T-minus 30 days

Mission #1: Commandeer a whiteboard

As per one of Manwhore's suggestions, my first mission will be to commandeer a whiteboard. This wil aid in planning and motivation. I'll be able to see it in the morning, it will fuel me, and help to plan my next moves.

Cool what's the business. 

T-minus 29 days

Mission #1: DOMINATED.

Cost: $67.76
Remaining startup funds : $432.24

Mission #2: Reverse Engineer

In this mission I will be defining my criteria that I need to design the business around. Basically, what I need it to do for me. Then come up with ideas to structure the business around those criteria.

You'll see

That whiteboard cost you $67? Lol 

 I found a white board for 16$ brah

http://www.cleanitsupply.com/p-44447/universal-dry-erase-board-melamine-...

not to be a dick but you might wanna return that, and get off to a better start.

Its 4 ft wide by 3 ft tall. That price also included a pack of dry-erase markers and eraser. Yeah expensive. Wal-mart had one for about $30 but it was only 2 x 3 or so. I wanted a big one.

My 4' x 3' was about $40 or so. But hey at least you got it that really is what counts when it comes to whiteboards. 

Mission #2: Reverse Engineer (part 1)... DOMINATED

(I decided to break up reverse engineering into two parts)

Cost  $0

It's my personal opinion that this is one of the most important parts of starting a business... Begin with the end in mind. For my "Reverse Engineering Mission," I'm starting with what I want this for. I thought long and hard about why I want to do this... It's totally stupid to start a business if it doesn't allow you to have what you want in life. This is about a fair exchange of value. You are connecting someone with/giving someone what they desperately need, in exchange they are giving you what you desperately need. So I'm starting with what *I* desperately need first.

I need to be not be tied down. I want to run around and go scuba diving, and hiking, and see awesome things, tour ancient civilizations and meet beautiful women all over and have the time to get training. This is the shit that FIRES ME UP. "The daily grind" is what kills me. So... my criteria for this business are:

1. MUST -ABSOLUTELY MUST-  Be mobile, which ties in with....
2. MUST be web or information based
3. MUST bring in a steady income to fund travel as well as the costs involved. It's gotta be $1000/week.
4. MUST be automateable
5. MUST NOT take too much of my time. I'm shooting for 2 hours per day on average. 4 at the max. So that I have plenty of time for fun.
6. MUST be outsourceable
   The last thing I want right now is to be self-employed. While being self-employed is great, and I've done and had success with it, it's not what I'm looking for here. There is literally a vast amount of talent around the world. People who are highly trained and/or educated in different skills. What I'm working on here, is connecting people who need that skill, with people who have that skill and knowledge.

This is dope! Will be following this for sure. The motivation to pull up roots and travel is a HUGE motivator. I've been all over this place already but haven't gone anywhere in the past year and a half and I am starting to lose it lol. Starting something online has been an aim of mine for a while. I resisted for a while because the work place is such a great source of being social, active, loud and stupid, comradery (spelling?), learning, etc. and it's definitely a "safe" good career. But fuck it, the need to get out and travel or at least have the ability to do so is a much heavier motivator. I can find other avenues to be social and loud, learn, etc

I kinda started a business a while back but the whole thing has been dead for months, I think the biggest trap is "I'll do this first, then focus on it". Pretty difficult to build any consistency because of university deadlines, but if not now when

That's where I am at darkrain. It was pretty shocking when I turned $15 bucks into 300 over a few days by selling really shitty tshirts with really shitty ads and really shitty marketing knowledge. The first break through like that is what made me really realize that... holy shit I can make money not trading my hours or labour. Of course this took like 2/3 weeks of ALL of free time and a couple late nights. Its part of whats making me really apply myself to learning how get get my computer to print money lol. I don't know if I ever want to JUST want to work from my computer. Sounds like a pretty lonely career but I need to get to the point where I CAN have the freedom and ability to go work anywhere with a wifi connection. I can stick with my current work but have the freedom to take off for 6 months every winter or switch jobs if I wanted. Also being broke would be nice and it'll be another two years until that happens if I just stay where Im at.

Hope I'm not hijacking this thread lol, kill em infinity

Niiiiice one!

will observe this one pretty closely, dude. Would be great to see you pull this off!

Come autumn I'll have to do really put my mind to something like that, too.

1000 $ a weeks is quite ambitious. How long  will you allow for it to become this profitable? right from the start? What are your criteria for that?

I have had couple ideas, too, that I could see generate some income, but all of these would have demanded way longer preparations then 30 days and definetely more prior investing.

And since they all had literally very little to do with what I have come more to believe is my path, I felt this to be more of distraction and stopped giving it too much thought.

So I'm also very curious to see what kind of product you'll choose.

In the end there seem to be roughly two kind of approaches to this: one is the Tim Ferris one: choose product etc. for desired lifestyle, i.e. low work load, lots of revenue, outsourcabliilty etc. etc. That seems to be your plan. A business that sets you free to do what you love.

The other one would be to take what you love and build a lifestyle and business modell around that. That would be more what Tyler and Elliott Hulse ended up doing, or Manwhore with his forum here.

Probably what I will want to aim for. But then one really needs a more longterm vision.

But then again, I guess that MW got some more online business besides this one.

Yeah, I definitely like the second option! I also find that when you're doing what you love, you are far more likely to succeed. Plus when you're doing something you love in a way that fulfills you, creating an online busienss for example instead of trading time for dollars, then it doesn't really feel like work. You do it because you want to. 

I don't know many people that pulled off the first business model. But if you can do it, then hats off to you. Thing is it's just not going to happen in a couple months. It takes time. If you're not creating something that you love, you're probably going to give up. It took me about 3 years to start doing six figures with my online business. But fuck, if I was just doing this to just make money and have a freedom business then I would have stopped long ago. 

My first year I did 15 thousand I think. Second year I did 70 thousand. And in 4 months of 2014 I've done about 50k

if you haven't thought about it there different ways to skin the cat. If already have proficient skills in one area you may start a blog, fill it with content and create products around it like an ebook with enhanced blog articles presented in a structured manner. You develop your authority in certain field or just find an audience for services. Crossposting on other blogs can work well for new traffic to your site as well. 

Basically you give a lot of content for free and then put out products for people to purchase if they feel the reciprocity for your free material. This is basically the applied Vaynerchuk model.  With this you build a community. You can launch courses based on your expertise as well. A basic model for doing this could follow this formula:

Create an e-mail signup page for the course up front to gauge interest.  Then you create four launch videos with a lot of free content but not give away the step-by-step method for the service you are selling. Put them onto the launch page + send them to the ones who signed up. A countdown can work well too. Do a free webinar where people can ask questions. Some people to an upsell to other add ons of the product after put it into the cart put I am not such a fan of that, a lot of people like to do it though. If you have followed the launch of juliens product you may be familiar with this sequence.  

In terms of what you can manage from a laptop while outsourcing the actual work (you just do sales) you can do mobile apps, video production or web design services. However it is important to learn how to do sales. A good resource for me was The Psychology of Selling by Brian Tracy, a lot of hustling, learning to love the process of selling (just like pickup) and then landing your first customers. 

I personally do consulting for people who want to create e-products but who are not that familiar with how to use computers and software. I have recently tried out alibaba and drop shipping physical products with my own branding. I may do a post about this if this turns out to be very profitable. 

I had the same feeling about the freedom business thing. If one doesn't jerk off at least two times daily to the thought of money it is probably rather hard to keep going at it, without it being also a passion business.

Add to that a shady little feeling of really just constructing another fancy obstacle between oneself and ones dreams. Might just be me here, though.

Also the timeframe you sketched makes sense to. Three years I figured, is probably necessary to make decent income from online business, if its not just a scam. Probably there are exceptions. But takes time and work to bult a reputation.

But your numbers are actually pretty impressive.

You mind sharing some more details about that business of yours? Like what is it exactly, how did you find your thing?

Yeah.... My passion is in fitness. I'm fucking obsessed with that shit - getting really lean, strong as fucked as jacked like a greek god.

I ended up buying all those courses online from my favorite fitness guys, then after I was creating my own workouts and plans, tweaking their shit and making it better, I figured I may as well start a blog. I started fitness blogging, doing key word targetting and ranking my articles on google. I also started busting out youtube videos. I developed a good fitness following. The first year I was an affiliate for a fitness program called visual impact. Then the second year I wrote my own courses. One for shredding and the other for building the body of a greek god. This is when I was full time. Oh and I was also doing online coaching and writing peoples programs and following up with them via email. This helped boost my income substantially. 

I also had awesome success with doing a free itunes podcast and releasing a new episode each week. Itunes is a more open market than youtube or google. Now obviously this was general as fuck and this is not the most effective way to go about it now.  But you definitely want to give a ton of value on the front end. This is what elliot hulse talks about, you have to give a shit ton of value to recieve.

Get people to opt in to your list. Build a solid audience and not be generic as fuck. Use the bruce lee mentality of taking that which works and discarding the rest and making something of your own. 

But htese days it's best to create an awesome resource, maximizing conversions and shit and then start paying for traffic. Relying on organic traffic is a slow and uncertain process.

Once you realize you 

are converting well then you should pay for traffic. 

That said, at this point I haven't really spent money on traffic. I suppose when I do, it will get big as fuck. 

yo man, really appreciate your input. Checked out your site, too, and it looks pretty neat. Can definitely see why it works. How much difference do the challenge result pics make for conversion? Big time, certainly.

Yeah it helped a lot, also good to use on my sales letter as testimonials/case studies. This makes it super good.

Yo, how'd you find my site hahaha. I havent mentioned it on here like ever. I'm trying to keep that seperate haha

Lol, got a friend with the NSA, haha

yeah, thought so, so  I didn't mention it.

Yo Infinity, how's that business coming alone??