Should your age dictate your success? Eric Luechter is cracking the code for young entrepreneur.

When most of his peers are busy using internet as a playground, Canadian teenager phenom, Eric Luechter, is using it to run his Social Media Marketing Agency (SMMA) deluxe SMM.

You wouldn’t be mistaken in assuming that the recent social tsunami known as Covid, helped and assisted greatly deluxe SMM in becoming a marketing force, however you wouldn’t be totally correct either.

In fact, Eric didn’t wake up one sunny morning, decided to create a SMMA and started his trailblazing. Far form the truth. Like most successful people, Eric had an epiphany moment.

Quite simply, whilst living his teenage life on the internet, he realised that his digital environment was filled with opportunities to spend money. Whether when playing video games, listening to music, watching tv or buying clothes, on internet you are never more than a click away from spending your money!

Therefore, a very simple connection could be made: If money can be spent online, there must be people who are collecting this money. Obviously, we all know about the behemoths that are Amazon, Apple, Google which alone represent a very high proportion of the overall daily expenditure on the web, however there are other very lucrative avenues.

These avenues existence are based on the Web2.0 concept. Often misunderstood and yet not truly exploited, Web2.0 can be summarised as “everything social media”. If you have either Facebook, instagram, Youtube, Twitter or Tik-tok (just to name a few) you are part of the Web2.0 scene.

This is the arena that Eric chose as the ground upon which he was to build his marketing empire. We sat down with Eric to learn more about his journey, his success and challenges, his plans for the future and to understand if and how anyone else could become another Eric.

Eric, thank you for your time, i imagine you are pretty busy in this thanksgiving and post Christmans period.

Thank you for this opportunity. Yes, we are busy, however it’s better to be busy and in high demand than not, so i can’t complain really.

Absolutely. So let’s go back a few years. Can you recall when you realised that a lot of money was circulating on internet?

There wasn’t a precise moment per say, but i remember talking to some friends who were, and still are, into playing video games. Somehow the conversation quickly move to how expensive it was to stay competitive, having to buy upgrades and other in-play items as you were playing the game.

Being young teenagers, money was scarce and more often than not, that money had to come from our parents. I knew that the companies behind those games were making money when selling it, but after a while we all realised that $75 for a game was nothing compared to what a teenager could spend when playing.

I was really taken by the idea that you could have a paid product and then making multiple of the off-the-shelf price when people were using it.

Well, we all know video games companies are pretty good with the pay-to-play strategy, in fact nearly everything is like this nowadays!!! So how old were you when you had that epiphany?

I was 11.

Incredible, not every 11 years old boy could see an opportunity there!!

Well, i understood there was something off, but i didn’t yet fully understand how it worked and how i could use it to make money either.

Right, so what was the next step? Did you study anything particular?

A few weeks later, i was bored and i simply typed in Google “how to make money online”. And that’s when i fell down the rabbit hole!! Obviously, Google threw at me millions on websites explaining how we all can make money online, how easy it was, how to do it from the comfort of my bed and everything in between.

I read quite a few websites but either the ideas didn’t appeal to me or it wasn’t presented properly, nothing really clicked.

However, i remember a couple of Youtube videos, which basically explained that once you had a lot of followers, you could make money through collaboration with other Instagram accounts or by selling posts space directly.

So, you got in the action before the reels was introduced, right?

Yes this must have been 2018, maybe 2019 and reels were introduced in 2020. So i had a little bit of time to try a few things out.

Now, growing on Instagram is all the rage nowadays, as it is obviously harder and harder to grow organically. How did you go about it? Did you have a precise plan? What was your approach?

No plan, no approach, i was focused on getting as many followers as possible. I watched as many videos as possible to learn how to grow as fast as i could, how to cater to an audience, how to select hashtags, how to make videos and why videos are important.

In parallel to this learning experience, somehow i became aware that there was many other ways to make money, again through Web2.0 but also through more traditional avenues.

It was challenging to get my first $1 online, but once it happened, i knew i could do it, and i devoted all my spare time to growing.

You touched briefly on those other avenues, can you tell us more about them?

Sure, without going into too much details otherwise we could spend a week on that subject, there are an incredible amount of ways you can make money online. In the Web2.0 scene alone, you can make money building up and selling social media accounts, helping people with their websites, designing graphics, advertising others’ accounts on yours and much more.

Somehow, i became good at advertising other’s Web2.0 accounts through my own and increasing their visibility, which in turn had a feedback effect on mine. From then on, it snowballed.

And then covid happened!!!

Yes. If we are talking purely business, covid helped me take my business beyond my original intentions. Everything shut-down, i was now home 24/7. For someone who is about to be successful online but can’t be online 24/7 because of school, covid was the perfect storm.

Everyone and everything was now focused on the internet, i made more connections in a week than i would have made in a month, was able to deliver in days what would have taken weeks. It was incredible.

I could test ideas, concepts and know within 7 to 10 days if this was valid or not, without hurting my growing business. I could setup virtual meetings at any times of the day or night and have extra free platforms available too.

Let’s fast forward to nowadays. How different is your portfolio to pre-covid?

It is day and night to be honest. The root is the same, but the connections i have made, the services i have created, the people i am interacting and working with are of a much higher caliber than when i started.

Obviously, as a package, i am more under stress, i have a slightly chaotic schedule now that covid is over, and i can’t afford to slip up as much as i could back then, but i take all this as a testimony to my abilities and my success, so i wouldn’t change it.

This comes with the territory, and i am ok with that.

Alright, last couple of questions and we let you go back to your busy schedule. What is the secret sauce for deluxesmm?

Haha!! well i can’t tell you but i can tell you this. I mentioned a few times my connections, not in name obviously, but i mentioned that i made connections.

It is really essential for everyone to understand that even though this is done on a digital platform, there is a very important human aspect to it all. You need to be able to relate to people, to be willing to talk to people, to write to people, to engage.

Now, obviously there is a way to approach people for business, but Web2.0 can be at times very cold, so getting to know people and doing business with them is something special.

Any last words?

Rome wasn’t built in 1 day. Whoever embarks on a journey to be successful online must understand that things take time, but to be a winner you need to keep at it even when times are hard.

There will be times when you will be down, when the entire enterprise feels like a complete waste of time, but if you quit then, you will never know what could have been. Keep your chin up, revise and improve your approach, it will work.

Thank you for your time, Eric and we wish you the best for you and deluxesmm.

Thank you.

Eric Luechter is a teenager, entrepreneur, business owner, marketing specialist, and the founder of Deluxe SMM. His agency specializes in Instagram and TikTok marketing while offering a plethora of services including celebrity marketing, endorsements, blue tick verification, press publication, etc for artists, brands, entrepreneurs, NFT/cryptocurrency projects, and more.

Eric’s agency Deluxe SMM is famous for planning, executing, and re-evaluating the desired results from actual results of the marketing campaigns organised for social media verification, follower growth on Instagram and Tiktok, celebrity promotions, paid partnerships, targeted mass messaging, etc.

French author Corneille wrote in “Le Cid” : “ I am young, it is true; but in souls nobly born valor does not depend upon age”

Success does neither have a face, nor colour, nor age, nor does it exist solely on a given platform. What is true is that some of us are more gifted than others, or simply desire it more than their counterpart. One thing for sure, Eric Luechter’s maxim should be:

“Valor Does Not Depend Upon Age”