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His first course earned $105,637 in 4 days 🚀
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
His First Course Earned $105,637 in 4 Days
She's Earned $5000 So Far as a Virtual Assistant
Solved His Own Problem & Made $3100 in 2.5 Months
Think About Your Hero
Built Her Talent Agency To $11M/Year in Only 3 Years
Boring Software in Competitive Niche: $500/Month After 2 Months
$6000/Month VA Business With Little Online Presence
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His First Course Earned $105,637 in 4 Days
Matt McGarry has been publishing Newsletter Operator since January 2023.
It's a newsletter about growing and monetizing a newsletter 📈
Off the back of that, Matt recently launched a cohort course called Growth System, which did quite well…
You don’t need a large audience to make money…
I had 13,230 email subscribers at the time [of launch].
The course generated $105,637 in revenue and we sold out of seats for the cohort in 4 days.
📝 Some backstory…
I’ve been running GrowLetter, an agency that helps media companies and creators grow their newsletters for 2 years.
I talk to people who want help but can't afford our services all the time.
The goal of Growth System is to be the “do it yourself” or “done with you” service option for people who can’t work with our agency yet.
In the course, I teach all the tactics we use to get clients more engaged newsletter subscribers and convert them into customers.
Plus, I share templates, examples, and case studies to make it easy to implement these growth tactics.
🤑 Pricing…
Cohort courses usually cost $800 to $1500 with some higher-end examples ranging from $2000 to $5000.
I decided to price my first cohort on the lower end of that and charge $999.
I limited the first cohort to 100 total students.
His reasoning for that limit 👇
1) To give me enough time to share 1on1 feedback with each student (I also paid 3 coaches to help with student feedback + coaching)
2) To keep the first cohort small. It’s better to limit the first cohort to a small group. Improve it. Then share it with a larger audience later.
3) To make it easier to sell. Real scarcity and urgency make this much easier.
I especially like that last point 👍
Another key thing for Matt was running free webinars, which he promoted via his newsletter and tweets like this (~16k followers on Twitter).
💬 He writes…
I did 5 live webinars in December 2023 and January 2024…
At the end of the webinar, I added slides about the benefits of the course, the limited number of students, the start date, etc…
On the 1st webinar, my pitch was bad.
I only had about 10 slides for the course pitch.
Then with each webinar, I got better. By the 5th webinar, I had refined my pitch and had 62 slides about the course and 177 total slides.
This was Matt's first course ever, and he hit it out of the park.
Worth considering something like this if you run an agency or some kind of service business: create your own paid training to share your processes and tactics with others 😎
But, like Matt, the first step would be to build up an audience, doesn't have to be huge.
Because it's hard to sell a course if nobody knows you or your expertise.
She's Earned $5000 So Far as a Virtual Assistant
Today's email is brought to you by Launch in 30 Days 🥳
That's a highly-rated virtual assistant training and coaching program that recently opened its door for a limited time.
📝 One student told us…
I was able to sign up a client on a 20-hour package which is all the capacity I have at the moment. This brings in an additional income of $1,400.
Another…
I launched my business in the end and the course helped with generating leads. I’ve earned $5k so far.
Doors close this Friday.
👉 Check out this page for lots more info.
Solved His Own Problem & Made $3100 in 2.5 Months
Keep it Shot is a Mac app that "utilizes AI to automatically provide descriptive names for your images and videos" 🤖
Founder Vignesh Warar writes…
[Keep It Shot] went viral and reached $3,000 in revenue with over $220 in MRR
💡 How he came up with the idea…
I was building a video-based search engine for lecture videos… In the process of building it, I converted videos into images, renamed them using AI, extracted text, generated descriptions, and built a semantic index…
And I thought, wow, if I'm being honest with myself, this screenshot renaming thing provided more value than the video search engine.
So he quickly pivoted and built out the first version of Keep it Shot in only 10 days…
Once I finished the product, I quickly posted it on Reddit… my scheduled Product Hunt launch went live automatically the very next day…
the demo video was tweeted from [Product Hunt's] Twitter account, which received 900+ likes, then was picked up by some big Telegram channels with millions of followers.
You could say Vignesh got lucky there, but really he put himself in a position to get lucky 😎
In particular, that slick 7-second demo video he created to showcase the app made it very easy for Product Hunt to tweet about it.
🤑 About 2.5 months after launch, Vignesh reported…
Users: 3000+
Revenue: $3,100+
MRR: $220
Last words from Vignesh…
Over the years, I have built numerous products, but if I have to choose the ones that truly made money, they would be the products designed to solve my own problems—something that did not exist in the market.
🗂 Think About Your Hero
From the archive, published July 2021…
From the book Mindset by Carol Dweck…
Think about your hero. Do you think of this person as someone with extraordinary abilities who achieved with little effort?
Now go find out the truth.
Find out the tremendous effort that went into their accomplishment—and admire them more.
Related: how to work hard
Built Her Talent Agency To $11M/Year in Only 3 Years
Adriane Schwager is the co-founder of GrowthAssistant, a talent vetting agency that "embeds the best offshore Growth Marketers into your company."
They vet workers from the Philippines 🇵🇭 and started in 2021.
In a recent interview, Adriane reveals…
Revenue reached a run-rate of $11M [annual recurring revenue]. We plan to grow to over $20M by the end of 2024.
What they do 👇
We go through over 50,000 applications per year to find the top 0.5% offshore talent for our clients.
They don’t just match talent, they also manage them and charge clients starting at $3000/mo.
GrowthAssistant has positive online reviews from workers. Apparently they provide paid leave, health care and other benefits. That's atypical, and surely helps them hire the best talent 💪
As you might guess, Adriane has a background in HR…
I must have done 10,000+ interviews before I left [my corporate job] after 14 years.
💡 How she got the idea for GrowthAssistant…
My childhood friend, Jesse Pujji, who had been doing very well with his digital marketing agency, Ampush…
We started a two-hour phone call by sharing business ideas from our lists.
Jesse outlined the vision for what would become GrowthAssistant. That call ended with me committing to building the offshore talent acquisition partner that had been on his list.
Jesse had a pretty big network and about 8k followers on X.
🚀 Along with Adriane’s HR skills, that was key to a successful launch…
$50k [monthly recurring revenue] in under 100 days.
Jesse’s network helped us A LOT initially. He knows so many people and opened so many doors. Most of our first customers came through it.
But hey, that was one of “unfair advantages” and I think we used (and still use) it quite well.
What unfair advantages do you have? 🤔
Could be someone you know, a community you're connected to, skills or experience you bring to the table, etc.
How can you leverage something like that to build your business?
Boring Software in Competitive Niche: $500/Month After 2 Months
📝 Vikash Rathee recently posted on Reddit…
Apparently he built his shortener (IDM.in) mainly to test out some tech...
I keep testing new cloud infrastructures to see what's new!
So the simplest I can think of is a URL shortener with analytics.
🤑 Just two months after launch…
it's now making over $500 MRR via Stripe (subscription) + Google Ads.
That's surprising, given that there are so many other URL shorteners out there, many of them well established and feature rich.
Vikash says…
Yes, there are 100s [of competitors]. But not very well maintained and run professionally with API, Team access, Reports and Analytics…
[My product has] Reports and API access in all plans. None of the other software provides plain click report access [IP address, device, location, etc.] for each click.
Three things he did to promote IDM 👇
1. Running one Google Ads campaign for targeting keywords
2. Launched on Product hunt (1 customer, 680 clicks on Launch day),
3. Submitted as Show HN on YC
For #1 Vikash targets keywords like…
URL shortener, Link shortener etc. with exact match and campaign goal as Conversion… [with a budget of] $8 to $10 per day.
That's about $300/month spent on ads, which obviously cuts into profit.
But Vikash notes that the $500/month is recurring revenue. So his ROI should increase over time, so long as he can keep customers happy and paying their monthly subscriptions 👍
His advice for others building products…
Just ship something and start talking about it (marketing), someone in need will buy for sure.
Once you find your 1st customer, keep improving.
Here is a quick example to inspire you - Someone just subscribed to $7/m plan from this Reddit AMA as well :-)
Vikash's success goes to show that you can do well in competitive markets 💪
So don't be discouraged if your business idea isn't all that original.
There may still be plenty of opportunity there if your product or service does things just a little differently.
Another example of this is Tim Bennetto's Pallyy…
Pally is yet another social media post scheduler, but it stands out enough from competitors to provide Tim with a good income 💰
🗂 $6000/Month VA Business With Little Online Presence
From the archive, published August 2023…
We review lots of virtual assistant courses on eBiz Facts 🧐
A student named Bri McDonald recently commented on our review of a course called Launch in 30 Days…
Right now I’m up to lucky client number 6…
During my first month [as a virtual assistant] I brought in $7,000, excluding GST. Several months in, I am on track to earn $10,000 (excluding GST) monthly.
Bri is based in New Zealand 🇳🇿 so those figures are NZD.
Approximate conversions…
$7000 NZD = $4200 USD
$10,000 NZD = $6000 USD
(Also, GST is a goods and services tax, like VAT in Europe.)
I find Bri’s results remarkable considering she doesn’t have much of an online presence.
A post on her Facebook page reveals how she landed her first client 👇
We have just spent a couple of days down in Franz Josef visiting my first client (Franz Josef Top 10 Holiday Park – aka my mum) 😎
The idea for my business steamed from the work I have been doing to support my mum remotely in her business. The thought of being able to provide remote admin support to multiple businesses across the country was super exciting.
So I ran with the idea and here we are!
Most likely, Bri used the results she got from helping her mom’s business to land other clients.
I suspect she also leveraged her existing network, which isn’t very big; Bri has less than 300 connections on LinkedIn as of this writing.
But despite not having a website or a significant social media following, she’s managed to build up a profitable VA business in a few short months 💪
My takeaway: your existing relationships and some word-of-mouth can be enough to get a simple service business up and running.
Does that uncle of yours need a website or help with Excel?
That little opportunity could well be the start of a new career 🚀
The key is getting results for that first client or two, then leveraging those results to land more clients.
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. Looking to launch a virtual assistant business next month?
Launch in 30 Days is a highly-rated training that will show you how.
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