aleclarson
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I've been meaning to share this piece with the Fastlane forum for over a year now, finally got around to writing it out. It's nothing crazy, just interesting because without the Millionaire Fastlane I would not have gotten the idea to build a directory site (my first website sale) or found one of my favorite quotes in the book that is the foundation for what I do: "in a gold rush, don't dig for gold, sell the shovels".
After reading the book in 2013, I was inspired to build a directory site. I was involved in the drone industry years before and noticed how many new drone pilots were starting aerial photography companies. The light bulb came on and I knew that I had to build a Drone Pilot Directory for real estate agents. I knew nothing about web development and after a week of research I concluded that the most plausible way of developing the idea was building the site on WordPress with a directory theme. About a month later I had a pretty nice looking and functioning directory site with custom logos and images I had designed myself. With a list of about 90 drone pilots I found on instagram, I started sending my initial emails for signups. I was able to get roughly 8 of 90 pilots signed up on free profiles. A few weeks into the process of marketing I realized the sheer amount of sweat equity I was going to have to put into the project. With competitors already popping up I felt a little discouraged because I didn't have the time to fully dedicate to it. It was during this time that I was browsing websites for sale on Flippa and watched a food truck directory with no traffic or revenue sell for $800. Out of curiosity I decided to list my drone pilot directory AerialConnect on flippa. It ended up selling two weeks later for $2,050.
After a few months of this I had another light bulb moment. I decided to start working on a video training course detailing the process of building and designing starter websites and selling them on Flippa. I named the course "The Ultimate Flippa Guide and named the website SellTheShovels.net I reached out to Flippa and asked if they'd be interested in featuring my story in an article, they agreed and we wrote a pretty cool article together last August. That initial article helped me build a mailing list of about 150 users that I eventually launched my training course to. I sold about 6 the first week and I let the site go dormant for a while until last may I wrote a second article with Flippa and then a third last month.
Thanks for reading! I know my story probably isn't that exciting because I'm really only making part time income doing this but it still feels special to me. I could go more into detail but I didn't want to write an extremely long an boring piece, feel free to reach out to me.
After reading the book in 2013, I was inspired to build a directory site. I was involved in the drone industry years before and noticed how many new drone pilots were starting aerial photography companies. The light bulb came on and I knew that I had to build a Drone Pilot Directory for real estate agents. I knew nothing about web development and after a week of research I concluded that the most plausible way of developing the idea was building the site on WordPress with a directory theme. About a month later I had a pretty nice looking and functioning directory site with custom logos and images I had designed myself. With a list of about 90 drone pilots I found on instagram, I started sending my initial emails for signups. I was able to get roughly 8 of 90 pilots signed up on free profiles. A few weeks into the process of marketing I realized the sheer amount of sweat equity I was going to have to put into the project. With competitors already popping up I felt a little discouraged because I didn't have the time to fully dedicate to it. It was during this time that I was browsing websites for sale on Flippa and watched a food truck directory with no traffic or revenue sell for $800. Out of curiosity I decided to list my drone pilot directory AerialConnect on flippa. It ended up selling two weeks later for $2,050.
"In a gold rush, don't dig for gold, sell the shovels".
This brought me to my next light bulb moment. With everyone trying to build the next Facebook or Airbnb (not saying this isn't a realistic task) maybe there is a big market in selling the apps, the tools, the plugins, the graphic design or the software. My idea was: "there might be a market for building these startup ideas as viable platforms to sell. Instead of going through the sometimes frustrating process of learning about domains/hosting, setting up wordpress, integrating specific themes and plugins, designing logos and writing content, what if you could just buy a fully functioning website already built and ready to go"? This is the model I implemented. Within the same month, I built an awesome flight school directory and sold it for $500. I repeated that process and sold about a dozen directory ideas over the year. Interestingly enough, some users would see my listings and request that I build out their domains/ideas because they liked my work. It was almost as if I was building a web development company by accident. I then started buying premium domain names at no reserve auctions. For example, I bought the domain Night-Clubs.com at auction on Flippa for $47, built it into an incredible night club directory and sold it a few weeks later for $1000. I focused on building great ideas that are actually viable businesses to sell to entrepreneurs who either had better sales, marketing or SEO skills than I had.
After a few months of this I had another light bulb moment. I decided to start working on a video training course detailing the process of building and designing starter websites and selling them on Flippa. I named the course "The Ultimate Flippa Guide and named the website SellTheShovels.net I reached out to Flippa and asked if they'd be interested in featuring my story in an article, they agreed and we wrote a pretty cool article together last August. That initial article helped me build a mailing list of about 150 users that I eventually launched my training course to. I sold about 6 the first week and I let the site go dormant for a while until last may I wrote a second article with Flippa and then a third last month.
Thanks for reading! I know my story probably isn't that exciting because I'm really only making part time income doing this but it still feels special to me. I could go more into detail but I didn't want to write an extremely long an boring piece, feel free to reach out to me.
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