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She earns $2000/month watching horror movies 😱
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
$2000/Month Watching Horror Movies
Newsletters Are About to 10x Due to AI
$250K/Year Helping People Find Sobriety
Orangutan Theory
$1000/Month Super-Niche Shopify App
She Earned $28/Hour From Google Maps (Starting From Scratch)
He Built a $10K/Month Newsletter in 10 Months
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$2000/Month Watching Horror Movies
Check out Katherine Fogler's YouTube channel: KatWatchesHorrorMovies 👀
The channel description…
I'm Kat, and I hate horror movies. They scare the beep out of me. LET'S WATCH'EM!
So it's basically her watching and reacting to horror movies 😱
Her most popular video, with 132K views…
Kat only started her channel in September 2022, but has already amassed 40K subscribers and 3.2 million views with 125 videos 🚀
Impressive growth considering her niche and the fact that she's not big on social media. (Her most popular social media account seems to be Instagram, with 2.7K followers.)
Kat monetizes her channel via YouTube ad revenue and Patreon memberships. Her patrons get access to monthly calls, a Discord community and other perks.
Kat's $10/month tier on Patreon is listed as her most popular. I've checked and that can't be faked, so probably 100+ of her 281 patrons are paying $10/month 😎
She also has $3, $5 and $15/month tiers.
Meanwhile, Kat's YouTube earnings are estimated at $100 to $2000 per month.
All told, I expect she's earning at least $2000/month from this project 🤑
Her story reminds me a bit of Karl Pilkington in An Idiot Abroad. That was basically a travel show featuring a guy who didn't like to travel. Viewers enjoyed watching Karl's reactions to uncomfortable travel situations.
Is there something you hate doing?
Who knows: maybe people would enjoy watching you do it 😂
Newsletters Are About to 10x Due to AI
Today's email is brought to you by Letter Operators 💌
That's a newsletter setup service by Richard Patey, who has built and sold two newsletters on beehiiv's platform.
A recent article explaining why he's bullish on the newsletter business…
Richard is offering $100 off his beehiiv setup service in November, so for only $99 you get 👇
Account setup (sending name, welcome email, custom domain etc)
Newsletter template (choose from a range of popular designs)
Subscribe funnel setup (including survey creation)
Reengagement automation (to keep your list pruned)
The Newsletter Is The Business (highly rated course that usually sells for $147)
$250K/Year Helping People Find Sobriety
Tim Stoddart started Sober Nation anonymously as a blog ~12 years ago, as a way to share his personal story of getting sober 💪
In a recent interview, he shares that he's earning $250,000 a year from the site, primarily via its directory of treatment facilities.
Tim says Sober Nation initially gained traction by sharing user-generated content on Facebook...
when I started [posting on Facebook], people would send me these pictures. Of their sobriety dates. And I called them sober stories. And so I would get pictures from people that I would just post them on Facebook and say like, Hey, Jane has been sober for three years.
And it would just go completely viral… And again, that wasn't necessarily something that I planned. I was just letting other people speak through the site.
Sober Nation now has more than 300K followers on Facebook 📈
A post from 2012 that shows what they were sharing back then…
Most posts were affirmations, prompts, and the sober stories already mentioned.
But Tim soon realized that social media buzz doesn't always translate to revenue 😕
The breakthrough came when treatment centers started reaching out about advertising.
Tim realized he could create a directory to connect these facilities with people looking for help 💡
But there was a problem…
I would say, yeah, sure. You can advertise on my website, but you don't have a website. Like you don't have anything.
I don't even know what you want me to do for you. And so I thought, huh, why don't I just create a service business that serves these.
So Tim launched Stodzy, his marketing agency to help these facilities with their marketing needs.
He did a similar thing after acquiring CopyBlogger.com, seeing it as a way to generate leads for his new SEO agency, Digital Commerce Partners 😎
Tim’s model could be laid out as…
Build an audience and community around a specific niche
Transition it to a directory model to generate revenue
Use the audience and authority to attract clients for a specialized service business
Could you do something like this in your niche? 🤔
I really like the idea of service providers starting directory sites as a way to connect with potential clients.
For example, if you wanted to provide marketing services for realtors, how about creating an online directory of realtors in your area?
That'd be one way to get on their radar, and you might ultimately be able to monetize the directory itself like Tim did 🤑
Orangutan Theory
Katharine Graham is a legend in the newspaper business, leading The Washington Post as it reported on The Watergate scandal back in the 1970s 📰
She was good friends with billionaire investor Warren Buffett, and writes in her autobiography…
[Warren] later told me that he subscribed to Charlie Munger’s “orangutan theory”—which essentially contended that, “if a smart person goes into a room with an orangutan and explains whatever his or her idea is, the orangutan just sits there eating his banana, and at the end of the conversation, the person explaining comes out smarter.”
Warren claimed to be my orangutan. And in a way he was. I heard myself talk when I was with him and I always got a better idea of what I was saying.
In other words: don't keep your ideas to yourself.
Run them by other people. Those people don't even need to respond. Just speaking your ideas aloud will help you evaluate them.
A variation on this is to explain your ideas in writing 📝
I regularly do this to work through challenges in my business. After a few minutes of writing about the problem and possible solutions, I always have a much better sense of what I should do.
$1000/Month Super-Niche Shopify App
🗂 From the archive, published October 2022…
That’d be Zippy, a zip code validation app for Shopify stores.
Founder Ashish Gupta reported a few weeks ago that he started it as a learning project while in lockdown, and it took about 16 months to get to $1000 in monthly recurring revenue.
He also tweeted…
I started Zippy with no clear vision and realized that It’s always possible to grow any low-competition app to $1k-$2k MRR.
It’s interesting to look at the Shopify app store and see how many of the “most popular” apps listed there have pretty bad ratings. Looks like Shopify themselves offer a load of free apps but many of them have poor ratings (prime example).
Could you build something better?