$3,000 to $1,000,000 in 15 months: HOW TO DO IT

[michael515]

How I'd do it...

1. Tape success principles to my wall and never deviate when the times get rough.

2. Research. I would look at businesses for sale on bizquest.com, bizbuysell.com, sites for sale on sitepoint.com etc. for the sole purpose of sparking ideas and seeing actual revenue. Most websites don't make money. Don't buy into the garbage for sale.

I would also look at the entrepreneur top 500 co's, Inc. most growth co's to spark ideas and see what co's and trends are making money. All the while I'd open up my antenna's for opp's and problems people would pay to have solved.

3. I would compare all these ideas to my strength's and see what's out of my reach - i.e. too much tech, to hone in on a few serious opps.

4. More research into the market. After finding a good idea that fits my mold as best possible I'd go to the library and research the market for this business idea. Study the problems, what they complain about, trade journals, etc.

(I'm fortunate to live in a big Metro and our county library was ranked #1 in the country and linked up to all colleges in the state. Their research databases are top-notch.)

5. After finding that there is a market who is reachable, willing to pay for this service, and having an angle that will give you leverage (niche, better service, faster delivery, etc.) then give it a go.

6. Product or service? I'd do service. Products can take too long to develop and cannot be adjusted as easily or at all as you go. Forget creativity in the product or service sense. Be creative with the delivery. I would be willing to license product rights but that might cost $$ and all the money should be funneled into marketing.

Also, be sure you can get repeat customers. Unless very high ticket, it's easier to get to the $1 mil mark when people are consuming every month. Creating new customers can cost alot ot time and money - better to resell current clients.

7. Study your competitors marketing methods. Use google adwords and design a website but don't spend months or thousands of dollars in this design. Hire a friend who can do this. Don't do this yourself unless you can complete FAST and cheap! Most websites are not the business themselves, but a marketing arm of the biz. Adwords and PPC speeds up the process of startup incredibly - that's why I'd do this first.

Keep your testing small and build on that. Could you run an ad in WSJ? Yes, but that costs serious money and may not be targeted. Forget mass marketing - that's for those with deeper pockets. Stick with small targetable, mediums and create calls for action via direct response. Use your profits to reinvest in more marketing.

8. After getting starting via small potato ad's on the web I'd start calling potential customers from a highly pre-qualified list, and to setup JV's. What I mean by JV's is setting up offers other businesses will send to their customers with their endorsement. Getting this may be tough but is much faster and profitable than any ad. Give the businesses a reason to do it like money in the form of % of sales revenue . Remember you only have 1 year and you must leverage the relationships of others.

Use press releases for PR and offer something of value to listeners - like a free trial for a week / one time use, etc.

I don't expect a newbie in marketing to jump in and tear it up unless they, at a minimum, learn a little bit. I'd be studying marketing, sales, and PR from a few very specific sources while in the research phase assuming I have no experience. I'd ask pros what they read. Most is just rehashed so go right to the top producers.

KEY POINTS:

-Don't be a pioneer trying to create a market. Create a better system of delivery or find an overlooked area to serve. Creating market's is possible but can be time consuming and expensive - we don't have this in 15 months.
-Don't be creative with the product or service but the delivery. Again too much time and untested.
-Direct response ad's on a very small basis. No branding.
-Leverage is key. You need to leverage your experience with the resources of others. -Much faster and more potential for than doing it alone.
-Focus on marketing and promotion and have other people or systems do the work for you.
-Research shouldn't take more than 1 month.

I think I just created my how-to for the next 15 months :banana:

Michael

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Here is how I would do it.

• Since $3K is not a lot of dough and it must churn to $1m, our scope of options is limited.
• Our business must be internet based since inherently, we must reach and impact A LOT of people with our product/service.
• Our business must use FREE, open source software in our site development with the our capital allocated toward custom applications.
• Our marketing must have a solid affiliate program with decent compensation to encourage affiliate marketers to participate.
• Our product/service must have "sizzle" or a marketing "hook" that is newsworthy. Can be something entirely new, or a new spin on something old.
• Our product must go viral through the use of home grown videos that can be uploaded to video sharing sites.
• Use of social networking sites like MySpace / Facebook to promote and go viral.
• Use of press releases to promote the sizzle.
• Our product/service must have a easy to remember domain name that can be rehashed and vocalized quickly and easily.
• Our website must incorporate upsells and/or other affiliate programs to monetize the site traffic - most popular being Google Adsense.
• The final piece -- finding that product or service that fills a need, or fills an old need, better. Clever marketing (like the pet rock) can take you places and even get you to your goal of $1mm, but its longevity is finite.

There's a guy that started selling vodka -- his hook was "new colorful packaging" -- it was a new spin on something stale and old. All of the techniques above are capable of generating great traffic, without spending a dime on CPC or Banner advertising.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Most people overestimate what they can do in ONE year and underestimate what they can do in FIVE years.

This is because of exponentiality ... the struggle is year 1 and 2 where nothing can happen, it's easy to give up, and start over redoing 1 and 2.

The explosion happens later after the grind.

 

[JasonR]

Most people overestimate what they can do in ONE year and underestimate what they can do in FIVE years.

 

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[Russ H]

OK, Here's a fun exercise inspired by one of our fastlane members:

1. You have $3,000

2. You want to have $1,000,000 in 15 months

****

Limits:

-You cannot borrow money from any banks or other lending institutions
-You are 17, so you're not eligible for most other loans, RE, etc.
-You have to go to school from 8 am to 3 pm M-F
-You have no particular skills that would be considered mega-valuable

****

That's it.

Outline a PLAN for the next 15 months.

Your goal: Fifteen months from now, you have $1,000,000 in your bank account (and it's all yours, not OPM)

****

Ready? Go!







-Russ H.

 

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[The-J]

What are you, then? What is your net worth?

I own my time & don't have a 9 to 5

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

[The-J]

Update on my plan:

It didn't work. I'm not a millionaire yet. Lol.

However, I'm much further now than I was four years ago when I wrote that post.

Some things I've learned since then:

• $3,000 to $1m in 15 months is possible but highly unlikely if you've never started a business before. However, if you're a serial entrepreneur who has been in the game for a while, $3k to $1m is absolutely within the realm of possibility and, for some, it's expected.
• The process is long but it can be made shorter with the right contacts. Leave the house and meet people, in real life, and listen to what they have to say.
• A failed business isn't a failure in the grand scheme of things. The business I was working on at the time was a complete failure because I didn't know how to make it work. However, I learned enough to start the business I'm currently working on, and I would have never been able to do it if it weren't for that experience.
• Some people move slower than others. There are people who started learning the game of business later than I, who are now much further along. I think that's okay, and I try not to judge myself too harshly for it. (Doesn't always work though)
• These kinds of mental masturbation thought experiments are only very slightly useful. They're good for opening your mind to what's possible but they don't help you move forward.

Hope this helps anyone just stumbling on this old thread and wondering if it's possible for them. It is possible: but it might take you longer than you hoped.

 

[imirza]

I didn't do it at least not in 15 months but I came close.

Here is what I did
- Found a new product/line of product that was very popular and growing rapidly.
- Found manufacturer in China
- Spent $1000 to purchase some product and listed it on craigslist with link to my paypal acct. Also listed on ebay. 1 week later I am sold out and have doubled my money. My margins are very high since I buy straight from manufacturer.
- Spent $3-4k to buy more product. 2 weeks later everything is sold I have doubled my money.
- Drop close to $10k on more product. Again its sold in 2-3 weeks.
- Christmas season comes and product is in VERY high demand. I net a quick $15k December.
- Things don't slow and January onwards very consistent demand. Competition is growing but I can get at a great price and beat competitors prices. I drop price and run competitors out of business on Amazon, ebay etc. Sometimes operate on razor thin margins for a week or so to kill competitors. Business is war. F*ck them !
- Business grows via Amazon etc + own websites.
- By following Christmas we are featured vendor for big online retailer and product/product line is everywhere. Sales explode net profit December 2011 over $400k. Some days I net over $50k !

Total 15 months $700k + net profit

Since Christmas a little burned out plus more competitors and margins are thinner. Slowed things down a little. Getting consistent income just not pushing as hard. Maybe just wait till next Xmas when business will really boom and I can do $1 mil net.

My advice - focus on one thing to get from 3k to $1 mil in 15 months. You try 20 different things you will fail at 20 different things. Find a hot product and service you can deliver at a better price and/or quality than the competition and run with it. Find something high growth. Search around and see what is experiencing massive growth. My product(s) were seeing overall annual growth of over 400% so I knew I could get a piece of that extra pie.

 

[AllenCrawley]

I know someone who managed $1,000,000 in about 18 months by selling t-shirts off TeeSpring. I don't know how much they started with but it's pure dropshipping so the only capital was ad spend.

The process is:

1) create multiple design ideas and keep listing. TS is a numbers game. Launching up to 100 fresh designs/week isn't uncommon.
2) send traffic to each shirt. Kill the losers. Scale the winners.
3) rinse/repeat.

That's about it.

"That's about it."

There you have it. A 3 step process to $1M.

 

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[Lex DeVille]

This is because of exponentiality ... the struggle is year 1 and 2 where nothing can happen, it's easy to give up, and start over redoing 1 and 2.

The explosion happens later after the grind.

Yup. Once you figure out all the crap that doesn't work, you're kind of left with what does.

Just be sure to note what doesn't work along the way or risk repeating it.

Exponential growth happens when positive effects compound on one another.

If mistakes keep getting repeated, then it creates a compounding effect in the opposite direction!

 

[Andy Black]

Phew. I'm not going to lie - this thread was hard to get through in places. I had to resort to skimming.

Also... paragraphs and white-space are our FRIENDS.

Maybe it's the nature of this thread where people are encouraged to blue-sky and think outside the box, but has the forum changed over the last few years? I think people would get shot down a lot more now-a-days. I dunno if that's a good or a bad thing.



Anyhow...

Make $1m by building a business that generates $25k profit per month and then selling it.

Obviously it has to be built such that the new owners are confident they can continue to generate $25k/mth.



Now, how to make $25k/mth ?

Maybe 1,000 businesses paying $25/mth ?

Maybe 100 businesses paying $250/mth ?

Maybe 10 businesses paying $2,500/mth ?


Or more likely, a bit of Perry Marshall's 80/20 rule of thumb that one fifth of your customers will pay 4 times as much.

So if you had 100 businesses paying you $250/mth, then 20 (20% of 100) will likely be willing to pay $1k/mth, and 4 (20% of 20) will likely pay $4k/mth.

So maybe it would look like:
• 80 businesses paying $250/mth ($20k)
• 16 businesses paying $1k/mth ($16k)
• 4 businesses paying $4k/mth ($16k)
Total monthly revenue of $52k ?

We've overshot, but maybe we pick the 100 * $250/mth scenario and any upsells are gravy, or we hit $25k/mth earlier than 100 signups.



Hmmm... interesting. I've already decided they are businesses and not consumers.



What springs to mind immediately is 100 cities for XYZ vertical.

Provide a service for a business in a city for $250/mth that needs minimal maintenance once built.

After you've dialled in one business in a vertical, scale by finding similar businesses in different locations.

Obviously we're looking at businesses that cover specific geographies.



EDIT: Why sell when you get to 100 * $250/mth for XYZ vertical?

Go to 500 in XYZ vertical as well as diversify to other verticals.

Add higher levels for businesses that want more of what you're selling.

Add lower levels for businesses that want less.



Start with 1 * $250/mth doing something that *could* scale.

Don't worry about scaling with your first client.

Just concentrate on landing them and use them to learn the vertical.

THEN find a way to scale.

 

[The-J]

Bump.

OK so here's my idea. Now, I changed up the rules a little bit, meaning that at any time, you can restart from $3000 and go again for the $1 million as long as you make $1 million off that new $3000 only. So failure shouldn't scare anyone, it's not like you can't just start over.

This is based on (but not entirely) my personal plan. This assumes that your job income or other businesses covers your expenses only (or you live with mom and dad), so $3000 is really all you have.

You'll need to set aside about $1500 for the main Fastlane (get money later) and the other $1500 will be for other things (get money now). Most of the time will be spent on the main Fastlane, something like the 80-20 rule. 80% of time on main Fastlane, 20% of time on the other stuff. You'll be spending an average of 6 1/2 hours on the main Fastlane and 1 1/2 hours on the other stuff. The other stuff will take more time in the beginning and less time later but the main Fastlane will take a lot of time as time goes on (lots of time in this sentence).

The end result will be $1 million in cash, in the bank. Not in assets. It will not end with the sale of a business or any other assets at month 15...

Again, split the money in half.

The First Half: Sort-of Passive Income

The point of this is to use half the money to get a steady, although small, stream of revenue that you can simply set and forget and make money off of. You can do this with affiliate marketing, writing an e-book about anything really, buying vending machines and placing them in good locations, making a YouTube video and using AdSense money form that, and/or buying a cheap application and selling it (this assumes that you're a kid who has no idea how to program an app).

The goal of this is to make a very small amount: $500 a month profit. Most teenagers make more than $500 a month from their part-time job at McD's, but that's OK. This isn't money to be used for personal reasons. But the point is you have about three months to make $500 a month. Three months is plenty of time to set up $500 a month.

This $500 a month will be used for the supplementing of the Fastlane business. This Fastlane will experience slow growth at the beginning: it's possible to start a Fastlane and have it profitable in a month but that's not the point of this. If you save $500 a month for 15 months you'll have $7500, which is piddly. We're going for a million.

The $1500 will be spent on domains, hosting, affiliate fees, and advertisements. If you choose a real-world pseudo Fastlane like vending machines or a lawn care business, the money will be spent on equipment. If you buy a lawnmower for $1500 and can mow one lawn every day for $30, you can pay off the mower in less than two months and have $900 a month income from an hour or two of work.

Summary: build pseudo-Fastlane semi-passive income streams (you must have more than one!) that, by the end of the third month, can bring in a steady $500 a month with 2 hours a day of work. If you can, spend the two hours to increase the streams to $1000 a month. That's not required but it would be nice. Unless you can take it all the way to the million, don't try to expand it much more than $1000/month because at a certain point, it will become a pain in the a$$ to scale further. After you get to $500-$1000 a month, focus as little time on these streams as possible and focus it more to your Fastlane

Note: If you can make a sellable income stream that nets $500 a month, you'd have to sell it for $7500 or more in order to 'cheat' effectively. But that probably won't happen, because some of the income streams I suggested can't really be sold.

The Other Half: A Fastlane Business

Month One to Three

This $1500 will be used to create a Fastlane business. A legit business with CUL (Controllable Unlimited Leverage) that will only take 6-8 hours a day to work on. (You're not allowed to drop out of school. You can quit your job if it becomes absolutely needed to scale the business further but most businesses can be scaled to the point without having to spend more than 8 hours a day on average on it). This will also require you to be extremely efficient with your time.

The first three months will provide zero or limited revenue. But that's OK because you'll have $500-1000 a month of revenue from your other stream to pad this venture forward. But by the fourth month, you should be profiting and on your way to exponential growth.

The first three months will be focused on building your concept from the ground up. This will be an Internet business (you have no choice, really) and must be one of the seven Internet Fastlanes (subscription-based, content-based, lead gen, social network, brokerage system, ad network or e-commerce). If it doesn't fit one of these models, don't use it.

Also, one more thing: you must be selling something of value. You must have paying customers. Selling 'free content' and mooching off of ad revenue is too much of a gamble for fifteen months. We're trying to do something that can actually be done by a 17 year old.

You'll need to learn how to use Wordpress. You can opt to use Wordpress for all 15 months but I would recommend against it: in fact, when it becomes evident that Wordpress doesn't fit your needs fully, you should get a programmer. If you can't start making money with a Wordpress or Joomla version of your site, throw your idea out.

When drafting your concept, it must fit the CENTS (Need, Entry, Control, Scale, Time) and if you don't know what this is, buy MJ's book. (Duh) It must be an Internet Fastlane and you must be able to start earning money off of $2000. ($1500 starting + $500 earned frm your pseudo-Fastlanes). You must be able to run and scale the business off of your profits PLUS $500. So exponential growth is a must.

You're going to need to do a lot of work in the first month alone: market research, due diligence, number crunching, product/service development, filing as a corporation and getting a tax license, creating a brand, drafting your concept from the ground up, defining your need, defining your target market and your avenues, buying the domain and hosting, and garnering traffic. (Phew!)

By the end of the third month, you must have profit. By the end of the fifth month, you must have paid off your initial $1500 investment. By the end of the sixth month, you must be on track for exponential growth until the end of month 15.

Month Four

Your job will change after you start gaining profit. You'll be spending most of your time trying to develop your current customer base so you can capture everyone in a niche market. If you have a total audience of 100 people, you must be grasping the 38 people who are most likely to pay for your service. You're building a brand after month four. You're getting yourself situated into the sphere of your market and you're not making your business big, you're making it STRONG.

Month Six

Between month six and ten, you're working your balls off and life is kinda sucking, but not really. You still have to graduate with good enough marks, you can't have a girlfriend (or boyfriend) cuz all your time is spent in your business, your friends are wondering what the hell you're doing with your life... but it's OK. You're on track for exponential growth and little do they know, you'll be a millionaire before they have an internship.

Exponential growth means that you must be increasing your revenue by a lot each month. If you hit profit of $100 at month four, you must be set for $800 by month five, and $1800 month six, $3290 month seven, etc etc. These are example numbers and will probably not fit your real numbers. With exponential growth, you must be pocketing your money exponentially. This means your expenses CANNOT be growing at the same rate as your profits. They must be growing at a much lower rate so you can profit more and also pocket more.

Month 10

After about month ten, you're starting to expand, and fast. You're no longer targeting the 38, you're targeting all 100, and then some! You have the reviews, the good press, the Web presence, the traffic. People know what your business is, they pay for it and it shows in the numbers. It's time to scale, baby. Scaling your audience and scaling your numbers. This is also hard work, but it's different work. Your expenses are about to go way up and you're gonna need a bunch of new things, new ad campaigns, and more traffic. Increasing conversion rate while at the same time increasing traffic. You're starting to swerve onto the Fastlane.

Also, taxes are due April 15th. You did do them, right?

Month Twelve

So around month twelve, you notice your earnings are through the roof. You can't believe you've made it this far, but it's still a lot of work. By this time, it's summer vacation (assuming you started something in late May or June and spent your last summer vacation Chuma-moding this entire thing while going to summer school cuz your grades sucked) and you're still spending a lot of time on the business. But it's OK, it's still a lot of fun and your bank account is busting at the seams.

Some example numbers you may fulfill are here. You can go at a different rate (you could even pocket $1 million after a year or less!) but these are just examples. They start at month four. Also, the profit adds $500 automatically to show your pseudo-Fastlanes at work. Truth is, that $500 will simply be a drop in the bucket, rofl. This also assumes you're pocketing all the profits.

Month: 3, 4, 5,..., 15
Revenue: $200, $800, $1800, $3290, $6029, $10320, $19382, $34,918, $58,949, $102,293, $239,930, $308,389, $392,293
Expenses: $600, $692, $801, $1209, $1310, $1702, $2309, $3039, $4950, $6948, $7893, $10,039, $17,394
Profit: $100, $608, $1499, $2581, $5219, $9118, $17573, $32379, $54499, $95845, $232537, $298850, $375399

Total Profit: $1,123,626

Are these numbers possible? Absolutely. You just have to be really efficient with your time and knowledgeable with your money. It will probably take many tries to get this right, but even if it takes you ten tries, each time failing somewhere around month six, you'll only be 24 1/2 when you hit your million. (Or 7 1/2 years older if you're not 17 lol)

The Aftermath

So, month 15, you're 18 years old and a millionaire. Congratulations! Now you can do so much: pay for college with one single payment, buy yourself a supercar, get a nice home wherever you want... but don't neglect your business. You're still not earning completely passive income. The goal is by month 24, to disconnect your time from your business and put it up for sale so you can enjoy a hefty retirement off of bonds and treasuries, young and living large and in charge.

Whew, this took a while. My girlfriend fell asleep while I was writing this. Poor thing.

How does my plan mirror this? Well, I get paid to go to school so I use that money in my business! Hahaha. I'm currently starting month two! Hopefully in 13 months I'll be a 20 year old millionaire.

So yeah, that's what I think. Someone should try it with me.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

This thread is so damn old, I mentioned MySpace as viable social network on the first page.

Over 10 years old, has 19+ pages, and since it continues to get "bumped", so I have to guess there has to be something in here.

So I'll mark it NOTABLE.

 

[SteveO]

Here goes that "One Trick Pony" again.

Your post did not limit you from using your knowledge so, I am going to assume...

I have knowledge in a field that would allow me to do this using OPM and contacts that are currently available. The problem is that not anyone could do this in this timeframe. There would be some significant challenges as well.

Locate a property with rehab and mismanagement issues.

This would involve the understanding that you can purchase a 7M property for 5.5M.

Get investors on board with a 20% down payment on the total project cost including rent loss and repairs.

Insure that the rehab can be completed in 4 months or less.

Whip the financials in order and push the rents to market.

Sell for 7M.

After closing costs, split the profits with the investors

 

[Russ H]

The whole reason I posted this thread was to challenge ALL of us to expand our thinking.

Yes, it's easier to come up with ideas to make 10K or 100K in a year.

But if you see that, why not try to scale it up larger? Is that possible?

My favorite responses on this thread are the ones who say, "Gee, this isn't easy."

No duh!

If it were easy, it wouldn't be a challenge, eh? :banana:

Seems like we get at least 3 groups of people responding here:

Group 1: Those who read the initial post and got all fired up to come up with a solution. They worked out a whole plan-- not just a few half-hearted suggestions, but an actual implementation plan.

Groupl 2: Those who try, but are stymied by their own self-imposed sense of what is -- and IS NOT-- possible. The ones who start, and can only come up with "invest in stocks" or "try this one big general topic". No high-level planning or entrepeneureal thinking is involved.

Group 3: There are others who can't see a thing. They're dead off the line. Car never even starts. Some don't even post--- they just read and click the back button. Others post how hard this is.

All in all, this is a great cross section of typcial responses to any problem.

But you have to ask yourself: If you're in Groups 2 or 3, and you plan on being a millionaire someday, how will this ever happen if your beliefs and lack of motivation hold you back?

-Russ H.

 

[Andy Black]

Nice bump. Never even seen this thread before.

I'm only on the first page and this excellent post jumps out:

How I'd do it...

1. Tape success principles to my wall and never deviate when the times get rough.

2. Research. I would look at businesses for sale on bizquest.com, bizbuysell.com, sites for sale on sitepoint.com etc. for the sole purpose of sparking ideas and seeing actual revenue. Most websites don't make money. Don't buy into the garbage for sale.

I would also look at the entrepreneur top 500 co's, Inc. most growth co's to spark ideas and see what co's and trends are making money. All the while I'd open up my antenna's for opp's and problems people would pay to have solved.

3. I would compare all these ideas to my strength's and see what's out of my reach - i.e. too much tech, to hone in on a few serious opps.

4. More research into the market. After finding a good idea that fits my mold as best possible I'd go to the library and research the market for this business idea. Study the problems, what they complain about, trade journals, etc.

(I'm fortunate to live in a big Metro and our county library was ranked #1 in the country and linked up to all colleges in the state. Their research databases are top-notch.)

5. After finding that there is a market who is reachable, willing to pay for this service, and having an angle that will give you leverage (niche, better service, faster delivery, etc.) then give it a go.

6. Product or service? I'd do service. Products can take too long to develop and cannot be adjusted as easily or at all as you go. Forget creativity in the product or service sense. Be creative with the delivery. I would be willing to license product rights but that might cost $$ and all the money should be funneled into marketing.

Also, be sure you can get repeat customers. Unless very high ticket, it's easier to get to the $1 mil mark when people are consuming every month. Creating new customers can cost alot ot time and money - better to resell current clients.

7. Study your competitors marketing methods. Use google adwords and design a website but don't spend months or thousands of dollars in this design. Hire a friend who can do this. Don't do this yourself unless you can complete FAST and cheap! Most websites are not the business themselves, but a marketing arm of the biz. Adwords and PPC speeds up the process of startup incredibly - that's why I'd do this first.

Keep your testing small and build on that. Could you run an ad in WSJ? Yes, but that costs serious money and may not be targeted. Forget mass marketing - that's for those with deeper pockets. Stick with small targetable, mediums and create calls for action via direct response. Use your profits to reinvest in more marketing.

8. After getting starting via small potato ad's on the web I'd start calling potential customers from a highly pre-qualified list, and to setup JV's. What I mean by JV's is setting up offers other businesses will send to their customers with their endorsement. Getting this may be tough but is much faster and profitable than any ad. Give the businesses a reason to do it like money in the form of % of sales revenue . Remember you only have 1 year and you must leverage the relationships of others.

Use press releases for PR and offer something of value to listeners - like a free trial for a week / one time use, etc.

I don't expect a newbie in marketing to jump in and tear it up unless they, at a minimum, learn a little bit. I'd be studying marketing, sales, and PR from a few very specific sources while in the research phase assuming I have no experience. I'd ask pros what they read. Most is just rehashed so go right to the top producers.

KEY POINTS:

-Don't be a pioneer trying to create a market. Create a better system of delivery or find an overlooked area to serve. Creating market's is possible but can be time consuming and expensive - we don't have this in 15 months.
-Don't be creative with the product or service but the delivery. Again too much time and untested.
-Direct response ad's on a very small basis. No branding.
-Leverage is key. You need to leverage your experience with the resources of others. -Much faster and more potential for than doing it alone.
-Focus on marketing and promotion and have other people or systems do the work for you.
-Research shouldn't take more than 1 month.

I think I just created my how-to for the next 15 months :banana:

Michael

In particular:

Don't be creative with the product or service, but the delivery.

Product-founder fit (does it suit your skills and experience?).

Forget branding ads and do direct response.

Use paid search (or other media buying) to get initial traction.

Study competitor funnels.

(Which assumes you're not creating a completely new product or service.)

Service based more likely than product based. (This makes a lot of sense for speed to market.)

Recurring monthly payments from customers/clients. (Grow this mutha like a snow-ball.)


I like.

 

[Vigilante]

Reality check.

You're not going to take $3000 and turn it into $1M in 15 months. Period.

No one without any prior business experience has read this thread, took action, created an actual business and turned $3000 into $1M in 15 months. No one.

False. Rich Kid. Did it in 90 days. He went from flipping bicycles on CraigsList to rolling a Lambo in less time than it takes the average forum member to read The Millionaire Fast Lane. And he did it all with vague innuendos and no data/proof.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Great post ... I'm formulating a strategy and will post it when complete.

In the meantime, a young man created the following page with the same aspirations

MillionDollarWiki
http://www.milliondollarwiki.com/

As of this post, he's recorded 450+ entries. At $100 apiece, thats $45,000 or 4.5% to his goal. Not sure how old the site is, but its been growing steadily. Novel concept and I commend the young man for being enterprising.

 

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[Jill]

Ah, this will be fun. In fact I've been looking for a young hungry buck to teach just what I have learned. If only I could go back to 17 with the knowledge I have now. Mmm, mmm, mmm. I would do exactly what I did with my (now) husband. If you have $3k with which to start, then you're WAY ahead of the game. We started with $50! This will sound over-simplistic, but it is exactly what we did. Sit back and enjoy my little novella.

Spend a few days learning everything you can learn about a product niche. For us, it was menswear, since we both already had some knowledge. Then go to every thrift and resale store you can find and buy every garment they have in the top 10(ish) brands. You'd better know what sells on ebay, because that's where you're going to have to sell them. I swear I'm not selling a "get rich on ebay" seminar. This was our reality for 5+ years. This is how the numbers will unfold (could be slightly different today, as I've not done this for over a year, but it will be darned close):

$3K will buy you (on average) 250 garments, which you will sell for an avg of $80/ea. The first month, this will take you all month (at least!) to turn that inventory around, as you learn the biz. But your gross on this first round was $20K. Note: Our worst month was $2K, our best was just over $30K.

The lesson we learned WAY too late was this: While this is a very profitable venture, it is NOT repeatable, duplicatable or scale-able, because each ebay ad is unique. So in order to grow this exponentially, you will either need to:
- teach the system to employees who will duplicate what you are doing (preferrably in other cities so that you're not all competing for the same inventory) for a cut (or if you're lucky, a paycheck)
- use part of your profits to source one or two items from one of the many 3rd-world countries that are now producing textiles for pennies on the dollar (compared to US and European factories). And yes, if you have cash, they don't care if you're 17. This is easy $$. One photo shoot + one ad = multiple sales. While the margin isn't as good as the second-hand clothing, the $/hour is a no-brainer and involves no measuring, no mothhole fixing and no crotch-rot cleaning. (Should I add this to the list of sh!t jobs on the other thread?)

After 6 months, our young protege could easily have amassed $100K. At this point, he could continue to grow this business or, if he could get a parent involved, start to make some serious investments in real estate. With someone over the age of majority to sign on, I would buy REOs at 60% of assessed value (which in my area, is fairly accurate, as prices don't fluctuate like they do in many other areas), then sell them ASAP for 80% of "market" value. Even if you couldn't get financing, then put the entire sum into an house, flip it and repeat. Without the power of leverage, this would take MUCH longer. But the numbers still work.

OK, I'm braced. Shoot holes in it. I know for a fact that the ebay part of the story works. Unfortunately, we burned out before we got wise to the part about repeatable business. So we were starting every month at 0. Since we were two adults, with two homes and a child in private school to support, we didn't have the benefit of low overhead that a 16 or 17-yr-old living at home would have. But we DID manage to hire several part-time hourly folks to help us with the more mundane aspects of the business.

The real estate piece, I'm pretty sure would work - at least on paper. I hope I'm on the right track there, because that's my next step . . .

 

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[MPCTrainer]

The quickest and easiest way I could suggest (though I'm using the model of product creator myself) with 3,000 dollars is Affiliate Marketing. I'll write this in a you format because I think better when I explain what other people should do. 3,000 dollars means that you can open up a series of websites very easily, and as you learn how to launch blogs, web pages, optin pages, and more, you'll get very good at web design and can even begin to offer your skills to local businesses. Not to mention you'll get good at SEO.

One sign up with Clickbank as an affiliate. Search their products for things that you're interested in promoting that you can find an audience for.

First, create a Niche page. This would be an authority site. Go and buy 20 or 30 dollars worth of PLR material--heck even 50 dollars worth of PLR material--in that niche. Your welcome page, the home page, is just a story of how you came to understand the niche. The blog posts--at least 10--so four thousand words--go around the subject. The optin page is on the side and you can pay and get Pop-up Domination for 79 dollars or you can use the free Wordpress pop up to offer your product. This Niche page should be based around a long tailed Keyword.

Up front costs: Autoresponder service 19 dollars a month
Hosting: 120 dollars for the year
Webdomains: 11 dollars for each one (10 within the first two months--110)
Optimize Press or Sales Press Pro--100 to 127
PLR Material To Get Optins and Entice People To Take Action- 200 dollars
The first month, you're looking at 550 dollars or so.

Then, you create pages with each of the products name on it that you want. You then have those pages linked to your Niche page--the links will appear on the sidebar. You'll have product reviews on your Niche page as well, but, you're just building a link structure to create authority and generate organic traffic.

Your blog pages that will sell the affiliate program should have your optin on the side as well--you should also have another PLR product (or a group of PLR products (another 20 to 50 dollars worth) offered on each of the blog pages. Titles you want to go for Theproductsnamereview.com Theproductsnamescam.com Theproductsnamesecrets.com

Two weeks time on learning how to set up the websites, it's really easy when you just type into youtube how to do anything you don't understand how to do.

Now, you want to maximize your results as quick as possible, I suggest buying Sales Press Pro or Optimize Press (i'm a bigger fan of optimize press). They're templates that let you make dynamic sales pages quickly and easily. 100 dollars or 127 dollars, both are quite affordable. You take my advice you've now spent 600 dollars of your three thousand in the first 2 weeks.

you have 2,450 dollars left and you haven't yet begun to see traffic coming in.

Create an Optin site (this is where you're going to send all organic traffic through articles, forums, blog posts).

Create a Facebook Fan Page For The Niche--post inspiring pictures (just search the internet for them), and run an ad to promote the page. Put a 10 dollar a day limit. Work on your ads every three days to see which one's converting and then copy them.

Here's the basic crash course on Facebook ads to get likes on page--one The picture needs to be catchy and interesting (but don't get it censored) the text needs to offer a benefit for liking the page.. GREAT QUOTES TO INSPIRE YOU TO... or something. Your two weeks in.

On that fan page in the info box, you'll have an offer and your website link. Three times a week, you'll put a post out that says sign up, and get put into a pool to win--and come up with some other PLR product you haven't released.

Okay, when people optin--you want them redirected to the Affiliate Product, with your affiliate link. The email your autoresponder will send will contain the link to the products.

If you manage your page well, and put up five pictures a day, 2 in the morning before school, 2 in the afternoon after school, and 1 before you go to sleep, you should be seeing a large amount of likes building up in your site. Also within 2 weeks, you should begin to see optins coming in.

This is more preferable for what you're main aim is--you can also advertise occasionally 10% of the time--affiliate products through your Facebook Fan page, which means, all these people are also opting in in one way to your eyes.

At 70 Dollars a week, you should run this for a full month and see where you're at. You want to keep changing up the pictures and ads and you want to make sure your images are having viral effect.

Go for one month 210 dollars. That brings you down to 2140 dollars. New month, new charge on your account, 19 dollars, you're doing to 2120 dollars.

You need an engaging structure of emails. Your emails need to tell people about the subject matter, inform them on pieces and nuggets of information, and then, they have to tell them about a great product you've checked out.

Also, don't forget to put adsense on your websites--Google tells you exactly how to do it. From your niche blog, to your review blogs, you want to have adsense on all your sites.

Now find another product in the same niche, do the same amount of websites, put them up on your main niche page, and with the same offers, and with adsense.

Do this with three products in a niche. which means you'll have 10 sites as previously said. Three blogs that are connected to your Main Niche site.

By month two, you should have an Active fan page that has a lot of viral pictures and that's constantly organically growing. You should have 10 websites up and running with a review and an offer and an affiliates link. Three you should have a list building. Four you should have 2,140 dollars left.

Next, I recommend buying Camtasia for screen capture video and hopefully ou have some form of Power Point or the ability to create a slide show. If not, and you're starting from scratch, this could get a little costy, but, it will be well worth it in the end. At most you'll spend 500 dollars on these two things. If you have a mac computer you'll spend 300 dollars on these two things. We'll take 500 dollars.
that brings you down to a grand total of 1621 dollars.

Teach your subject, lower your voice, talk into a microphone, and create a slideshow presentation and record it to make videos for Youtube and Vimeo. Again in the subject you're going to put your site and your optin information. Use again long tail keywords so that they can easily be ranked.

Two videos a week will do great. Basics, Create a title open, get some free music, and then, start off with 90% teaching, ten percent telling them that they should sign in and get a bunch of free stuff, and more information.

Register a fiverr account, send backlink pyramids and backlink wheels to your youtube page, 15 dollars worth should do it, for the long tail keyword, and a main keyword. That's thirty dollars a week. so, now you're spending 100 dollars a weeks. But, you should be seeing massive amounts of optins and getting conversions at a large rate--especially if you picked a dynamic niche.

Post your youtube videos on the Facebook fan page, and after the second month, you should be able to quit all advertising. So that's 400 dollars more. 1221 dollars.

Now, let the viral effects do the work for you. Keep up putting pictures, keep posting your videos--remember, they don't have to always be new pictures, after 3 weeks of five pictures a day, you can start recycling the pictures so that people who are new can see them for the first time.

All in all, it takes about 2 hours to set up a blog with three 500 word posts. It takes 5 minutes a picture to save picture as and load it up to your facebook fanpage, it takes 20 minutes of going through your ads every three days to see what's high performing and what's failing and maybe an additional 20 minutes to set up everything. It takes 5 Hours to set up a major Niche site that looks good. Headers and the such can be bought at fiverr for five dollars. so that's an additional 50 dollars for the headers. 1171 dollars. Not counting the money you should see begin to pour in from your affiliate links.

You begin to publish articles. Release press releases (there are 100 free Press release sites, and you send people to one of your blog pages in the press release sites). you talk about the magnificent product someone released, how it will accomplish something, and then you point to the blog that reviews it.

This will pull in a lot of major backlinks for you and it's all free. 400 words a press release. Do 10 a week. That's two a day. On average, an hour's work tops.

Your current expense is the 30 dollars a month you spend on backlinks to your two new youtube videos each month around keywords.

Each month 120 dollars gone. The third month brings you down to 1000 dollars.

By this time, with all of this being done, by the fifth month, with 760 dollars left, you should have 100 press releases out. If you go and buy a 17 dollar article spinner, and spin the articles, you can have 5 times that amount with only an additional hour of work on the articles each day. All for free. You have 28 videos out with a series of backlinks and well tuned. The videos should be entitled How to.... 3 Easy Ways to... How Does... How Can... How you... Niche Effectively... so forth and so on, short tailed and long tailed keywords. Which means in a mere 5 months period, with 2,240 dollars spent, no one should be able to search the niche you're advertising without finding a link to one of your affiliate offers.

The money should be rolling in at that point.

You can then let your current system just function--or, if you want it to really make you money, outsource the work for 50 dollars a week (at that point you should be making 200 dollars a day or more), and let them continue to keep your facebook page going, buying the backlinks to keep your video relevant.

Next: Find another niche, do this process all over again.

In 15 months, you should have a lists in the tens of thousands and sales that prove it.

Create a massive affiliate marketing program on the system you used and sell that system. And there, you have a million dollars.

 

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[Lex DeVille]

Would be really cool to read more progress threads by participants. $3k is easy to come up with even if you don't have it. Numerous ways to do it listed on this forum. Then you gotta be brave enough to put the money to use once you have it. Gotta be willing to jump off the cliff and hope for water below. And since the thread was for thinking outside of the box, I guess it really doesn't matter if you have $3k to start with or not. Just start from wherever you are and go.

 

[Peter2]

It is possible - hearing someone successful like Peter2 say, yeah I'm going to start another business soon - sounds so confident and makes you excited that it can be done.

Of course it's possible. It's actually pretty easy to go from $3000 to $1,000,000 in 15 months. You don't actually have to earn a million. All you have to do is start a business that make a $25,000/month profit and then sell it after 15 months, and you should have a million.

Of course you need to start making $25K/month very quickly, but it shoudn't take more than a couple of months to get to that point.

 

[kurtyordy]

ok, my brain has been turning for some time on this.
Instead of just doing a theoretical exercies, I am actually going to do this and be a test subject. I am ready to embark, I have secured a website, and have some needs, I will start a new thread for advice so as not to hijack this thread.

Product- service with lifetime subscription.
Target- est. 10-20% of population would be possible client
Webbased- knowledge threshold will need to be overcome
Marketing- affiliate and otherwise, also threshhold of knowledge will need to be overcome
Budget- $3,000. spent so far $6
Pricing- est around $285. Estimating about 40% profit margin, meaning I will need about 9000 customers to hit 1mill. Which means 600 sales per month. Very aggressive. For the sake of easy tracking, we will stack from 10/1. This means I will be a millionaire by the end of 2008. Merry Christmas 2008 to me.:banana::banana::banana::banana:

Here's the link to the new thread.

 

[biophase]

That's a tough thing to do. I can't see any way to do it other than trying your hand at the markets.

Think about how many examples there are of people who've done this less than a year ago. Here are two:

www.milliondollarhomepage.com - took him 5 months
www.milliondollarwiki.com - He's at $100k in 3 months I believe

I heard about this from a friend of mine and don't know the name of the company. I post this just as an example of thinking outside the box. Two people developed a website that tracks lightning strikes. Collects weather data from sources online. Simple huh? WTF do you do with a website that collects lightning data???? Sell it to insurance companies!!! Result? $1M sales in a few months.

How about a site that sells a service at $25/mo. 10,000 members in 12 months. $250,000 a month in gross revenue.

 

[BeingChewsie]

I am hitting wall after wall as far as finding a niche to break into or a product that will sell. Are there any threads or subjects or anything on this issue?

I believe there are some posts on these thread that discuss selecting products and niches:

https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/fastlane/35694-addicted-passive-income-deposits.html

https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/internet-mobile-apps-software/38312-ask-me-about-ecommerce.html

https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/ge...-yay-my-first-purchase-overseas-supplier.html

https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/in...how-i-find-suppliers-my-ecommerce-stores.html

https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/your-goals-your-fastlane-plan/27474-broke-try-ebay.html

Maybe you are dismissing potential niches, products or services because it doesn't feel like it will make "enough" or be big "enough"??...Might be worth reading the latest post by Biophase on this thread about missed opportunities...https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/mi...y-does-everyone-want-get-there-so-fast-2.html

Good luck, you'll find your path .

Sue

 

[AllenCrawley]

Omfg....

I am 17, being for 2 years interested in "another way" and I've told myself that there MUST be a way to make 1 000 000 $ in 15 months. I am literally 24/7 reading, working and making screenshots around the forum (+300 now lol). I am in my first month and then something like THIS comes up. I am in my first month now and have a plan.

I don't believe in destiny but damn...amazing coincidence...

God bless you guys, keep the work up!

Reality check.

You're not going to take $3000 and turn it into $1M in 15 months. Period.

No one without any prior business experience has read this thread, took action, created an actual business and turned $3000 into $1M in 15 months. No one.

 

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[Finance_Machine]

This is because of exponentiality ... the struggle is year 1 and 2 where nothing can happen, it's easy to give up, and start over redoing 1 and 2.

The explosion happens later after the grind.

I have had a similar experience. I've recently brought in a partner that hasn't started a business before and he will often call us a start-up. We are at a stage when the phones are ringing, hundreds of emails per day, and our growth and growth prospects are incredible. Moreover, there is never a time where we are sitting around wondering about if we are on the right track. Wondering if we have the right strategy or worried there won't be any interest and nothing but a big pile of spend.

The true start-up phase is when the phones aren't ringing, the emails aren't there, and you are wondering if this is really something you should be doing with your life.

I can say that something magic happens around year 3. I can only speak for myself, but in my last business it just seems that in years 1 and 2 there was a lot of support from people that wanted to help (or work with) a small business. In year 3 it is almost like people re-arranged their brain and just treated us like any other business in the space. So, we were able to capture true "market" pricing, even though we didn't have the same overhead or scale as the "market." And that is when we started making very real money.

People will only justify paying so much to an individual. When we were thought of as a couple of dudes, we might hear "you guys shouldn't be able to make that much!" But, add a little branding and the perception that we had a "real business", and then all of a sudden they would pay many multiples of what seemed absurd just a year earlier. BUT, there was no real underlying change to the business. Just a change in perception.

 

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[imirza]

How much did your product cost per unit and how much did you sell it for on average? Also, you started with $1000 dollars? If so, after doubling your money you would then have $2000 dollars. How did you then buy $3000 to $4000 thousand in product after? Second job? Had other savings not yet tapped? Also can you expand a bit more on starting out with craigslist and a paypal account? How does $700,000 sitting in a paypal account work? Do they have limits on how much money you can transfer out? Never used a paypal account and it seems like a lot of money to be sitting in one so I'm curious if you can school me on that a bit as I've always had reservations in using paypal.

Thanks,

Bought product for under $50 sold it for under $100. I did have more than $1000. I bought $1000 of product initially and doubled it. Then I bought $3-4k of product 2nd time around and doubled that. The challenge is about turning $3,000 to $1 million. I did cheat and buy $10k or so of product the third time around. So technically that would be like using $4-5k instead of $3k. I pretty much reinvested EVERY penny into more product. I never spend a penny of what I made. I still haven't spent a penny of what I made. This was just a side business started for fun that ended up making a lot of money.

I never kept that amount in paypal. I only used paypal initially to test the product out on craigslist. Once I was on Amazon etc I was getting money directly into my bank account. I don't trust paypal or google checkout for that matter.

 

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[biophase]

You know. I never say this but... my new business is being launched with $2000 and I think it has some real potential to do this. Actually seeing this thread title after it getting bumped made me think. Could it actually do $1M in 15 months? All it takes is a small idea and you never know. I guess we will see where its at on Feb 2017.

 

[AllenCrawley]

Just got a book in the mail today, Wild Company, which @AllenCrawley recommended in his thread on marketing to the affluent. Here's the first sentence on the inside cover:

"With $1,500 and no business experience, Mel and Patricia Ziegler turned a wild idea into a company that would become the international retail colossus Banana Republic."

Seemed appropriate for this thread, and for anyone who might be waiting to pull the trigger.

Doesn't take much sometimes. However, it wasn't a 15 month journey