Building a Business From a Bedroom, $98,130 and 11-Months In
By: Daniel Bourke
Tags: Remote Working, Business, Money, Small Business, Entrepreneurship

How do I make money?

Before working for myself, every job I had, I’d exchange time for money. I’d get paid for the hours I was there. 9–5? That’s 7.5 hours. Come on, you didn’t think you’d get paid for lunch, did you? No sir.

The first benefit of this depends on the job; you’ve got an opportunity to learn skills that you can use in your business. One of the ideal situations in life is to get paid to learn.

The second is you can use the funds from your regular job to fund your business.

That’s what I did.

My last two jobs were working for Apple as a Genius (the one who talks to customers fixes your computers) and as a machine learning engineer for Max Kelsen.

So the skills I built there were explaining technology in an understandable way (Apple tech support) and writing machine learning code to help various businesses get information out of their data.

My primary source of income is now at the crossover of those two. I created a beginner-friendly machine learning course to teach people how to do what I was doing as a machine learning engineer.

This didn’t happen overnight.

The good news is, once you realize your brain is comprised of programmable mush, mostly in the form of hydrogen atoms, you’ve got the recipe you need to start changing direction. In other words, learning what you need to learn and creating what you want to create.

In 2016, I switched my balance from consuming to creating. A line in the sand. A strict rule to start making more things than I consumed.

I became a frozen yogurt machine. All output. Blog posts, videos on YouTube, Medium articles, all around the topic of me studying my self-created machine learning master’s degree, and sharing what I’d learned.

Through this, eventually, people found my work and started asking questions.

The most consistent one being, “I want to learn machine learning, where do I start?”. To which I’d usually answer with a list of curated resources.

But despite an opportunity hitting me in the face (I’d get the question almost daily), it took me longer than I care to admit to starting answering it properly.

The history books will show, I left my job, wrote an article about the 12 things I learned during my first year as a machine learning engineer, a few people read it, including someone called Andrei. He’d created a few technology courses and was looking to create one on machine learning. He asked if I wanted to partner, and after doing my research, I said yes. It turns out Andrei was one of the most popular instructors on Udemy (an online platform for selling and participating in community-made courses).

And since launching our course on January 17, 2020, I’ve made more from it than I did for the whole time I worked at my last job.

Let’s get a little specific, shall we?

The skill I get paid for is at the crossover of machine learning and communication. Breaking down an intimidating topic in a way others can understand.

This crossover led to the following income sources (all in USD):

My machine learning course on Udemy — $5000-$8000/month

Affiliate partnership with Coursera (an online learning platform for technology and other topics) — $500-$2000/month

Affiliate partnership with DataCamp (an online learning platform for data-related topics) — $150–350/month

Premium Medium articles — $250–2000/month

YouTube ad revenue (I’ve never claimed this, it’s still sitting in Google’s bank account) — $300–600/month

Other misc sources — $50-$200/month

The first thing you might notice is none of these amounts are set in stone. Unlike a salary, there’s some variability here.

Some months might be higher, and some months might be lower. Some can’t handle the instability. But as you’ll see later, I think it’s a good thing.