$75,000 per month creating animated explainer videos 🤯

The business currently generates about $750,000-$1,000,000 annually, with expenses coming in around 20-30% of that.

I started doing voice overs as a side-hustle to get out of debt.

After a few months of growth, I noticed that many of my customers were pairing my services with video.

So, I decided to begin teaching myself to create videos as well. This way, I could pair this service with my voiceover business.

I started out on a platform called Fiverr 12 years ago, and have grown to become one of the top 5 sellers all-time on the platform.

In just 18 months, we had paid off $50,000 in debt, and were finally free!

Unlike most businesses, since I started on a crowd-sourcing platform [Fiverr], I didn’t have to worry about marketing. In fact, it was 7 years before I spent a dime on marketing my business.

All I had to do was serve my clients well, put out quality work, and make sure my pages were optimized.

Our greatest source of new business is client referral. We currently spend very little on outside marketing…

Our business is very visual. So, when we create a video and do a great job, others will see that video and ask, "Who created that for you?" That natural evolution is what typically brings us referrals.

Because I’ve maintained good reviews over the years and have increased the quality of my services, Fiverr continues to bring new clients to me through the algorithms they’ve developed to connect quality buyers and quality sellers.

We launched in early 2023 and are doing around $3k in MRR but growing quickly - we did just over $18k in revenue in January 2024 alone!

I started playing in tournaments at my home course and wished that I could see how I was doing during the event instead of having to wait until it was over.

I knew about the industry standard, Golf Genius [starting at $4200/year for public courses].

After talking with the head pro at the course, I learned that they didn’t use it because the product was incredibly expensive and difficult to use.

Other players at the course shared that they had tried using Google Sheets as a live leaderboard in the past, needless to say, that wasn’t a great solution.

The first time Live Tourney was tested for a real round of golf was on June 7th, 2022.

Our first paying customer came in January of 2023… The first few months after “launch” were spent fixing bugs and urgently responding to requests…

We’ve been profitable since Day 1 since it doesn’t cost much to run the business. Outside of one-time fees to start the LLC, our expenses are around $100 per month!

Regardless of what software (or no software) a course uses, making a change is a big deal and requires a bit of upfront work for them to get everybody on board.

It’s our job to convince them that the experience is better in the long term since we have a better product that is also much more affordable.

Our most successful method for finding new customers is through cold calls and cold emails.

It continues to surprise me how many courses respond positively and take a demo with us.

This doesn’t scale all that quickly, but we’re happy to continue to do things that don’t scale at this stage and grow sustainably.

The biggest surprise fan of the product was an 80-year-old man. His wife was the fan because, for the first time, she was able to follow her husband’s round and track his progress on her phone at home.

Just start. Start by doing the first thing you can think of to move the needle on your idea. Pulling that string will unveil what the next few things are and after you continue doing this for days, weeks, months, and years, it’s pretty incredible what can happen.

Figure out the things you need to do to make that first dollar, because that feeling is electric.

Then: spending too much time on tasks I understand best
Now: prioritizing bottlenecks
Insight: your startup won’t grow if you focus only on tasks you’re comfortable doing

The 16 companies in this report are behind at least 588 individual brands.

Combined, Semrush estimates they pick up around 3.5 billion clicks from Google each month. An average of 5.9 million monthly clicks per site.

If it’s not a broad top-level niche category like Sports or Tech, they don’t seem to have as much interest in building out a site to cover it.

There are countless specific sports, industries and hobbies they don’t cover all that well.

Fishing. Fish keeping. Motorbike riding. Tennis. Sewing. Audiophiles (far beyond the ‘best headphones’ kind of query). Snowboarding. RC racing. Board games. Off-roading. Books. Coffee. Survival equipment. Horse riding. Hiking. Beard care.

There are lots more, but I think you get the idea.

If you want to go and compete with the digital goliaths in Google then please don’t let this report stop you. If you want to create the next big tech / sports / health site and you have a real passion for that, then you have my full backing.

I know it’s meta to say this but I proudly write about topics (link building, keyword research, etc) where hugely profitable companies, who have teams of writers and designers, are covering the same thing.

These 16 companies, and those like them, don’t rank in every niche. Don’t always grow their sites. Don’t always take over the top results.

There will always be opportunities available if a bigger slice of the pie is your aim.

And if it’s your goal, who knows…you might be the next independent site they look to acquire.

At seminars and lectures, I’ve asked my audience, “How many people in this room would like to grow their company or department 10 times larger than it is right now?” 

Typically, 99 percent of the audience raises their hands. 

Then I say, “Leave your hands up if you can work 10 times more hours or 10 times harder than you’re working now.” 

All the hands go down. 

The point is that there are companies and departments that are 10 times bigger than yours, and you know they aren’t working 10 times harder than you are. 

They’re just working smarter.

An app that converts your voice notes into concisely summarized text.

No more filler words, repeated sentences, and unnecessary ‘umms’ […] It’s like having a personal assistant who summarizes and types out your thoughts.

Unfortunately, no. I’ve designed it specifically to work for live voice notes.

Might add that feature in the future, but don’t want to lose focus at the moment.

Something I learned from my uncle – if you have momentum, don’t stop.

So screw work-life balance for the foreseeable future.

I’m going to just keep going.