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$1 million selling thin pillows on the internet 😴
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$1 Million Selling Thin Pillows on the Internet
The Fastest Way To Build A Lucrative Side Hustle?
Most of his 25 Directory Sites Earn $600/Month Each
She Tripled Her Income By Doing This
Business Idea: Help People Create Telegram Bots
Latest Momentos
4 Years Doing Squarespace Projects = $800,000
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👋 Before we get stuck in, a couple more short videos I published recently…
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$1 Million Selling Thin Pillows on the Internet
😴 Spencer Haws recently shared the full story of his $1 million pillow business…
A few years ago, I was sick of not being able to find thin pillows. I LOVE super thin pillows to sleep on.
The thinner the better.
I couldn't really find anything suitable online (or in stores), so I decided to create my own.
So, I found a manufacturer on Alibaba, got a bunch of samples, and ended up becoming the "thin pillow guy".
He listed his product on Amazon, optimizing the title, description, and other elements for SEO 😎
His goal was to be the top result when someone searched for "thin pillow" on Amazon. With minimal competition at the time, he succeeded.
In the first month, Spencer sold $4,399 worth of pillows, all through organic searches on Amazon 🤑
He continued to invest in larger order quantities and created a niche website to attract traffic from Google for thin pillow-related keywords and other relevant terms.
He ended up selling over $1 million worth of thin pillows 💰 primarily via Amazon and Google SEO.
Eventually…
This was always a side project for me, so I decided to sell the business.
I was netting about $15,000/month (after ALL expenses) and sold the business for $425,000 on Empire Flippers.
Takeaway: If a product or service you want doesn't exist, create it.
There are probably other people who will want it too 👍
And if so, it could become a nice business.
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Most of his 25 Directory Sites Earn $600/Month Each
💬 John Rush tweets…
Years ago I bought an apartment for $300k.
Rented out for $600/mo after expenses.
Lots of headache with the tenants & things breaking.
Today, most of my web directories make more than $600/mo.
It took me years to earn the cash for an apartment and it took me one evening to build and launch one directory.
These 20 directories were built using @unicornplatform in few hours.
Unicorn Platform is John's own website builder that he acquired back in 2022.
He adds…
I came up with the idea by scrolling twitter feed and seeing what's trending and then testing these ideas for SEO traffic using Google Keyword Planner.
A reply in the comments lists out some of John’s directories along with traffic metrics 👇
💻 nextjsstarter📈 20k visits / month
💻 allgpts📈 15k visits / month
💻 mvpwizards📈 15k visits / month
💻 osssoftware📈 8k visits / month
💻 llmmodels📈 5k visits / month
💻 hostedsoftware📈 5k visits / month
💻 aitoolfor📈 5k visits / month
💻 saassoftware.org📈 5k visits / month
How he monetises these directories…
The links on my directories are affiliated links, I get paid for every sign up via my link.
On this one link alone as you can see on Marc screenshot I got $280/mo. Just one link.
I have 1000+ links.
Which reminds me of this tweet by Ayush…
Put more buy buttons on the internet!
In John’s case, those "buy buttons" happen to be affiliate links on directories.
He says he has about 25 directores and most of them make at least $600/month. So likely a total of $8000/month minimum, and it all sounds fairly passive 🤑
Directories are something anyone can build pretty fast with no-code platforms like Unicorn Platform, Softr, WordPress or Webflow.
And you can use tools like Easy Scraper to scrape data 🤖
Like job boards, the trick with directories is probably persisting through that initial stage where you don't get much traffic.
💡 An idea here: you could build local directories in your country for each state/city for different type of trades and business (plumbers, pet shops, accountants, etc).
Instead of affiliate, you could monetise by charging for top positions in the directory.
🗂 She Tripled Her Income By Doing This
From the archive, published June 2023…
🏝 Travel blogger Lauren Juliff is featured in a recent BBC article: The workers quitting digital nomadism…
In 2011, Lauren Juliff quit her job at a supermarket in the UK to see the world. She launched a travel website aiming to fund her adventures. To her surprise, she started making enough within a year to be a digital nomad.
“For me, I loved the travel. My dream was always to see as much of the world as possible, so once I made that dream a reality, I was determined to never let it go. Exploring new countries made me feel alive and I learned so much – about new cultures and myself – on a near-daily basis.”
But after five years…
the excitement of the nomadic lifestyle across the world began to ebb. Juliff, now 34, describes her journey – initially idyllic and dream-like – morphing into an exhausting ordeal she was desperate to escape.
Living and working on the move had unintended repercussions on her mental and physical health. “I began to have panic attacks on a daily basis – ones that only stopped whenever I imagined having a home,” she says. The absence of a stable community resulted in a loss of long-term friendships, leading to feelings of loneliness and depression. Juliff’s health suffered as she experienced food poisoning and infections frequently.
🇵🇹 Then Lauren found a home base…
Upon settling down in Portugal and signing a lease on an apartment, Juliff saw her income triple within a year. She credits the improvement to the consistency of being in one place and not traveling constantly. Her panic attacks vanished, she joined a gym, started cooking healthy meals and built a solid community of friends.
Lauren’s travel blog is Never Ending Footsteps.
Soon after she moved to Portugal, she reported in an interview that she was earning “typically between $5,000 and $7,000 a month,” mostly from affiliate marketing.
Elsewhere she says she started earning six figures a year around this time 💰
It’s worth noting however that Lauren hasn’t stopped traveling.
The travel schedule currently posted on the sidebar of her website…
April: Australia
May: South Korea
June: England
July: Ireland
August: Mauritius
But she wrote in 2021 that having a home base is big for her…
I stopped travelling full-time back in 2016, when I moved to Portugal, and I’ve maintained a home base ever since… I’m planning on moving to Melbourne in September of this year and to be quite honest, I’m hoping it’ll be my forever home.
I had a similar experience to Lauren.
I quit my day job in 2010 to start traveling the world and working online.
(See some of the many highlights from my travels in this 5-minute video)
I earned enough via freelancing to travel indefinitely, but after a few years I started to crave more of a home base.
The final straw was Bali 🇮🇩
Cool place to visit. But it was tough trying to build a serious business from there. And in 11 months I got seriously ill twice, hospitalized once (dengue).
I haven’t traveled much since then. And my life has improved significantly in many areas, including financially 📈
In conclusion: being a digital nomad is awesome, but there are some heavy trade-offs.