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$1000/month passive income from 2 simple Chrome extensions 😎

(Sorry for the delay! This edition was supposed to send yesterday but we had a hiccup 🙈)

Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.

Today...

  • $1000/Month Passive Income From 2 Simple Chrome Extensions

  • 3-Day Live Online Summit For Virtual Assistants

  • From Near-Death Experience to $1 Million Per Year Business

  • $420k/Year One-Person Business

  • February Finance Report

  • $10K+ From a Product "Nobody Would Buy"

  • She Earned $9,544 Last Month as a VA for Influencers

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$1000/Month Passive Income From 2 Simple Chrome Extensions

Hacker News has a thread like this every year 👇

💬 One commenter

I made a couple browser extensions that make over $500/month each.

The key seems to be naming your extension after high-volume search terms and getting good reviews on the chrome store (and obviously having an extension that works well and solves a common problem on major websites).

The commenter is Glen Chiacchieri.

🧐 I found these extensions listed under his name on the Chrome Web Store…

The first two have a paywall. You get unlimited use of the tool after a one-time payment 💵

Back to Glen's HN comment…

I'm extremely biased… but I think browser extensions are a pretty neat way to break into indie hacking. They cost nothing to run because they're hosted by extension stores.

They're often faster and easier to build than whole apps because you can just use them to fix or modify existing websites rather than create your own from scratch.

They can get organic traffic from extension stores, especially if they're well-named.

The main piece that was a pain in the ass for me was adding payments, so I made a service to do it (https://extensionpay.com), and now I can just focus on making the extensions work well.

Because of all my previous work I was able to build and submit my last extension (making over $500/month now) to the chrome store in four hours — no joke!

I reckon there’s lots of money to be made with utility tools that people would need once in a while and are happy to pay a small fee for access.

💡 To come up with some ideas…

  1. Look for a problem you face regularly while using Chrome.

  2. Use keyword tools to find high search, low competition keywords related to that problem.

To actually build the extension, hire a developer on Upwork or use ChatGPT to build it yourself.

For a small extension, there wouldn't be a lot of code involved.

🤖 I asked ChatGPT to sketch out a plan for building an extension to delete Reddit posts – like the one Glen is earning $500/month from – and it estimated I'd ultimately need 270 to 570 lines of code.

Even $100/month from an extension like that would be a solid ROI 💪

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3-Day Live Online Summit For Virtual Assistants

Today's email is brought to you by the 2024 Virtual Assistant Online Summit.

That's a 3-day live summit for virtual assistants, running March 12-14 🥳

The blurb…

Whether you’re an experienced VA or just starting out, we all want one thing – and that’s to create a successful business.  

Our international line up of speakers are leaders in their industries, who know the value of hiring a VA. Who better to provide you with the know-how to ensure you thrive in the VA space.

Tickets are only $23 USD and you get access to the session replays if you can't attend live 👍

Oh, and the whole thing is brought to you by the VA Foundry, creators of a top-rated VA course.

From Near-Death Experience to $1 Million Per Year Business

Matt Serel is the Co-Founder of You Are Accountable 👀

Their tagline…

Beating addiction is hard. We're here to sustain recovery.

💬 Matt says in a recent interview

We primarily meet this challenge by using a combination of peer recovery coaching, toxicology monitoring, and amazing technology… that makes us an efficient, organized, lean mean recovery sustaining machine.

I built the company with my partner AJ (who is a therapist) based on both of our experiences finding sustainable recovery from addiction. Basically, we just built what we wish we had access to when we got sober!

What tough experience have you been through?

What products or services do you wish existed at the time?

Could you build those for others? 🤔

Matt's business has turned out well…

Accountable is bootstrapped, grew over 300% in the last year, and has a 7 figure run rate…

More importantly, we’ve had a part in impacting thousands of lives at this point and it is just the most beautiful thing to witness.

7 figure run rate = $1 million per year in revenue 💰

And they only started in 2020.

🚀 How it all began…

I always loved to party… On October 14th 2013, I overdosed on Oxycodone, alone, on a work trip…

My girlfriend (now wife) was nervous that I didn't answer my phone in the morning, broke into my email to find out where I was staying, and had the hotel call 911.

I would be dead if she had waited 15 minutes.

Matt's approach to starting the business, having built 2 other businesses previously… 

I always start with things that don’t scale (manual processes), and once a model is proven out, then build the system around it.

For initial traction 👇

I basically harassed the treatment center I went to, spent months cold outreaching people on LinkedIn, and showed up at any local events I could find.

It took about a month to get our first paying customer (wahoo take that $99 to the bank!), and really 3-4 months of relentless outreach to start to get any sort of traction.

📆 Now, 4 years later…

90% of our clients are referred to us from clinical providers (treatment centers, individual therapists, psychiatrists, etc)...

Because of our model we were able to offer services that normally cost thousands per month, at hundreds of dollars per month instead.

What else do people spend a lot of money on each month?

Could you provide a cheaper alternative? 🤔

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🗂 $420k/Year One-Person Business

From the archive, published March 2022…

That was Makerpad, a “no-code education and community” that sold to Zapier a year ago.

Ben Tossell writes that he got Makerpad’s revenue to $35,000 per month as a solo founder working on the business part time, and without being able to code 🤯

His costs were apparently less than $500/month.

Ben’s advice to other entrepreneurs…

Get customers before worrying about scalability… It’s better to start small and be profitable than to build for scale.

In other words: don’t think too far ahead when you’re starting out. Getting your first customers is hard enough. Make sure you can do that consistently before planning months or years ahead.

Also from Ben

Thinking your first startup idea will succeed is like walking into a gym and hoping for a six-pack when you leave.

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