In 2012, I was working in a furniture factory as a ‘salesman’, earning $800 a month. That was my first job. Towards the end of every month, I was flat broke. My breakfast, lunch, and dinner towards the end of every month was tea biscuits. They were cheap and that’s what mattered. $0.25 a pack and all my meals for the day were set.
This is what one of my sites have earned me in the year 2020 –
Roughly $75k a month in revenue with 80% profit margin.
In short, $2000 of profit a day from one of my sites.
Life is funny to say the least.
Let’s back up to 2012. So, working as a salesman in furniture. Why? Well, to be honest, that’s the job that I ‘got’ and I had to take it to survive. From there I worked 3 more jobs in the same industry and I hated every bit of it. I didn’t have a psycho boss or anything – I was ‘meeting my targets’ and my ‘superiors’ were happy but I was myself just not happy about it. This is not what I wanted in life. I honestly felt I could have done well in that industry and made some ‘decent’ money but, I didn’t like it one bit.
Every day after some 10-12 hour shift, I would come home and learn coding. Why? Well, I loved the internet, I loved coding and I just enjoyed it. This was my happy place. Over a few months, I mastered HTML, CSS, My SQL and a got a decent hang of a few other languages. It was not to make money to be honest. I was just doing it because I liked it.
And my second favorite thing to do? Excel sheets! I would spend hours every week building up excel sheets of places I dreamed of traveling to. I would make itineraries and imagine myself traveling the world. Travel was always something I got really excited about. While starving on some water and biscuits, I would sleep with a smile dreaming about places that I would one day travel to.
Over time, I started coming up with ideas. Ideas about starting my own online virtual business. In 2013/14, I went to my Dad and I told him, I want him to help me out to setup a business. I wanted to start a digital agency that focuses on web development, CRM and SEO. My Dad, given his age, thought I was high and told me to continue my ‘real job’.
With no way out of my situation, I started out building websites for local companies. I would use my evenings after work and go to nearby restaurants, cafes, and every other shop I could find and try to convince them to let me build them a website. For how much? $300. Haha. It was a big deal to me back then.
About an year later, I quit my day job and started doing web development full time. It was making me a good $5000 a month. And that was plenty for someone who started out at $800 a month.
The funny thing is – when you are in web development, you somehow find your way around a few other skills. Every now and then we’d have a client say to me ‘while you are doing the web development for us, why not setup all our social profiles and manage that for us?’
And that, was my entry into social media.
At this point, my 12 hour work shift for $800 a month has turned into a 30-45 minute work shift a day for $60-$100k profit a month.
So, maybe you’re wondering what exactly I did to get here.
I’ll tell you one thing. The beauty of running a service based online-business is that you have no limit. You are limitless. The entire world is your customer base. So – it doesn’t matter what you are doing – whether its verifications, PR services, social media management, branding or anything else for that matter – as long as you are into ‘service’ side and you don’t have ‘products’ to deal with, you can scale up all the way to the sky!
One advise I would give anyone reading this, to work on a steady flow of income instead of a ‘one-off’. Its easy to make $100k in one month every now and then. Its not easy to build a steady stream of $10k every month and ensure that the stream will continue even if you stop putting in the time.
Everything I’ve built around me is based on steady stream of income. I guess, that’s because I don’t want to ever visit those dark days where I have to starve.
Everything in this space is so limitless. And its so easy. Learn how to code. Learn about SEO. Learn how to work with Photoshop. Learn about social media. And, if you use your head just a bit, you’d be ahead of most of those that are out there.
With that said – I would also like to point out how important it is to maintain relations in this space. A lot of what I have built, is built around good relations. Always reach out to people and build good relations. And that way, you’ll grow as everyone around you grows. This is one of the things I find a lot of a younger people coming into this space lack. They want fast money and nothing to do with sustainability.
Even on this site and outside, I’ve built some really fruitful connections. Not really about money as such either. But, more about trust, respect and common goals.
So – work hard, build your network, and remember, the sky is the limit!
One of the other things that really plays a big role is understanding the fact that having ‘problems’ and ‘hurdles’ is part of life. If you have a life where everything is perfect, that most likely means you are not living it.
Throughout the years - I’ve had several times where I’ve hit a road block. I’ve hit problems. I have had days where my business was brought to stand still. I had nights where I couldn’t find sleep due to stress. But - by now - I’ve learned, that, this is life. You’ll run into a ton of issues, that is okay. As long as you are doing right by your customers and focusing on sustainability, you’ll do just fine.
In all, I get to do what I love. I get to meet awesome people. I work less than an hour day when I want to but most of the time I’m working all the time as I love it and its just really fun.
That excel sheet that I made of itineraries of places I would travel to - I’ve done it all. Visited 25+ countries so far. Many more to be done once the pandemic is relaxed. 
With all that out of the way - I’m also really glad I found SWAPD. Not because of the services but because I got to know some amazing people. You know who you are. 
And - here is a random idea! We should have yearly meet-ups!
And, if there are enough requests about it here, I may make a detailed post about what it is that I do and how I did. It would take a week to write it all down as there is just too much info to input.
Congrats on your success, 
for a sustainable future.