1. Made $700K last year and will make more like $850K this year. I sell a SaaS product. Two thirds of my revenue comes from the Shopify App Store, the other third comes from regular website customers. Month after month the money just rolls in, higher than the month before. I reinvest it all into dividend funds and my $900K house is paid off.
Some comments here like “if you made $500K you don’t have time to post on Reddit!”, or “I’d rather be happy and have free time!” are nonsense.
The key to wealth is you must create something which separates time from income. Even most high-income professions (such as doctors) don’t become truly wealthy because they can’t do this.
Normal people: spend time = get paid. (Jobs, services, etc.)
Wealthy people: spend time = build something which creates income without time. (Products, investments, loans, etc)
2. I run a digital marketing agency – we focus on four core services from web design, local seo, ppc management and social media management. We are hovering around 900k per year right now. We as an agency normally take on a client if we take over all of their marketing. We don’t simply come on just to build a website or to run their SEO. We take over everything because that’s the only way I know we can truly help. If a client wants to do just a website build or socials we normally turn them away or recommend them to another agency.
I can’t really go deep into specifics but I know the clients below we do the following for: web design, socials, ppc, seo. We also run anything they need as far as graphic design goes or anything out of scope we figure it out. We also answer our phones Monday through Sunday for our clients only. Real personal touch.
The best thing I can say as why we are this far is because we show results, we pay attention to detail, and when they need us we are right there ASAP. The client list below contains to pool companies, telehealth, doctors, lawyers, tire shops, iv therapy, and dentist. We work great with service based businesses.
Client 1: 264k annually
Client 2: 180k annually
Client 3: 132k annually
Client 4: 130k annually
Client 5: 60k annually
Client 6: 60k annually
Client 6: 43.2k annually
Client 7: 36k annually
3. I started a wood sunglasses company, Woodies, 90% of my income comes from Amazon FBA
I’ve never felt more free. I’ve outsourced all of the inventory and customer service so I travel a lot, paint, I’m learning Italian, and how to play the trumpet
What helped me get here? I tried to never do the same work twice. I either automate it, outsource it, or eliminate it.
I read 4 hour workweek 10 years ago and it shaped a lot of my philosophy around ‘work’. A lot of people call me ‘lazy’ these days because it takes me 3-4 days to respond to an email. But I don’t care.
Amazon FBA is still the easiest and best way to create a recurring income that allows for remote living
4. I bootstrapped a few consumer brands then become an independent sponsor focused on turnarounds.
Short version: Buy struggling companies inexpensively and shift them back into growth mode – then sell them.
5. I have a company that sells home remodeling products/services (actually just 1 but I’m trying to keep it vague). We buy the product from a supplier and contract the install – so sales and customer service is really all that we keep in house. I’ll make 3-4 mil this year. Started between 1 and 2 years ago.
6. My net last year was 2.1M. I own an Amazon business…in year 12. 18 employees, 15m revenue. I live off 60k a year. 275k house, 5k Ford fusion paid off. Dumped ab 150k in RE syndicates and 900k in stock market. Also purchased a warehouse for ab 2m (SBA with 10% down). My biz requires inventory so I invest most back in the business. Plan to continue diversifying and stepping back from the day to day next year.
7. I own 3 gyms. I sit on my ass all days while money flows in. Super blessed
8. I own a plumbing business, mitigation firm and a construction company.
I pump a lot of money into advertising for the plumbing firm. They find water damage and refer it to my mitigation company. The mitigation company refers the buildback (think post work renovation) to my construction firm.
I have a partner with the trade expertise at each company. I invested the starting money and run the marketing arms.
We started with mitigation and added plumbing and construction this last year. I own 75 of plumbing and mitigation and 100 percent of the construction business.
I take home around 100k a month but that is ramping up.
I actually started with a gym and still have it as it’s a great referral source for my other companies.
I work 4 days a week for a few hours but am texting clients and managers throughout the day. I think I could work more but I went into business for myself so I could prioritize my wife and son.
The key to my success was having the gym, finding the right people to be the trade expertise at each company and not paying myself more than 2k for the first couple years!
9. I built a service based company and hired people to do every job I personally did for the company.
Once I had basically removed myself from the day to day functions of the company I was able to use that income to start smaller companies that don’t require my full attention.
Eventually when those smaller companies require too much attention I’ll put an ops person in charge and step back further.
The key is to find a way to make money without getting bogged down in the work so that you can find other ways to make money at the same time.
10. For the last 7 years i’ve been working as a business consultant helping large corporates test business ideas using large scale Fake Door testing through Google Ads and Facebook ads.
There’s a lot of money in this, last year I made $600k, as it is a very specialized field where there’s basically only me and a couple of other companies in Europe (that I know of).
Companies love it because they get early feedback on ideas, and reliable data to calculate a business case – on top of this, it’s wicked cheap compared to doing more traditional market research such as surveys, focus groups or interviews.
The setup if really simple:
1. Create an ad campaign targeted early adopters. Google Ads, Facebook ads, Guerilla sticker marketing.
2. Setup a landing page where people can apply to become beta-testers. Collect as much info as possible on users (age, city, occupation, interests, favorite features etc.) if you can, let them think they will have to pay if they get chosen as beta-testers. Lately i’ve been using Typeform instead of landing-pages. Much easier, and better to analyze where people drop-off in the sign-up flow.
3. Launch campaign in the channel most likely to gain early adopters. Run 3 tests in total. First test you should only focus on clicks (CTR, CTR), this can be done even before you have the landing page. The test should only take 1-2 days and have a reach of about 1000 people. you can test multiple channels to see which ones are the best. In the second campaign you want to get at least 100 visits to the landingpage, adjust improve and get to at least 500 visits (statistically significant) in the second campaign.
4. Create a business case where you forecast revenue per month based on your results using a Monte Carlo simulation.
5. Send a report to the client with your forecast, early adopter profile, and your recommendations for next-steps like creating a new campaign with re-targeting and look-alike audience which should grow the leads significantly (reach x amount of sign-ups in 30 days for x $) upselling.
Companies will pay anywhere from $2000-7000 to do this kind of test and I can basically make one in a couple of hours, sometimes I can just use templates I’ve made and almost automate the process.
11. Project based software consulting.
Best decision of my career since becoming an independent software consultant was to hire a technical sales person. This is the first step to start pitching consulting gigs per project basis vs the typical charge by the hour. It’s not that I don’t want to do the selling, it’s just that scoping take a really really long time. People don’t know what they want, and even if they do they ask for the moon.
Most of our leads are still outbound, but it’s totally fine, lots of ideas people with money need things built.
Key learnings:
- You have to find the right project ie. they’re funded (self or vc).
- They must really values equity so they don’t mind paying you cash, and are too busy selling/raising funds to micromanage the product with you.
- Lastly, you gotta be really good and can really carry the weight. Join a 5 persons start-up and very quickly bullshit will bubble up. At this level you gotta come in and start adding value from day 1, nothing can be new to you (which is relatively easy for software projects).
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