Niall Doherty's Blog, page 116

What Gets You Into Trouble

Words from a book called The Road Less Stupid by Keith J. Cunningham…

When you stop to think about it, what gets us into trouble and causes most of our problems (and dumb tax) is our genetic coding to look for the easiest path to success. 

Our biggest problems are a result of a never-ending quest to find the path of least resistance instead of a commitment to do whatever it takes to achieve the desired outcome. 

You can’t commit if you are still looking, and most of us are looking for the easier way. We seem to be addicted to “keeping our options open” . . . to find a way that is less painful or requires less sacrifice . . . a way that enables us to be passive and still be rich.

It’s a double-edged sword, that tendency to look for the easiest path to success.

Every now and then it will help you find a great shortcut, but more often it keeps you jumping from one shiny object to the next, never sticking with one thing long enough to see results.

ChatGPT Coded 95% of His App (And It’s Making Money)

The app is SkipVid.ai, which allows you to specify a YouTube video, ask anything about it, and get a response from ChatGPT

The creator posted about the project on Reddit…

I’ve tried and failed a few times building simple apps.

Every time I hired developers from overseas, and they would promise they could easily build it, but every time it would be unworkable, even as an MVP.

So when ChatGPT API was released, I wanted to see if I could make an app that is a TLDR for Youtube videos, since youtubers love to ramble on just so they can run more ads. 

He goes on to detail the prompts he used in ChatGPT to create 95% of the app

Apparently the other 5% was “just setting up login auth and stripe payment links.”

There’s some skepticism in the comments about ChatGPT actually doing 95% of the work, but there’s no doubt it was a big help.

You can use the app for free on videos up to 21 minutes long, then there’s a premium version for $5/month.

The creator posted in the comments on Reddit…

Theres definitely demand. Payments are steady coming in daily and starting to compound.

Also worth noting the free marketing he got for the app via that Reddit post (and others), but apparently the app had already been used 100,000 times before any marketing efforts.

Do you have an idea for an app?

Play around with ChatGPT and see if it can help you build the thing

Related: How to Train ChatGPT to Write Like You

The $1 Million Email Playbook

The guys from Ship 30 for 30 break down how they’ve generated 7 figures in revenue from “one, flawless email funnel”…

Twitter thread50-minute YouTube version

Nicolas Cole describes the playbook in a nutshell

A digital business is very simple. Create content on Twitter, LinkedIn, insert whatever social platform. You drive [followers] to a specific landing page [for an] education email course. At the end of that email course, you soft pitch them on whatever the product is, whether it’s async or an upcoming cohort. You move them into an evergreen newsletter because you want to keep showing them, “Hey, there’s a lot you can learn from us, we really want to help you.” And then before every cohort, that week before, you run through these 6 emails.

The 6 emails…

The TransformationProof of Financial OutcomePrice AnchoringYour Challenges / Our SolutionsCreate FOMOEverything You Get

There’s a 1-minute summary of each of those in the thread

If you’re selling any kind of online course or training, you’ll likely find something useful in that playbook.

$40K/Month With Line Drawings of Unicorns (And Other Things)

Evgen SilinSerial Entrepreneur $40,000 SuperColoring.com estimated monthly revenue
Published April 13, 2023 by Niall Doherty

A few days ago I told you about the guy who earned $47,055 selling a 25-page coloring book on Amazon

That got me wondering about niche sites in the coloring space. And sure enough there are a whole bunch of websites that provide line drawings that you can print off and color in.

One that stood out to me is SuperColoring.com.

The site gets 4 million visits and ~20 million page views a month according to Similarweb. 

Their unicorn coloring index is the most popular page on the site according to Ahrefs.

Looks like the site is monetized primarily with Google display ads.

Google Adsense has a revenue estimator here. Setting the region as North America and the category as Arts & Entertainment, that returns $1.35 million for potential annual revenue on 20 million monthly page views.

Only 23% of the SuperColoring.com traffic comes from the US, but I think it’s safe to assume the site still earns something like $40,000 per month / $480,000 per year from those display ads

Digging deeper, one of the founders of the site is Evgen Silin from Ukraine

His LinkedIn reveals that he is also the co-founder of…

wikiart.org – 2.3M monthly visitsanimalia.bio – 690K monthly visitscreazilla.com – 432K monthly visits

Quite the online empire he’s built up over the years

First time seeing our Online Money Maker profiles? Click here for a quick intro.

The goal of our Online Money Maker profiles is to show you all the different ways people make money online. We strive to ensure that each profile is realistic – no hype, no scams – so you can see what it really takes to build each type of business.

If you'd like to hear when we publish new profiles, subscribe to our free newsletter below. Each edition is packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday to 29,976 legendary subscribers.

Sign up to get the next edition of eBiz Insider delivered to your inbox




HP

We'll first send a confirmation email to make sure it’s you 🔒
Check out our privacy policy to see how we protect and manage your data.

See our latest profiles of Online Money Makers


Learn more about income claims and estimates on this website

Our goal at eBiz Facts is to give you accurate information about online business so you can gain clearer insights, make better decisions, and achieve your own success.

With that in mind, we strive to ensure the accuracy and transparency of the income claims and estimates that you see on this website.

Here’s how:

We treat all income claims we find online with skepticism.We don’t report incomes that seem especially controversial or unrealistic.We cite our sources and/or share our calculations so you can see where the numbers come from.If there are uncertainties about an income claim or estimate, we tell you what those are.

If you see an income claim or estimate that seems off, please tell us so we can fix it.

Is this kind of business right for you?

Check out our framework to see the 19 types and 6 levels of online business, and discover which is best for you.

Other ways to make money online

There are many other ways to make money online, to work from home or anywhere in the world.

Full list of ways to make money onlineMore profiles of online money makers👇 Subscribe to eBiz Insider 👇

Every Tuesday and Friday we email 29,976 people like you with top tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business. No hype, no scams, no fake gurus. Sign up below to get the next one.

HP

We'll first send a confirmation email to make sure it’s you 🔒
Check out our privacy policy to see how we protect and manage your data.

Zero to $7M/Year in 3 Years With No Funding

Sabba KeynejadCo-founder of Veed $7 Million Veed annual recurring revenue
Published April 13, 2023 by Niall Doherty

That’s the story of Veed.io, an online video editor.

The business launched in 2018, and they bootstrapped their way to $7 million in annual recurring revenue before landing $35 million in funding

It wasn’t always obvious that co-founder and CEO Sabba Keynejad would go on to build a big company…

he grew up with significant dyslexia and was held back for three years trying to pass his English GCSE (one of a set of intense exams students have to take in year 11, aged 15/16, in England to progress to the next stage of school).

Sabba apparently came up with the idea for Veed when he found existing tools lacking.

And a tweet of his from July 2021 reveals one of the keys to Veed’s success…

Done make something people want.
Make something people search for.

From a case study about Veed’s growth…

Veed has been focused on SEO from the start, with their product roadmap defined by what potential users were searching for. For example, Veed built their subtitle generation feature after realising that there were tens of thousands of monthly searches from people looking for this kind of tool.

According to Ahrefs, Veed’s website now gets 3.5 million visits from search engines each month, and they rank high on Google for terms like…

online video editorvideo compressorscreen recorder

From the same case study…

Veed.io successfully built several different programmatic SEO campaigns spanning north of 500k different pages.

Programmatic SEO is a way to scale content production. Instead of creating a unique piece of content for every topic on your website, you’d first create a template that can be used to quickly produce several articles

An example from Veed’s website are their pages about creating videos for different social media platforms: Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | Twitter | YouTube

All those pages use pretty much the same template, with different text and images plugged into each section.

Could you do something like this for your own website?

Even if you create all the content yourself, it could save you a ton of time.

First time seeing our Online Money Maker profiles? Click here for a quick intro.

The goal of our Online Money Maker profiles is to show you all the different ways people make money online. We strive to ensure that each profile is realistic – no hype, no scams – so you can see what it really takes to build each type of business.

If you'd like to hear when we publish new profiles, subscribe to our free newsletter below. Each edition is packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday to 29,976 legendary subscribers.

Sign up to get the next edition of eBiz Insider delivered to your inbox




HP

We'll first send a confirmation email to make sure it’s you 🔒
Check out our privacy policy to see how we protect and manage your data.

See our latest profiles of Online Money Makers


Learn more about income claims and estimates on this website

Our goal at eBiz Facts is to give you accurate information about online business so you can gain clearer insights, make better decisions, and achieve your own success.

With that in mind, we strive to ensure the accuracy and transparency of the income claims and estimates that you see on this website.

Here’s how:

We treat all income claims we find online with skepticism.We don’t report incomes that seem especially controversial or unrealistic.We cite our sources and/or share our calculations so you can see where the numbers come from.If there are uncertainties about an income claim or estimate, we tell you what those are.

If you see an income claim or estimate that seems off, please tell us so we can fix it.

Is this kind of business right for you?

Check out our framework to see the 19 types and 6 levels of online business, and discover which is best for you.

Other ways to make money online

There are many other ways to make money online, to work from home or anywhere in the world.

Full list of ways to make money onlineMore profiles of online money makers👇 Subscribe to eBiz Insider 👇

Every Tuesday and Friday we email 29,976 people like you with top tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business. No hype, no scams, no fake gurus. Sign up below to get the next one.

HP

We'll first send a confirmation email to make sure it’s you 🔒
Check out our privacy policy to see how we protect and manage your data.

Jerry Seinfeld: Treat Your Brain Like a Dog

Words from comedian Jerry Seinfeld…

If you’re going to write, make yourself a writing session… How long are you going to work on it? Don’t just sit down with an open-ended, “I’m going to work on this problem.” That’s a ridiculous torture to put on a human being’s head.

It’s like you’re going to hire a trainer to get in shape, and he comes over, and you go, “How long is the session?” And he goes, “It’s open-ended.” Forget it. I’m not doing it. It’s over right there. 

You’ve got to control what your brain can take… You’ve got to treat your brain like a dog you just got. The mind is infinite in wisdom. The brain is a stupid, little dog that is easily trained. Do not confuse the mind with the brain. The brain is so easy to master. You just have to confine it. You confine it. And it’s done through repetition and systematization.

Found via Twitter, taken from Seinfeld’s interview on the Tim Ferriss podcast.

$10K/Month as an Online Personal Trainer

Sukh SidhuSerial Entrepreneur $10,000 estimated monthly revenue as an online personal trainer
Published April 10, 2023 by Niall Doherty

13-minute video from Sukh Sidhu detailing how he became a full-time online personal trainer

He had a head start since he owned a couple of gyms, but I reckon his journey is instructive for anyone wanting to do some kind of online coaching / consulting / training.

First, Sukh found 6 people who agreed to have him as an online personal trainer for 12 weeks. He worked for free and documented their results

The results were so good that all 6 clients stayed on after the 12 weeks, paying Sukh £100/month (approx $125 USD) going forward. And Sukh was able to show off their results on social media and via his email list to land even more clients.

As the service became more popular, Sukh raised his rate. Eventually he had 60 clients paying him £100-250/month. Then he scaled it back down to 40 so he didn’t lose his sanity

With 40 clients he must have been earning something like £8000/month as an online personal trainer, which is about $10k USD

Sukh kept evolving the business. He started offering online group coaching and brought a couple of other trainers on board to help with the workload.

Eventually he launched his own software product for personal trainers, which was pulling in $30k/month last I checked.

Really cool to see his progression through different levels of online business. And a great example of how a simple 1-to-1 service business can lead to big things

First time seeing our Online Money Maker profiles? Click here for a quick intro.

The goal of our Online Money Maker profiles is to show you all the different ways people make money online. We strive to ensure that each profile is realistic – no hype, no scams – so you can see what it really takes to build each type of business.

If you'd like to hear when we publish new profiles, subscribe to our free newsletter below. Each edition is packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday to 29,909 legendary subscribers.

Sign up to get the next edition of eBiz Insider delivered to your inbox




HP

We'll first send a confirmation email to make sure it’s you 🔒
Check out our privacy policy to see how we protect and manage your data.

See our latest profiles of Online Money Makers


Learn more about income claims and estimates on this website

Our goal at eBiz Facts is to give you accurate information about online business so you can gain clearer insights, make better decisions, and achieve your own success.

With that in mind, we strive to ensure the accuracy and transparency of the income claims and estimates that you see on this website.

Here’s how:

We treat all income claims we find online with skepticism.We don’t report incomes that seem especially controversial or unrealistic.We cite our sources and/or share our calculations so you can see where the numbers come from.If there are uncertainties about an income claim or estimate, we tell you what those are.

If you see an income claim or estimate that seems off, please tell us so we can fix it.

Is this kind of business right for you?

Check out our framework to see the 19 types and 6 levels of online business, and discover which is best for you.

Other ways to make money online

There are many other ways to make money online, to work from home or anywhere in the world.

Full list of ways to make money onlineMore profiles of online money makers👇 Subscribe to eBiz Insider 👇

Every Tuesday and Friday we email 29,909 people like you with top tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business. No hype, no scams, no fake gurus. Sign up below to get the next one.

HP

We'll first send a confirmation email to make sure it’s you 🔒
Check out our privacy policy to see how we protect and manage your data.

Building a $15k/Month SaaS While Working Full-Time

Justin DukeFounder of Buttondown $15,000 Buttondown monthly revenue
Published April 10, 2023 by Niall Doherty

That’s Justin Duke’s story

The blurb from a recent podcast interview…

Justin Duke is the founder of Buttondown, a simple email newsletter tool without all the bloat. In December 2022 Buttondown was around $15k MRR. He also runs Spoonbill, which is a way to stay updated on what people change on their social profiles. 

At the time of recording this Justin was an engineering manager at Stripe so you’ll hear references to that, but he’s since left to go all in on being a founder.

Apparently Justin started Buttondown in 2016. He built it for personal use, but shared updates on Twitter and a few followers said they’d pay to use it too

Someone on Hacker News asked how Justin got traction on his side hustle.

He replied with some hard truth…

This may be an unsatisfying answer: slowly.

I tweeted and wrote a fair deal about the process, and had good-but-not-great launches on HN and Product Hunt. There was definitely no ‘big bang’ where one day I did not have product-market fit and/or traction and then the next day I did; it was a slow drip of new users and new customers who helped refine the product & its position.

This is a strong advantage of having something be a side project; your runway is drastically longer than other business models. (For example, from 2017-2018 MRR slowly grew from around $500 to around $1500. This slow growth felt painful, but also it was incredibly sustainable since I wasn’t drawing a salary from it; churn was extremely low, and the only real problem was a small top-of-funnel since I wasn’t going viral or spending money on ads.

My takeaway from that: sometimes the best thing you can do as an entrepreneur is go get a “real job.” 

That way, there’s less pressure to pay the bills with your own projects, and you can give them room to grow organically instead of trying to force it.

First time seeing our Online Money Maker profiles? Click here for a quick intro.

The goal of our Online Money Maker profiles is to show you all the different ways people make money online. We strive to ensure that each profile is realistic – no hype, no scams – so you can see what it really takes to build each type of business.

If you'd like to hear when we publish new profiles, subscribe to our free newsletter below. Each edition is packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday to 29,909 legendary subscribers.

Sign up to get the next edition of eBiz Insider delivered to your inbox




HP

We'll first send a confirmation email to make sure it’s you 🔒
Check out our privacy policy to see how we protect and manage your data.

See our latest profiles of Online Money Makers


Learn more about income claims and estimates on this website

Our goal at eBiz Facts is to give you accurate information about online business so you can gain clearer insights, make better decisions, and achieve your own success.

With that in mind, we strive to ensure the accuracy and transparency of the income claims and estimates that you see on this website.

Here’s how:

We treat all income claims we find online with skepticism.We don’t report incomes that seem especially controversial or unrealistic.We cite our sources and/or share our calculations so you can see where the numbers come from.If there are uncertainties about an income claim or estimate, we tell you what those are.

If you see an income claim or estimate that seems off, please tell us so we can fix it.

Is this kind of business right for you?

Check out our framework to see the 19 types and 6 levels of online business, and discover which is best for you.

Other ways to make money online

There are many other ways to make money online, to work from home or anywhere in the world.

Full list of ways to make money onlineMore profiles of online money makers👇 Subscribe to eBiz Insider 👇

Every Tuesday and Friday we email 29,909 people like you with top tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business. No hype, no scams, no fake gurus. Sign up below to get the next one.

HP

We'll first send a confirmation email to make sure it’s you 🔒
Check out our privacy policy to see how we protect and manage your data.

$47,055 From a 25-Page Coloring Book

That KDP GuyBook Publisher $47,055 revenue in ~2 years from 1 book
Published April 10, 2023 by Niall Doherty

That KDP Guy shares on Twitter…

My best selling book is a quote coloring book.

It is a gag gift.

It’s only got 25 coloring pages.

Cost me less than $5 for the interior.

Compiled in Canva in a few hours.

It made $47,055 in just over 2 years

He sells the book on Amazon but doesn’t reveal the exact listing

I get the impression it’s a coloring book for adults, so it might be something like this “motivational swear words”  coloring book that has 13,000+ reviews on Amazon.

KDP Guy says he spent less than $2000 on ads to promote the book, and also spent very little time researching the idea…

It took about 2 hours of research from memory. I took what was a popular notebook idea and turned it into coloring book. It’s now become its own niche with over 1000 books. I started with automatic ads in UK spending £2 per day with a £0.05 cost per click.

Asked if this could work in 2023, he replied…

Absolutely, but your best bet is to bring a fresh idea. All anyone seems to do lately is copy covers

I searched on Amazon to see if anyone has done coloring books for different professions, but couldn’t find anything for professions such as…

NursesAccountantsCashiers

So there might be an opportunity there. Hobbies could also work well, in keeping with the “gag gift” angle

That said, I think this kind of business is very much a numbers game. 

The company that produces the coloring book I linked to above has 270+ others listed on Amazon right now, and only two of them have more than 200 reviews, meaning probably only two of them generate significant income.

But if you can figure out a way to quickly pump out that kind of book – and an AI tool like Midjourney could surely help with that – it could well be worth it in the long run.

Related: a genius hack for getting rich selling books (not really)

First time seeing our Online Money Maker profiles? Click here for a quick intro.

The goal of our Online Money Maker profiles is to show you all the different ways people make money online. We strive to ensure that each profile is realistic – no hype, no scams – so you can see what it really takes to build each type of business.

If you'd like to hear when we publish new profiles, subscribe to our free newsletter below. Each edition is packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday to 29,909 legendary subscribers.

Sign up to get the next edition of eBiz Insider delivered to your inbox




HP

We'll first send a confirmation email to make sure it’s you 🔒
Check out our privacy policy to see how we protect and manage your data.

See our latest profiles of Online Money Makers


Learn more about income claims and estimates on this website

Our goal at eBiz Facts is to give you accurate information about online business so you can gain clearer insights, make better decisions, and achieve your own success.

With that in mind, we strive to ensure the accuracy and transparency of the income claims and estimates that you see on this website.

Here’s how:

We treat all income claims we find online with skepticism.We don’t report incomes that seem especially controversial or unrealistic.We cite our sources and/or share our calculations so you can see where the numbers come from.If there are uncertainties about an income claim or estimate, we tell you what those are.

If you see an income claim or estimate that seems off, please tell us so we can fix it.

Is this kind of business right for you?

Check out our framework to see the 19 types and 6 levels of online business, and discover which is best for you.

Other ways to make money online

There are many other ways to make money online, to work from home or anywhere in the world.

Full list of ways to make money onlineMore profiles of online money makers👇 Subscribe to eBiz Insider 👇

Every Tuesday and Friday we email 29,909 people like you with top tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business. No hype, no scams, no fake gurus. Sign up below to get the next one.

HP

We'll first send a confirmation email to make sure it’s you 🔒
Check out our privacy policy to see how we protect and manage your data.

From Pandemic Side Project to $20k/Month

Matt OneyFounder of Zenmaster Wellness $20,000 monthly revenue
Published April 10, 2023 by Niall Doherty

The site is ZenmasterWellness.com and it was actually earning $40k/month at one point, but is now at around $15-20k

That’s according to a recent interview with founder Matt Oney.

His site reviews health and wellness products, and earns money through affiliate partnerships.

Matt registered his domain in February of 2020 and built up the site during the pandemic. He was into health and wellness himself and it seems his main “hack” was to focus on reviewing newer brands…

Matt didn’t do a deep dive into how competitive the telemedicine niche was.

But after publishing reviews of some relatively new brands, he ranked number one for his focus keywords — a rare feat for brand-new domains.

[…] One of the first articles Matt put out compared three at-home smart gyms. He was one of the first to that piece of territory, and it led to a spike in traffic.

He eventually got into affiliate partnerships with all three companies, and three months after he published that article, he saw his first dollar of affiliate income.

Some of the brands Matt reviewed didn’t even have affiliate programs, so he would help them set one up. Smart way to build relationships and limit competition

Matt focuses on quality over quantity, and still only has about 50 articles published on his site. Search engine optimization is crucial, with most traffic coming via Google. 

One of the big factors for improving SEO is building quality links to your site, and Zenmaster Wellness has racked up 1900 backlinks from 800 domains in only 3 years, including a bunch from DR80+ sites (source: Ahrefs)

Sounds like Matt’s most reliable source of backlinks has been HARO (Help A Reporter Out), “an online service for journalists to gather feedback from the public.”

Matt apparently pays health and wellness experts to answer journalists’ queries there. Then, if a journalist quotes one of Matt’s experts in an article posted online, it will often include a link back to Zenmaster Wellness

Lastly…

The biggest thing that surprised Matt was the fact that all he had to do to start and grow his side hustle was put the time in.

“Nothing that I do is rocket science,” Matt said. “As long as you’re going about things the right way, good things will surely follow at some point in time.”

First time seeing our Online Money Maker profiles? Click here for a quick intro.

The goal of our Online Money Maker profiles is to show you all the different ways people make money online. We strive to ensure that each profile is realistic – no hype, no scams – so you can see what it really takes to build each type of business.

If you'd like to hear when we publish new profiles, subscribe to our free newsletter below. Each edition is packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday to 29,909 legendary subscribers.

Sign up to get the next edition of eBiz Insider delivered to your inbox




HP

We'll first send a confirmation email to make sure it’s you 🔒
Check out our privacy policy to see how we protect and manage your data.

See our latest profiles of Online Money Makers


Learn more about income claims and estimates on this website

Our goal at eBiz Facts is to give you accurate information about online business so you can gain clearer insights, make better decisions, and achieve your own success.

With that in mind, we strive to ensure the accuracy and transparency of the income claims and estimates that you see on this website.

Here’s how:

We treat all income claims we find online with skepticism.We don’t report incomes that seem especially controversial or unrealistic.We cite our sources and/or share our calculations so you can see where the numbers come from.If there are uncertainties about an income claim or estimate, we tell you what those are.

If you see an income claim or estimate that seems off, please tell us so we can fix it.

Is this kind of business right for you?

Check out our framework to see the 19 types and 6 levels of online business, and discover which is best for you.

Other ways to make money online

There are many other ways to make money online, to work from home or anywhere in the world.

Full list of ways to make money onlineMore profiles of online money makers👇 Subscribe to eBiz Insider 👇

Every Tuesday and Friday we email 29,909 people like you with top tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business. No hype, no scams, no fake gurus. Sign up below to get the next one.

HP

We'll first send a confirmation email to make sure it’s you 🔒
Check out our privacy policy to see how we protect and manage your data.