How I Built a $5K a Month Side Project

And source the most popular kids items from Alibaba and use language to market it to whomever your locale is.

> As I mentioned, my first lead/opportunity came from an introduction. That was made possible when I took a couple friends (who are salespeople) out for drinks to tell them what I was working on. Afterwards they both said they would try to think of people to refer me to.

> My next two customers came from a less obvious channel. A friend told me about a service called Growth Geeks and suggested I create a profile for my service. I was hesitant at first because it seemed like a distraction, but I signed up nonetheless.

So basically he sent an email to the founder of that website like this https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5706d181b09f95e331b21... saying that the author (a bit confusing to figure out as both are called Mike/Michael) can grow your sales with no marketing.

Then this happened:

> He responded that day and asked if I had time to speak on the phone.

> On the call I learned that he had a customer who needed 2,000 leads a month and they needed 2,000 leads a month for themselves. I used the same sales process as my first call and closed two deals in 30 minutes worth $3,000 / mo (25% of the $4,000 in revenue went to Growth Geeks). Suddenly I went from $1,000/mo to $4,000 / mo.

My question is now, how he manages to make 4k leads?!

> Later that week I decided it was time to double down on this side project. I spent a couple nights writing email templates and planning outbound email campaigns. By May of 2015 I had sent over 30,000 sales and marketing emails so I knew how to get high response rates (see play #1).

So now he says he sent over 30000 emails (I assume he has a mailing list of 30000 and sent an email, but that doesn't match what he says, he seems to have sent multiple emails). So let's say he has 30000 email list and a click-through rate of 13.3% (which I think is very very high, maximum I got was around 3-4% and was only once) then he would make 4000 leads.

First thing I think is strange, is how he got 30000 emails? That's kind of the most important part of the guide, without this he couldn't make any lead.

Then he says this:

> I sent emails to about 500 people over the course of a month which resulted in ~20 free trial sign-ups. Two of those free trials converted within the month and by the end of June, I had $5,000 in booked MRR.

Note that this is another customer acquisition source. So he has an additional 500 emails.

I mean how can a person reproduce this guide without these mailing lists?

So even if he says how he did it, you can't really do the same unless you have:

- Friends that can sign up for your product or refer other people - Big email lists - Create leads from ???

I feel like all these missing points leads directly to his startup https://getsimpledata.com/ - So I guess is more about marketing.

Anyway, I think the post was interesting, but not too much I can do about it because I probably know about:

- Focus on a problem that already exists - Work on your pain point - Outsource to a cheap country - Positioning in the market

Some types for the author: Philipinnes

If you study hard and get good grades, you might find yourself in a position where someone needs to hire for a role that you're already prepared for. Sure, there's luck in bumping into that person, but you worked hard to be able to take advantage of opportunities, so I'd say luck had very little to do with your success. If it wasn't this lucky break, there would be another one.

If you brush off school and happen to get hired by a boss that could care less if you do work of any quality, that's mostly luck and probably not repeatable.

Sure, Gates and Bezos experienced luck during their careers, but I'd be willing to bet that the dominant trait in their growth was hard work and intelligent decision making. Some people like to think of them as happening to be in the right place at the right time, but I think they worked hard to prepare themselves with the skills necessary to see those massive opportunities and were obsessed with moving as fast as possible towards their goals.

I am making better money working at FAANG for relatively ethical work better by hundreds of lawyers and moral force.

I just look down on these people who have no programming skill to get paid higher at top companies.

Resorting to cheap tricks at us.