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(3 minute read)

I know it’s been awhile since the last newsletter and there has been a significant increase in subscribers so as a reminder, my name is Edwin and I am building a cleaning business in Seattle, WA. I recently graduated from UW with a degree in Computer Science.

This newsletter is focused on my entrepreneurial journey. For now, this means focusing on my cleaning business, but in the future it will include other ventures I pursue as well.

May Monthly Revenue (collected + receivables + booked cleans): $19,595.70
June Monthly Revenue (collected + receivables + booked cleans so far): $11,640.25

Growing Pains

May and June’s revenue looks crazy considering I started this cleaning business back in January of this year, especially considering my April revenue was “only” $5,566.35.

However, it’s not what it seems…

Did I almost generate 20K in sales last month? Yes. This resulted in a profit of around $6k.

However, the vast majority of it was from one time customers for move out cleans. 

On one hand, this is great since I have their information and can re-market to them. However, it is almost a turn and burn situation when I have to keep finding new leads.

In a low ticket service business, the only way to become profitable is to have recurring clients and/or free leads. 

One time low ticket services like move out cleans pad the bottom line but do not sustain it long term.

In addition, labor has been tough to deal with at times, but is the most vital part of this business.

Above all else, good labor is the most important part of this type of service business, full stop.

That being said, good labor is difficult to find. Finding staff that communicate well, do good work, are honest, and reliable seem like finding a needle in a haystack.

At the start of the business, I had a massive pipeline of applicants and was interviewing constantly. However, that has been on pause for the past 2 months and it has been a mistake.

Reigniting The Fire

A few weeks ago, I hired a virtual assistant and tried to have them take care of everything: The day-to-day management, the client follow ups, inbound calls etc. without me spending much time to properly train them. 

It was a mistake bringing them on and expecting the world from them without much input from myself.

I became lazy. Heck, I am still lazy. Complacent, even. And it’s cost me dearly from customer complaints to not being able to book some leads due to being understaffed.

As stated before, labor is the most important part of this business. This cannot be understated.

I have been lazy in hiring and quick to delegate sales and fulfillment. Both are 100% my fault. I would probably have a larger pool of great labor had I spent more time on hiring.

So this is what my days are going to start looking like: Sifting through applications on Indeed from potential cleaners, calling and reaching out to cleaners on Facebook groups, Nextdoor post comments, etc. All that + following up with leads in my crm.

With hiring labor being the most important aspect of my business, I cannot delegate it out.

At this point, I have a good amount of leads coming from SEO, Realtors, and FB ads. What I worry about isn’t “will I get jobs?”, but rather “will I be able to fulfill them well?”

With this said, I know that Edwin from a few months ago would be overjoyed at almost hitting 20K in one month. I try to keep this in mind and realize that I am actually not doing too bad.

Parting Thoughts

I know I skipped A LOT in this edition to keep it brief. I also wanted to show the reality of the current state of the business instead of pretending like everything was going smoothly.

Being real holds me accountable for my actions.

With that said, what do you, as the reader, want me to write about next? I have a few ideas I wasn’t able to get around to this time:

1. My process of getting leads from Realtors and cold emailing brokers (which is how I am about to land a $3,599 job soon, if my bid gets accepted)

2. Breaking down my SEO strategy that has gotten me results like this (plus a $4,249 job I am personally going to help out with):

   

   

   

3. How I am working on almost automating my lead follow up 

4. My results and findings with running FB ads for cleaning (cheaper leads doesn’t mean better)

5. Something else?

Let me know by replying to this email or commenting on Substack. Either way, thank you for reading this far! For those who have been reading since day 1, I appreciate you and sorry I haven’t been writing as frequently as I should have. 

For new subscribers, thank you for joining me on this journey, welcome!

Welcome to 0 To 100k Per Month!

Every week, I send out a newsletter with an update on my journey from 0 to 100k per month. I share my successes, failures, and lessons along the way. I hope you’ll consider subscribing (if not already) and sharing this post with others who find entrepreneurship and businesses fun and interesting.

Subscribe now

Current Monthly Revenue (collected + receivables + booked cleans): $3,577.00

I was Horribly Wrong With My Pricing.

My pricing almost killed my budding business.

Until now, I was pricing my services at $50/hr/cleaner. So for 2 cleaners, $100/hr.

I was naively pricing cleans as a flat fee. For a 3 hour deep clean, I would price it at $300 for a team of 2 cleaners working for 3 hours.

I would make $120, and the cleaners would make $180. Sounds simple, right?

Wrong.

There are multiple different problems and issues with my old pricing that have left me with almost no profit this month.

In no particular order:

• Charging a flat fee is terrible when you’re paying labor hourly. If the estimated time is too low and the clean takes longer than expected, you have to eat the cost or try to negotiate a higher fee with the client. Neither is a great experience.

• Charging a base $50/hr and paying labor $30/hour leaves no margin for discounts and promotions which are crucial for attracting new customers. Offering a simple 15% discount reduces my gross margin down to less than 30%. YIKES.

• Not having a significant gross margin leaves no room for growth. While I can scrape by as I am currently, I want to grow through paid ads and hire a VA. This growth starts with a healthy gross margin.

By now it's obvious that I was charging too little and a flat fee is simply not an option when paying hourly.

But that’s just me still learning the business and paying the dumb tax.

So, how do we fix it?

Hello Healthy Margins!

Before we fix my margins, let’s get rid of my horrible flat fee pricing.

Instead, let's charge by the hour! Labor being paid hourly and charging hourly means I don’t lose if estimated time is off.

However, this opens up possibilities for small jobs such as a 1 bed 1 bath for only paying out $50 or so. This is not worth my time or the cleaner’s time to do the work.

How do we fix this? By implementing a 3 hour minimum charge. Assuming a rate of $50/hour, that same 1 bed 1 bath would be $150 (unless it takes more than 3 hours to clean).

This may deter some customers, but it is crucial for maintaining jobs that are attractive to my labor.

This fixes the worst of my problems, but what about my margins?

What is a good gross margin? A quick google search and it seems to be around 50-70%, although this varies a lot based on the industry.

That being said, for a service business like cleaning, it seems like a good profit margin is around 30%. I’ve seen this figure thrown around anecdotally and in @Remotecleanr’s interview with Booking Koala.

Given that 30% is a good for profit, we know that gross margin has to be greater. But how much greater?

I arbitrarily set a gross profit margin target of at least 50% because that’s what @iancushing teaches in his course (as you can tell I didn’t follow it very closely).

Considering I pay labor $30/hr, I need to charge $60/hr to get a 50% margin. In fact, I need to be charging more due to Stripe’s ~3% fee on each transaction.

After accounting for Stripe’s fees, I need to be charging $62/hr per cleaner minimum to achieve my target of 50% gross margins.

Let’s see how this works in real life if my business made $10,000 in a month (after Stripe fees) with some of my actual business expenses:

Real fixed costs:

• Booking Koala: $60/month

• CRM: $10/month

• Insurance: $52/month

Total: $122/month

Assumed Costs:

• Future VA will cost me $1000/month.

• Maintain $30/hr/cleaner

Revenue: $10,000

Labor: -$5,000

Gross profit: $5,000

Total fixed costs + VA = -$1,122

Net Profit = $3,878

A couple things to note:

• No marketing cost. Realistically, I would have had to spend on marketing. This cost can vary wildly. I know there are some people like @vamsidotdev who are killing it with paid ads. I am currently only acquiring customers through SEO, reaching out to Realtors, my network, and bandit signs.

• No taxes accounted for.

• No discounts accounted for. I am pretty generous with giving out discounts if it means a closed sale. The downside is a reduced margin.

• No pay for myself. Right now, I am not paying myself anything, and I intend to keep it this way for a few more months.

Overall, it seems like 50% gross margin seems like the absolute bare minimum I should shoot for to get close to a 30% profit margin.

In the coming weeks, I am going to see how high I can get this and report back on my progress.

One last thing: From the beginning, I wanted to charge at the top of the price range and offer a more premium service. Flat fee undermines this by incentivizing fast work to earn the most $ per hour.

Charging hourly allows the business to thrive in addition to incentivizing labor to take time and perform a quality service without being rushed.

As usual, I’m excited for what’s ahead!

Every week, I send out a newsletter with an update on my journey from 0 to 100k per month. I share my successes, failures, and lessons along the way. I hope you’ll consider subscribing (if not already) and sharing this post with others who find entrepreneurship and businesses fun and interesting.

Subscribe now

(3 minute read)

Current Monthly Revenue (collected + receivables + booked cleans): $1,709

Marketing Channels I’ve Tried

So far, my business has completed 5 cleans since the start, and I have 2 more scheduled this month.

That sounds great, but none of it is recurring. As quickly as it came it could go.

Keep in mind, all cleans except the first one came from outbound marketing or people in my existing network (the first one was from Google LSA). I intend to keep it that way due to the rising costs of ads

So far, I have found success with running texting campaigns to Realtors, and email campaigns to property managers.

If you want to know how to run email campaigns yourself I wrote this doc that explains exactly how I do it here.

I have also hung up signs but have only gotten 1 lead so far. As of this writing, I have put up an additional ~30 signs in high traffic and affluent areas less than 2 days ago.

With yard signs, I don’t expect any leads for a week due to the Rule of 7. Essentially, consumers need to see an ad at least 7 times before they buy.

I believe this also applies to my signs. Assuming someone passes by them once a day, the earliest I’ll get leads will be in 7 days.

I have also placed door hangers, but I don’t think I’ve placed enough to be able to say if they are effective or not.

I had Google LSA turned on for 3 days which got me my first booked clean, but it came at a net loss of $40. After that, I decided to shut off LSA.

Getting leads for $70 a pop is not a good way to grow a low ticket service business. Especially when my sales skills are okay at best.

Before LSA, I was cold calling apartments and dropping off door hangers to be included in their move-in packets. I didn’t get a single lead from this.

If I had to rank my lead sources based on quality it would look like this:

1. Existing Network

2. Realtors

3. Property Managers

4. Yard Signs

5. Cold Calling Apartments for Move-In Packet Placement

6. Door Hangers (Not sure yet, but probably better than LSA)

7. Google LSA

Marketing Going Forward

Building a business from scratch feels like climbing a vertical ice wall.

One. Step. At. A. Time.

When you think you have a solid foothold, you slip and get set back.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

That being said, I’ll continue on with what’s working. 

This means doubling down on getting cleans from my existing network and reaching out to Realtors and property managers.

I’ll still hang up signs and door hangers. There is still low hanging fruit for me to pick.

However, I am also diversifying my efforts into more sustainable marketing, SEO. 

For backlinks, I’m using a combination of Sneaky Backlinks from @ConnorShowler and links from @theseoguy_. 

As of right now, my Search Console looks like this:

Not much is happening, but after some more links and time, my goal is to be able to generate a consistent amount of leads from Organic SEO.

Additionally, I plan on adding customers to email drip campaigns for discounts on recurring cleans and to promote my referral program where both they and their referrals both earn $50 in credits for my services.

Everyone wins here.

Overall, I am excited for this venture going forward. The proof of concept has been validated and now it’s time to keep pushing forward and scale the ice wall.

Every week, I send out a newsletter with an update on my journey from 0 to 100k per month. I share my successes, failures, and lessons along the way. I hope you’ll consider subscribing (if not already) and sharing this post with others who find entrepreneurship and businesses fun and interesting.

Subscribe now

(5 minute read)

Current monthly revenue: $0

Interview Scheduling Nightmare

This past week I feel like the house cleaning business stagnated and it was completely my fault.

In last week’s issue, I raved about being able to schedule interviews with qualified candidates on autopilot. Little did I know, I was making a grave, subtle mistake.

I added 15 minutes of padding between each interview and allowed applicants to book anytime between 12-5pm.

I thought this would give applicants plenty of interview time slot choices and prevent interviews from going over into each other.

Instead, this resulted in 3 days of seemingly non-stop interviews where I would work on other tasks for a max of 15-30 minutes before the next interview.

Each and every time I would just be getting into the groove of a task when I then realized I had another interview. No momentum was created during these days with lots of interviews.

That is why going forward, I have strict interview time slot schedules. 

Applicants can only book between 1 - 3pm, Monday - Wednesday and there is no buffer between interviews. 

I have learned that I simply cannot get any meaningful work done in between interviews.

Plus, interviews rarely go over time.

I’m excited to get more productive work done this week!

Cold Calling to Get Business

I somehow managed to get my door hangers into new resident move-in packets in 3 separate apartment buildings. 

This was all done through cold calling.

A year ago, I used to be terrified of cold calling. Like most people, the thought of soliciting strangers over the phone seemed repulsive.

It wasn’t until I started cold calling for real estate leads that I learned the value of selling over the phone.

I now consider cold calling to be a cheap, reliable source of leads.

Let me show you the numbers behind cold calling and how to use it to scale:

The Numbers Behind Cold Calling

In the real estate world, talking to people is how deals get done.

More conversations = more opportunity = more deals. Therefore, cold callers are typically on a 3 line dialer to dial as many numbers as possible in a single day.

With each answer, a script is followed that’s along the lines of: “do you want to sell your property?”

No? Hang up.

Yes! Ask them questions about the property.

Here’s how this works in real life:

A virtual assistant on a 3 line dialer will dial 800 numbers / day. 

This will result in 80 people (10%) answering the phone. The rest will go to voicemail.

Out of those 80 people, 40 (50%) will be the wrong person.

Out of the final 40, 2 (5%) will say yes to wanting to sell their property.

For the real estate wholesaling niche, 1 in 50 leads will convert into a closed deal. This means 20,000 dials gets us 1 closed deal with the percentages outlined above.

For this niche, one closed deal can net $10k+ so the high marketing costs are worth it.

However, there’s one thing I forgot to mention:

Wholesaling real estate is a B2C industry. This contributes significantly to the high volume required to be successful.

House cleaning is both B2C and B2B.

After cold calling apartments this past week, I can confidently say cold calling B2B is much, much easier.

Let’s take a look at the numbers:

I did 13 total dials on my personal phone (I should have done much more).

Of those 13, 7 (54%) leasing agents/property managers picked up.

Of those 7, 3 (43%) said yes to adding my door hangers into their resident’s move in packets.

Based on these numbers, it takes around 5 dials to get my door hangers into an apartment’s move in packet. 

In both real estate wholesaling and house cleaning, cold calling can generate consistent business. More dials = more conversations = more opportunity = more deals.

While the specific numbers and conversion rates vary industry by industry, I’m certain almost all businesses that have a B2B aspect can find some success with cold calls.

Cleaning business next steps

I might be on the verge of getting my first customer!

Regardless, this week I am going to go heavy with organic marketing and cold calling.

This is going to include continuing cold calling apartments and starting to do warm outreach to some of my real estate investor friends.

I’m excited to see what lies ahead this week and I am almost certain I’ll be able to book my first clean by next week.

Every week, I send out a newsletter with an update on my journey from 0 to 100k per month. I share my successes, failures, and lessons along the way. I hope you’ll consider subscribing (if not already) and sharing this post with others who find entrepreneurship and businesses fun and interesting.

Subscribe now

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(5 minute read)

Current monthly revenue: $0

My remote house cleaning business is starting to come together piece by piece.

Still no booked jobs, but this is mainly because I haven’t had any cleaners that have fully onboarded, until now.

It’s hard to complete jobs without any cleaners and I don’t want to do fulfillment myself, that would be the easy way out for what is essentially a staffing business.

I also found myself drowning in my inbox trying to follow up with applicants. I realized I needed to create a system for onboarding cleaners with limited human interaction.

I spent a few hours building a simple hiring system in a crm called Go High Level. I would recommend it to anyone for just about any business since there’s so much that can be done with it (I genuinely think that and have no affiliate link to give you).

This resulted in me getting 17 interviews next week and I didn't have to send a single email manually.

Let me break it down:

Attracting Talent

To attract users, I post to over a dozen Facebook groups. 

I even have a spreadsheet to keep track of all of them because it was getting out of hand. I will automate this in the near future with a Virtual Assistant (VA).

I also use Craigslist. I bought a gig post and a job post for a total of $52/month. I have been getting a lot of applicants from here.

I posted on Indeed. I only posted once for free, but I might pay for a boost in the future since it generated a decent amount of applicants too.

Finally, I paid $25 to list a job post on Offer Up thinking my target demographic would be on there but have gotten 0 applicants.

Overall, I think I’m going to double down on Facebook groups, Craigslist, and Indeed.

I am also going to add posts in Spanish speaking Facebook groups since right now I’m only in English speaking groups. I have a hunch my demographic may not speak English as a first language.

Thank you mom and dad for teaching me Spanish.

The Meat of the Automation

On every job post, I add a link to this form:

Once submitted, applicants are automatically filtered based on certain responses. For example, if they respond they are unavailable to commute to Seattle, they are rejected.

The qualified applicants are sent an email with a booking link for an interview automatically:

Once they book a time slot, they are sent an email confirmation and will receive reminders of our meeting 24 and 1 hour before. My hope is that this will prevent no-shows but we will see this week.

Sometime in the future I will also create an automation for onboarding cleaners after the interview. Right now I am doing this manually and have fully onboarded 1 cleaner so far, but it has been a very manual process.

There’s still a lot to be done such as:

• Get EIN (IRS is taking forever to process my submission)

• Get verified on Google (Google also taking forever to process verification)

• Heavy overhaul website copy + SEO

• Add citations (will do this when Google Business Profile is verified)

I also cold called a few apartments this past week and managed to convince a leasing agent to insert my door hangers into their move in packets. Thank you Kyle.

However, I realistically see myself getting my first few jobs via Google Local Service Ads or Yelp ads, since those seem the quickest way of generating business (albeit expensive).

Finally, I have 6 inboxes warming up to use for cold email. I plan on targeting property managers in the Seattle area for cleaning. I figure this is another way to be able and potentially secure commercial clients.

I’m excited to see what this next week’s full interview schedule brings!

Why Solopreneurship Is Not for Me

Solopreneurship is usually thought of as running a business without any partners or employees.

This means no people to manage and complete flexibility in your schedule. 

As someone who prefers to be async and is trying to create a semi passive business, this sounds great.

However, there are several downsides with solopreneurship that I don’t see talked about often:

When You go on Vacation, the Business Halts

I want to build business(es) that works for me, not the other way around.

I also want to take vacations whenever I want, and still make money while not actively working.

This is possible with solopreneurship, but if something goes wrong, or if the business needs attention, you bear all the responsibility, regardless if you’re on vacation.

The obvious answer is to then hire people to help you run your business, but then that wouldn’t be solopreneurship, would it?

You Work on Low Value Tasks

Doing everything yourself as a solopreneur sounds great at first. You have complete control over everything and can shape your business and its outcomes.

However, what I’ve found is that I end up doing repetitive, low value tasks. 

For example, last week I created a well performing Facebook post to promote expiredlistingscout.com that generated ~70 emails of my ICP. These emails were commented on the post itself.

If I wanted to stick to strictly doing everything myself, I would have spent hours monitoring the post and copying each email one by one. 

Instead, I sent this 4 minute loom video to my virtual assistant and he was able to spend a few hours scraping each and every email for a grand total of $8 (he charges me $3/hr).

I know my time is worth more than $3/hr and for that reason, I choose to delegate low value, repetitive tasks to my assistant.

Hiring great people and having trust in them to be able to run aspects of my business is how I’m going to be able to scale and remove myself from the day to day operations.

Solopreneurship seems to be against these beliefs.

I believe I should be focusing on higher value tasks like marketing, strategy, and creating time saving automations.

I’m excited to be able to hire the right people that will allow me to work on the businesses rather than in the business.

Delegating the right tasks to the right people is how I’ll eventually reach 100k/month.

This past week I’ve been blown away by my own marketing efforts.

I created a single post and was able to reach 10k accounts of my target audience. This turned into 70 emails and one paying customer (currently on a short free trial) for expiredlistingscout.com for a total of $200 MRR if they continue.

It’s not much, but it’s progress. So how did I do it?

I did it through self promo in Facebook Groups.

The tricky part is that most Groups do not allow self promo. However, if you disguise the promo as value with a lead magnet, you can certainly get away.

I used the search bar for keywords like ‘email’, ‘drop your email’, ‘email it to you’. If you find posts with these key phrases, you can take inspiration to what the mods have approved and work within the boundaries.

For reference, here’s my post:

Notice a few things:

1. I have a lead magnet. I am marketing to real estate investors and I created a dataset that is valuable to them (it also happens to be my core product)

2. ‘Let me know if you want me to email it to you’. This is the key phrase. Do not say ‘DM me’, most of the time that will not fly by the moderators.

3. I’m a ‘Top Contributor’. What does that mean? It’s basically a way of knowing which people have made posts with significant traffic in a group in the past. This lets others know to pay attention to your posts since you have to earn it, ideally without spamming. I’ve been in this specific group for over 1 year and have posted other valuable data sets for free. All it takes is one post to do well and you’ll earn the ‘Top Contributor’ badge.

Once I got enough emails, I simply instructed my VA (with this 3 minute loom) to scrape them and put them in a google sheet to start marketing to them.

There’s a lot more that I want to cover with organic Facebook Groups marketing but I feel like that might be beyond the scope of this edition, let me know if I should go more into depth on it!

I’m Starting a Remote House Cleaning Business

Yup. Basically what the title says.

For those who don’t know, a remote house cleaning business essentially acts as a staffing agency. Its prime focus is handling all the admin and lead gen, while contracting external cleaners for fulfillment.

So why am I choosing to start this? Well, there are a few reasons:

Recurring revenue potential

From weekly to monthly cleans, there is potential for customers to stick around for longer and provide more consistent business.

Strong referral potential

Do a great job? It’s likely that customers will tell their friends.

Competition is much less

Unlike online businesses which compete with the best of the best around the globe, I am competing with maybe 3-5 cleaning companies in my area that are decent at marketing.

The vast majority of local service businesses have lack luster marketing (assuming they have any in the first place), and rely heavily on repeat clients and referrals.

I know from first hand experience that my family’s landscaping business has been running for 10+ years with no website, no Google Business Profile, and no ads.

Just sweet, sweet repeat customers and referrals.

I know I can dominate by providing a great service and incorporating modern marketing.

Has B2B potential

I love this one. Commercial cleans provide a larger volume of work.

With cold calling and cold email, I can reach these customers cheaply.

Low cost to acquire + high LTV = $$$

Proven business model

Nick Buzz, the man behind baked.design, started a remote cleaning business first. While his other ventures have outpaced the revenue of his cleaning business, he is proof that it can be done, and better yet, be semi passive with hiring the right people.

Another example is Ian Cushing, who is currently at 45k/month in rev between 2 locations of his remote cleaning business. 

Full disclosure: I purchased his course + 1 hour of his time for $100, and honestly so far it’s been 100% worth it.

My key takeaways from these two are:

1. Generating business is not rocket science. I either pay for marketing like Google LSA or pick up the phone and start dialing. (There are other ways of course, but these 2 are the primary ones)

2. This business is so simple to understand it can be automated with the right hire.

Current State and Next Steps

So far I have my website (be nice, it’s not finished yet), LLC, business bank account, general liability insurance, online booking, and have some door hangers on the way. 

I also have 15+ cleaner applicants (from Facebook Groups and Craigslist) and have done 3 interviews thus far. 

I am realizing I need to systematize the hiring process or else I will spend the rest of my days inside gmail.

Major to-dos:

1. Get verified on Google

2. Wait for my EIN (the IRS takes forever)

3. List website on directories and gain backlinks

4. Onboard first cleaners

For starting this business less than 2 weeks ago, I’m proud of where I am. 

I truly believe this business can be making at least 20k in monthly revenue by EOY, especially in Seattle.

I’m looking forward to finally cold calling some apartments!

2023 began with massive action. 

In the latter half of 2022 I had heard of a real estate wholesaling business and I wanted to give it a shot. It was pitched as “be in real estate with no money and no license”. 

Should have triggered a red flag but I pursued anyway. 

For those who don’t know, this business relies on getting houses under contract at a very steep discount and then assigning (aka selling) the contract to an investor at a higher price.

I partnered up with 2 others, and we began working on this business every single day. 1 of them dropped before February. 

Me and my partner that remained kept working on the business. We actually had leads coming in and successfully closed a deal for 9.5k in Memphis Tennessee.

Despite some success, there were 2 major flaws in the business model:

1. No recurring business. The business model relied on homeowners’ selling their houses at a discount (usually due to a distressed situation). Once this transaction was complete, getting more business from the owner was very unlikely.

2. No referrals. Unlike the vast majority of businesses, this business model had very little referral potential. Ever hear of someone say “Hey, you should sell your house to these guys at a steep discount instead of listing on the market”. Yeah, me neither.

Apart from these, I also felt that the business model went against my morals since it relied on low balling people on their homes and pretending to be the buyer when in reality I was a middle man.

Pivoting Away From Wholesaling

I quit wholesaling in August 2023. At the time, I was interning as a software engineer in NYC.

Balancing a 9-5 and real estate wholesaling was rough.

It all came to a breaking point when I spent an evening in downtown Manhattan reflecting on what I’ve done with my time and how I needed to pivot to something more sustainable.

I reflected on the skills that I had: programming, and extensive knowledge of real estate.

I decided to then combine the two skills by becoming an “integrator” for a land wholesaling team. Similar to real estate wholesaling, except they worked with raw land exclusively and in my opinion, much more ethical.

I helped them automate sales processes and set up their marketing campaigns in exchange for equity % on closed deals.

I received my first $500 from that 6 weeks later and now they have 7 deals in the pipeline.

I also decided to create a service for automating marketing to expired listings (expiredlistingscout.com) and an ai cold calling service (callcue.ai) with the real estate knowledge I have.

Overall, the latter half of 2023 was me applying my tech skills in real estate.

What I Learned From 2023

These are some lessons I learned and will write more detailed breakdowns of each in future editions:

Outbound marketing is one of the cheapest, fastest, and most consistent ways to generate business from day 1. Having the willingness to cold call, email, and door knock when others shy away will get you business they won’t be able to get. 

B2B is more straightforward and easier to reason about than B2C.

Knowing and being good at sales is important not just for business, but life. You’re selling more often than you think.

Distribution is more than product. Build it and they won’t come without marketing.

Goals for 2024 and Beyond

After 2023, I now know what I want my ideal business life to be. Some principles I want to have in 2024 are as follows:

1. Async as much as possible.

   1. Having to be in a quiet place with good wifi at a certain time for a meeting or work takes away my freedom of location, so not ideal

2. Any meetings must be scheduled

3. No meetings before noon.

   1. I have found that going to the gym early and going straight into deep work has worked the best for me. Having meetings in the morning destroys any momentum for the rest of the day

4. Marketing first

   1. I spent too much of 2023 building without marketing. I now realize this and in 2024, I want to pivot to marketing first instead of building. I believe this applies to SaaS and other businesses

5. Build Businesses with referral potential

   1. Getting referrals in the wholesaling business I built in 2023 was almost impossible. Any business I build moving forward must have a good possibility of referrals (which 99% of businesses do thankfully).

6. Build Businesses with recurring revenue potential

   1. Another problem with the wholesaling business was that repeat customers were non-existent (a person sells their home maybe once or twice in their life). Having repeat customers increases their LTV.

7. Do what makes me proud

   1. At the end of the day, I want to build businesses that not only make money, but also make me proud. I want to be able to explain my business to my grandma and not feel ashamed of how I’m making money.

What’s up with ‘10 to 100k a month‘?

‘New Learnings’ honestly didn’t make much sense.

So I decided to rebrand this newsletter.

‘0 to 100k a month’ makes sense from the get-go. It also reflects a new goal I have for myself in the next coming years. 

Going from $0 per month to $100,000 in revenue per month in my businesses combined. That’s 1.2M in revenue every year.

Will it be easy?

No.

Will it happen this year?

Probably not.

Will I share what I do and my monthly income as I embark on this journey?

Absolutely.

I intend to be as transparent as possible, sharing my bets and where I am placing my time to achieve the 100k revenue goal per month.

What I’m Doing Now

Currently, I have a small portfolio of bets. Only 1 has made money but I have confidence in the others. I will go into more details on each one in the next edition.

As always, thank you for reading and see you in the next one!

I’m Edwin, a student at UW in Seattle. In my free time I love to tinker around with new technology, learn new skills, and bounce ideas off others. Currently working on callcue.ai and expiredlistingscout.com

Problem I solved this past week:

In today’s age, there is an endless amount of tech stacks, creating a dilemma on which one to choose.

I faced this problem this past week with expiredlistingscout.com.

I toyed with the idea of purchasing a boilerplate to get started quickly vs starting from scratch with something like NextJS (which most boilerplates use anyway). 

In the end, I decided to go with a NextJS app from scratch with Supabase as the backend for the following reasons:

• NextJS, while some flaws do exist with the new app router, still has fairly good DX

• Likewise, Supabase is DX first. I love being able to generate typescript types from the database without having to use an ORM like Prisma (although I do like Prisma!)

I realize that by not using a boilerplate, I end up spending time setting up things that have minimal impact on my product like setting up auth and linking Stripe webhooks. 

A part of me realizes this, but another part sees this as an opportunity to learn. By building an app from scratch (bit of a stretch to claim with this stack), I see myself learning the essentials, even if it takes longer. 

Eventually, I hope to create my own personal boilerplate that I can simply fork whenever I have another idea.

Current Problem that I have

Building an application sounds great, until you realize you have to make it look good 😅.

 I would describe myself as a ‘backend engineer’. I love spending my time creating algorithms and backend processes instead of making good UIs. 

This works great for tinkering around with AWS but not so great when making a consumer facing product. 

Thankfully, I have found some good sources of frontend knowledge that I plan on studying this week. All of these resources were recommended to me by Denis @dinvlad:

• https://web.dev/learn/css/

• https://learnlayout.com/

• https://flexbox.io/

• https://cssgrid.io/

• https://ishadeed.com/article/grid-layout-flexbox-components/

Like anything, I know learning frontend will be a challenge, but it is doable and I possess the skills and knowledge to do so. If anything, I plan on working on these for the next week and will share my progress then!

Observation I want to share:

I feel like myself and other entrepreneurs focus on building, rather than marketing. 

Marketing is often seen as an afterthought or difficult to accomplish. And to be fair, marketing is hard. 

Not getting removed for self promo on Reddit is an art and finding ways to get in front of your target customers can be daunting.

So I offer this observation (credit: @codyschneiderxx on X):

Distribution is more important than product.

‘What? Are you saying that product quality doesn’t matter?’

No.

Product quality is still important but is less important than distribution. 

Think about it this way: Threads was able to gain 2 million users on its first day. I’m not sure about you, but I know that if I released the exact same app, it would take much, much longer to reach 2 million users. 

Threads was able to grow so fast simply because it was able to be distributed very well through shoutouts from Zuckerberg and subtle hints throughout Instagram.

We also see distribution play out in the form of sponsorships and shoutouts. Products and services that want to reach their target customers pay very good money for distribution.

Heck, building an audience via a newsletter, LinkedIn, Instagram, X or any other platform is valuable due to the attention it brings. 

Where attention goes, money flows. 💸

With this in mind, I have decided that going forward, I will focus on audiences I can reach effectively and work on figuring out solutions they will find valuable. 

For example, both of my projects, callcue.ai and expiredlistingscout.com, are tailored to real estate investors. 

Callcue.ai is cold calling using AI and expiredlistingscout.com automates the usage and collection of expired listings to find off market real estate deals.

This was done on purpose because I knew I could leverage my existing relationships in the real estate world to:

1. Gain feedback

2. Get initial traction. 

When starting a new venture, I would urge you to consider, ‘who can I reach better than anyone else making a similar product or service?’

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