Best way to earn $50 profit per month. Advice please.
My name is Mark & I have dreamed about making money online since high school.
I have earned $0 making money online. 0, nada, zilch!!
Yet, I have spent a lot of money & time reading books & listening to Podcasts. You name it, I have likely read or listened to it. Pat Flynn; Mixergy; Tim Ferris are all part of my almost daily routine. For all those hours spent reading/listening to others, I do not have anything to show for it!
I have made attempts in the past to start an online business, but these fizzle out quite quickly when I do not see traction especially when the goal I have set myself is too high.
I have set myself a new challenge. Instead of having these bigger goals (make $2k/month, which take 12+ months to realise), I will set myself a much, much smaller goal. I am simply looking to make $50 profit per month. That's it.
I need some advice from those who, unlike me, have actually earned some passive income! What do you think?
- Is $50 profit too low? How long did it take you to earn $50 per month?
- What is a good way of achieving this?
Thanks
Mark
aka the $0 online business entrepreneur
Stop worrying about the money, and build something that solves a problem. If it solves a problem for you - it will likely solve a problem for someone else. If it solves a significant problem, those people might be willing to pay for it, but even if they aren't... it solved your original problem right? There is a famous phrase - if you do something you love, you'll never work another day in your life. That phrase is so important. You could build something that made you $50 / $100 / $2000 per month, but if you hated it, eventually it would die. Find a passion. Build it. Solve a problem.
big up for this
Words to live by
much appreciated
Wish I could upvote this more than once.
thanks! :)
You put the cart before the horse. You listened to all these podcasts etc, but I can't see what skills you have.
Time would have been better spent upgrading your skills.
Passive income is close to a myth, sold by gurus online to get you to buy there courses.
Making money online is a lot harder than making it locally. So you need to decide what your goals are. Is it to make money or be location independent?
$50 there are people who spend a lot more than that on coffee a month, would that low goal really motivate you?
Thank you!!! Passive Income is not real! Maybe if you own property, or write a timeless book, but other than that it's not real. If you start a SaaS and follow the 4 hour work week model, you will most likely start losing customers, because your product will get stagnant as time goes on.
I second this!
Yep, even owning a property isn't passive unless you pay a letting agent to look after it then you lose profit from it.
Hi there. Thanks for your reply.
I am a software developer & have done/am doing well in my career / job.
Goals outside of my day-to-day job is to make additional money online. It has eluded me & I understand that it is very hard. That's why I am coming to this forum to hope to learn from others who have had similar goals. ie make small money of a side project.
Can you share your personal experience building an online business?
Started freelancing and that wasn't good. Clients are very demanding and you're competing vs people from countries with much lower cost of living.
I built a SaaS company, I had the problem and was passionate about the space, but it was a very niche problem and I would have had to educate the market. So decided to stop working on it.
I'm currently working on https://versoly.com/, we have paying customers, haven't launched yet, and people sign up without speaking to me :)
I wasn't passionate about landing page builders, but I do like the customers I serve. Much easier to build something when you like talking to your customers.
I like dev tools, but developers are hard to reach, very opinionated and difficult to sell to. Which I found out in my previous SaaS. The only way I would target devs is with large freemium tiers or enterprise solutions which are hard for bootstrapped companies.
I would have done it slightly different. Find a target audience you like and want to spend time talking with. If you're a developer you would normally pick developers, but if you have hobbies etc or work in an industry you like, then I think it would be wiser to choose one of them. It will be easier competition, you will most likely be competing vs paper or excel spreadsheets.
After you have picked what target audience you want to serve, start building simple free products for them, which could be newsletters, basic free tools etc. Then create a paid product for them. Don't rush to a SaaS app, wait until you see a real problem you can solve and get customers to prepay (you should already have an audience).
What skills do you have? What do you know how to do that other people ask you for help with?
Put all the podcasts and books on hold. Just do something!!! Anything!
Not always you gain financial goods.. For example I'm working on a side project since 2012 and I've earned 0 and invested a lot of time and some money, more than 2000$. (been using AdSense for a while but I've decided that ads make the site look cheap and didn't get any good $.. so I've removed the ads)
It's a hobby project and I have a full time job so my main aim is not money, at least at the moment. I've gained a lot of experience since I had to code and design everything.
As indie hackers we look to speed the process up.
Do you think the path you took was the fastest way to get where you are now?
What did you learn on the way that could save others time?
What if your hobby project paid more than your current full time job, would you still be working?
It's true that if a hobby project could generate money I would consider leaving a full time job and bring more dedication to the project..
What I wanted to focus is that not money is always important in everything. In my case I've learned new web technologies (for example React).. so in the end it did help investing in my deloper skills.
I am not considered myself an entrepreneur so maybe I shouldn't comment on this in the first place.
Always comment if you have something to say :)
I built a real project and learnt React doing it. It was good, but I kind of wish I just went and worked for a company that did React and got paid to learn it. Companies pay for you to go conferences, have senior developers,etc so you should be able to learn at an accelerated rate.
You make a point there.
I've managed to get into Laravel and Vue.js thanks to my current job. So here I was paid to learn things :)
React was my personal choice and I've started experimenting when I was job-free.
Here is one way to make money online right now.
Start asking and answering Quora questions.
Their partner program pays you some revenue (very small) based on the questions popularity. I have earned 13 dollars in the last 30 days there.
As you just start solving problems for people, including yourself, you can make money. What is a problem you have? How can you solve it? Solve it and put it online. Repeat. You can do it.
One thing you might think of stop cold turkey listening to all the podcasts and don't read another article. Just find a problem and try to solve it. Repeat. Good luck!
Build a small content based website (anything that interests you and will get organic traffic) and throw adsense up.
The importance of the first customer! Go for it.
Find a passion, and build on it.
Try creating an online app of sorts that either solves a problem in your passion or brings people together. Then charge a monthly fee to access your app. Would be happy to speak more on this if you'd like. This is an issue I see time and time again during the early phase of my program (nocodify).
I have seen 1000s of todo apps made by people who were very passionate, not many are around anymore.
Charging monthly fees for something is very hard. I have seen serial founders struggle to do it.
If it was easy - everyone would be rich.
No business is easy to start and maintain. It's hard work.
I would get on a call with someone who has commented here and drill into some problems that they have. Continue to do customer discovery until you find a problem that a startup owner is willing to pay to fix. Then build the cheapest quickest MVP you can and see if they will follow through. Continue to do market research until you find a solution that will net you a profit and is scalable. It's a really grueling process, but if done right you have a product that people at least want! Hope this helps :)
I have never seen that work before. Do you have an example of someone who went out looking for problems in a random place like indie hackers and built a successful business they liked?
Yes! Customer discovery comes in all shapes and sizes. I cold called hundreds of SEO agencies and we are currently servicing several businesses on our platform. If you have a small goal of getting $50 MRR you can absolutely get that through Indiehackers or forum. I have several things I would outsource for $50 a month or more. There's a great video by Eric from Pebble that's from Y-combinator. It details how to do customer discovery and what to focus on. It was a great resource for us, maybe it can help you as well!
Cheers.
So you cold called SEO agencies and had no experience in SEO before?
Yes! And we were able to get to 2k MRR In 3 months just from distilling their worst pain points and delivering a solution. It's not easy, but definitely doable!
Interesting you should do an interview for IH, many people here wish they could get to 2k MRR.
I agree. This would be really useful for people to read.
Thanks for the kind words Volkan! Just followed you and I will let you know when/if that interview ever comes out.
Cheers!
Please don't suggest that. This forum is already filled with too many people trying to sell here rather than help each other or learn.
Customer discovery should be at the core of any product and is the best way to help another startup. It requires no payment from the person being interviewed. If at the end of the customer discovery cycle you create something that fixes a pain point that is discussed, I think that is a great benefit rather than someone trying to annoy me with sales.
Sure, customer discovery is great. The question is how and where you do it.
Do you simply walk into someone's yard during a family barbecue and ask them to schedule a call with you? Do you cut strangers off on the street to do customer discovery? Or do you look for people who are open to (and preferably looking for) your help?
Hi Alchemist, I totally see where you are coming from.
However, this is not a stranger's yard at all. This is programmingmark asking about how to begin generating revenue. The people who are commenting here are already engaging him and helping him with customer discovery. I personally would be happy to give him an interview if he prepares questions for me. I DO NOT advocate for programmingmark to try and immediately sell me some course or service, but if he is doing research to build a service I really don't see the harm.
How and where you ask is definitely important. Programmingmark interviewing people who have commented on his post with advice? I would say that is fair play, especially if he is very flexible and polite. Perhaps if he began sending unsolicited messages that would be a different story.
However, we can agree to disagree!
The core of my message here is "consider externalities".
The absolute optimal path for one person to build a business (or evangelize their religion or find a romantic partner, etc, etc, etc) often imposes costs on the community as a whole!