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How I made $25,000 per month in less than 6 months
A Side Hustle to Start Living My Dreams
Kevin Ham
May 30, 2024
Recap from last week
You started your 6-step Entrepreneurial Blueprint:
1. You made the decision to start something new.
2. You envisioned the end financial goal and set your first target to make at least as much as your current job.
3. You set-up your first domino by commiting to a start date and daily time block to work on it (this could be as little as 30 min/day).
4. You started scoping down your idea to something you can accomplish by your target date.
5. You wrote down the first four steps of the blueprint and have read it everyday.
6. You asked for support and got buy-in from your significant other(s).
It is in changing that things find purpose.
My goal was to make $10,000 USD, which would be $15,800 CAD a month. I would do it by starting a Yellow Pages-style online directory. I could only devote an hour or two a day at most and four hours on the weekends. I quickly determined that since I could not invest very much time and hardly any money, I had to scope my Yellow Pages idea down to one category. Back then we had big, physical Yellow Pages (businesses by categories) and White Pages (people) address and phone books. They may be antiques by now.
So what category would I select? What would the Internet be unique for that I would also enjoy learning about myself? I knew I would need to build a website and find a web host. I was struggling to find a low-cost and easy-to-use web hosting company to host my directory. I believed that eventually, every business would need a website and a web host, like me. In my own search, I was missing reviews and ratings on web hosting companies. Eureka! This is what I would create.
What will I name my new venture?
Tigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names.
What you name, you breathe life into. You conceive your new venture, idea or product with a name. This name has some meaning, or better yet, a story.
I believed the Internet would be global. So I found an available domain, HostGlobal.com. I would later need a formal company but I would incorporate it after I made some money. Naming would later become one of my great gifts.
My Entrepreneurial Blueprint
You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.
Start date: Jan 1, 1999.
Name: HostGlobal.com (registered on Jan 10, 1999).
Financial target: $10,000 USD/month by Jun 30, 1999.
Idea: Create a Yellow Pages-style directory for web hosting companies with reviews and ratings.
Scope:
Find software that allowed me to build a directory (1 week).
Add 20 Webhosting companies per day to my directory (daily).
Build and add a review and rating module to the software (4 weeks).
Offer the review module to users of the software in return for adding their web hosting company with a review and rating. This would:
Differentiate my web hosting review site from the handful of other ones (my secret edge).
Attract entrepreneurs and companies looking to find a web host for their Internet business.
Sell sponsorship packages to the web hosting companies (1-2 months). 300 companies at $30/mo = $9,000 USD/mo.
Incorporate in Nevada to have a U.S presence (2 months).
Adapt to users, web hosts and competition.
Ask, Tweak and Receive. 10x. 100x. 1000x
The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.
I learned the programming language PERL as that was what the directory software was written in. I had never taken a computer course before so I printed out some lessons on PERL from the Internet and studied them in my allotted side job time. I created the review module within a month and kept improving it daily until it worked well.
I then offered the hundreds of web hosting companies on hostglobal.com an unbelievably low-cost sponsorship opportunity of $30/month. I waited for the orders to come in. I waited … and waited for days. I wondered what was wrong.
A couple of other good web hosting directories were charging $1500 to $3000 per month. I thought that underpricing them would be a no-brainer. Was it too cheap? Maybe the perceived value was too low.
So, I thought I would try $300/month for category sponsorship. In a month I had two sponsors. 10X! I had made my first real dollars. What a thrill. That first order!