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Self-taught developer earning $12K/month from a simple app 🇫🇷
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
Building Veterinary Websites = $10M Exit
Free Training: 3 Secrets To Grow Your Travel Blog
Self-Taught Developer Earning $12K/Month From a Simple App
Failed His Way To $720K/Year
Google's 293 Failed Projects
His Vampire Website Earned $500,000 in 1 Year
$30K/Month Solo Travel Blogger
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Building Veterinary Websites = $10M Exit
Adam Greenbaum is the founder of WhiskerCloud, a digital marketing agency for the veterinary industry 🐶
Per a recent profile…
In January 2022, Greenbaum sold the agency in a low 8-figure deal to Petdesk, which provides similar website and app services for veterinarians.
So that's at least a $10 million exit 💰
Adam says…
The best part of this story is that it was a bootstrapped venture, and I did it with almost no marketing budget.
🚀 It all started back in 2011 when…
Greenbaum launched a Boston terrier rescue and, with a background in digital marketing, built a website for it…
The site immediately began to grow, and Greenbaum started working with veterinarians around the world to help Boston terriers in need.
So he had some experience with building websites and working with veterinarians.
Then, a few years later…
When Adam Greenbaum Googled the best local veterinary hospital for his two rescue Boston terriers in 2015, he found a whole lot of broken links.
That was the catalyst for spending 10 months building the infrastructure of WhiskerCloud, an agency that builds, hosts and manages veterinary websites. In June 2016, WhiskerCloud went live.
How Adam got traction…
Built in Colorado published an article about Greenbaum and his new agency, WhiskerCloud. Within 24 hours, big veterinary medicine companies were reaching out.
Side note 👇
Built In Colorado is an interesting site, featuring tech businesses in Colorado.
Is there a similar site for your local area? If yes, you could try to get featured like Adam did.
If not, maybe there's an opportunity to create something like this? 🤔
Back to Adam, and another thing that helped him grow the agency was influencer partnerships…
Early on, he became tight with two of the industry’s top influencers.
“Both owned and ran huge Facebook groups filled with thousands of people who were my target audience,” he explained. “By working with them and producing content together, I had their biggest fans falling in love with my company.”
He also featured influencers in WhiskerCloud’s content with custom graphics and posts. The influencers would then share this content.
Sounds to me like he built genuine relationships with influencers who shared his mission and values 👍
Fast-forward to 2022…
Once WhiskerCloud crossed $2 million in ARR, he received multiple emails from venture capitalists each day…
Adam ended up selling the agency to PetDesk for $10+ million.
At the time of sale, he apparently had 2000 customers, which would mean an average of $1000/month per customer 🤑
I reckon there are still plenty of opportunities like the one Adam found.
What industries or niches are you familiar with? Check out the websites of businesses operating there. Do you see room for improvement? Could you help them find more customers somehow?
Help one business in that niche and it should be easy enough to convince others to work with you 🤝
Free Training: 3 Secrets To Grow Your Travel Blog
Today's email is brought to you by The 3 Secrets To Exponentially Grow Your Travel Blog In 2024.
That's a free live training happening this Thursday, Feb 29th.
Your host is Laura Peters, co-creator of Scale Your Travel Blog, one of the top-rated courses I've ever reviewed 🤩
If you're into blogging at all, the training is worth tuning into.
You'll learn…
How to drive thousands of readers to your blog each DAY on autopilot.. .without social media!
How to convert your blog traffic into consistent and predictable passive income.
How to take your travel blog to six figures and beyond.
(There will also be a replay sent out to anyone registers, so don't worry if you can't make the live training.)
Self-Taught Developer Earning $12K/Month From a Simple App
Benjamin Houy is the creator of French Together, an app to help people speak and understand French 🇫🇷
In a recent interview, he reveals…
French Together started as a blog 10 years ago while I was studying in Germany and became my full-time job over the next few years.
You can see an early version of the blog from 2014 here 👈
Benjamin writes in the interview…
When the COVID pandemic struck, I decided to turn my main product (an interactive ebook) into a proper web app…
Back when I was a kid, I learned a bit of C++, Python and PHP but never really got deep into it. Somehow, there was always a point when I would lose interest and switch to something else.
😕 However, during the pandemic…
My SEO traffic started declining. I ignored it at first, telling myself it would get better. Months went by with my traffic declining a little more every month.
After a while, I had to face the inevitable: my traffic wasn’t coming back. What I took for a simple seasonal change was in fact a shift in the market.
I found myself backed in a corner with only 2 choices: let the business die, or reinvent it.
He chose the second path…
My initial goal was to take all the content and features of the ebook I was selling and put them in a web app…
After 2 months or so, the app was built and I was eager to get feedback so I contacted all the people who had purchased the ebook in the last 12 months and offered them free access.
🚀 Even after launching the app…
My income dropped. That’s because I switched from selling an ebook with an optimized and tested marketing funnel to selling a SaaS [software as a service], something I had never done before.
After a while though, I got used to SaaS marketing and my income started increasing… I’m now at roughly $12k MRR and hope to double it within a year.
Elsewhere he mentions…
The large majority of my sales and traffic come from SEO…
My funnel is pretty simple: people search for some French-related keywords, find the French Together blog and then either sign up for the newsletter or start a free trial directly.
💬 Benjamin's advice for others…
Don’t overthink it. It’s easy to spend years or even decades dreaming of starting, only to find yourself full of regrets. Start now with the skills and knowledge you have, learn as you go.
You don’t need the perfect idea, you just need to offer something people are happy to pay for.
I suspect there are opportunities to do what Benjamin has done but for other languages.
His app looks simple enough, wouldn't be too hard to build yourself or outsource 💪
Benjamin's main advantage though was his 10-year-old blog that already ranked for a lot of relevant keywords. So you'd either need to build up a blog like that yourself or find some other marketing channel.
If you're a developer, you could find established language-learning blogs and offer to build apps for them, see if you can figure out a revenue share 🤝
🗂 Failed His Way To $720K/Year
From the archive, published July 2022…
Omar Deryan writes about trying to make money online back in 2017…
During that year, I have tried and tested various business models, in this order: blogging, affiliate marketing, dropshipping, Amazon FBA, and Airbnb investment.
He managed to earn $500/month profit from Amazon, but that wasn’t enough 😩
However, Omar joined lots of online communities that year and “started receiving requests to write, optimize and translate product descriptions for Shopify (Dropshippers) and Amazon sellers.”
He pivoted to a service business and in December that year earned $7000 🤑
Fast-forward to today, and he’s evolved the business into OJ Digital Solutions, a $60,000/month agency that helps Amazon sellers create effective product listings.
Google's 293 Failed Projects
As of this writing, Google – or rather Alphabet, its parent company – has a market cap of $1.8 trillion, making it the 6th most valuable company in the world 🌎
Keep that in mind while you check out this website: Killed By Google
That site lists all the projects Google has shut down over the years 😵
For example…
Google Domains
Google Podcasts
YouTube Stories
Google links
Lots of those projects had value but not enough for Google to keep them alive.
I know from personal experience that it can be really hard to kill something I've built. When I do that, I'm essentially admitting that I wasted loads of time and energy 🙈
But as we can see from Google's example, even the biggest and best companies in the world don't hit a home run every time.
Far from it.
And I think it's safe to say that Google wouldn't be so successful today if not for their constant attempts at new products.
And their willingness to keep trying despite hundreds of failures 😎