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- $1000/month passive income from 2 simple Chrome extensions 😎
$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 👇
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…
Look for a problem you face regularly while using Chrome.
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 💪
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? 🤔
🗂 $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.
February Finance Report
My latest monthly finance report is here 👈 detailing everything we earned and spent in my business last month.
$22,798 income
$8,849 expenses
More details in the full report.
$10K+ From a Product "Nobody Would Buy"
Last June, Philipp Keller posted on X about a "Backlink Harvester Tool" he was building, to see if anyone was interested 🤨
He had about 2000 followers at the time.
Philipp recently revealed what happened next 👇
Lots of people wrote to me: Yes they'd use this product…
Two months later I had an MVP [Minimum Viable Product] ready. I released it at a 10$/month price point, but only allowed 10 customers to use it (because it was still too much MVP).
The tool lets you do email outreach to get more backlinks.
Then…
Though I was thrilled that I found 10 customers (and had a lot more customers in the waiting list) I saw that they struggled with the outreach tool
Basically, the tool still required you to send emails asking other site owners to link to you.
🤔 That got Philipp thinking…
I was looking for an easier way to get first backlinks for solopreneurs who had no prior knowledge of the subject.
While developing the SaaS solution I stumbled over lots of great places to post your startup, where you don't need to send an email but instead can register on the website directly…
There were already MANY lists out there which promised you "100 great places to list your startups". I had a look at some of them and found the quality lacking at best.
So…
I investigated 200 startups [websites, directories, businesses], using 4 different SEO tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, MOZ and Majestic) investigating backlink those 200 startups had in common and organized them by backlink strength, achievability and categories.
🛠️ After spending a couple of months building this…
I wrapped up my research and at Xmas sent emails to around 15 people asking them to review my resource… nobody seemed interested.
Philipp was devastated, but decided he'd give it one more shot by tweeting out a 4-minute video explaining the product, which he called SEO Kickstarter for Startups.
He didn't expect much 🙈
But…
over the course of the next 48 hours I made 134 sales (I raised the price two times, in the end it was 2.5x the original price). In total around $6000.
I gained 2000 additional followers on Twitter.
Over the course of the next 30 days I made more revenue than at my day job
(context: I'm having a well paying salary in Switzerland).
Given Philipp's resume, he's likely earning $10K/month from his day job, so it's safe to assume he earned more than $10,000 from his product in those 30 days 🤯
His takeaway from all of this…
I needed to do a landing page and launch with a video with the proper pitch before my product was credible. Sending a person a link with "hey, can you have a look" is not validation.
Philipp's story also illustrates the winding nature of the path to success.
He spent 2 months building a tool that didn't really work. But that led him to creating SEO Kickstarter… which flopped a couple of times until he figured out a better way to market it 💪
🗂 She Earned $9,544 Last Month as a VA for Influencers
From the archive, published April 2023…
Kate Christine posted on YouTube last September that she had earned $6000 in one month as a virtual assistant for influencers 😎
She had 4 main clients and was charging them $25-30 per hour for tasks like…
Daily posting on LTK and Amazon storefront
Writing blog posts
Creating graphics (in Photoshop or Canva)
Posting to TikTok and responding to comments
Weekly newsletter creation
Posting to Pinterest
And yes, Kate was working a lot to earn $6,000 in one month, about 60 hours per week 😱
But she much prefers her VA work to what she was doing before…
I was a corporate employee for a marketing agency and really did not like it… each paycheck was like $1400 in my corporate job so I have definitely surpassed that [as a virtual assistant].
Sounds like Kate is mostly self-taught as a VA…
I have about three years of experience in this and I have a business management degree. But honestly the degree did nothing to help me in what I am doing [now].
Kate posted another video to YouTube a few days ago, announcing that her business pulled in $9544 last month, a new personal best 🥳
The vast majority of her revenue still seems to come from direct client work, but Kate has started to transition into more of a VA agency by outsourcing some tasks to other contractors.
She also launched her own VA course and has made a few sales of that already.
I love the path Kate is on here 😍
She’s a great example of the progression I usually recommend to people new to making money online…
Start with freelancing or a remote job
As you gain experience, increase your rate 📈 and reduce your hours 📉
Enjoy your free time or invest it into building a Level 3-5 business
Kate is investing a good chunk of her free time finding and training talent she can outsource to (agency business), and creating her own course (digital products business).
Re: finding clients for her VA business, Kate recommends you do the same thing that has worked well for her…
Besides referrals, I have gotten every single one of my clients by emailing them directly. It is the best way to get in contact with them, because they check their email everyday.
She has a blog post and video with more details on this approach, including an email template you can use for your own pitches 📝
…
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. Interested in becoming a virtual assistant?
Then check out the 2024 Virtual Assistant Online Summit.
It's a super low cost way to learn how to become a well paid VA.
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