- eBiz Insider
- Posts
- From locksmith to $74K a month in 4 Years 🔒
From locksmith to $74K a month in 4 Years 🔒
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
From Locksmith to $74K/Month SaaS in 4 Years
High-Level Authority Site Training
$1000 in 10 Days From Public Data
Non Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR)
$13,500 From Her First Online Course (Before Creating It)
AI Content Farm: Zero to $16,000 in 2 Months
$1500/Month For Studying Full-Time
Did someone forward this to you? → subscribe here
From Locksmith to $74K/Month SaaS in 4 Years
Tim Bennetto tweets….
Was a locksmith, taught myself to code at night, started a SaaS and now have 1k+ paying customers.
Without coding, it would never of been possible.
His SaaS is Pallyy, a "social media management platform" that is now earning $74,000 per month 💰
In another tweet, Tim shares how it all happened….
➜ Learning to code
Spent 6 months or so learning HTML, CSS, JS and Nuxt.
Every evening I would spend a few hrs doing this with CodeCademy (a free learning platform).
➜ Building an MVP
Spent 30 days building an MVP of an Instagram analytics platform.
Point of difference would be that you could "share" your Instagram analytics with others.
It was very very basic.
The initial launch didn't go well, mainly because Tim had no audience at the time (about 4 years ago) 😕
But the project started gaining traction when…
Friend had a free IG analytics tool, he gave it to me & we redirected it to my platform.
Ended up getting me around 100 customers (at $5/mo).
The sharing feature that was the original focus didn't interest anyone. So Tim pivoted to focus solely on the analytics dashboard.
But it was still a tough grind to grow the business 😩 …
Growth completely stalled, in total for almost 2 years.
People wanted scheduling & analytics but at the time Instagram scheduling wasn't possible due to their API.
When Instagram finally opened up their API, Tim built a scheduling feature and added support for other platforms, and scheduling quickly became the #1 feature 🎯
With scheduling now the core of the product, Tim decided to rebrand from the original name, Sharemyinsights…
"Pallyy" was short, a cheap dot com and fun but also not limiting to a certain feature.
Then it was another 2 years before Tim "started marketing properly."
He hired a content writer for blogging and social media, optimized for SEO, created alternative pages (example), and launched an affiliate program 🚀
The result…
This was the turning point.
The following year had around 10x growth.
Now, after 4 years of running Pallyy solo and hitting $74K in monthly recurring revenue 🤑 Tim is expanding the team by hiring a developer.
He says…
Anyone can build a SaaS.
The motivation for me was building a better lifestyle. I've got no degrees, dropped out of school, had zero coding or marketing knowledge.
Just get started and learn along the way.
His advice for coming up with business ideas 👇
Don't re-invent the wheel. Don't try to come up with a unique idea.
Find a validated market, with lots of competitors and build something.
The more competitors, the better.
High-Level Authority Site Training
Today's email is brought to you by Authority Hacker Pro 👈
That's a highly-rated growth hacking training for site owners. Doors only open twice a year, and it's available this time until October 12th.
I've updated our Authority Hacker Pro review and you can also read 20+ reviews from students there 🤩
Be aware that the training is NOT for beginners – see their TASS program for that – but if you’re already earning $1000’s per month from your website it’s well worth checking out 👍
(Btw, AH Pro is the top-rated course out of ~130 we've reviewed in-depth so far.)
$1000 in 10 Days From Public Data
Alberto Fortin tweets…
I just had my first $1000+ month… I got there by making and launching gumtrends.com. Took a week from idea to launch, and 3 days from launch to $1000
Gumtrends is…
A dataset of 39k+ Gumroad products [that lets you] spot opportunities by finding profitable items with many 3 star reviews.
Alberto sells access to the database for $49 💵
Most likely, you can find all of the same data via Gumroad Discover, but Alberto has packaged this data into a tidy database that's easy to filter. He also added estimated revenue and some other bells and whistles.
This got me thinking: what other products could be built around publicly available data? 🤔
A few you could try 👇
ThemeForest is a website templates and theme marketplace that has over 9M visitors/month (source). Every listing (example) shows the price and number of sales, which could be used to estimate revenue.
What if you built something like gumtrends for ThemeForest, then spread the word via seller communities on Facebook?
The parent company of Themeforest, Envato also runs CodeCanyon, VideoHive, AudioJungle and GraphicRiver.
Those are all marketplaces focused on different niches, and all have at least 1 million monthly visitors (according to SimilarWeb) with lots of publicly available data that could be packaged for different types of sellers 📦
Etsy is another popular marketplace that has ~450 million monthly visitors (source), with tons of physical and digital products for sale in various niches.
You could go niche with an Etsy database, focus on one or two verticals such as…
Non Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR)
The neurobiologist Andrew Huberman coined the term NSDR and calls it…
such a powerful tool… a zero-cost tool that has enormous effects on not just accessing sleep and calm, but enhancing rates of neuroplasticity.
NSDR is really just a new name for an old concept called yoga nidra, literally "yoga sleep" 😴
It's basically a guided meditation that helps improve your energy levels and make up for poor sleep.
Here's an 11-minute NSDR session from Huberman on YouTube.
Personally though, I prefer this 23-minute version.
Give it a try when you're feeling sluggish and see if it works for you.
Btw, while researching NSDR I came across this simple website: nsdr.co
The domain was registered 13 months ago (Sep 2022) and it's getting ~100,000 views per month already (source) 📈
Looks like there's no monetization going on, and their YouTube channel is pretty sparse.
I reckon there's an opportunity there to make a much better resource, steal a lot of that site's organic traffic, and monetize with display ads 😉
$13,500 From Her First Online Course (Before Creating It)
🗂 From the archive, published January 2023…
Janita O'Hara shares in a 15-minute interview how she earned $13,500 from her first online course, without a big audience and before she'd even created the content 😎
Janita had built a business as a wedding photographer – specializing in small weddings and elopements – but when COVID hit and her bookings dried up she decided to launch an online course.
Her first thought was to create a Photography 101 course, but after doing some market research she figured it would be more profitable to teach people how to set up their own photography business 📸
She called her offering the Pursue Photography Course.
Janita only had 50-75 people on her mailing list initially, and grew it to 150 during the course launch. She also had a following on Instagram, but as of right now she has ~3800 followers and I suspect she had more like ~2000 back in 2020 when she launched.
So a pretty small audience.
Sounds like her course was initially priced at about $800 a pop, and Janita was hoping for 10 sales on the first launch.
Instead she ended up with 17 students and $13,500 in the bank 💰
It was only after making those sales that Janita got busy creating most of the course content. Each week for 12 weeks students would get access to new lessons.
Janita's schedule during that time looked like this…
Monday and Tuesday: create the lesson scripts and slides
Wednesday: create bonus materials
Thursday: record the lessons
Friday: upload everything for the students
If you want to launch a course of your own, here are two great lessons you can take from Janita's story 👇
First, build an audience. It doesn't have to be a big audience – especially if you can justify a high price tag for your course – but active and engaged followers/subscribers are the people most likely to buy from you. The more of them you have before launch, the better.
Second, definitely consider preselling your course like Janita did.
Imagine if she had created 12 weeks of course materials first – 12 solid weeks of work! – then launched and made only 2 sales 😩
Instead, she took the smart approach of testing the market before creating a complete product. If only 2 people had bought, she could have refunded them and gone back to the drawing board.
AI Content Farm: Zero to $16,000 in 2 Months
Fery Kaszoni recently tweeted about a website called CoopWB that is using AI to generate content at scale and dominate Google search results 🤖
According to Fery, the website gets 12M monthly visits and earns over £60,000 ($73K) per month in income from display ads 🤯
The timeline, per Fery's tweet…
They bought an expired domain sometime in 2023
Published 1 article in July 2023
Published ~5,000 articles in August 2023
Published ~15,000 articles by September 2023
Getting 12M organic visits per month by September, per Semrush
Fery calls this..
the largest AI hijacking of the SERPs that the world has ever seen
The site even ranks for competitive keywords like Kanye West net worth.
It seems they were mostly rewriting and paraphrasing content that already exists, since GPT has a knowledge cut off. (Or at least it used to.)
However, Fery's numbers should be taken with a grain of salt 🧐
I checked the site's traffic with a bunch of different keyword tools and Semrush is by far the most generous. I've seen other traffic estimates range from 240K/month to 4.7M/month.
According to the official Google Adsense Calculator, a site in the entertainment niche – which this site probably falls into – would earn a maximum of $6000/month per 1M visitors from Google display ads.
So $18,000 per month is likely a more realistic estimate for the site's earnings 💰
Which is still impressive for a young site full of AI-generated content.
Although, as someone replied to Fery...
There’s no way they maintain those ranks once google figures out it’s just basic content.
Fery’s response…
Even if they tolerate it for 5 months, they have already made £200K+ [$243K+] from ads, with this traffic.
Again, the number is probably much smaller than that.
But even if it was $200K+, methinks this is a short-sighted approach to SEO 🙈
Why create a site full of crappy content that is likely to get penalized by Google before long?
When you could instead create a site with quality content that Google will love long time? 😍
Yeah, I get it: you can probably make money faster with the first approach.
But keep in mind the story of Rick Guerin, who was a business partner of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger – two of the richest people in the world – back in the 1970's.
You never hear about Guerin anymore, and when Buffett was asked why, he replied…
Charlie and I always knew that we would become incredibly wealthy. But we were not in a hurry to get wealthy; we knew it would happen. Rick was just as smart as us, but he was in a hurry.
And so actually what happened was that in the 1973-74 downturn, Rick was levered with margin loans. And the stock market went down almost 70% in those two years, and so he got margin calls, and he sold his Berkshire stock to me. I bought Rick’s Berkshire stock at under $40 apiece, and so Rick was forced to sell shares at … $40 apiece because he was levered.
By 1990 that same stock was priced at $8000+ a share, a 200x increase 🔥
So yeah, don't be in too much of a hurry to get wealthy. It's hard to make wise decisions when you're desperate to make a buck.
$1500/Month For Studying Full-Time
🗂 From the archive, published May 2021…
Computer engineering student James Scholz has a YouTube channel where he live streams his marathon study sessions, with occasional appearances by his cat 🙀
Recently he put out a video about how he studied 12 hours a day for a year (excluding weekends).
His channel now has 279k subscribers and recently he’s been getting up to 600,000 views per video 📈
Once calculator estimates that he earns an average of $138 in ad revenue from each video, which works out to $690 per month.
Looks like he’s also earning at least that much every month via Patreon.
And he has Amazon affiliate links in each video description.
I’d estimate that he’s earning minimum $1500/month from everything, though of course it’s taken him a year of live streaming to get to that point.
A few other live streamers profiled in this article…
#16 – folks in South Korea earning as much as $10k/month for eating on camera
#17 – another live-streaming student earning $253 per video
…
Thanks to Fardeen Khan for helping me write and research today's newsletter.
Hasta la próxima, rock on with your legendary self 💪
Niall Doherty – Canillo, Andorra
eBiz Facts (follow on twitter)
P.S. If you have a website earning $1000's per month and want to take it to the next level, check out Authority Hacker Pro 👈
What did you think of today's email? |