Making $45,000/ mo through side projects

Hey there,

As you might know, I love building bootstrapped companies. At least to delay raising money for as long as possible.

But when we started building our dream startup, buildd, I realized that it might take a year before we make money. And we didn’t want Flexiple to support buildd’s expenses.

It seemed like we would have to raise money. Then, we instead decided to monetize all the skills we learned over years of building Flexiple. By building side projects.

So, let me share how we are planning (and have already made solid headway) to fund buildd.

Monetizing our skills

So, when I say monetizing our skills, we considered the following: SEO, NoCode, Social media and GPT.

First off, we tried making money off our SEO course. But that failed for various reasons. That’s for a later mail to you. While we had other courses we would have liked to make, we decided against that route (at least for now).

Next, we considered building a few products on NoCode. We even spent good time building a couple of them.

But, we realized that we had underestimated the amount of time growing the product would take us - in terms of building it, marketing it and also customer support.

So, we decided to monetize our skill in SEO in a multitude of ways. Mostly through different types of ads.

SEO for the win

We already had experience driving a huge amount of organic traffic to websites using SEO. So when our startup failed, we decided to use its website to buildd a “niche website”.

Basically, drive SEO traffic to a website and monetize it through an ad network.

And, that’s what we did => we were able to drive 1 million+ visits/ month to that website. We connected it to the ad network, Mediavine, and started clocking $12,000/ month.

We have doubled down on it and just in the last month it has now increased to $14,000 :)

Now, we have begun doing this for 2 new websites in two other niches. In totality, across these three websites, our goal is to hit $35,000/ month.

Affiliate ads

Monetizing through an ad network is great. The next way to monetize these same websites is through affiliate ads (links to Amazon products).

We have started this very recently, so our current revenue is just $200/ month. We aim to increase this to $5000/ month.

Link ads

We get specific interest from people in those niches to market their products. The model is to charge them a fixed amount to add their product.

While we started this just 6 weeks back, it has already grown to $3000/ month (past 4 weeks). Our goal is to get this to $5000/ month.

SEO course

While we did fail to generate a substantial amount from the course, we still make a sale of $1000 to $2000/ month.

A pity for the quality of content of the course, but no worries. I don’t have any goal against this head.

Overall

Lesson 1: Choose a problem you are passionate about

1. Niche site
   Current: $14,000/mo
   Goal: $35,000+/mo

2. Affiliate ads

   Current: $200/mo

   Goal: $5000/ mo

3. Link Ads

   Current: $3000

   Goal: $5000

4. SEO course

   Current: $1,000 to $2,000/mo

OVERALL
→ Current: $18,700/ mo (assuming SEO course at $1,500)
→ Goal: $45,000+/mo

Ensuring side projects don’t become a distraction

This was a big concern for us. The advantage we have with SEO is that we have really cool people in our team who grew their skillsets in SEO along with us.

Thus such side projects don’t require much time from us apart from being a general guiding force.

At the same time, this money helps us stay independent while still ensuring we have money for experiments!

What do you think about this?

Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email :)

Best,
Karthik

P.S. Please consider forwarding this to a friend! It would really help my two startups.

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