David Freudenberg, ‘SEO With David’ – Focus On Separating You From Your Competition to Generate Increases in Lead Quality

NO child ever says I want to be a CEO/entrepreneur when I grow up. What did you want to be and how did you get where you are today?

David Freudenberg: When I was a child, I had a burning desire to be a professional basketball player in the NBA. I would spend 3 hours every day practicing basketball. I practiced so much the grass in the front yard around the sidewalk turned into the dirt as I shot jump shot after jump shot. 

Unfortunately, the parenting that I had as a child could not drive me to basketball practices and games. It was not a lack of money that hindered this dream. It was a lack of focus on parenting. My father was a very successful real estate investor that had three websites ranking for the largest keywords in the country for generating real estate investing leads on Google. Keywords such as “We Buy Houses” or “We Buy Houses Florida’. Before I was eight years old, my father was in my life regularly. After the age of 8, I began public school. Before that, I was homeschooled. At the same time, the real estate market was crashing around 2006 and onward, which led to him dogmatically working away to distract himself and support us.

On the other hand, my Mom has a borderline personality disorder and has been neglectful and abusive throughout my childhood. She would refuse to take me to games because she did not care. I recall a moment in time when my Mom was driving me to football practice after hours of myself negotiating with her to take me and reciting how important it is that I am there on time. Well, I was running late to the football practice, and my Mom just finished up buying my siblings and me Chick Fil A. When she got pulled over by the cops for making an illegal U-turn, she immediately began yelling and cursing at me that it was my fault for being pulled over because I insisted on going to football practice. Long story short, the cop drove me to football practice instead of my Mom! 

My parents were incapable of taking me to practices and games, so I could not play basketball throughout middle school and high school, which killed those dreams.

My Dad let the real estate investing company go as I got older, and our family lost everything. From 14 to 19, I lived in a mobile home and slept on the floor. The mobile home had holes in the bathroom floor, and the shower was in shambles. Around the age of 13 to 14, I wanted to work to get away from my Mom, who would make home life a living hell. My father would not let me work or drive until I was 18 years old because I had anger problems and he was concerned with me getting into a road rage car accident. He started working at the age of 9, which stripped him of childhood, so he wanted me to have a childhood. When I turned 17, I got my first job at Cracker Barrel while still in high school, making about $100 a week at the same time my sister gave me a car to drive when I turned 18 and got my license. Then my Dad said I had to start paying rent of $200 a month, buying some of my food, and pay my car insurance. Keep in mind that I was still in high school, somehow doing college classes in school while slacking through high school and missing over 40 days of school a year. When I turned 18, I had my driver’s license, and my car insurance was $650 a month, and I purchased the first cell phone I owned in my life. It was an iPhone 5, which I would spend about $60 a month on the phone bill. Gas for the car cost about $20 a week, which is $80 a month. My total bills were about $990 a month, and I was making $400 a month at Cracker Barrel, which left me $590 a month in the negative. How did I pay my bills, you ask?

I started selling drugs, and I never did drugs in my life. Drug dealing was the first business I started at 18, and I was the perfect candidate. I was a loner that took college classes and barely showed up to school. Nobody would have guessed that I was selling drugs. I remember my Dad saying, “You would never make it selling drugs,” while I made about $1000 a week. 

Fast forward to the end of my drug-dealing career, I got robbed a few times and received regular death threats from bigger drug dealers in the area. I narrowly escaped going to jail when I was pulled over by the cops three times throughout my career. At this point, I decided to stop. I had already gotten a second job at a breakfast restaurant and made about $400 to $500 a week, so I no longer needed to sell drugs. I remember the day I decided to quit. I told myself, “David, you could do better than this. You are destined to do something great in life, and drug dealing does not align with your future.” 

However, I picked up a couple of bad habits during this period of selling drugs. I started smoking weed every day, taking dabs before work regularly. I was addicted to weed; however, I had a plan to quit. I started hanging out with older friends from work that partied regularly. I began drinking and partying every day for months straight. I changed out my weed addiction for alcohol addiction. I would show up to work drunk most days without a lick of sleep. I hated myself and thought life was pointless. I was trying to kill myself accidentally while being drunk. I had a fake ID I shipped from China that the Chinese stole from someone and put my picture on. I was making it a real ID with my photo on it, which landed me in this bar one night next to my work. One night my friend Carter and I challenged the bar manager and owner of the restaurant where we worked to a drink off at the bar, and I was only 19 years old. Fast forward to the end of the night, getting kicked out because I could not walk, and my friend Sam picked me up. I was throwing up outside the window of her car on the highway, and she could not get me to give her coherent directions back to my house, which led to my friend Jordan picking me up to help me get back to my house. At this point, I decided to start opening the car door of my friend’s mustang and fell out of the car while it was moving.

I had scratches all over the side of my face the next morning and was unable to walk. This was when I decided to change my life. I quit drinking cold turkey at that moment. Then I started a real estate investing company and my first website focusing on generating leads from SEO. I started getting counseling through the government, which was better than nothing but rather incompetent. As the real estate investing website started generating leads, I began to get calls while at work. I wanted to quit my job to answer the phone when people would call to sell their house. Quitting my job would enable me to show up at homeowners’ houses who need to sell their houses fast. A mentor from a group I joined told me I could sell links to businesses and use that money to quit my job, so that is what I started doing. 

Then I quit my job and started running both businesses at the same time. Around this time, I met my future wife. She was Mexican and barely spoke English. I met her on Tinder, and she happened to live a couple of miles from my house. We started dating for a couple of months, and it was apparent I needed professional psychological help, and government-provided counseling was not cutting it. I began to pay for my counseling to work on myself to improve my relationship with my wife. Another month passed by, and it was time for my wife to go back to Mexico to renew her tourist visa. She was staying with her sister and brother-in-law in Florida, where I am from. When returning to Florida, she got deported at the airport because she overstayed her visa and was babysitting at a next-door neighbors house for money. 

I made the split-second decision to leave the following week to Mexico to live with my wife to be there. I only had $400 after purchasing my passport and was uncertain if I could return it. I ended up making it in Mexico over the next year and a half and returned home with quite a bit of money, but I quit my real estate investing company during the time away. I found it very challenging to run a startup residential real estate investing company location-specific to Florida while in Mexico for a year and a half. At this point, I decided to double down on the freelance link building company and moved back to Mexico to live with my wife in Puerto Vallarta. 

This brings us to where I am today in Puerto Vallarta with my wife and our dog Poncho growing a freelance link building company doing quite well. We are expecting our first baby in December and are enjoying life mentally and physically healthy. I still attend counseling and have to say it is the best investment of my life. Additionally, I got a mentor through SCORE, who worked alongside the modern inventors of advertising during the mid to late 1900s and some of the largest advertising agencies in the world. With his help, much hard work, reading, systemizing, and taking notes, the business has grown considerably to a team and a couple of managers.