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Running a $120K/month digital agency in South Africa 🇿🇦
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
Running a $120K/Month Digital Agency in South Africa
Starting Monday: Free 5 Day VA Challenge
$1K/Month Building ChatGPT for Secondhand Shopping
22-Year-Old Earned $12K Last Month
Her Candle Business Earns $1 Million Per Year
Clever Hack For Finding Content Ideas (Via Reddit)
Teaching Math on Pornhub = $270,000 Per Year
Update: ReplyGuy Looks More Shady Than Sneaky
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Running a $110K/Month Digital Agency in South Africa
Felix Norton is the co-founder of Woww, a digital marketing agency based in South Africa 🇿🇦
In a recent interview, Felix reveals his business to be earning…
Between $100-120k monthly recurring revenue (MRR). We aim for a 20% profit margin.
That profit margin makes sense when you consider he has a co-founder and 32 employees.
👀 Felix's background…
I ran a neighbourhood IT support service, dabbled in crypto mining, started and flipped an e-commerce brand, and even tried to start an online course business on how to build profitable online stores.
But the consistent business during all these side-hustles has been running a digital marketing agency.
He started out with web design while at university…
I made my first website for my dad and then one of his friends and ultimately started gaining enough work that it made sense to hire another freelancer part-time.
Shortly after, I hired multiple freelancers and was suddenly running an agency.
Now 12 years later I run Woww, a fully remote digital marketing agency based in Cape Town with 32 full-time employees servicing clients globally.
🧐 Getting those first clients…
In the early days I did everything I could. Friends and family, doing free projects, networking events, cold email outreach, Facebook Groups, and responding to classified ads.
Anyone I could somehow get in touch with, I would try to work with.
Interesting how Felix has tried a bunch of other business models, but a simple design agency has ultimately proved best for him.
His agency now earns more than $1 million per year 💰 and it all started with him making a website for his dad.
So don't underestimate starting with a simple freelance business, serving clients in your local area.
Starting Monday: Free 5 Day VA Challenge
Today's email is brought to you by The 5 Day VA Challenge.
This is a free challenge by Hannah Dixon to help you get started as a virtual assistant 🚀
You'll learn…
What skills to focus on
How to find clients
How to sharpen your entrepreneurial mindset
It starts Monday, June 24.
One person who went through it before wrote…
I met super cool people and got a client by the end of the challenge!
$1K/Month Building ChatGPT for Secondhand Shopping
A recent post on Reddit…
The app is called Encore Shopping, and it lets you…
Search for mid to high-end clothing on hundreds of secondhand sites.
It has an interface similar to that of ChatGPT, but customized for budget fashion recommendations 👚
Looks like they only launched ~1 month ago and they're already earning $1000/month.
📝 The founder writes…
My friend and I were frustrated by the high prices of mid-to-high-end fashion brands online and getting outfit inspo
so for our climate tech class we created an AI fashion assistant called Encore for our class that links the best second-hand/cheaper alternatives for any item and and provides style/inspo/outfit recommendations
The free version of the app gives you 1000 recommendations, whereas the unlimited version costs $9/month.
They justify their pricing nicely…
For people who shop 3+ times a year, save $270/yr on average.
However 👇
Something to keep in mind is that businesses built on the back of GPT can be at risk of ChatGPT eventually making them extinct.
Giglish is one that comes to mind, featured in the newsletter a while ago…
Not sure how that business is faring nowadays, but looks like the recently released ChatGPT-4o can do essentially the same thing 😕
So if you're going to build an AI app, try to assess the likelihood of your app's functionality soon becoming a part of ChatGPT itself.
🗂 22-Year-Old Earned $12K Last Month
From the archive, published July 2022…
That’s Stephen Wise, as detailed here 👈
I made $11,750 from freelancing last month working 30 hours a week.
I’m 22, have no degree, and dropped out of college on my 18th birthday.
Sounds like Stephen taught himself how to build Webflow websites mainly via YouTube, and now offers that service to clients 😎
He also has a nifty 17-minute video breaking down the simple framework he used to build a successful online business.