How to setup your own 10 hr/week “lifestyle business” in a few simple steps
You may not know this about me but around 2013, I decided that I wanted to stop working for clients.
I had a nice lifestyle business setup offering digital marketing and SEO, and was traveling through Southeast Asia working an hour or two a day. But I started to get burnt out and wanted to increase my contribution.
So I wrote my first book, “Buy your Own Island,” covering everything about lifestyle design and how I set up my own lifestyle business working just 1-2 hours a day.
But the simple reality is, a content-driven business is TOUGH.
I was not able to earn enough money from the book sales or from the blog to replace the income that I had gotten from working with clients… And had to work 10x more to boot!
So I stopped creating so much content and started offering client services again.. And I got my two hour work day back and was earning more than ever… While traveling to exotic cities like Seoul, Kathmandu, and Mumbai…
There’s a popular saying 90% of new businesses fail.
But when it comes to agencies… it’s more like 90% of them succeed.
An agency isn’t necessarily the brick-and-mortar office building you might find on Madison Avenue in New York. It’s simply a business (often just a freelancer or solopreneur) set up to offer a business, marketing, development or consulting service to other businesses.
It works because you don’t have any overhead (you can run it from a coffee shop), and because business owners are overwhelmed and always need help. They need YOUR help. You just have to find a service that would be useful to them and offer it.
And all you have to do is decide what service you want to offer and get a few clients to be in business.
So what was my secret sauce?
With the first agency, I was able to work with well paying local clients to optimize their businesses for search and then purchased a link building service, revSEO, which immediately got them to the first result for their local keyword phrases.
Then I employed a freelance writer in Thailand who was able to publish SEO content to their blog for $7 each. I was earning thousands per client and only paying a couple hundred on costs.
With this model you only need a few clients to earn a good income.
With the second (growth hacking) agency, I used automation to my advantage. I purchased a license for Ma$$Planner which is an automated social media software that runs 24/7 on a VPS (it’s now called SU Social, btw).
I used it to send direct messages to help me get clients, and then automated their campaigns on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. It took less than hour to set up each campaign and then the software took over.. and I’d earn passive income each month from the clients.
In this post I show you real examples of some of the automation campaigns we did, so you can learn how to do the same: https://schoolofgrowthhacking….
In any case, at this moment with the proliferation of AI and tech, it’s never been easier to create bootstrapped lifestyle businesses that are profitable from day one.
And even if you don’t want a 10/hour workweek, you can use the revenue you earn to fund other projects, the way Basecamp has done.
And of course, if you want to know the shortcut to create a business that’s easy, very profitable, and fun — Premium membership is the place to start.
You’ll gain unlimited access to every single one of our full masterclass courses, all books and other products we’ve published, as well as monthly mastermind calls with me and other experts — where you get all the newest and greatest growth hacks where I show you the exact ways I’m using AI in 2023 to create a competitive advantage so that you can create your own 😊
And you can get all of this for less than $26 a month 🙂 and a 30-day guarantee iron-clad guarantee if you’re not completely satisfied.
To your success.
-Danny
