I made $48,164 last month—here’s how (full breakdown)

hey what's going on in this video I'm going to show you how I made $48,600 last month uh that's 48. 1 164k profit not revenue and I make that disambiguation because a ton of people on the internet love just jumping on and saying I made a million dollars last month and here's how and then uh because of margins they only really make like five or 10% of that or something so the whole idea of this video and basically every other one that I've recorded and I'm going to record this is to show

you guys like the realities behind operating an internet business um the highs the lows everything in between and in this video what I'm going to do is go through the two businesses that I own that generate me about 20ish th000 a month each um December the month where I made $448,000 was certainly exceptional in so far that I usually do not pay myself that much money I usually don't make that much money there were a couple of key things that resulted in me paying myself a little bit more on average it's usually about 30k any who let's dive in so I run two businesses the first is called 1 second copy this is essentially a productized Content Marketplace and all that really means is you know in instead of being like a traditional agency where you know you'll sign up and they'll try and Pitch you on some big monthly package and you'll be assigned an account manager that sort of thing a productized agency just strips away literally everything except for the actual deliverable that you're getting and then usually gives you like just a very simple straightforward way to order something um and then does it all in like a completely automated fashion and so what exactly do I mean by this well in our case we're offering content writing services and so if you think about the way that a Content writing agent he usually operates it's like you know you sign up you have some type of kickoff call uh SEO strategy like content road map you have like all of this stuff around the actual deliverable that you know your agency supposedly produces which is the content and so we don't have any of that when you work with us you basically just get a dashboard which looks something like this isn't actually accurate unfortunately just because uh the dark mode fix that we wanted to put into our app just still we just still continuously have trouble with that might be because I'm the sole developer who knows um any who uh you know it's like an app and you have a little dashboard and then you can like create a request for that using let me just show you actually this is the light Mode app as it is right now without those updates um you can go down to order content and then you can just like basically select whatever you want um almost like you'd select something like a SAS right and so the product Eyes solution is basically you pay a certain number of words up front at the beginning of the month and then you can just slice and dice those however you want using this interface but there's no account manager there's no uh book a call with us to go over you know your weekly progress update there's none of that the only thing that we offer is the content itself and it makes it so easy for our company to staff because we don't need to hire like you know one account manager for every three clients we just hire like writers basically writers and editors um and then everything else is kind of handled on the back end using automations so this is what the pricing looks like this is very much squarely what I would consider like a commodity type of service so you know how the vast majority of people when you are you know watching like motivational YouTube they're like oh man you know you got to make sure that you're you compete in a market of one and that you make your service completely exceptional and so different from all the other services that like it doesn't matter what price you charge because people are going to be willing to pay it it's not that I don't disagree with that but there is certainly a way to success uh that doesn't follow that and that's basically what we at one second copi have done could we make more money if we tried to make it this all-inclusive service probably but I like the way that it is right now because there's very little headache there's very little upkeep I don't really have to do anything in this position anymore cuz of H to manager um and basically yeah basically just a very straightforward way of like getting articles blogs or uh or ebook chapters and that sort of deal so um that's what the business is um how it operates on the back end is pretty interesting we have a clickup pipeline uh end to end that I set up using What's called the theory of constraints methodology is basically a project management Paradigm developed by a guy called uh Eli Gold rat and the way that this works is it's and I talk about this all the time both the clients on YouTube and just everything so they're definitely better summaries of how this process works but basically the theory of constraints visualizes your entire business as a pipeline from end to end where there's your uh raw Goods coming in at the beginning of the pipeline and then there's some transformation happening in the middle and then there's the finished high quality products coming out at the end of the pipeline and you basically make money uh based off the distance between your like shitty raw good and then the high quality product and like that's where your arbitr es so in the theory of constraints your whole goal is to maximize the width of that pipeline at every step if you notice that there's a space in your pipeline like let's say in a writing agency it might be like the QA or the editing and that space is like constraining or bottlenecking the rest of your flow um all the theory of constraints is it's just a systematic way of alleviating that and then setting up your pipeline in such a way that like every stage is just moving along as constantly and as high throughput as possible so that's the background for how I set this up um and the way that I built this out in practicon is in clickup which is a project management tool and essentially we have like a variety of different ways that you know we manage the content but the big one is the content pipeline where a new article will come into the top of the queue and it'll jump into awaiting assignment which is just this flexible end to end q and then you know it'll sort of be acknowledged it'll move to assigned when it starts being worked on it'll move to writing when it starts being editing edited it'll move on to editing and then you know there are a few other stages here but generally speaking they just continuously move down the pipeline at every step and it's fully self-managed I don't really have to do anything which is quite nice the writers are usually Adept enough at self-managing all of this stuff uh the way that I hired the Freelancers was a combination of upwork um indeed. com which is pretty big um and then like Facebook groups and stuff like that as well and that's was pretty important and then we also have a few uh kind of executive assistants and administrative people scattered all throughout the world but primarily in the Philippines which allows us to take advantage of like Market Arbitrage so you know my company doesn't have to spend $40 or $50 an hour to get the equivalent skill or talent that somebody in the first world might charge just because you know they have absolutely egregious living expenses and that sort of thing so yeah that's more or less the business uh in a nutshell in terms of how we actually do what we do and then uh the last thing I wanted to cover was how we get customers so at the very beginning of this company the vast majority of the customers that we got were through platforms so that is like fiber uh upwork uh crowd content tons of these other like online writing platforms that were essentially like gig platforms where you have to fill out some application and you have to like show that like you're capable of you know writing in a certain quality or whatever uh before you can get in and then once you're in you know you can like browse proposals and that sort of deal and that's pretty cool um definitely got a really good start we probably scaled well past $20,000 a month just using platforms I'm not the

kind of guy that ever says no to money I think a lot of other people on the internet will always uh they'll talk about how like you want to develop your own um lead generation system that like isn't dependent on any platform or isn't dependent no nobody holds your balls device essentially but I've always kind of laughed at that like any platform or any business in 2024 that's successful utilizes some platforms you're just kind of picking your battles like who do I want to cut my balls firmly in their hands and in my case we picked Fiverr we picked upwork we picked a couple of other platforms so that's how we got our start we uh essentially like tried to reverse engineer what made successful freelance or agency operations on upor possible and then we set up uh the agency profile and you know just a bunch of infrastructure to accommodate that and that worked really well and then eventually we started growing so quickly because of that we had to put some kind of slow down caps in place uh and then I think that just made us like really in demand remember this was before GPT 4 before all these like super Advanced AI writing platforms that made it uh really easy to whip up your own similar quality content so you sort of needed a writer right and um yeah that was pretty good and then after a certain point we developed a bunch of email systems um and they were all C email systems where our offer was essentially we will write you a free highquality article that's a sample on anything you're choosing you know we'll take care of it from end to end all you have to do is respond to this email with what you want the article to be about and we'll do it because we know that like we need to provide value upfront in order to get a client and that's pretty good I think just because the wording of the email campaign and the transparency and stuff like that and we managed like a basically fully automated system for that where uh they'd fill out a form with the sample that they wanted and then that would automatically go into the queue that I showed you earlier and then that queue would just like you know a writer would be assigned to it when it moved to ready for submission it would automatically be sent via email back to the client super straightforward streamline process where we got the internal cost of production that it maybe like $8 or $9 and the value in having an internal cost of production $8 or $9 for acquisition is our lifetime customer value at that point was probably about $7 $800 so you know if we send out three of those and then one of them is like oh yeah this sounds great I'd like to work with you then you can imagine how that's an internal cost of maybe like 25 to 30 bucks to acquire a $700 plant um not account counting for you know like the lead generation costs and stuff like that which are usually another $ 20 or $30 per person so yeah like the acquisition amount was probably like 4 or 5% per client which is pretty sick uh and that enabled us to scale very quickly now this business peaked at about 90 something thousand uh earlier on in the year I think like it was April or May or something like that before then at the beginning of the year we were at about 60k and now we're hovering around 50k um I'm attributing the growth and then the fall specifically to um GPT or chat GP kind of gaining a ton of popularity and then you know companies that otherwise would have hired us to write all their SEO lisal stuff no longer have to because they could just use chat GPT to write something that's like 70% of the way there and then instead of needing like an agency to do it or a product IED solution like ours uh they can just use uh you know like chat GPT and then have an in-house admin or something you know fix it and bring it up to par so it's not the worst thing in the world but that's where the company is right now and I made about $220,000 from that um those $20,000 in profit and then we also had a couple of big uh big clients that month that uh you know just gave us significantly more content than we usually got so that's what enabled me to bump up for my average of 30k to uh to 48 and then the other business that I operate is sort of like a consultancy it's a very interesting sort of business and I used to have a partner for it was the same partner that I started one second copy with that I no longer work with on this business just because we decided that we go our separate ways no hard feelings or anything uh really enjoy working with them but the way that this business

works is it's essentially like at one second copy I built a bunch of systems that enabled me to make a lot of money quickly and like get clients and then I use those systems to get clients for my service which is one second copy and that was good what I realized is why don't I just use the systems and then sell the systems as a way to make money for any business like you know isn't the upside potential significantly higher over there what if instead it's like a very uh instead of content writing it's a very high growth industry maybe something like lead gen or uh you know some info product business and then I just build a system that enables them to go from 300K to like a mill well I'm pretty sure if I were to take a percentage of that 300K to a mill that's $700,000 I'd make way more money than I would with one second copy and so far it appears to be true um this is essentially like uh it's like uh fractional operations consultancy I want to say where I am the sole operator at this moment in time yours truly and I will essentially take a lot of the systems that I developed for one second copy and other businesses that I've worked with in the past and then I'll just like paste those into new businesses apply a little bit of my project management knowledge sort of as a consultant and then uh grow and scale the hell out of every business that I work with and this is really what my heart is because I find this so much more interesting than just like iterating the same process over and over again every business I work with is usually quite different and that enables uh just a very interesting sort of work day I've worked with a variety of businesses on this now from like six figure smaller companies that are just getting started that might have some startup Capital to seven figure companies uh which are probably the most common to even eight figure companies to develop systems that like shave 3 or 4% off their margins so depending on whatever place that they're in um you know my value proposition sort of changes and it's no longer like if you're very early on in your business I'm usually pitching how I'm going to help you make money up front if you're a little later on in the business you guys are at seven or eight figures I'm usually pitching how like my operations will improve your profitability and your margins just because that's really where the priority is um and I tried doing this in a product bized way as well where I would like charge somebody a fixed amount of money $4,400 a month and then offer some type of fixed service and it doesn't really seem to be working that well people like to have uh Consultants on retainer I found and it seems just quite difficult to pitch them on a deliverable that I can consistently provide every single month for $4,400 so yeah it's not that part's not going the best um but my pricing does seem to be relatively variable relatively ad hoc and it's resulted in me being able to make a ton of money now since I'm the sole operator of this the margins of this business are well over 85% I have basically no software cost the only cost that I have is the acquisition of customers and for this I followed a very similar system to what I did for 1 second copy which is why where when I started predominantly on upwork and then I gained a lot of notoriety on upwork over the course of three or four months and then uh you know I started getting a bunch of referrals and then those referrals from there gave me a little bit of latitude to explore alternative lead generation strategies like email and now I have a couple of email clients upward clients and I have a bunch of referral clients as well so that's how that works um if you are interested in learning about those upwork strategies that I mentioned earlier uh I'm more than happy to walk you through them in a Future video just let me know I mean like I have an entire Playbook and I have a little bit of a following on Twitter now uh and I think a lot of them are just waiting for me to like drop my big up work guide so maybe that'll be motivation but um yeah I usually just like record an extremely custom high quality video for every single proposal that I send takes like an hour or two every single day to like get through four or five but then at the end of it I usually have like three of them say hey I'd really like tock chat with you and you know this is only really capable if you're really good at what you do and what you know you got to know your stuff but I was just blessed that for the last eight years I've basically just locked myself in my basement uh in my pajamas and just you know learned all about how this stuff works so yeah I hope that makes sense um where do I go from here I would like to continue making large amounts of money like this has been great because I bought a lot of financial flexibility for myself and I'm not going to lie like everybody says that money uh doesn't make you happy but it sure as hell cannot not make you sad I hope I said that right um I come from a family that's historically like our family was bankrupt for a large portion of my childhood like in bankruptcy and uh I think that just colored how I viewed money growing up and to me to be able to make $48,600 in one month like that's more money than I probably made the entire year in 2020 um granted that was exceptional because it was Co but maybe even like 2021 as well uh so just having access to that Capital has freed me up from problems that I didn't really know that I had and I would highly recommend every man woman or child at some point in their life try and like give their life like a couple of years to like really try and push and try and make a ton of money like it's freaking amazing and it does change the way that you view the world do I think I'm going to maintain $48,000 a month every single month no I don't think so probably not for the next you know six months or so I am working on a bunch of lead generation strategies that should assist me with this like this YouTube channel for instance like my Twitter um but I think after I peaked at that 48k I just sort of realized hey this is amazing I wonder if there's a way that I could sustain this a little more passively than just constantly working my ass off every day and so I'm going to take a backseat I'll probably make between 20 to 30k over the course of the next half year I'm try and strategize and come up with like a different way to break through that next plateau and I think that a lot of entrepreneurs do this they'll achieve some success and they'll be like okay but at what cost is there any way that I can achieve the same level of success or more with less cost then they usually have to ease off the pedal a little bit figure that out and then you know re up or reack whatever business that they're uh they're doing next so yeah that's it in a nutshell we got one second copy over here and then left click if you guys got any questions about how any of this stuff works I mean I'm still very early on this YouTube career I'm more than happy to like literally uh invite youall to a sock Channel or a Discord or something and just walk you through exactly what each of you guys needs to do if you're at a point in your business careers where I think that I can help you um no cost I'm more than happy to assist you uh yeah that's more that's it have a great rest of the day and hope you guys find Value in this video oh don't forget to like subscribe and do all that fun bye-bye