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$300,000/Year: ❤️ London & Digital Coloring Books
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
$300,000/Year: Love, London & Digital Coloring Books
This Software Powers Million Dollar Newsletters
Sold His Alternative to a Popular App for $100,000+
$100K Productized Service In 12 Months
Changed Monetisation Strategy = $650/Month Job Board
Scaled Their Business To $50K/Month Within a Year
The Secret to Building a $39K/Month Business
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$300,000/Year: Love, London & Digital Coloring Books
Jessica Dante is the founder of Love and London, a tourist blog and media brand about all things London ❤️
She says in a recent interview…
It all started back when I moved [from New York] over to the UK in 2013, I set up a little blog to document starting my new life as an American who moved to a foreign country.
A couple of years in, a bit bored with writing, I started creating YouTube videos about travel and giving tips for people visiting London. The London videos started garnering an audience.
This was probably her first video and how she got started on YouTube 👀
Jessica also has a video revealing her revenue from 2021… looks like it was around £50K GBP ($63K) back then.
😕 But that wasn't a great time for the business…
The low point was ABSOLUTELY COVID-19 times. We had almost two years of very little profit, no matter what I tried to launch and how many “pivots” we attempted.
I’m really happy we’re through that period now, it was extremely hard to deal with in many ways.
Nowadays Jessica has…
a team of 14 helping me make it all happen, and generating a healthy six figures in revenue.
And on her personal site, she writes…
In 2023, shop sales averaged £16,000 [$20,000] per month.
Looks like the shop is all digital products and guides, so probably ~90% profit on them 🤑
I especially like their digital coloring book for adults. Every location-specific site could have a product like that, makes an easy gift purchase around the holidays.
Here's Jessica promoting the coloring book recently on Instagram, where she's built up an audience of 402K followers 📈
All told, I expect Love and London is generating around $300,000 a year in revenue 💰
Jessica's advice for others getting into content creation…
Know what you want to get out of it business-wise.
It can be fun to make content, but ultimately it needs to pay the bills and keep growing for it to be a sustainable business.
So how will your channels do that?
Will your Reels bring in leads for your graphic design work? Or will your YouTube videos get you in front of CEOs so you can be hired for consulting work?
Other location-specific online businesses we've profiled 👇
$1 Million Hyperlocal Website (Frisco, Texas)
$2500/Month Website + Newsletter (Mallorca, Spain)
$12K/Month 1-Woman Tourist Website (San Francisco)
Turning Her Passion Into $16K/Month (Rome, Italy)
Could you build a similar business based on your city or region?
This Software Powers Million Dollar Newsletters
Today's email is brought to you by Beehiiv 🐝
That's the software I use to publish and grow this newsletter. I switched to it last year and it's been great so far.
Beehiiv's CEO was head of growth at Morning Brew, a newsletter which was valued at $75 million a few years ago 🤯
Beehiiv is also the software used to power The Milk Road, a newsletter that sold for $10+ million after only 10 months.
I really like the pricing of Beehiiv. There's a 14-day free trial and you can continue to use it for free up to 2,500 subscribers. After that it's flat-rate pricing.
So yeah, Beehiiv is a nice, inexpensive way to start a newsletter. And they've got a ton of growth tools built in.
👉 Check it out if you're thinking to start a newsletter.
Sold His Alternative to a Popular App for $100,000+
Abzal Assembekov is from Kazakhstan 🇰🇿 and the founder of ContactInBio.
It's basically an alternative to Linktree, a tool people use to link from their social profiles and it lands you on a page with all their info and links 🔗
In a recent Reddit post, Anzal shares…
I sold my link in bio tool for 6 figures.
🚀 Origin story…
My story begins in 2015 when, as a second-year university student… I raised around $65,000 in Dubai and opened a product- and service-based company. We built multiple iOS apps…
Although we broke even, we couldn't sustain it further, and the venture failed by 2017.
After that, Abzal went the bootstrapping route…
I asked myself what tool did I pay for while being a business owner?
And the answer was an Instagram automation tool, so I bought a ready code online and published such a site, within weeks users started to pour in reaching $700 MRR, until Instagram blocked it.
When he says he "bought a ready code online," I suspect he’s referring to scripts you can buy on sites like CodeCanyon. You can buy ready-made software, host it somewhere, and sell it to your customers 😀
I'm guessing Instagram blocked Abzal's software because it didn’t align with their policies in some way 😔
But he didn't let that deter him for long…
I analysed what customers were using besides my tool and it was LinkIn.Bio and Linktree. I went ahead and built ContactInBio and by 2021 it grew to over 100,000 users as a side project while I was working full time.
How he got traction…
I launched an Instagram/Fb ad, then answered lots of related questions on Quora. Quora was big back then on Google, always on top of many search results. Then published on ProductHunt, BetaList.
🗓️ In 2021…
I finally left my full time job as income has been more than my salary for many months and within a month got connected to Taplink founder, it is a leading link in bio tool in CIS region.
(CIS = Commonwealth of Independent States. More or less the former Soviet Union.)
Abzal ended up selling ContactInBio for 6 figures ($100K+) though the exact price is undisclosed 💰
His advice for other founders…
Find startup ideas based on what you or someone you know is paying to use.
In other words, it doesn't matter if there's competition out there already.
In fact, that's a good thing: it proves there's a market 👍
Ideally though you'd enter a different segment of the market, or put your own spin on an existing product somehow.
🗂 $100K Productized Service In 12 Months
From the archive, published February 2022…
Side Hustle Nation has an interview with Timmy Bauer, who leveraged his knowledge and skills from writing kid’s books into a book production company 📚
This new path has taken Timmy from “just over the poverty line” to running a 6-figure business in the last 12 months.
The books are super niche – aimed at kids, explaining what different jobs are like – but the most interesting part to me is how Timmy initially priced his service at $500 a pop…
Timmy has raised the price of his service several times since then. Today he’s charging $6,000 for his standard service and has a team he works with.
His hourly rate at that $500 price probably worked out very low, but it was necessary to land those first customers, gather feedback, and see if the idea had potential.
Reminds me of that billionaire who started out selling chewing gum and delivering newspapers 🗞
So if you’re wondering how to earn $100,000 online in 12 months… start by figuring out how to earn $1, then $100, then $500.
Changed Monetisation Strategy = $650/Month Job Board
Morgan Gao is the founder of EchoJobs, a job board for software engineers 🤓
In a recent interview, he shares…
I had this idea when I was looking for jobs two years ago. I was interested in a specified type of companies, tech stack, etc.
But…
Websites like Indeed, LinkedIn have a lot of jobs but I found it really hard to search and filter through the jobs I want.
💡 That inspired him to start EchoJobs…
I spent about 3 months on the first version. It included scraping jobs from most of the popular application tracking systems, parsing job posts for all kinds of information like title, tech stack, level, location and salary.
By May of 2022, I had a working website and released it to the public the first time.
Morgan adds…
In a since-deleted Reddit post, he shared EchoJobs and got 2.4K upvotes (which, if you’re not on Reddit, is a pretty big deal 😲)
📈 After seeing the traffic that generated…
I put up a plan so employers can post jobs. I tried to reach out to businesses and companies who are hiring but no one posted jobs on my site.
So I kinda stopped there. I knew I got my first sale about a month or two later… Since then I have got about 5 paid job posts so far.
But it has been a while since I got any paid job post.
So Morgan tried something different…
I pivoted to charging job seekers. I think EchoJobs provides more value to job seekers than employers at this point.
With just 5 dollars a week, they can get a whole list of jobs that match their skills, preferences.
💪 That change has worked out well…
It's been two months now and I have about 20 active subscribers and a total Monthly Recurring Revenue of roughly $500.
Besides that, I promote Indeed jobs on my site and that brings an additional $150 per month. This is done through the Indeed Trusted Partners Program.
It would have been easy for Morgan to give up on the project when his first attempt at monetization didn't work out.
Kudos to him for sticking with it and trying another approach 👍
If you're struggling to get traction with a project of your own, step back and test the assumptions you've made along the way.
Are you targeting the right people?
Could you monetize in a different way?
What are your competitors doing differently?
Scaled Their Business To $50K/Month Within a Year
Chris Panteli is the co-founder of digital PR link-building agency Linkifi 🔗
From their site…
Get Featured on Large Publications. We’ll pitch journalists and land powerful links on your behalf.
So they basically help you get more links to your website, which should increase the traffic you get from search engines like Google 📈
According to a recent interview, Chris started the business with Nick Biggs and it took off fast…
Just over two years ago the duo started a PR link-building agency called Linkifi. The business quickly went on to clear $50,000 per month within the first year.
Chris says…
My interest in the digital world sparked during the pandemic. I created my first website which gained traction rapidly.
Pretty sure he's talking there about his finance site, LifeUpSwing, which he has listed on his LinkedIn.
💬 Chris on how Linkifi came about…
The inception of our business is rather serendipitous. My introduction to my business partner came when I outsourced some guest post link-building work for my personal finance website. He took note of the significant links I had acquired through PR requests and was genuinely impressed.
But they didn’t go all-in initially…
I was engaged in a full-time job and my business partner managed his own agency, we ventured into this as a side project, serving a handful of clients.
🤔 After the initial traction…
The influx of referrals and repeat orders from satisfied clients made it evident that juggling both was becoming challenging.
I began to reach out to influencers and peers in our domain… Offering them a glimpse of our prowess at no cost, with the understanding that they’d become clients if satisfied, proved to be a game-changer.
And…
Within our first year, we quickly surpassed $50k per month and maintained a commendable growth trajectory thereafter.
So they're likely earning more than $50K/month now 🤑
Pretty cool how Chris got into all this by starting his own finance blog.
Through that venture he found he had a knack for building links, and that became its own highly-successful business.
Goes to show how the big opportunities tend to present themselves once you're already in motion, already working on something.
🗂 The Secret to Building a $39K/Month Business
From the archive, published May 2021…
Jordan O’Connor launched an automation tool for Poshmark about 5 years ago.
Now it’s pulling $39,000 in monthly revenue 💰
He recently revealed the secret to his success:
if I just told you about my product’s revenue growth – it would be a wild story. Starting from “nothing” and growing it to where it is now. What a dream.
What’s not told, is the years and years of learning valuable skills required to pull something like that off.
Any real success takes a lot of time, and chances are, if you’re not what you consider “successful” you may not have been doing it long enough.
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. Thinking to start a newsletter? I'd highly recommend checking out Beehiiv 👈
It's the same software I use to publish and grow this newsletter, and it's free up to 2500 subscribers 😎
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