$0 to $50K/month Case Study: Week 0-Context — Ten Minute MBA
By: Dean Woods
Tags: Startup, Case Study, Side Hustle, Make Money Online, Passive Income

Hi there!!

Context for this case study

Thanks for coming to step #1 of this case study. I’m Dean, the writer behind Ten Minute MBA.

As I wrote about here, I’ve decided to quit my job. My last day is June 1, 2019. As a result, I’m going to try to do something crazy. While I make ~$0/month right now, I’m going to try to build up to $10K/month in income by December 31st, 2019.

That’s 220 days from now.

Then, I’m going to try and build it up to $50K/month of profit in 18 months.

This is absolutely nuts. I’m absolutely nuts for trying it. But research shows that big, audacious goals are more likely to be achieved.

So here’s the plan

I’ve mapped out the next 18 months in terms of profit targets. I’ll use these to carefully track my income by month and see how I’m doing against my goals.

I’ll share a monthly chart that shows how I’m doing against the projections. With some luck, I’ll be ahead of those projections each month.

So here’s the profit targets by month:

2018 2019

Why I picked these profit targets

I picked these numbers because they are large, ridiculous, and extremely difficult to hit. I have no clue if I’ll come anywhere close to hitting them. But if I don’t try to hit them, I won’t.

I calculated each month’s profit targets by picking round numbers for some specific months (May 2018, October 2018, December 2018, April 2019, and October 2019). These seemed like good “intermediate check-in points.” Then I used the “Goal Seek” function in Excel to calculate what the other month’s profit targets should be.

More importantly, there are a couple of big purchases in my life coming up that I’d like to be able to finance. In particular, a house!

The time I can commit to working on this case study

Honestly, a limited amount. I will be leaving my job shortly but will be starting a new one relatively soon.

This is a bit of a double-edged sword. I’ll have things like healthcare covered and not need to worry about that while working on these profit goals. However, I have less time to devote to working on this.

I’ve written before that I’m an early riser. I’m going to need to be in order to make this work. My plan is to devote a few hours before work to this case study, and as many as I can after work to it. Things like sleeping may, unfortunately, be sacrificed, but I’m willing to make that trade-off.

The money I can commit to this case study

I don’t have a ton of money to spend on this case study. I have ~$750 in the bank that I can use on this. My goal is to stay well under that number, but that’s my upper limit.

Any other money that I spend on this case study needs to come from the income on this case study.

How I plan to make money on this case study

Ahh, the most important question!

The short answer is, I’m not entirely sure what the composition of businesses will look ~18 months from now. But there are definitely a few different things I want to try through this case study. I’ve mapped them out below.

Amazon Affiliate Sites

I’ll write out a longer description of how these work at some point. But the essential gist of it is this. You write ~200,000 words of content about a very specific niche topic (for example, best candles for a bachelor pad).

With 200,000 words of content, Google will recognize your site as the authority on the topic and send you a bunch of traffic. You then send that traffic to Amazon, where you make a commission off any sales there.

The difficult part here is that this can take ~12 months for Google to recognize that your site is “legit.” It also takes a TON of time to write 200,000 words. Assuming 1,000 words is an hour, we’re talking 200 hours to fill up a site.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time on sites like Niche Pursuits and Just Start on Reddit. It seems like Amazon Affiliate Sites can generate ~$2k/month after ~2 years of work. My plan is to work on 11 of them this year.

These 11 are abbreviated as:

Right now, exactly zero of these sites are built and launched online. Looks like I need to teach myself WordPress!

They also have zero content on them right now. With 200K words of content per site, and 11 sites, that’s 2,200,000 words I need to write over the next 220 days to finish them in 2019. That’s 10,000 words a day. Looks like I need to write a lot!

Medium Partner Program

This is directly from Ten Minute MBA. My articles on TMM are shared to Medium, where people have the ability to “clap” on my articles. When there is a “clap”, I get a few cents.

With enough claps, my hope is that Ten Minute MBA can generate some income here to contribute to the goal!

eBooks

I have a few eBooks that are available right now on the Amazon Kindle Store. They make ~$10/month right now, but it should be much more.

The reason why is I do have a lot of expertise in this personal development space and business. I’m an award-winning business instructor with years of experience advising CEOs on their most pressing business issues. I hopefully should be able to put that experience into eBooks that can help a large group of people.

Right now, I have 2 eBooks that are available online. I want to have 100 available by the end of the year. That means I need to write 98 eBooks on a variety of business and personal development topics over the next year.

That’s a ton of writing (I calculate over a million words), but I think it’s something I can do because I already have a lot of material from old lesson plans.

Time to write some more!

Google Apps

I have a few apps that I’ve bought through Flippa. They are crappy free games that are listed on the Google Play store. When someone sees an ad while playing the game, I make a few cents.

With some optimization, I hope to be able to make a few bucks here.

Consulting on Fiverr and other platforms

I can use platforms like Catalant and Fiverr to offer consulting services on areas for which I’m knowledgeable. My old firm used to bill me out at ~$500/hour. While I made way less than 5% of that amount per hour, I do have experience on how to provide value for business and services.

My goal is to try and provide some value to people on these platforms in order to reach that target. This is something I plan to start in a few months

Authority Sites

These are similar to niche sites, but they are a bit broader. For example, if a niche site is “candles for bachelor pad”, an authority site is “bachelor pad.”

This means that they have much higher income potential, but they also are much harder to build and take longer. I think they are closer to an ~18 month game.

I have ~5 authority sites that I’d like to build. While I’m going to be slammed with the affiliate sites over the next few months, I want to at least publish these authority sites so Google can start to recognize these sites. With some luck, I’d like to have a few articles up on them as well.

Subscription Box

I am really passionate about this one. I have an idea for a subscription box that I am super excited about. However, I think a subscription box will be $5K+ to get up and running in the way I would intend it to be run. As a result, I’m planning on holding off on this until I have some of these other businesses running the way I want them to be.

This also has high profit potential so it can help bring me from $10K/month to $50K/month.

SAAS products

SAAS stands for software as a service. These are platforms that build software for customers in exchange for a monthly fee. Netflix is probably the best example of a successful SAAS model.

While this also has a high upfront cost, it also has the potential to lead to high profit. We’ll hold on this for now, but will get to it eventually.

FBA

FBA stands for Fulfilled by Amazon. It essentially just means selling things on Amazon. I think it’s a potentially profitable model that is less of a headache then dropshipping ( even though I made $10K dropshipping.)

We’ll hold off here on this one as well!

Other business models

My guess is other business models will probably emerge over the next few weeks and months. Investment real estate is a logical one. For now though, this is how I’m thinking about the next few months.

What I promise to do over the course of this case study

I’ll publish weekly updates on my end about how things are going and what I plan to work on the next week. I also plan to share what went well, what went okay, and what went absolutely horribly.

My hope is to make this exciting and a great learning opportunity both for me and for anyone who is reading along.

My plan for the next week

For the next week, my plan is:

Write a few more articles for Ten Minute MBA

Write and publish at least one eBook on Amazon KDP

Finish WordPress development for at least two niche sites

Write ~5,000 words of content for two of the finished niche sites

Collaborate with a freelancer I use on Fiverr for technical development of another niche site (that one is over my head to build)

If you would like to follow along with this case study over the next 18 months, make sure to sign up below to track along with the journey!