How I made $79,000/month at age 21 living at home

Hey guys it's Nathan. Just before I would share a story of how I was able to make 79 000 per month at age 21. It was actually from my my parents bedroom. And it was the it was about the third company that I had. I'd set up so it was also the first ever software as a service company that I set up and it was a it's a pre-packaged SaaS and they actually still sell them it was from a website called CodeCanyon which is like a marketplace for almost anything digital for software for website templates for WordPress templates for video templates.

Various different things and they actually have you can still use it now you can search in SaaS and it will show you a number of sort of pre-built SaaS software apps that you can buy and then you can buy what's called an extended license and they will give you the right for you to go and sell it on to almost like a not quite white label because you actually own own the service so you install it on your own server. And all the customers yours you plug in your own like Stripe keys etc and so on so almost like a self-hosted white label service let's call it.

But you're also completely free to make any adjustments to the code base if you want and so the business was a Instagram post scheduling and sort of automation software platform. This was back in how old would I be it was about five years ago about probably 2016 2017. When I first set this up and this was it was at like a good time for Instagram automation there weren't so many blogs it was really quite it was a very popular way a very successful way of growing Instagram accounts.

So this software allows you to do like post scheduling it allows you to do automated liking automated comments, automated follow-on follow reposting automatically sending direct messages to new followers so it was and it worked and there were quite a lot of different use cases basically from what I mentioned from like social media managers to perhaps an e-commerce store who want to send like a discount code to all of their new subscribers so there were some interesting ways to promote this and the first to start off with.

It also came with like its own landing page as well it's a terrible landing page, but which is also how I first actually got into conversion rate optimization. So to start off with I was selling this software about five dollars per month and to bring in customers I was promoting it on Reddit so I would do a little not hack but it's like a little bit black hat I would go and leave a comment, on like specific threads in like social media. In social media subreddit where someone would ask what is like the best Instagram promotion what's the best way to grow an Instagram account or what's the best way to get real followers or how can I automatically schedule posts and so I would.

Go and I would use that Google X-ray search to find these Reddit threads and then I would leave a comment from one account saying, I've been using. Like the company was named Social Growth so it would be I've been using Social Growth it's me leaving these comments and then what I would do is buy or I had multiple Reddit accounts I would then upvote the comments. To get them into position number one so I've explained this before but just to explain again so it would look like it has a lot of social proof and that a lot of people are agreeing with that this is like a great solution.

And I would also leave it from like multiple accounts so they would like to keep seeing the same name popping up multiple times and so in like one thread these threads would get a lot of search traffic as well Reddit ranks incredibly well on Google so you can be a bit creative with like the marketing there anyway. I was able to get like I remember getting about 100 customers from it and it's not like explosive growth it's more like sort of steady you will consistently bring in maybe three or four customers per day and so in the space of a month I was able to bring on about 100 customers doing this.

Not full-time I hadn't actually had a full-time job at the same time as well so just in my spare time I'd be leaving these comments on on Reddit as I was bringing in about 500 per month bearing in mind this was like a terrible landing page as well. It is actually quite quite a good result and but I would constantly see my competitors were running Google Ads campaigns when you see a competitor running Google Ads campaigns it sort of tells you particularly over like a long period of time so I've been in the Instagram growth space for about, about 18 look at that but about a year actually on like a separate business.

And I also had about 40 000 followers myself at the time so I would constantly see specific names popping up and advertising themselves on Google for as an Instagram growth service and of course you know that they're paying to be in position number one so it basically tells you that they have a profitable campaign running that they're making money from it and so I went ahead and made my own Google Ads campaign my first ever Google Ads campaign and I think like most people I spent about a hundred dollars I didn't get any sales and I decided Google Ads doesn't work which is completely wrong.

But I I think a lot of people will would have been there particularly if like you don't have a someone in the space sort of sitting in the Google Ads marketing space or any like traffic buying experience doesn't tell you no that's completely normal like you'll lose money you're just buying data so for anyone out there if your competitors are running Google Ads over a long period of time it means they're making money and if you're not able to get profitable it means the problem is either your campaign or your landing page is going to be one of the two there's a very small chance your competitors are consistently spending money on an ads campaign they're not making money on as a general rule for.

Myself now I will say I will test with about two thousand dollars. Any nuanced campaign I set up I'm sort of prepared to lose about two thousand dollars sometimes I'll break even sometimes I'll be profitable straight away it sort of depends on like the industry how well you know the industry. And like in some cases there's even like a little bit of luck involved like is there a lot of competition and so on so there are factors out for control but generally people be okay with losing money in order to test a paid acquisition channel it's completely normal and it's completely fine.

But I didn't have that understanding at that point in time so I spent a hundred dollars and I was very upset that I I didn't get any customers in which it was my own. My own like incorrect thinking. So for about another month I just continued like promoting on Reddit I would do a bit of like email outreach and so on. But then I just for like why are these guys always spending money on Google Ads if they're not making money so I went back to Google Ads and I was able to get a profitable campaign going.

At that point we I offered a three-day free trial as well so it would require it would require a credit card up front to gain access to the three-day free trial I also at that point in time I knew HTML and CSS so I built out a second landing page and I put that up and I also quadrupled the pricing which I put as, 19 or 20 I can't remember the exact amount but about 20. Starting price then the next one was 60 and the next one was 99 which meant when I was running Google Ads I had a lot more space to to become profitable to actually make to make money because I could afford to spend more to acquire a customer I ran.

A campaign and I set target cpa to 20 I adjusted the keywords quite a bit and I had a profitable campaign running every day I was bringing in about 30 new customers and that's when like the growth really started that went on for like a couple of weeks and I started dating a girl who she wasn't in business or anything like that she was just like, yeah not in business at all she worked in fashion, as a fashion designer but she she said to me it sounds cheap why don't you try doubling the pricing like why don't you like double it make it like 40 dollars that's exactly what I did and I just thought okay why not let me just test it I doubled.

The price and expecting the number of sales to go down but seeing if I could get it to work and that's not what happened the conversion rate actually went up by me doubling the price with no fundamental changes to the product at all people are literally buying the same thing so I can't give the exact reason why that happened but to guess I would say it's something to do with trust and before I was trying to like undercut the market and I thought that was a great strategy to come in as like a cheaper option.

But people often associate price with quality so it could be a good reason that people saw my like five dollar offer as something that was too good to be true it looked like a scam. So by increasing the price up to which I brought up to, in the end 39 starting price 39 79.99 I think was the final pricing I stuck with definitely 39.79. It actually increased the number of sales and of course the revenue that I was receiving so by that point I was in like a really really good point it was very very cheap to deliver the service the only cost that I had was Google Ads so my sole focus was on a mixture of optimizing the ads campaign and conversion rate.

Optimization which is really how I actually started in conversion rate optimization because one day I was able to by simply by just changing the landing page I was able to double the conversion rate which was like a fantastic result of me which again just meant I was I was making even more money and so in the space of less than 90 days it was just under three months I was able to take this business from 500 per month to 79 000 per month using Google Ads and website optimization they were the only two channels that I used I had a little bit of email automation for checkout abandonment and so on very very and yeah I was I would have been on schedule to make.

About two and a half million dollars in profit that year unfortunately there was a unforeseen change of events I I had become one of the biggest Instagram growth agencies. Not agencies Instagram growth services in in the space, I was managing it was about four three thousand or four thousand active customers. I believe and towards the end of it I was I actually took on 1,093 new customers in a day because the numbers were just going up and up and if I was able to maintain that I would have been very very rich unfortunately as I said I became one of the biggest Instagram growth services on the market I was probably the second biggest and that put the target on our back from Instagram I.

Received a cease and desist letter directly from Facebook from Facebook with some very like strong threats and I showed this to my to my own lawyer who basically says that you just don't stand a chance she said even if you like want to fight this they will just bankrupt your paperwork it's absolutely nothing for Facebook to spend one or two million to make an example of you to scare off all the other Instagram growth companies bearing in mind there were about 300 other competitors at the time because this pre-built software was available it was such a low barrier to entry for people to get started with their own Instagram software platform.

Which resulted in like I said my lawyer just said just you just don't stand a chance they will bury you in paperwork and they will bankrupt you so even though I was making good money at the time compared to one of the largest companies in the world it's obviously absolutely nothing and she also said that they were like they would extradite me and they were coming at me for criminal charges for like breach of a private computer network bearing in mind we were just using automation built on top of.

I didn't even build this it was a pre-built package but our servers were performing automated activity on Facebook and they classified this as breach of a private computer network which carries a prison sentence so it wasn't really a route that I wanted to go down Facebook also asked for all of the profit that I had I made which just simply like it just wasn't even possible to do even if I wanted to because of course I'd spent on marketing I'd pay myself. Something to spend money paid myself a salary and taken money out of the business so there was no way it would have been possible to give back all their money so over a period of like negotiation I went after about six months.

I'll be honest it's really quite a stressful period, especially for like a 21 year old like when this. When this letter like came through it was completely unexpected. I literally fell fell back off my chair and had a. I guess like a state of shock right everything was going so so well for me and this was like completely unexpected so the lesson that I really learned from this because one mistake I did make is I was constantly reinvesting my money back into the business because I was had such great return on investment I was sort of doubling anything that I put back into the company it made complete sense to me oh we're printing out money let's have as much money in there as possible.

But in fact that was probably a big cause of like the downfall if I had gone much more slow and steady not being so aggressive on marketing and ran this campaign for a couple of years because not all of the other competitors were shut down some of them are still running to this day if I had taken a much more slow and steady approach and also focused on paying myself a salary so withdrawing a healthy amount from the business keeping the campaign running but not being so aggressive making sure that I'm looking after myself I would have been in a much better position whereas instead I was investing as much money back into that company as possible every month.

And I was just leaving myself with like a thousand two thousand dollars at the bank and reinvesting everything when Facebook shut down that business and they gave me like three days to shut everything to a halt so I withdrew three days worth of revenue and that was that was basically all that I got away with and so that is why and it's also part of the reason I sold this company that I recently did now just a couple of weeks ago was because I didn't like having everything tied up within the business I've been down that road before and it ended very very negatively.

If I had actually focused on paying myself and looking after myself you know paying myself 20 30 000 per month and halving the rate of growth I saw in the business I would have ended up in a much much stronger position and also taking care of yourself in the short term it's good to think about long term and to be prepared and so on but often there are just things that are completely unforeseen that you you do everything that you can to prepare for these situations but you just simply can't think of everything and there can be some unexpected.

Events like whatever it could be like what we've seen recently with a pandemic or there could be anything that shuts down your business which is why I think it's so important you make sure that when things are going well for you you think about the long term as well and don't do any like rash decisions that are going to put the long-term the future of your business in jeopardy but you also when things are going well you make sure that you're looking after yourself you're paying yourself a salary you're taking money out where you can just in case things things do go wrong is in my opinion it's a foolish move not to not look after yourself to keep putting money back and I learned.

This lesson the hard way right this is talking from experience it can happen to anyone and even now on my businesses as well I prepare for things that could possibly go wrong and try to protect myself as much as possible but you cannot protect yourself from every possible outcome so make sure that you're looking after after yourself other than that I think some other key points that I would really like to make on this is take risks I remember when I first bought this software for four or five hundred dollars I was thinking to myself would I make this money back would it be something that I can actually profit from and obviously it turned into because that was a lot of money for me.

At the time and obviously it completely paid off the other thing I would say is don't get caught up in your own your own opinions and mindset towards things when I first started this I'm I would not have believed that someone would spend 40 dollars per month let alone 120 per month and at the start I was really quite shocked when these customers were coming in forty dollars it was because I had no I didn't have any money at the time forty dollars is a very small amount of money it really is and there were people a lot richer out there than you who are in very different situations to test your pricing pricing is generally something which is quite emotional and we come at.

It from like our own standpoint funnily enough one of the least tested aspects on on most e-commerce sites particularly in the software as a service industry is pricing people just sort of make it up at one point. When they're first setting up the company and just that will go along with it but it's a terrible terrible strategy. So test out pricing go higher and often you'll find there's a really good book called, selling selling to the affluent I believe it's the name where it talks about selling to like the higher higher classes of society the people who have money and how it can often lead to more revenue working with clients who are just just easier to work with in quite a lot of ways.

Because if they don't value the money quite so much they're not so focused on getting like a return on investment and like often you'll find in fact in pretty much every business I've had the customers who spend the most money are the easiest to work with which is just something quite interesting to know so it's something to be wary of by trying to go for like the cheaper customers and think that you're doing yourself a favor by coming in as one of the cheaper products on the market you may actually be shooting yourself in the foot and often it can be more powerful to come in with something more expensive and rather than someone thinking oh why is this product so cheap it must be.

Because they've cut corners on things or the quality isn't as good as the the higher level services which is generally what most people will think instead if you take the opposite direction and charge more than the market people will just it's a cognitive I really think it's like cognitive bias where value is associated directly on price so if you charge higher than the average market value people will just immediately look at you and think why is this service more expensive it must be better regardless of it being better or not and you did like I said I didn't even make any changes to the product at all to the service people were receiving but there was a difference in the number of sales that we.

Had and I personally noticed not through any type of data tracking but I was the one who was who was handling all of the customer support I personally noticed like a very big difference between the type of complaints the or the num the volume of complaints that the lower cheap customers have the ones who are on the lowest plan or who joined from the staff compared to the ones who are paying like the highest amount and the people who were paying more money were like much much easier to work with and if they did have a complaint it would tend to be a reasonable maybe isn't something like more like reasonable complaint or something like that whereas often when you're selling to like the bottom.

The cheapest levels of the market you're selling to people who are expecting everything for nothing whereas the higher levels of the market often I found they're looking for like a much more specific solution they're very happy when they get it and they have money so they are happy to spend that money if you solve a problem for them they're in my opinion they're the type of people that. That you really really want to be working with yeah I think that that's like the main takeaways I have nonetheless it was an interesting journey I have absolutely no regrets about it.

At all I did end up losing my access to Facebook for life. As well as an Instagram account that I had with is about 47 000 followers I believe when it got banned personal personal Instagram but I'll actually make another video on that at another point actually how that was more of a positive than the negative being being kicked off with Instagram anyway I think I'll end it there thank you very much for for watching any questions feel free to leave a comment but for anyone looking to start a business I think the skills that I learned then apply more so today probably than they did back then so learning some basic website developments you can build your own websites and having an understanding of.

How to to buy traffic to those websites and then researching deeper and deeper into conversion rate optimization the only two skills that you really need a conversion rate optimization understanding how you can profitably buy traffic to to a website it will make you super valuable to any organization that that you choose to apply for to work with it's the two things that every company pretty much every company will want you being able to bring them in customers and you then being able to optimize the price point that they've paid to bring in new customers, as a marketer you'll do very very well with just those two skills but it also opens up the door for you to build your own product your own business which.

Is the route that I would recommend that you take because you solve the two biggest well the biggest problem which is customer profitable customer acquisition it's a problem that every single startup has right so if you're able to master those two skills and you could explore some other different channels for marketing as well but personally it's my recommendation there's so much resources so many resources online for learning Google Ads and as well there's a ton of resources now on conversion rate optimization. Back when I was starting in this it wasn't quite so big and it was much more much harder to come across like the the the type of content and knowledge that is out there now so yeah that's my recommendations as always any.

Questions leave a comment I would love to, I don't know hear your thoughts and feedback I actually did a write-up blog post of this before that went viral on on Reddit but yeah always interested to hear people's people's thoughts and opinions thank you for.