Rake is the devoted owner of GuidedHacking.com, an educational platform dedicated to reverse engineering, game hacking & cyber security. With 10 years of experience building this resource, Rake has grown not only as an expert in the field, but as a trusted authority on the subject. A passionate educator, Rake has meticulously curated a wealth of tutorials, courses & other resources unparalleled in the world of game security.
Education & History
All of Rake’s expertise if self-taught, he did not go to college or do any certifications or courses for IT. He has 1 year professional experience building a website for an ISP, 3 years of experience working for a Managed Service Provider and owned a computer repair business for 3 years. This is actually his second major career, having 13 years of progressive work history and formal education in another industry where he managed several businesses. After years of working for other people, he wanted to start something new and saw a unique opportunity with Guided Hacking.
Job Experience
Rake’s first job was building a website for a local ISP in the year 2000, soon after he fell in love with coding & hacking. He started reverse engineering & game hacking 20 years ago, but didn’t go all in until 2014 when he bought Guided Hacking from the previous owner.
Through Guided Hacking’s consulting service, he has also been doing software development, reverse engineering, cyber security, search engine optimization & other services for pay cheat companies. He also does paid mentoring and training for those who want more formal coaching. He has provided these services for the past 3 years.
In addition to all this, the 10 years of growing the Guided Hacking business, has been a unique experience, combining many interesting skills related to reverse engineering, hacking, software development, website administration and information security.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
Being a small business, I am the jack of all trades. I do EVERYTHING.
The key to success in this situation is to be organized and always be working towards your goals. To this end, I start each work day by consulting task lists which are broken down into daily, weekly, monthly & quarterly tasks.
Even if it’s something small like “check my emails”, I keep it on the list. It might seem silly, but being able to check off small tasks on a list each day, keeps me moving forward and it always feels like I’m making progress even if it’s just the little things. I like to build momentum up to accomplishing the large tasks by breaking them down into smaller ones.
How do you bring ideas to life?
Brainstorming is the first step, particularly identifying the purpose of a good idea, who it’s being crafted for and how it fits into my business in a wider way. People sometimes get focused on the little things and forget the big picture, so I always look at it from the bottom up and the top down. Pitching ideas to the team, and getting buy-in is the next big step, without a team of excited people, most ideas won’t go anywhere. Once we’re sure the idea is good, delegating is the next step. Having a good team that can take ideas and run with them is what you need.
What’s one trend that excites you?
How about I answer the opposite question, which trends do NOT excite me? That’s an easy answer, as a content creator who manages a team of content creators, I hate the trend of using artificial intelligence for content creation. I love AI like ChatGPT just like anyone else, it’s great at answering questions quickly, which saves me lots of time. But it’s ruining the careers and lives of content creators, simply be replacing them.
We all know what a “AI written article” looks like, and it’s not what anyone wants. We want real content made by REAL content creators, not AI generated garbage. As someone who has written, edited, reviewed & published 3,500+ articles over the past 10 years, my life is dependent on my content being exclusive, hand-made & high quality. With AI taking over content creation at the scale it currently is, things are looking really bleak for content creators.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
Being organized and knowing when to take a break. Everything I do is logged in a note taking app. Obsidian & Notion are the most popular. Everything I’m working on is organized, reviewed & iterated over on a schedule. So many good ideas get lost when you’re not organized. Some people ask “how do you stay busy, you’ve been doing this for 10 years, what else is there to do?”. Well, I always have more I want to do, I’ve got list of content, growth and marketing ideas that could keep me busy for 30 years
One of the worst feelings is not knowing what to do next, and not everything works out. You have to be able to adapt. If something doesn’t pan out, I’ve always got a backup plan or something else to try next. I also like to separate brainless tasks and deep-thought tasks. When I’m lazy, I just bang out lots of monotonous boring work while I listen to music. This way no matter what kind of mood I’m in, I’m always moving forward.
Knowing when to take a break is huge too. Getting burned out will always happen, but you need to keep it at a minimum. Getting frustrated? Take a 30 minute break. A half hour isn’t going to make or break your business in the long run. But dying of a heart attack will.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Don’t go to college. Ridiculous waste of money unless you want to be something like a lawyer, doctor, scientist etc… Get hands on experience ASAP. A degree is worthless if you are a self-starter, type A personality, entrepreneur. You don’t need it. All you need is faith in yourself to never give up, and you will be successful in whatever you want to do. If you are confident in yourself, you can get any job you want.
Tell us something you believe that almost nobody agrees with you on?
Not everyone has what it takes. Don’t waste your time talking to people who aren’t working towards a goal in earnest. I’ve wasted a lot of time on people that will never go anywhere. Your social group should be a team of builders who can crowd source their experiences and skills.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
Building, growing and running a business is very stressful and you won’t always be on the upswing. It’s easy to lose motivation or blame yourself for a failed project. If you know the story of most entrepreneurs, most had a dozen losses before they had their big success. A big let down or failure can really hamper your growth.
The one thing I’ve learned to do is: Hit rock bottom as fast as possible, so you bounce back faster.
Instead of going through a slow multi stage process of feeling failure, loss of self confidence, and then finally bouncing back, you want to speed through this process as fast as possible.
Life is filled with mistakes, failures and lessons learned. So instead of beating yourself up about it, trying to avoid it, just indulge yourself for a few days or weeks and get back on the horse. You spend so much time trying to avoid these life phases, that you end up paralyzing yourself or making them worse.
The faster you accept that you failed and give yourself the time to feel bad about it, the faster you’ll be back on your feet and moving forward again. That short term BS is part of life, instead of trying to avoid it and making it worse, give yourself the down time you need, focus on the issue and train yourself to move on faster. It’s part of life, the sooner you’re on the upswing, the better, but you gotta hit rock bottom first before you can start building yourself back up.
This might sound crazy, but it’s still better than what most people do, which is just straight up ignoring problems until they explode.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
Go for a walk or try a guided meditation. HeadSpace on the app store has really good guided meditations. Doing some yard work always clears my head too, get outside and give yourself a mundane task to focus on so you stop thinking about work.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
Picking the right niche is the first step. High competition markets are a nightmare. If you pick a niche with no competition, you’re guaranteed to win. That was the first step to my success.
Secondly, focusing on long term growth, not short term. Your competitors will all focus on short term gains, and give up when they aren’t successful. I played the long game, I never focused on any get rich quick schemes or any short term gimmicks. I didn’t chase trending topics or make things to “wow” people. I just identified gaps in the market and filled them, completing each task one at a time. I am a strong believer in “building momentum”, and you’ll see that echoed in my other statements.
My greatest strength is my work ethic, I will always work harder and longer than anyone else, so I use that to my advantage. I can outlast anyone else who tries to do what I do. I don’t like big risks because there is no guarantee they’ll work out. My approach is safe and always wins in the end, it just takes a long time and a lot of hard work.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
I wouldn’t call it a failure, but I had a career for 13 years that didn’t work out. I thought I would do it forever, but in the end it wasn’t what I thought it would be. After 6 years, I was very unhappy but it was hard to make a lateral move into another high paying position doing something different, so I was stuck. I ended up jumping around every 12 months because I was blaming the businesses I worked for instead of the career choice.
In the end, the problem wasn’t the individual job, it was the career as a whole. Too many hours, too much stress. I finally got fed up and took a HUGE risk. I quit my job, vowed to never do it again, and I focused on GuidedHacking.com full time. I knew I could make it work, and in the end, thank God, it did.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
None, I don’t need anymore competition!
I had one other really good business idea, and guess what? I pulled the trigger on it just a few months ago. I already have 3 clients and things are going well. I’m not ready to launch officially yet, as I’m planning to operate both companies 50/50, so I need some more time to get set up.
Instead I’ll give away a piece of advice: A good idea is worthless if you aren’t committed to its success. Too many people have big ideas but don’t have the work ethic to see it to fruition. There is no substitute for hard work, so stop trying to avoid it!
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
Notion or Obsidian note taking apps for organizing ideas and tasks, I couldn’t live without them.
GSuite For Business is the best, Outlook 365 is such a worthless piece of trash in comparison. Everything you need to do is 10x easier with the Google version (i.e. Google Docs, Sheets, etc…)
pdf24.org for all your PDF needs – it’s free and “just works”, no bloated garbage software, it does everything you could ever need with PDFs.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast you’ve gotten a ton of value from and why?
One of my favorite books is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. When you hear about famous people in history, you might think that they’re super geniuses or demi-gods and you will put them on a pedestal for all the wrong reasons. What I love about the Benjamin Franklin biography is just how simple of a man he was, he wasn’t a super genius he just had good ideas, worked hard on them and never gave up.
This goes for many famous people in history. They are just normal people who lived their lives with conviction. They all made mistakes, had failures and they weren’t perfect. Just normal people who did what they thought was right, and never faltered in the commitment to their goals.
Never underestimate the value of working hard, having strong principles and never giving up. We owe our grand history to these types of people.
In the book, he quotes Proverbs 22:29:
Seest thou a man diligent in his business?
He shall stand before kings
He shall not stand before lowly men
So there you go, one of history’s greatest men, believes hard work is the answer!
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
I’m watching the HBO mafia series, The Sopranos It starts off as a show about mafia gangsters but quickly becomes a treatise on mental health, the human condition, karma & all the lies we tell ourselves. They really don’t make shows like this anymore, a bygone era. Kinda feel like a boomer saying that to be honest.
Key learnings
- Don’t waste your money/time on college, self starters don’t need it
- Life has many phases, go with the flow but stay goal oriented
- Build momentum with small tasks & good organization