Journey to $10k/mo and Beyond...

[BPH1994]

It's been about a month, so I want to provide an update since I last posted here about what's been going on and what I'm doing.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to move the needle very much, so if you're hoping for an exciting update about massive progress, this isn't it yet.

I have been fortunate to have @Andy Black and @Two Dog keep their channels open for me to message them asking for advice as I try to progress.

Andy's advice is to help the people nearest to me. I don't interact with too many people face-to-face on a daily basis, so what I've been doing is helping my parents de-clutter the house by loading and transporting donation boxes to Goodwill as they assemble them for me.

One thing that sucked was Andy asked me how I can make a sale, today. I thought the lowest-hanging fruit would be to offer online personal training services to my followers on Instagram and friends on Facebook. I reasoned that I'm in excellent shape, have been posting my workouts, diet, and weigh-ins regularly for a couple of years, and occasionally have people DM me asking me questions about what I eat or why I do certain exercises. I even had a family friend admit that he just copies the workouts I post and does them himself since he doesn't have any direction in the gym.

I took inspiration from Andy who put out a Facebook post offer about Google Adwords. I put up an Instagram story about it, and while that disappears after 24 hours, I'll link the Facebook status post to give the gist of the offer I made to about 1200 followers and 1700 friends:

This actually got more engagement than on Instagram where I routinely have people messaging me questions. The only responses were from friends, not ones who were interested, but to offer advice on how I should build the thing to the people who responded.

So that kinda took the wind out of my sails...personal training was the BACKUP to whatever bright idea I'd move forward with as far as business goes. And to get ZERO interest was extremely disappointing. I messaged a friend who's doing exactly what I want to be doing in terms of training - this guy is extremely good-looking and in shape and regularly posts about him and his clients on Instagram as part of a training team. I found that he doesn't have ANY online clients and that all of his business is local. The fact that he's way better at this than me, is doing way more, and still doesn't have the outcome I'm looking for means this is likely to be a dead-end idea.

The only interest I have in this concept so far is from a member of this forum.

That puts me back at square one. The only nice thing right now is that I'm able to save more money because I'm not bleeding it to maintain any business ideas.

I'm currently re-reading Noah's Million Dollar Weekend to make sure I understand how to properly test my ideas before investing in them. I'm getting old and can't afford too many more f***-ups. The part that's conflicting is through my talks with Andy, the goal is to find a problem and solve it by helping people - versus Noah's suggestion to test an idea each week until you find traction.

Anyway, here's what I'm doing:

• Re-reading Million Dollar Weekend to understand how to properly test a business before committing
• Helping my parents move heavy boxes of clutter out of the house as they pack them
• Offering advice to users on that other forum regarding guys with girl problems
• Asking friends and family what inconveniences and problems they run into in their daily lives that they wish there were solutions to
• Waiting for responses from the interested forum member to see if we should proceed with personal training

Here's what I need to do:

• Find ways to contact and help people, since I encounter so few in my regular day-to-day
• Identify an idea and test it to find traction
• Once there is validation I'll follow Raven_Shadow's calendar to keep myself moving in the right direction (I already have it printed, I didn't want to ping him since I'm sure he already gets plenty of notifications from his various threads)
• Talk to @testuser about his book since I saw his thread and had questions about that journey. I'm wondering if this is something I can do if there's a topic I can write about that would help people

One thing I've tried to do is look at my own problems and how I would solve them:

• Pet-Sitting App - Rover exists and is very popular. My family has a cat that we have to get our neighbors to take care of when we go on vacation. I didn't do too much digging on this, but it seems a lot of people who pet sit get their business by word of mouth and rarely use apps - despite their popularity. I wonder if finding out why those people don't use apps, and what would push them to use those apps could be used to find improvements. The problem is that a quick search of app development costs makes this idea out to be prohibitively expensive to execute.
• Sucralose-Free Energy Drinks - I love caffeine, but I don't enjoy coffee because of the teeth staining and the fact that I usually want more of a kick than a typical cup has. Most of my favorite energy drinks contain sucralose as a sweetener to provide a drink that has zero calories and zero sugar. The problem is that drinks with sucralose MAY disrupt gut microbiomes, causing people to avoid them. I have not heard of or tested any of the drinks that do NOT contain sucralose, I imagine that if a good-tasting one existed while still maintaining zero calories and zero sugar it would be quite popular. I do not know how difficult it is to formulate a drink, although I know Mud/Wtr came to be from similar desires.
• Weight Plates with Finger Protection - Having spent a significant amount of time in the gym, one of the things that always bothered me was trying to rack/unrack weight plates and pinching my fingers against the other plates while sliding them in. Many plates have handles, but I don't believe any have handles thin enough to slide your fingers in while creating enough space to keep fingers from getting slammed between the next plate. This idea seems extremely niche and might not be solving a large enough problem, but the industry as a whole is massive.

That's what I've got for now. Wanted to provide this update in case anybody following cares to weigh in. Right now my biggest roadblock is finding a problem to solve and an idea to test so I can be proactive with my time and focus my effort on moving something along.

 

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