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Her failed startup led to a $40K/month business 💪
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
Her Failed Startup Led to a $40K/Month Business
Zero to Money-Making Website in 7 Months
$20K/Month From a Subscription-Based Design Service
$6K/Month Automation Manager
They Earn $45K Per Month Selling Code Templates
May Finance Report
From Pandemic Side Project to $20k/Month
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Her Failed Startup Led to a $40K/Month Business
Cecilia Razak is the founder of Slides With Friends, which she describes as…
… an interactive presentation builder. We enable teams to come together in groups to learn, connect, and communicate.
Think slide-style quiz and trivia games but you can join in like it's a Zoom call 👍
Cecilia reveals in a recent interview, that the business does $40K in monthly revenue with a team of 4.
Slides WIth Friends was actually born from the ashes of Cecilia's first startup, "a tech platform that connected pet care providers with pet owners."
💬 She explains…
I remember, we had a week-long on-site meeting in March of 2020… we wondered if we should discuss this "COVID 19 thing"...
By Friday, the trains were shut down and we struggled to even get our team members home.
😕 That was the beginning of the end for that business…
Within a matter of months, our revenue decreased by almost 70%...
It wasn't just a lack of demand that killed our startup. With such a large and (suddenly) remote team, it was urgent that everyone was aligned with our mission… As we grew, communication started to break down and the service itself suffered.
That realization led to the idea for Slides With Friends…
Slides With Friends was born out of need, as well as circumstance, as that startup went silent…
And the upside of our startup troubles was that we suddenly had time to work on something else. So we built Slides With Friends for ourselves and it turned out to be valuable.
🧪 To test the waters…
We initially used PPC [paid ads, eg. Google ads] to help validate the idea. It started making money and we were like, "Oh, this has legs and value: We can run with this." So we started focusing on it full time.
Their pricing model helps with marketing…
We're running a freemium model. It was the right choice for us because the product is inherently self-marketing — customers are launching events with our brand on them for their audiences.
But…
Our main conversion driver is content marketing — SEO has paid off a great deal. Word of mouth is important for us too, which is another reason that freemium makes sense for us. I'd say it's about 70/30, respectively.
I love stories like this, where entrepreneurs turn defeat into triumph 💪
A good reminder that your tough times may well contain the seeds of success.
Zero to Money-Making Website in 7 Months
Today's email is brought to you by The Authority Site System (TASS).
I've now done in-depth reviews of 45+ popular affiliate marketing courses, and TASS ranks #1.
That ranking isn't just based on my own extensive experience with the course – the 58 student reviews we've collected have the biggest say in the ranking 🤩
A recent review…
I’m roughly 7 months into the course (side hustle) and started earning affiliate commissions this month.
What I liked the most was the emphasis on niche selection and ruthlessly checking the numbers before starting the actual work.
Another…
Following The Authority Site System 3.0’s strategies, I built my website from the ground up. Remarkably, the site began generating revenue after just six months, and two years on, it continues to grow.
So it's by no means a way to get rich quick.
But if you follow the training and put in the work consistently, you're likely to have a website earning solid income within a year, with plenty of room to grow.
👉 Get started for as little as $132 (60% discount)
Also, they recently increased their refund policy to 60 days, so you can try out the training for 2 whole months and get your money back if you're not feeling it.
$20K/Month From a Subscription-Based Design Service
Amin Memon is the founder of Draftss, a productised design and development service.
Per a recent interview, they’re apparently earning $20K/month in revenue 🤑
Amin says…
I had been running my own design agency for some time, but I felt that the traditional model was outdated and there was an opportunity to innovate.
🧠 His thinking behind doing subscription-based design service…
The average cost to hire a designer in the US is around $60,000 a year. That's when I decided to create Draftss and revolutionize the agency model.
We developed a subscription-based model that allowed customers to request unlimited graphic design tasks [one-task at a time] and get top-quality designs from our highly rated-team.
Looks like they launched around April 2018, see the first version of their website here 👈
To get traction…
Our strategy for achieving our first 50 customers was to leverage the power of community marketing. We connected with niche communities such as Indie Hackers, Facebook Groups, and Reddit, and used our side projects to launch product launches.
And…
Within the first week of our launch we had crossed $3.2k MRR. Since then there is no looking back as we are increasing the number of customers over time.
🔑 They key to Amin's success…
For building a great start-up, you must focus on the end result of the product which solves the customers problem and provide immense value…
For example there are tons of other companies that try to copy our model & build their own design subscription model as a service. But they eventually failed because they weren't able to obtain great designs & provide them at a fraction of the cost, with a fast turnaround time.
Sounds to me like Amin's great at finding, hiring and managing talent.
And that talent provides excellent service for customers 😍
If you've got a similar skillset to Amin, or you'd like to develop those skills, then an agency business could be a good fit for you.
Just note that the margins on such a business aren't usually very high. Amin doesn't mention how much of their $20k monthly revenue is profit, but I suspect it's likely less than 30% 😕
Hiring talent ain't cheap.
🗂 $6K/Month Automation Manager
From the archive, published August 2022…
Freelancing is my top recommendation for anyone looking to get started working online (tied with getting a remote job).
But what skill do you freelance? 🤔
Ideally it’s something you can learn fast, and quickly earn a good living from.
Sami Abid’s story provides a solid argument for learning the skill of automation with no-code and low-code tools.
He started his consulting business less than 2 years ago, was able to quit his day job this past January, and is now earning a steady $6000 per month via retainer contracts 😎
Sami writes…
coding was always my limitation. But low-code meant I needed to know very little or, in most cases, no coding knowledge at all to build systems and solve problems.
To achieve results for clients, Sami uses low- and no-code apps such as Airtable, Notion, Zoho, HubSpot, Zapier, and Integromat.
He started off “with minor projects valued at $200-$400” and worked his way up to contracts valued at $2000 a pop 💰
Sami did gain experience with the aforementioned tools at his day job. But there’s nothing stopping you from learning them on your own time. Many have excellent training materials and free plans you can practice with.