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His "little productized service" earned $11K in 12 months 📦
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
His Little Productized Service Earned $11K in 12 Months
Running A Lead Gen Agency From an RV
3 Business Ideas From Least/Most Enjoyable Activities
How to Raise $100K in 10 Days (Mentor Fishing)
$3000/Month Collecting and Sharing Coupons
Latest Momentos
$100K/Month Lead Gen Agency
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His Little Productized Service Earned $11K in 12 Months
🇳🇱 Bas van Straaten is a Webflow developer and founder of Webflow Cookies, where he provides a simple productised service to build cookie banners on Webflow sites.
The selling point…
Unlike other solutions, we will match the look-and-feel of the cookie consent banners with the rest of your website.
This sells for €72.95 ($78.95) per site.
They've apparently had 250+ customers, which works out to $19,000+ in revenue 🤑
Bas says in a recent interview…
The service I created was never meant to make any money. When the GDPR rules were announced in Europe, I increasingly received the request to make my clients’ websites GDPR compliant and set up a cookie banner.
There were many services out there to help, but most of them were either expensive or lacked styling control. Short story: it was always a hassle at the end of the project.
So 👇
To help the community, I decided to design my own cookie banner and offer it as a free resource to the community.
People started to use it and this is how the story of what is now known as Webflow Cookies was born.
After launching the free resource…
People started to ask me for help with the setup. I installed the cookie banner, set up their Google Tag Manager and sent an invoice for the hours worked.
Only after the 20th order I realized this could be a great little productized service.
A few weeks later, and I built a website, wrote out all SOPs and trained a VA to handle the implementation.
📈 His "little productized service" has done well…
In the last 12 months [it has] made just under $11,000 – with a 90% profit margin. While it only contributes <5% to my annual revenue of all income stream together (freelance work + 2 other small services), it counts as some good pocket money given that it’s fully outsourced.
I reckon Bas' approach could be replicated in many areas.
You'd basically create a free resource for a popular product (eg. Webflow, Airtable, etc.), then offer a paid product or service that complements the freebie.
Another example of this in action: Zite Design Carrd Tutorial 👀
That's a tutorial showing you how to build landing pages for Carrd. You can watch the videos for free, and then Zite Design itself is a template marketplace.
So if you get fed up learning how to build templates yourself, you can head over to Zite Design and buy a pre-built template.
😍 Lastly, I love Bas' advice for aspiring entrepreneurs…
If you’re just starting out, and don’t have a clear idea yet for a service/product – consider going the freelance route first:
– You get to learn new skills, people and software while getting paid for it.
– In the short term – selling your time to clients gets you much more cash much faster than trying to build a product (in my experience).
– As you spend time becoming an expert in a certain niche, you start to uncover problems and new opportunities – which you then can turn into products or services.
Bas said $11K is <5% of his annual revenue.
So he's earning about $220,000 per year overall.
And it sounds like most of that comes from freelancing 💪
Running A Lead Gen Agency From an RV
Today's email is brought to you by Local Marketing Vault.
That's our top-rated lead generation training 🤩
One reviewer writes…
I took December 2018 to watch the videos and started actively prospecting for clients in January 2019…
I have been earning a full-time income since May 2019 and have been building my business ever since. I live and run my agency full-time in my RV, traveling across the U.S. That would not be possible without Local Marketing Vault, Jason & James, and the incredible community they built.
If you'd like to build something similar, check out their free masterclass video 👈
3 Business Ideas From Least/Most Enjoyable Activities
Check out this study on Time Use ⏳
This image in particular stands out…
😫 The type of activities rated as least enjoyable…
Doing homework
Looking for a job
Laundry
🥰 Most enjoyable…
Theater, concert
Go to sport
Play with child
Jakob Greenfeld writes…
This seems like extremely useful data when looking for a business idea.
Agreed.
You'd basically be looking for ways to help people do less activities from the top of the graph and more from the bottom.
But instead of sitting here and racking my brain, I uploaded the graph to ChatGPT 🤖 and asked it to generate some business ideas based on the data that would be worth exploring.
In particular I asked it for "out of the box" ideas that could be done mostly online, without leaving home 😜
Some interesting ideas it came back with…
Online Decluttering Game: Since household chores aren't enjoyable, create a gamified online platform where users can set cleaning goals, challenge friends, and earn rewards for completing tasks in their real home.
Online Skill-Betting Platform: Users can bet on themselves to learn a new skill within a certain timeframe (like cooking, playing an instrument, or learning a language) and share progress with a community for accountability and support.
Remote Social Dining Platform: To mimic the enjoyment of eating out at restaurants, develop a platform where people can sign up to have meals with strangers over video chat, sharing the experience of cooking or eating together while apart.
No clue if those ideas are viable.
But hopefully that shows you the potential of brainstorming with ChatGPT. Especially when combined with real-world data 😎
🗂 How to Raise $100K in 10 Days (Mentor Fishing)
From the archive, published July 2023…
📖 In the book Tools of Titans, author Tim Ferriss writes about Mike Del Ponte, one of the founders of Soma…
[Mike] raised $100K on Kickstarter in 10 days, and I asked him to share some of the best tools and tricks you can use to replicate his success.
Soma makes water filters; see their Kickstarter campaign from 2014.
One of the tips Mike shares in the book 👇
planning and running a Kickstarter campaign is often done in a haphazard fashion. To prepare for ours, we didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so we interviewed 15 of the top-earning Kickstarter creators.
It’s a simple but effective hack: before starting any business venture, reach out to people who’ve already done what you’re trying to do and ask if they’ll jump on a call with you.
I did this myself a couple of years ago when I was thinking to start collecting and publishing student reviews on my website 🤔
(Before then each review was just an editorial. Our review process has since come a long way.)
I made a list of people who already had established sites built on user reviews, then emailed them individually and asked if they’d be willing to jump on a call with me.
I call this Mentor Fishing.
And it works best when you bait the hook 🪝
Part of what I wrote in those emails…
If possible, I’d love to pay for an hour of your time to hear about the challenges you’ve had growing [your site], and how you’ve overcome them. Especially what has and hasn’t worked for generating user reviews.
That would be very helpful to me as essentially we’re thinking to build similar to [your site] but for a completely different niche.
Let me know if you’d be willing to jump on a call. Any insights you share with me would be kept private, of course.
And if you’re too busy or would just rather not for any reason, no worries at all. I’ve learned a lot already just from browsing your site and going through the interviews you’ve done.
Thanks for your time and keep up the great work.
Thanks to those emails, I ended up on several insightful calls, and only one person accepted my offer to pay for their time.
But even if they had all asked me to pay, it would have been worth the money. There I was learning directly from people who had done exactly what I wanted to do 😎
Give this a try yourself if you have in mind a particular business you want to build.
$3000/Month Collecting and Sharing Coupons
Uzair Farooq is from Pakistan and the founder of PennyCanny 💵
Started in 2021, the site shares coupon codes, discounts and offers for stores like JCPenny and DoorDash.
In a recent interview, Uzair reveals the site is now earning $3000/month 🤑
How it works…
Collecting online coupons requires effort, as you've to scour promo codes across the web. That's why I hired a team of 12 members for our operations team. The first member (Ops team manager) I hired already had some experience and had worked with another coupon website. The rest were trained.
We manually collected coupons by visiting online stores, signing up for their newsletters, and using social media channels. And we still follow the same process.
The team first validates the coupons by applying them and then uploads them on the backend portal we've built specifically for their ease.
So they’re basically saving people from having to go to all that trouble themselves to find and validate coupons.
And if you can save people time and effort, you can probably make money 👍
Best I can tell, PennyCanny is mainly monetized via affiliate partnerships and display ads.
For example, they have affiliate links to Fiverr from this page, and you can see display ads on their blog posts (like this one).
And while there are a ton of other coupon sites on the web, most of them look really spammy and their codes rarely work. PennyCanny is standing out with a clean interface and legit codes.
Also, 12 team members might sound like a lot, but the business is based in 🇵🇰 Pakistan, where the average monthly salary is only $287.
Plus, there's clearly a lot of money to be made in the coupon business. Ever heard of Honey, the coupon-finding browser extension that sold to PayPal for $4 billion?
🤯
So while PennyCanny likely isn't earning much profit for Uzair just yet, there's plenty of potential there.
Lastly…
We only have a handful of stores on the website (around 50), but the response is encouraging… Our main focus is adding more stores to reach and serve a wider audience on a global scale.
I'm thinking there could be an opportunity to build something like PennyCanny for specific niches.
Is there a niche you're particularly interested in? 🤔
What if there was a coupon site dedicated to that niche?
Latest Momentos
My latest batch of personal ramblings is here if you fancy a look 👀
From the recent leap day…
Last Feb 29th we were still in Bali, right before the pandemic. I was working hard but had only earned $14K the previous 6 months. Now we have residency in a country we love and the business earned $158K the last 6 months. I wonder could we 10x it again by this date 2028.
10xing revenue over the last 4 years might sound like rapid growth, but day to day it has felt slow. And I've often been frustrated with what I've perceived to be a lack of progress in my business.
The key thing to remember…
Impatience with actions, patience with results.
If you keep taking action consistently, the results will come.
Just probably not as fast as you'd like.
🗂 $100K/Month Lead Gen Agency
From the archive, published November 2022…
Andre Haykal Jr tweeted about a year ago that he’d grown his “lead generation agency to $46k/mo in just 6 months.”
More recently he shared that the same agency pulled in $100,600 in revenue in August 🤑
The agency is called KnowledgeX, and it positions itself as a lead generation service for agency owners.
Andre notes that his clients come from three main acquisition channels…
– Inbound leads from Twitter
– Cold outreach
– Referrals
Cold outreach has always been a consistent source from us, but leads from referrals and Twitter have been insane…
This goes to show how important it is to build a brand online!
He has a thread here on his 4-step process for cold outreach.
Andre is a good example of turning one successful business into multiple 😎
Once he got his agency humming along, he built a productized service to help with cold outreach and a course teaching people how to build an agency.
He shared monthly revenue numbers from all three businesses back in March…
KnowledgeX (B2B lead gen agency): $63k
Client Ascension (coaching program): $104.6k
@ListKitio (list building service): ~$8k
That amounted to $175,567 in total revenue in a single month. Apparently Andre “posted a $789 loss” from his business the same month a year before.
He writes…
if I can go from losing $789 in a month to generating nearly $200k in a month…
So can you 👊
…
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. Check out this free masterclass from Local Marketing Vault: How Tiny Two Page Websites Make Us $40,000/Month 💰
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