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$160,000 in 2 years selling spreadsheet templates 😎
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
$45,000 in 2.5 Years as an Unqualified Language Teacher
The Formula To Profit From Amazon
Unsexy Business Sold for $50 Million
Imposter Syndrome vs Growth Mindset
Revived Her Teenage Passion = $1 Million in 4 Years
$160K in 2 Years Selling Spreadsheet Templates
$75K/Month Online Arbitrage
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$45,000 in 2.5 Years as an Unqualified Language Teacher
In a recent video, Zee Chew talks about how much money she's earned as a community tutor on iTalki 💬
iTalki is a language learning marketplace, where learners can hire professional teachers or community tutors.
As a community tutor, like Zee, you don't need to have any formal teaching qualifications 🥳
Check out Zee's profile on iTalki and you can see that she teaches Chinese (Mandarin) and English. The vast majority of her students seem to be Mandarin speakers who want to learn English 🇬🇧
Zee charges about $20 per 30-minute lesson.
She says in the video…
In total, I made about $45,000 [in 2.5 years] after the 15% commission cut, which, in my opinion, is still quite a decent amount of money…
Thanks to the consistent extra cash coming in, I was able to live a digital nomad lifestyle and travel across Europe back in 2022.
🚀 How she got started back in 2021…
I was feeling miserable and lost after investing six months in a [job] interview which I ultimately failed. It took me six months just to fail that interview.
At that time, I just wanted to do something productive, and I knew that I had to make money. I couldn't just stay at home doing nothing.
So…
I started googling how to make money online, and that's when I stumbled upon iTalki and Preply [another language learning marketplace]….
After assessing my own skill sets and checking the requirements from the platforms, I signed up immediately and began my tutoring journey as an online figure without any experience.
If you're eager to try iTalki yourself, Zee offers some tips in the video 👍
However, she doesn't mention anything about pricing, and I suspect a big part in her success was starting out with low prices and raising them over time as she gained positive reviews on the platform.
She does say that her total earnings (before fees) = $50,000 after 2500 hours of tutoring, which works out to an average of $20/hour.
So she probably started out charging closer to $10/hour on iTalki.
Nowadays she's effectively charging $40/hour, but it clearly took a lot of time and effort for her to get to that level 📈
Use the search function on iTalki to get a sense of how much different community tutors charge. You can filter by language, type of teacher, time of day, etc.
The Formula To Profit From Amazon
Today's email is brought to you by The Wholesale Formula.
That's a highly-rated Amazon training that's opening its doors again this month. The course creators have apparently done more than $36 million in sales via Amazon 🤑
In a few days they're running a free webinar…
on this webinar, you're going to discover a 3-step formula that helped 960 folks initially sell over $1,057,143,592 on Amazon. Yes, over a billion dollars!
Even better: those 960 successes had no real "pattern." Their ages, locations and experience levels varied. Most had no previous online successes. Many started part-time. And all did it risk-free.
When you join this webinar, led by one of the top online business trainers in the world, you’ll discover the exact formula to sell on Amazon and see success.
Unsexy Business Sold for $50 Million
This newsletter is all about making money online, but let's take a quick detour into the offline world ↩️
A recent post on Reddit…
Trash collection.
Friends of mine, a husband and wife team, started this in their 20s.
By age 45, it had grown huge and they sold the company to the largest waste management processor in their country and walked away with $50 million in cash.
Carpet/sofa cleaning. Met someone who is fully booked every single day.
These stories are a good reminder that there are lots of business opportunities in the offline world.
And there may even be more opportunities offline since so many people prefer to stay behind their screens nowadays 😵💫
One of the largest deficits in the coming years are industry tradesmen like plumbing, electrical, hvac, etc. Most millennials were told they had to go to college. Gen Z’ers followed suit. Now nearly any tradesman worth a shit can name their price in most areas.
An article from 2020 tells a similar story 👇
The number of unfilled HVAC technician jobs is about 80,000 or 39% of technicians currently employed. On top of that, we’re suffering a net technician loss of about 8% or 20,000 per year.
(HVAC technician = someone who installs and repairs air conditioning systems.)
One more comment from that Reddit thread…
Most people my age don't want to get their hands dirty anymore. I think it has to do with the social image we now see on social media.
If someone focuses on building a business that requires physical labor or work that requires human interaction together with automated digital processes managed by AI, I believe it could be extremely successful.
Reminds me of that guy who wrote software to optimize his sister's cookie delivery business and sold $200,000 in one month 🤯
So yeah, don't get too caught up looking to make money online.
There are plenty of good business opportunities offline, usually with less competition 👍
🗂 Imposter Syndrome vs Growth Mindset
From the archive, published January 2023…
Adam Grant tweets…
Impostor syndrome: “I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s only a matter of time until everyone finds out.”
Growth mindset: “I don’t know what I’m doing yet. It’s only a matter of time until I figure it out.”
The highest form of self-confidence is believing in your ability to learn.
I have an article and video entitled, How To Rapidly Build Your Skill (And Start Getting Paid)
Included there is this list of successful people who have admitted to feeling like a fraud at one time or another 👇
Neil Armstrong
Jodie Foster
John Steinbeck
Meryl Streep
Chris Martin
Tina Fey
Cheryl Strayed
Elizabeth Gilbert
Jennifer Lopez
Daniel Radcliffe
Lady Gaga
Emma Watson
Denzel Washington
Sheryl Sandberg
Tom Hanks
So if you ever feel like an imposter, congratulations, you’re in great company.
And that feeling doesn’t have to stop you doing what you want to do 😉
Revived Her Teenage Passion = $1 Million in 4 Years
Sam Parr recently tweeted…
My mother in law… wanted to sell fancy throw pillows she was making.
I gave her very basic steps. Enough to get started.
Now…
A few years later, she's done well over $1,000,000 in sales, has a small team, a cool brand, an office, repeat customers, and a thriving business.
The business is Smithy Home Couture by Smithe Sodine, selling via the website and on Etsy 🛍️
Smithe shared her story in a 2022 interview…
I’m a former elementary school ESL teacher and college instructor.
In 2020, I founded Smithy Home Couture, a handcrafted decorative pillow company. I design and manufacture custom luxury pillows, cushions and bedding. My clients are interior designers, homeowners, and home goods stores.
🧐 The origin story…
Working with textiles has been a constant thread in my life…
At 16, my family immigrated to Florida [from Haiti]. Life as immigrants in the USA was both challenging and exciting. I didn’t speak any English, so I worked hard to graduate high school. I still loved sewing and wanted to pursue a career in the fashion industry.
But life happened and Smithe never got to follow her dream.
Until she became an empty nester and officially launched her business in February 2020 🚀
The timing was tough…
Unfortunately in March, New York City went into a covid-19 lockdown.
Launching the business became a real challenge, especially because I expected to sell most of my products in person.
💪 So she found another way…
I shifted gear and started an Etsy store. I took all the fabrics I had in my workroom home and started making pillows in my basement during the Covid-19 quarantine while also making much needed facial masks for friends and family.
Many of those friends and family became my first clients.
Since then…
I have grown steadily over the last two years. I quadrupled my revenues in the second year. I earned more than I ever did as a teacher (teachers are grossly underpaid).
Most importantly, now I have a team of three. My employees are skilled artisans. Together we make, pack, and ship hundreds of pillows and other items every week.
Four years on from that rough start, Smithe's business has done more than $1 million in sales 💰
Amazing what a person can build in a short amount of time, even with very little experience as an entrepreneur.
Where might you be in a few years if you start now? 🤔
$160K in 2 Years Selling Spreadsheet Templates
Check out this Etsy store selling templates for Google Sheets 👉 SimplyOrganizedPro
The store has only been around since 2022 and has made 37K+ sales across 24 products.
Per a recent article, the store is estimated to have earned $160,000 so far 🤑
One of their best-selling products is this Monthly Budget Spreadsheet, released 14 months ago and with 8.6K sales.
They're selling that template for $1 to $2.50 a pop, so they've likely earned $10k from it, with very little overhead 😎
Some of their other products…
As you can see, they're a bit all over the place, creating templates for all kinds of niches.
I'm guessing their product choices are based on market research 🧐
Also, I looked around for social media accounts for SimplyOrganizedPro, but couldn't find anything. So it seems all their sales are coming via Etsy organic searches and recommendations 👍
And their prices are so low that I suspect they get a lot of impulse buyers.
Interesting as well that they mainly do Google Sheets templates.
💡 Some ideas…
Do the same thing but with Microsoft Excel templates
Create spreadsheet templates for a niche (eg. fitness or finance)
Instead of coming up with more ideas myself, I put what I'd written above into ChatGPT and asked it to give me a few more 🤖
A couple it came back with…
Interactive PDF Forms: Creating fillable and interactive PDF forms for various needs, such as business forms, surveys, workout logs, or event planning checklists. These can be particularly useful for small businesses or freelancers.
Social Media Content Templates: Designing customizable templates for social media posts and ads, catering to platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. This could include templates for stories, feed posts, and profile banners.
Who knows if those ideas are viable, but they can be good jumping off points for research.
With that in mind, any time you come across a story you like in this newsletter, you could copy/paste it into ChatGPT and ask it to brainstorm some ideas based on the text 😎
🗂 $75K/Month Online Arbitrage
From the archive, published September 2021…
Chris Grant tells Side Hustle Nation how he earns $75,000 to $80,000 a month with online arbitrage 😎
That’s when you buy physical items online for a low price, then resell them online at a higher price.
Surprising best-sellers for Chris have been items like diapers, calculators, and “weird electronic devices that are hard to find.”
Last year Chris tested out an item commonly found in pharmacies – he doesn’t say what it was exactly – and ended up doing about $140,000 in sales in 3 months, with profits in the region of $35,000 💰
Chris uses a combination of FBA and FBM (Fulfillment by Amazon vs. by Merchant) in his business.
🔎 amazon fba | permalink
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. Remember to sign up for that free webinar mentioned above: The Formula To Profit From Amazon 👈
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