How I Made $29,517 in 3 Weeks (Full Breakdown)

Six months ago, I was asking people for $1 in exchange for an Instagram shoutout.

I was 35 days into my 50 day challenge to make $1k online and was more lost and desperate than ever.

Fast forward six months to today, I just completed a $29k launch.

Unlike the shoutouts, this launch was not spontaneous nor desperate. It was methodical.

If you’ve ever been curious about making money online with your own product, we’ll be going over the key principles I used to execute this launch.

If you’re like me from seven months having never explored entrepreneurship, you might think making money outside of a job is like magic.

Don’t people go get MBA’s at Harvard to learn this stuff?

Well, I never did any of these things.

Maybe that’s why I failed so often and so quickly since starting my journey.

Thankfully, these failures gave me real-world experience about “business” from a dead simple point of view.

When I took leave from Google and started this whole thing, I spent a full month building SwipeIQ - an AI dating profile analyzer.

I thought that surely this SaaS app was going to make me money.

Built the entire product. Launched to maybe a dozen people via email. Zero buyers.

A month of work… for what?

Was the product bad?
Was the pricing wrong?
Did I need more features?

I was asking all the wrong questions to avoid the obvious answer:

If nobody sees your offer, nobody buys.

The opposite is true as well. If you put a block of dirt for sale for $100 and get a billion people to see it, someone will buy it.

We’re going to call getting eyeballs on your offer traffic.

Traffic can come from any source. A piece of viral content on social media, your personal brand, a paid ad, cold calls and emails, DM’s, flyers, etc.

Every eyeball you get on the thing you’re selling is a shot on goal to convert into sales.

Once you have eyes on your offer, you’ll find out if anyone converts AKA buys whatever you’re selling.

As an example, we can look at the traffic and conversions for The Viral Playbook (the course I just launched):

Views = the number of people who actually hit the sales page.

Conversion rate = the number of people who bought after hitting the sales page.

In this example, the conversion rate is 5.1% (exceptionally high). This is because a lot of the traffic that arrived on the sales page was already warmed up to it from my content. We’ll talk about this in the launch process.

So now it should make sense: get traffic to your offer → some of the traffic converts → money lands in your pocket.

When I starting thinking from these two principles, making money online no longer seemed like black magic. Because from $1 Instagram shoutouts to selling The Viral Playbook, the mechanism was the same.

Get traffic → x% of traffic converts → collect money & fulfill

For $1 Instagram shoutouts:

Instagram story → offer details w/ venmo QR code → shoutout on stories

For The Viral Playbook:

Instagram stories, reels, lead magnet, newsletters → sales page → course is delivered to email

When you understand this, you understand the fundamentals of the creator economy as a whole.

Creators generate traffic in the form of views. Brands either pay these creators for traffic (brand deals & UGC), for conversions (affiliates), or for both.

Of course, creators can also take full control and direct traffic to their own offers like I did with the Viral Playbook.

With this foundation now set, we can talk about how I drove and converted traffic to make $29k with The Viral Playbook.

The launch had three phases, but they all map back to those two levers: traffic and conversions.

Imagine spending over a hundred hours building an offer, a hundred more hours directing traffic to said offer, all the while just praying that people will convert.

That’s how you end up in the same situation I was in with SwipeIQ.

These days I like to validate conversions before building or routing too much traffic.

The way I did this for The Viral Playbook was a pitch at the end of a live cohort I ran:

One Instagram story. One Discord announcement. One email.
Result: 50 pre-sales in 48 hours. $7,500.

Context matters here. These people had just gone through a month-long transformation with me. Some of them gained thousands of followers from the systems I’d shared. Reciprocity was built in. Trust was there. That drives conversions.

But the point is I still made sure to validate demand before building anything.

If I can’t get 10 people to pre-buy it, why would 100 people buy the finished version?

Once I got the green light, I started phase 2.

Here’s where I screwed up and wasted countless hours.

If you create an info product for the first time, this is where you will too.

Because you’re going to want to make the greatest thing ever. Package all of your knowledge. A super-product worth 10x the price in value.

I spent dozens and dozens of hours on The Viral Playbook trying to load it up with everything. It was a jumbled mess.

Then I paid $3,000 to a coach. And while the coaching didn’t really work out for me, the one thing stuck with me was that more info does not mean more value.

In fact, it’s often the opposite. Inundating someone with information to try to “overload with value” creates more work for the customer for less results.

I completely tore down what I had recorded and written and rebuilt it with this principal: One problem. One solution.

For The Viral Playbook, the problem was: “I’m posting and posting but nothing seems to work and I don’t know why.”

You can always expand a product later based on real customer feedback. But once you include something in a sale, it becomes awkward to take it away (even if it’s for the sake of driving better results).

Here’s where we drive traffic to your offer.

If you don’t have a history in sales, this phase will scare you.

Because when it comes time to actually promote and sell, the devil on your shoulder starts whispering all kinds of things.

“What if no one buys?”
“Am I worthy of people’s money?”
“There’s no way I can sell for this much.”

The devil on my shoulder was why I ended up refunding my first ever offer even though not a single person complained.

Rather than treating this as something that determines your self-worth, treat it as learning. Results are simply data.

During the promotion phase, you just want to

You’ll see how I did this in my three week promotion period for The Viral Playbook:

Week 1: Awareness

Week 2: Soft Promotion

Week 3: Hard Promotion

Final 24 Hours:

Most sales happened at the end of any given launch. This is normal because of urgency and all the warming you do over the course of the few weeks.

Could I have done more direct response marketing AKA more emails? Yes.
Could I have run paid ads? Yes.
Could I have done hard promotions on Instagram reels? Yes.

All of these would have driven more sales.

But I said I’d do the three week launch with organic only and so that’s what I did.

At the end of the day, you choose how you launch your own products and the goals you attach to each one.

Regardless of your goal though, make sure to adhere to the principles: validate your offer converts, build it, then drive traffic to it.

Simple, but not easy.

If you’re looking to make money as an entrepreneur, I need to tell you something that will save you months of time: everything has shit in it.

I used to tell myself: “Sell a course? Easy money. But I’m above that so I won’t even try.”

When I was cooped up in my Airbnb in Bangkok, working on The Viral Playbook, all that was going through my mind was, “I never want to make a course again.”

It took me endless hours to build. Then dozens of hours to promote and launch.

Once the launch ends, sales drop. Once my content stops promoting it, traffic stops. Once traffic stops, sales stop.

So… there’s good news and bad news.

Bad news: I’ve come to learn that there’s no such thing as passive income.

Good news: I’ve also come to learn there are endless ways to make money online.

I’ve done coaching, SaaS, a cohort, courses, a Notion product, affiliates, adsense, a brand deal, and more.

It all works.

And that’s the exact trap that I fell for.

When you make your first dollar with a given business model, it will feel great… at first.

Then you’ll come across the shit.

That’s when you go “ew” and pivot to the next shiny thing. Reset your progress.

The cycle continues endlessly in a search for “the one”.

That is, until you accept that everything has shit in it.

*Sigh* another pivot from Jim again.

Yeah, yeah, let me explain.

Could I scale creator education? Absolutely.

Run Personal Brand Challenge again as a paid cohort. Upsell the Viral Playbook. Add high-ticket coaching on the backend. Add continuity with a community.

That’s a real business.

Well, it could be.

But I have resolved to going full circle back to where I started. Before the endless cycle of pivots.

Seven months ago, before I started this whole content creation thing, I wrote in my journal: “30 SaaS in 3 years.”

But after SaaS #1 failed (SwipeIQ), I ended up going on a long detour into the creator economy for seven full months.

All of that just to retroactively learn that I didn’t actually fail with SwipeIQ. I just encountered some of the shit and saw some shiny objects.

Now that I’ve experienced a variety of business models and the nomadic lifestyle in Asia, I’ve found that I actually enjoy holing myself up in a room, building, and making content.

So even though the money will come much slower and fixing bugs in code makes me want to (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻, they’re tradeoffs I’m willing to make. Even if it means turning away from the proven teaching models.

So over five countries and five offers later, I’m circling all the way back to the original software plan. But this time with eyes fully open to the tradeoffs and ready to wade through shit.

Even though I could have probably built a profitable SaaS by now if I just stuck to it from the start, I won’t say that I wasted my time. But I do want to emphasize that if you can really just internalize the fact that everything has shit in it, you can avoid a lot of the shiny object syndrome that I fell for.

The next time I write to you, I’ll speak more on what this whole journey has taught me aside from money.

Hope you have a beautiful week,
Jim