems unachievable. But to go from $100,000 to $500,000, all it takes is working smarter at what you do.
To make the million, you gotta start leveraging stuff, and not many people can do that.
So, if I were to set a target for someone to make a real impactful income for their family, it would be in that $350-600,000 range because between there and $1,000,000 a year, nothing really changes besides the kind of stress you have.
– Vadim Moda
Bonus: Vadim’s Reddit Marketing Tactic
In the early days, my thing was I wanted to be extremely polarizing. So, I’d present something that is usually very classy in a way that you can’t just scroll past it.
For instance, the thing that I’m famous for is something called “a mortgage arm.” What I would do is put a lot of really expensive watches on one arm, and I’d hang them over a balcony.
It drove people nuts because normally, when you’re talking about, say, a $100,000 watch, you’re like, “Oooh, look at this; look at it from this angle.” Meanwhile, I was over there with an armful over a balcony, and they were just like, “What is wrong with this guy?”
- Note from Nazar, General Sales Manager at Moda: “It’s a point to add that the people on Reddit are extreme like that. They would think it’s crazy to hold a $5,000 watch over a balcony, so to see Vadim doing it with really expensive stuff drove them crazy to the point where they hated him for what he was doing.”
The way that I really got people on Reddit to convert was that most of the people commenting were talking about like $5,000 watches, but the ones I was posting were extremely expensive, and you’re seeing a ton of them in one picture.
So, anyone who knew anything about watches was like, “Holy crap, this guy has something, and he’s not trying to target the people who are commenting; he’s targeting me. I gotta figure out what he does or how he does it.”
It built so much FOMO that they just had to find out. I never told them about our group; they just found it. This tactic rocketed us from $300,000 to about $700,000 – that’s where it was super impactful.
– Vadim Moda
Closing Remarks
Vadim Moda is a truly impressive, modern entrepreneur. The Moda Club is a powerhouse in the luxury assets niche, but its influence doesn’t end there. Today, Moda has ties in all sorts of industries and niches thanks to the power of the communities Vadim has built.
The Moda network is responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in commerce, and it all started with one ambitious man who quit his job (without a backup plan) and decided to pursue entrepreneurship.
If you read carefully, you can clearly see that Vadim became successful because he constantly learned from his experiences and found unique ways to solve problems for others in his niche.
It’s cliche, but solving problems and helping others succeed is the ultimate path to success. Vadim Moda is living proof of someone who created solutions that first enriched others and, consequently, enriched himself.
Take the valuable advice Vadim shared in this exclusive VIP Case Study, learn from his experiences, and be inspired by his success so that you can build (or optimize) your own business empire in the coming years.
– Team Vavoza
