You have one month to make rent, what do you do?
Sort of finding myself in this situation, but I also thought it would be a fun exercise.
You have one month to make rent. Let's say it's $2k. As an indie hacker, what's your plan to go from $0 to $2k in one month?
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Pre-sales of something with high ARPU, so I could hit my goal with only a small handful of sales, or ideally only one. It'd probably have to be service-based, but I might lean toward services I could grow into a much larger agency or product business. For example:
This is some great advice!
Similar to Courtland's concept, you don't have a ton of time so you need a big sale.
Align with a product and sell it with services bundled with it.
Spend week 1 or 2 calling, emailing, and visiting specific industry / business niche of your choice to prospect who is doing a terrible job content marketing and outline a good sales pitch to take this over and what it could do for their business if you ran a solid campaign for a month or two.
Align with a known or reputable product that can bring you some credibility if you don't have it immediately such as Hubspot (plus you get a $ kickback) or Convertkit (small affiliate $). Then charge them 5k to consult and make them an initial content marketing strategy including x blogs, a killer landing page, basic PPC ad setup. Then $XXX - YYYY/mo to manage and grow it.
Sell just one of those and you're good to go. Take 1/2 up front month 1, and 1/2 upon delivery during month 2 with a satisfaction guarantee on the deliverables since you may not have past work product to show and need the deal to pay rent.
You can estimate but can't guarantee the results of the campaign. Handle your guarantee very strategically and don't mess up. ;)
Solid advice. Thanks Courtland!
The more urgency you have the closer you should be to a service and something that currently exist and people curently use and try not to build anything, just find a customer and something you can do for him... something you are already proficient at or at least capable, something phisical or creative.. like airtasker/task rabbit for phisical, things like fivver for creative or any other work platform... transfering gigs to a bussiness...
I like this approach, but I've heard places like fivver and upwork are hard to break into. You have to do small jobs to get good reviews first. Regardless, I think they're pretty swamped with candidates.
The raiser it is the less they expect in return
...
If your resourceful and an extravert with soft skills for example you makes create a mowing or cleaning service that employees other people to execute and you handle getting the job at the start able to do it with 0$ start in multiple contexts/mixes to that concept...
If you make an automated service that does a popular expensive gig you can undercut the cost and profit from the volume
....
You need the mindset to find value and biz formulas and mix and match ideas until one works
Guaranteed demand is a huge jump start which is what these platforms have in a way if you can search existing jobs and historical even better...
Also doing anything usually teaches you the details and opens you to how to do it, better/cheaper/faster/add value if you had the breathing room, doing the core job for free would force you to get innovative
ah, gotcha. Never thought of using sites like that to validate ideas!
I would start to reach out cold to my ideal prospects as soon as I can:
6am: wake up
6.30: done with shower & breakfast
7am: done with news + updates
7.30am: make a list of 70 ideal accounts
8am: reach out to them
11.30am: take a break, walk my dog, lunch
12.30pm: keep reaching out to these folks
3.30pm: write content about the problem I solve
5.30pm: post content on multiple websites, communities, forums
6pm: family stuff
10pm: read about the industry
10.30pm: couple stuff
6am: seize the day
Allison, I went to your blog and tried to subscribe to your mailing list but ended up getting the error "Please enter a valid email address!" when it was a valid email.
Ah! I'll have to look into that. Thanks!
@cafdc0der Looks like my Mailgun settings were incorrect. Should be fixed now. Thanks for letting me know!
Great thanks I’ll subscribe now! Interested in following your journey and wish you luck in the future!
This is all assuming that you don't make money from your own products yet.
I'd say freelance, but if you don't already have some steam behind you (i.e. references, previously completed work etc) or you don't have a very marketable skill, it could be difficult to find a client in one month.
If I was desperate, I'd probably take out a credit card/loan to make sure I could make rent. Then I'd focus on making money / utilising my assets.
Do you have friends who could spare a couch for you? Maybe you could rent your apartment out on airbnb and do some couch surfing to pay back some of the credit card loan. Time to sell some of those clothes that you don't wear very often? Depop is a good option there.
The loan would give you a bit of runway to secure a good quality freelance contract. When you find a contract, you could try to get payment upfront or agree to shorter payment terms (i.e. pay every 2 weeks as opposed to a month) so that you can pay the loan off quicker.
Freelance. Post on social media twitter/linkedin/facebook that i'm looking to do some contract work.
Last resort would be sites like Upwork but it takes time to build a trusted profile and you'd be working for peanuts.
Why the artificial limitation?
The fastest way is to go to a job agency, do whatever job is available that you have the skills for, including a minimum-wage job.
Otherwise, for me, I'd try a high-risk swing trade with leverage to get $2k.
Bruh, you spend too much time on /r/wallstreetbets
I'm more r/Cryptocurrency. ;)
My personal situation is that I"ll likely have to start looking for a job in a month, I'm not necessarily going to miss rent. But I wanted to discuss the idea of "If you HAD to build an indie business in a month, how would you do it". I'd prefer to keep working for myself if I could.
The entire S&P500 has been bombing the past week or two. Every single investor I know has been losing money. There's no guaranteed quick money to make money in the market at the moment, you're more likely to lose your butt. We are in a recession after all (some people don't even realize still that we are officially labeled as being in a recession) and during a pandemic, the market just hasn't caught up to that yet. It will though, or perhaps just realized it.
That's why you short!
If a person is willing to forego quality of life (and maybe risk their health, things being what they are, at the moment) for the month, United States Minimum Wage of $7.25 means working a hair less than 276 hours, which averages about nine hours, twelve minutes of work per every day for thirty days. So picking up a couple of jobs in the nearest downtown is probably the most expedient (if unglamorous) solution, assuming there isn't a labor glut where they'd need to compete with people who can be expected to stay past the end of the month.
Depending on where our worker lives, minimum wage might be higher, trimming the number of required hours. For example, Emeryville, California's minimum wage is $16.86 (the highest I could find), which only requires 119 hours of work; if eight-hour shifts are available, that's only fifteen "normal" days of work, which leaves half the month plus evenings to mess around with earning money through other means. Or socialize and take care of the family, which is entirely valid, too.
A simpler solution, assuming that it's just a fixed cost for the month, would be to try to take a small personal loan out from local banks. If I knew that money was coming in next month, that's where I'd probably go, first.
That's assuming no connections, no audience, no advance notice, and nothing to just sell on one hand (requiring a certain level of bottom-feeding) and just concerns for the month on the other (which allows for solutions that might not be sustainable). With advance notice or good connections, it's generally not hard to land a short-term consulting gig that'll pay better, though whether the employer pays on time is another matter. With advance notice and an audience, it wouldn't be hard to bring in customers for a simple digital product/service. If the money is suddenly needed for longer than just the one month, though, that complicates things a lot.
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