- The Road to $10k
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- Month 10 Income Report
Hey there!
This is Zach, and in this newsletter, I share a monthly update on how my full-time entrepreneurship journey is going.
I’m at the end of month 10, and… I’m employed again.
Yep, I’m just as shocked as you.
Let’s dive in.
Revenue tracker
I did a small holiday sale for my online golf training course in early December, which helped the revenue not look miserable again. Other than that, Adsense and affiliate revenue are down (a common January trend).
The above revenue is primarily broken into 3 separate business areas.
The DIY Golfer + Local Golf Spot - my golf websites/brands
Full Stack Foundations - web development courses + YouTube
Services - a “catch-all” for one-time contract work
Here’s a detailed look at how the overall business has done comparing Jan. 2024 vs. the prior period, Dec. 2023.
Wait, you’re employed?
Some of you may know that before this “Road to $10k” thing, I worked as a software engineer at a startup called “Maybe” (personal finance app).
I’m going to save myself a lot of writing here and just link directly to the announcement where I explain how it all happened and what’s coming next.
This all happened very fast.
I started the month with a 0% intention of doing anything full-time and ended the month employed again.
When given a chance to “try again” on something you poured thousands of hours into, it’s very tough to say no. And that’s what happened here with Maybe. I’m super excited to work on this again!
Reflecting
For those of you who have followed this journey, you know how challenging it has been. I sunk a solid 8 months into building “foundational” stuff for all of my sites and didn’t focus much on revenue growth. Then AI (LLMs) hit us. Google algorithm updates hit us. YouTube Adsense rates have tanked. All of these things have been huge headwinds and paired with the fact that most of this journey I have NOT been actively focused on revenue-generating activities, it has made for some pretty abysmal outcomes.
Funny enough, this month, I finally started consistently producing content. I was publishing a blog post or YouTube video daily. I was finally doing revenue-generating things and producing content for the “engine” I had worked on for months prior! I was getting into a good rhythm.
But there was a problem—producing content 24/7 is exhausting. I was spending 10 hours a day writing posts, writing video scripts, filming, and editing videos. Things that I used to feel “creative” doing now made me feel like a robot. It was not fun.
I knew this wouldn’t be sustainable. I knew I needed to limit all this content creation to a max of 4-5 hours per day.
Before finding out that I’d have the chance to rejoin Maybe, I had already planned out what I was going to share for this January update.
I was planning on talking about an adjustment to my overall strategy.
In the first week of January (again, prior to knowing I’d be rejoining Maybe), I sat down and talked to my wife about what we needed to do moving forward.
Looking at the revenue growth over the past 10 months, I knew I wouldn’t reach $5k, much less $10k within the year. Golf season is approaching, so my fingers are crossed that a lot of my work will start to pay off. But there’s no guarantee.
So we decided that sometime around April or May, I’d actively start looking for freelance work, something I haven’t prioritized at all thanks to how busy I’ve been with building everything else.
My “rough” plan since day 1 has been:
Build Local Golf Spot, rebuild The DIY Golfer, and launch Full Stack Foundations
Experiment with content formats and find what works for each site
Do keyword research, build a content schedule, and lock myself into some sort of weekly posting schedule for both brands
Split my time 50/50 between freelancing and content creation until the content got me to $10k
10 months ago, I would have guessed that step #4 would take 1.5-2 years total. I now think that based on my style of content creation, it’s going to take 2-4 years.
And I’m fine with that—I’d much rather work a full-time job and slowly chip away at these content sites over a multi-year period than continue pumping out content like a machine every day.
Here’s what’s changing:
This newsletter will continue, but I need to take a break to catch my breath. Ultimately, the “Road to $10k” goal still exists—it’s just being put on a longer timeline.
I may consider doing quarterly updates moving forward while employed full-time.
I will continue to run the businesses but will be drastically reducing my output on them (by ~80%)
Luckily, everything I’ve talked about in this newsletter is a content-driven business, so they are mostly passive and will hopefully keep growing and have interesting things to talk about.
So that’s it for this month!
Like I said, I’m not sure when the next update will be, but I’m excited for this new chapter and hope to keep sharing the journey however I can!
Zach
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