How I Revived a 20+ Year Old Product and Sold 70,000+ Units at 22
It started with a 6-second video of a stretchy monkey being dropped on a bathroom floor.
The product was called the "stretchy, indestructible monkey." An old Chinese toy, basically an animal version of Stretch Armstrong that never really made it to market. When I first saw it on TikTok, something took control of me. I can't explain it any other way. It was like a current so strong I had no option but to follow it.
The only seller I could find was some random website in Italy. The whole thing was in Italian. I don't speak Italian. I spent 30 to 40 minutes fumbling through Google Translate, trying to figure out how to buy this damn monkey toy. Eventually, my order went through.
Here's what's weird: up until that moment, I had never bought anything from social media. Not a single ad had ever gotten me. But this monkey? I couldn't scroll past it. Looking back, I think about all the ways this could have never happened. What if I got home two minutes later that day? What if the algorithm showed me something else? What if I just liked the video and kept scrolling like a normal person?
But no. Something told me I needed this toy. And something in the back of my head was already whispering that I needed to start posting videos of it.
The First Video
A week later, the monkey arrived. I picked it up after school, unpacked it, and just stared at this weird 4.5-pound squishy thing. I took a bunch of pictures. I had no plan. All I had was a feeling. I knew this monkey was special. I just knew it.
I went to my bathroom to record a video of me dropping it on the floor. The first take was bad. So was the second. If you scroll back in my camera roll from that day, you'll find maybe 20 videos of a toy monkey being dropped on bathroom tiles. It took me a solid 30 minutes to get the shot I wanted.
But something was still missing. The original video I saw had no background music, and mine felt too quiet. So I went on YouTube and found this random interview video filmed somewhere in New York City. I've tried to find it since but I can't. The audio you hear in my TikTok is just ambient NYC street noise layered underneath. It made the video feel alive without adding anything obvious.
I posted it from my personal account, @frederikfeldt. In Denmark, "going viral" usually meant 3,000 to 5,000 likes. The video got around 3,500 in a few days. Cool, I thought. Nice little moment.
Watch the original video here
Then It Exploded
At the time, I was working as a fry cook at a fish and chips place while finishing my last year of high school. My days were brutal: school from 8am to 2pm, then work from 4 or 5pm until around 10:30pm. One day I walk into work and check my phone. The video is at 100,000 likes.
I was freaking out. I had never seen numbers like that. I shoved my phone in my pocket and forced myself not to check it for my entire five-hour shift. When I finally sat down with my post-work beer and opened TikTok, I was at 250,000 likes and 25,000 followers.
I changed my handle to @monkeman317 that same night.
The video kept climbing. One million likes. Then two. Then three. Then four million likes and 400,000 followers. All from one video of a monkey being dropped on a bathroom floor.
Young, Dumb, and Blind to the Opportunity
Here's where I have to be honest. I was 18 or 19, and I had absolutely no idea what I was sitting on.
I was eager to start a business, but I kept chasing the wrong things. I tried NFTs. Crypto investing. Stocks. At one point I was trying to raise funds to run a crypto casino from some small island like Malta. Meanwhile, I had this viral account just sitting there.
My life at the time was chaos. I had an apartment that cost me $1,250 a month, which is insane for an 18-year-old in Denmark. I had a girlfriend who wanted to go to Paris in the fall. I sold a chunk of my NVIDIA stock to take her. They say chivalry is dead.
And then there was the gambling.
Danish business high schools have a weirdly high rate of gambling addicts. I was one of them. Every day I'd sit at the back of class with the boys, spinning slots on our phones. It got bad. I even reached out to gambling websites with my monkey account to fund my habit. One of them gave me $5,000 in credit. I lost it all the same day.
All this chaos was happening while the real opportunity, the thing that could have changed everything, was staring me right in the face. I just couldn't see it yet.
Everything Falls Apart
Eight months later, the monkey account was dead. And my life was falling apart fast.
First, I dumped my girlfriend. I couldn't handle being screamed at for positioning a vase wrong after being at school, gym, work, and studying for 18 hours straight. So that was done.
Then work fell apart. I used to love my job at the fish and chips place. The head chef was this Greek guy named Billy, and we had a great thing going. Post-work beers on the company tab, good routines, sales records. Then Billy left for a real chef job, and this new head chef came in. Everything changed overnight. No more fun. No more flow. So I did what any 19-year-old with too much confidence would do: I tried to stage a quiet coup against her.
The bosses found out. I got fired.
Now I had no job, no savings (I'd lost basically everything to crypto and NFT projects that went nowhere), and rent I couldn't pay. I had shaved my head bald for some reason. My face was covered in acne. It was a complete shit show.
The breaking point came during a family dinner. My older brothers made some innocent joke about me being broke. They had no idea what was actually going on. But when I heard it, something snapped. I got up, went to the bathroom, and just broke down crying on the floor. Twenty minutes later, my parents came and found me. I told them everything. We agreed I'd move back home.
I've been very privileged my whole life. I grew up in a big house with a pool and a jacuzzi, and we had a winter chalet in the Norwegian mountains. But this was the first time I'd been on my own, and I had failed completely. I was really, really bad at being on my own.
The Turning Point
I sent an email to my landlord, told him I was moving out, promised my parents I'd stop gambling, and tried to get a grip on things.
Then, the very next day, something happened that changed everything.
I showed up to school, said hi to everyone like normal. It was a math class. The boys asked if I wanted to throw in $10 to play slots together. Thirty bucks total between the three of them. I said no. I wanted to actually try to get my grades up in those last few months. I was paired with the smartest girl in class. I wanted to focus.
You can probably guess what happened next.
My three friends start screaming and jumping around like maniacs. They just hit a $10,000 bonus with the thirty bucks I decided not to be part of. They didn't give a damn about class. The teacher was cheering them on. (Fun fact: we went to the casino with that teacher after graduation. Turns out he was a registered gambling addict who used his cousin's passport to get in. I know. Wild.) They ran out into the hallways dancing and yelling.
It stung. Really bad. For about ten seconds.
And then something clicked.
Instead of feeling angry or jealous or sorry for myself, I felt this rush of hope and determination. I remember the exact thought that went through my head: Of course there's a way out there for me to make $10,000 in 30 days.
That became my goal. My bank account probably had three dollars in it. But I was absolutely certain I could do it.
Back to the Monkey
Remember that stretchy monkey toy?
I went straight home and ordered another one. The original color was sold out, so I got a grey one instead. I signed up for a free Shopify trial, threw together the ugliest website you've ever seen with one picture and a $24.99 price tag, and posted a single video.
That video got 140 million views.
The website was so bad that my conversion rate was around 0.2%. Even with that, I made about $20,000 in my first month.
Now I had proof. The question was: how do I scale this?
I went on Alibaba and started messaging Chinese suppliers, all of them calling me "dear" at every opportunity. I liked it. I ordered from one of them. And I got scammed. It took three months to deliver the first batch of monkeys to customers. I had around a hundred chargebacks. I made basically no profit.
I was so bad at running this business that I seriously considered shutting it down and getting a job selling phones at the local store.
But I wanted to give it one more shot.
The Amazon Bet
I had gotten interested in Amazon FBA, so I used basically my last bit of money to send 500 units to a warehouse in the US. They sold out in two days.
Awesome. We were back.
I kept going. Order more, sell out, scale. It doesn't really work that smoothly on Amazon, but I made it work. Within 12 to 16 months of selling there, I had done over $1 million in sales.
From there, I branched out into new products and new projects. I kept growing my social channels. I hit new records, like having a single video reach half a billion views. We even sent our toys to space on a professional weather balloon. It's been a wild ride.
What I Learned
I'm 22 now. I feel like I have more experience, both good and bad, than most people my age. I've made a lot of money and lost a lot of money. I've been at rock bottom crying on my parents' bathroom floor, and I've watched my products get launched into the stratosphere.
If there's anything I want you to take from this, it's this: you can just do things.
There are millions of dollars hidden in your phone. All you have to do is press the right buttons to get it out. That's not a metaphor. I built a million-dollar business because I saw a 6-second video, spent 40 minutes buying a weird toy from Italy, and then dropped it on my bathroom floor.
The opportunity was there the whole time. I was just too distracted, too unfocused, and too busy chasing the wrong things to see it. When my back was finally against the wall and I had nothing left to lose, I stopped overthinking and just did it.
Sometimes the thing you're looking for is already right in front of you. You just have to stop scrolling past it.