I want to make $1 this summer.

Hello everyone,

I have really been into the idea of building in public recently, so this is my attempt at doing that this summer. My goal is to make $1 USD this summer using software.

About me:
I'm a CS college student and have been trying to build internet businesses for a long time. Even though I have had some small successes, I am still not where I want to be. My biggest success so far was a site called sellphone.io (no longer in business). Sellphone was an online service where you could sell your used cellphones (and other electronics) - Hence the name "sellphone" (sounds like cellphone). Then to make money - I would resell the electronics. I stopped doing that because it was cutting into my studies as it was very labor heavy.

Sellphone stats:
Yearly revenue: $80K+, Yearly profit: $10K+, Ran for: 2 years

From sellphone, I learned that I want to stick to software only businesses as much as possible. From a scaling perceptive - software is easier to scale. And from a personal perspective - I enjoy code more.

Here are my goals this summer:

• Make $1 USD
• Validate quickly - In the past I have spent months and months building something just to realize problems that I did not catch during product development.
• Build as many things as possible (inspired by perter levels' 12 startups in 12 months)

With that in mind, here is what I have built so far this summer;

https://dothis.tech

Built in: 1 day (deployed last week)

Description: A website that has straight to the point tech guides in video form. Why do I need to watch a 5 minute video to learn how to take a screenshot or unzip a file? This was inspired by a problem I had when writing tech documents for a class last semester. Even before building this, I knew scaling it would be difficult due to the content creation part of it. But I felt it was a good first project that I could build quickly.

Monetization strategy: ads

https://crowdstock.net

Built in: 1 week (just deployed yesterday)

Description A crowdsourced website for tracking product's stock status. This website was inspired by https://nowinstock.net after realizing that only the web admin has the ability to add items to track. This means that the admin decides what items to track and if your product is not there - then you're out of luck. So the idea is to give that decision making power to the users with a social component.

Monetization strategy: ads and affiliate links (or maybe affiliate links only)

I have realized that to reach my $1 goal, charging money might be the better way to go. So I definitely want to try building something I charge for straight out of the gate this summer.

Also, I have been looking for other people building in public and the only place I see people consistently doing it in - is twitter and indiehackers. I have yet to see some awesome video content with builders that stick with it long term. That's likely because making video content is a lot harder compared to text content. So another one of my goals this summer is to document the journey on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/alfredosequeida

I'd love to interact with other builders so, I'm open to questions / comments.