Doomscrolling Twitter doesn't usually lead to building a million-dollar business... but for Clifton Sellers, that's exactly how it happened.
This Hampton member went from "stupid broke" with two kids to building Legacy Builder, a content agency making over seven figures a year. Raised in rural Alabama and battling addiction in his youth, Clifton's path to entrepreneurship wasn't exactly straightforward.
In our exclusive Hampton interview, Clifton doesn't hold back on the roller coaster that took him from sending 100 DMs a day to hitting million-dollar run rates:
- How he gained 40,000 Twitter followers in a single month and leveraged that into paying clients.
- Quit a stable job after scaling his side hustle to $50k/month (and doubled revenue afterward).
- How he went from a $10 DIY website to commanding premium rates from elite clients running $100M businesses.
For founders wondering if your "guy/gal with laptop" hustle can evolve into something bigger, Clifton’s no-BS insights are probably what you need to hear right now.
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
My name is Clifton Sellers. I'm a guy from Birmingham, Alabama that grew up in lower Alabama off of County Road. Single parent household. My mother passed away at a young age. I was adopted at three months old and battled with drug addiction as a kid. Ended up playing football and kind of reversing my entire life from there. First person to get out of that pattern.
The business I started was a content business. It started on the back end of… well, I worked in higher education and fundraising for almost seven years in the nonprofit space. And then I was super broke. Like, stupid broke. I had two young kids and no way to create wealth.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
So one night, I was sitting on my couch doomscrolling Twitter, and I saw this guy who said, "I make $1,000 a week online." And I thought it was a scam. But I bought this $30 Gumroad course, and it was like this 12-page Word document. It was the most generic stuff in the world.
My wife woke up and was like, "What are you doing?" And I said, "I'm launching a Twitter account."
She goes, "What does that mean?"
And I was like, "I have no idea."
So I’m just typing on this iPad. That led me to trying e-commerce, Amazon dropshipping—basically, the seven circles of hell when it comes to making money online.
Then in early 2022, I just started writing content. In March alone, I gained 40,000 followers on Twitter and completely fell in love with it. From there, I started writing for other people, and eventually, I launched my own business, Legacy Builder.
In the beginning, I did everything—fulfillment, scheduling, writing, all of it. I kept my full-time job even as the business grew. I mean, we hit $50,000 a month, and I was still working a full-time job.
I finally quit on April 10, 2023, and went all in. That year, the business almost doubled.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product…
The first client I ever had paid me $200. He was a kid in Ireland, a fitness trainer. But the first real founder I signed was a leadership coach. She paid me $4,000 a month, and I handled everything for her. I basically took over her entire account—tweets, threads, everything. She grew to 68,000 followers in 16 weeks.
Describe the process of launching the business.
You know, there are two phases to that answer. So number one is basically—I was case study number one. I showed that I could grow my account, and I got clients from that. When I got my first clients, I hit my first scaling milestone of $30,000 a month. I used to send a hundred DMs a day on Twitter. I was just ripping DMs—sending a hundred straight. I didn’t have any money for marketing, so it was all sweat equity.
I’d say how I ended up in the position I’m in today started about a year ago. We did a total rebrand and relaunch. Before that, I was just 'guy with laptop.' Okay, so I’m 'guy with laptop'—you hire 'guy with laptop' to build your business. But it was very much like, 'Who the hell is this guy? Is he gonna steal money from me?' It felt kind of cloak and dagger.
I went to this guy and said, 'I want to be a real business. I want to be legitimized in this space.' So we went through a full rebrand. If you go to my website now—before, I had a no-code Carrd page. My website was literally a Carrd page I built myself for like $10. We overhauled everything—new logo, messaging, positioning. I paid for this. I spent two grand on a video to live on the website, shot it out here in Birmingham—all these things.
We launched this new brand with a new logo, new colors, new everything. And literally overnight, the quality of people coming to our business completely changed. We went from being this scrappy, makeshift growth hacker thing to an actual content agency—one that writes amazing content for founders, actually cares about them, and wants to grow with them. After the relaunch, the business doubled again. And that’s when we started hitting the seven-figure run rate we’re seeing now.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
I think sophistication is a big word when you go from a small shop to more of a B2B business. You almost have to sophisticate yourself because when you start working with people running $10 million, $20 million, $100 million businesses, they want somebody who knows what they're doing—someone professional, who’s going to show up.
One of our core things—the biggest thing—is that we just started positioning ourselves as the solution. We have competitors, of course, everybody does. But we wanted to be a no-brainer option at the top end of the content space for founder-led content. It started with a rebrand. When you look at a side-by-side comparison, we’re the obvious choice.
Our differentiator—why choose us over other people—is that we obsess over content. We do what we sell every single day. Our business is built on the back of organic content. We scaled to over a million dollars. I just started running ads. Before that, I didn’t run any ads, nothing. All my business came inbound, through referrals, from the content we create. And the reason we attract people is we know what we're doing, and our systems are really dialed. These are incredibly busy people that we work with.
We needed a way to write content for people, which is an extremely hard thing to do because you're writing for another person—it has to sound like them, they have to like it, they have to approve it, and it has to go live under their name. So we had to dial in the systems to get the voice, tone, and direction just right. And we had to do a good enough job that they wanted to stick around.
We kind of moved away from ghostwriting to a content agency model because we wanted to be able to tell people who we work with. Some clients still prefer to keep it private, and that’s fine. But we’ve evolved into this content agency model where we're working with incredible founders, and now they’re openly saying that we do their content. That helped us retain clients and attract even more people.
Another thing is that it’s not just transactional. We want to be our clients' content team for everything. If there’s a launch coming up, a new product, a new season—whatever it is—we want to be the team that brings it all to life through content. So as the business grows, as the founders grow, their content grows with them, and we’re executing that at a high level.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
We want to be a one-stop shop for personal branding for founders, CEOs, and agency owners. People should be able to come to us to build on social, start newsletters, and create video content—all with Legacy Builder.
And another thing I didn't even mention—we do content, but we also handle outbound systems for our clients. DM connections, outbound requests—all the actions that funnel traffic to their website and business. We also build targeted email lists and manage their newsletters. If you tried to build all that in-house, it’d be incredibly complex.
Did you ever have an “oh shit” moment where you thought it wouldn’t work?
Yeah, I think there are a lot of them—trying to think of good ones that look good but don’t make me look terrible. Oh, this is a decent one:
There was a time I had just quit my job, and I had my first real employee situation. They were handling an incredible amount of work, but they weren’t doing a good job, and we were losing a lot of clients. I had to make the decision to let them go, even though they had basically helped build the company to where it was at that point. And I hated it. It almost broke me as a human because I don’t like firing people. I don’t.
But as a founder, I had to make this really tough choice—if I wanted the business to get to where I envisioned it, we had to make changes. So we moved on really amicably. But that moment catapulted us into bringing in a more functional COO, building out our processes, and tightening our systems. And there have been times, man—sometimes it just doesn’t work out. One of the biggest lessons I learned early on in my agency and in business is that if it’s not a fit, I don’t try to force it anymore. If it’s not a fit with a client, that’s perfectly fine—we just move on. But nine times out of ten, it is.
Then there are all the crazy moments, like the first time I did taxes—that was wild. And these platforms, man. The algo shifts are insane. One day something’s working, then Elon Musk takes over Twitter, and suddenly everyone’s freaking out—"Twitter’s gonna disappear!" The algorithms change, personal brands are dead. LinkedIn goes through shifts all the time. Newsletters are hard. It’s a tough game because there are so many factors to keep up with. And honestly, that’s the number one reason people hire us—because there’s really no platform problem we can’t overcome… other than a platform just completely shutting down. Which is why we encourage all our clients to build an email list.
But there are days, man. I’ll never forget—there was this one time when Twitter made a massive shift to its ads platform. It completely nuked the way we did business. Elon just came in and flipped a switch, and I was like, holy crap. I ended up staying up for 48 straight hours, just locked in, trying to figure out a new way to make it work. And we did. We’ve been doing that for years now. But one day, that way will disappear too, and I’ll have to lock myself in a room again to figure it out.
That’s kind of our secret sauce—we live in these algorithms. When one door closes, we find the other one.
Is that a good answer?
What platform/tools are absolutely crucial for your business?
We keep it pretty simple. Notion is our go-to for all of our operational stuff, and Metricool handles all of our scheduling and posting across Twitter and LinkedIn. For newsletters, we use Beehiiv as our default platform.
On the DM management side, we use tools like Expandy for outreach and Engage for LinkedIn engagement when needed. For outbound on Twitter, we use Drippy AI, and Metricool also helps with posting there.
It’s not that complicated.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I send every one of our employees the book Unreasonable Hospitality. It’s our number one core principle at Legacy Builder. I’m fascinated by the restaurant industry, and basically, we want people to feel like they’re eating at a five-star. There are all these little moments you can create in a client experience, and that book is completely—I've read it like three times a year.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Pick one skill, obsess over it—just become obsessed with it. Once you’ve got that skill, the biggest hurdle you have to get over is time. A lot of us want to rush time, but the only thing you can do is pick a direction and say, "This is what I want," and then micro-learn your way there. Information has never been easier to attain than it is right now.
Every skill gap you have is probably the reason you're not scaling your business or reaching your goals as an early entrepreneur. It’s usually a skill issue—you’re either not good at sales, not good at fulfillment, or not good at X, Y, or Z.
Your job is to find something you're naturally gifted at, identify a problem you can solve, and then overcome the skill issue standing between you and the next level. That skill issue could be: How do I create an offer? Once you figure that out, the next question is: How do I get someone to pay me for it? Then, how do I get more people to pay me for it? Eventually, it evolves into: What kind of business do I want to run? How do I hire and retain people?
Every time you reach a new summit, there’s a new skill issue you have to solve to get to the next one. You just have to be obsessed with solving problems for people and overcoming the skill gaps that stand between you and your next level.
Can you share a specific example of how being part of the Hampton community has helped you achieve a goal or tackle a challenge?
There are multiple. I'll give you two.
One is—I launched a SaaS product with a guy I met in Hampton. We've never met in person, and we launched a full SaaS that's almost at $20,000 a month.
On the relational side—how did Hampton help me overcome challenges? I'd say I've been to two Hampton events: a golf trip and one of the foundation retreats. One of the things I brought into Hampton was this question: Am I good enough? Am I good enough to be around all these incredible entrepreneurs?
Going to those events made me realize—I talked with Jordan, I talked with several founders, and even though they were ahead of me monetarily, they were still wrestling with who they wanted to be and what kind of impact they wanted to make on the world. And I think the biggest takeaway I've had since joining Hampton is: we’re all just trying to figure it out, man.
We're all incredibly talented people with problems and families and businesses and everything that comes with that, but at the end of the day, we're all just wrestling with what type of impact do we want to make on the world? And how do we want to do that?
That question—am I good enough to be around these people?—was quickly answered by a community that’s warm, welcoming, and just wants to help you grow. Not just make more money, but actually become—become a better person, embrace the journey, and make something meaningful out of it all.
And through it all, I've become way more level-headed.
Where can we go to learn more?
Personally, I find being the CEO of a startup to be downright exhilarating. But, as I'm sure you well know, it can also be a bit lonely and stressful at times, too.
Because, let's be honest, if you're the kind of person with the guts to actually launch and run a startup, then you can bet everyone will always be asking you a thousand questions, expecting you to have all the right answers -- all the time.
And that's okay! Navigating this kind of pressure is the job.
But what about all the difficult questions that you have as you reach each new level of growth and success? For tax questions, you have an accountant. For legal, your attorney. And for tech. your dev team.
This is where Hampton comes in.
Hampton's a private and highly vetted network for high-growth founders and CEOs.
