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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.