A few weeks ago after reading one of my buddy Noah Kagan‘s posts on building a thousand dollar business in 24 hours I got to thinking “I could totally use an extra $1k a month of spending money.” After discussing it with my buddies we thought this would make a great personal challenge. We figured we would put our own twist on this by creating some rules for our side project challenge. We all have jobs, so this couldn’t be a build your next empire business, but it would push us to have something that generates real revenue for us, unlike most of our side projects. The key thing is this has to make money, if it has no business model, it immediately loses the competition.
So taking a page from my buddy Noah, and another from his buddy Tim Ferriss, we figured we should add some constraints.
- You can’t spend more than a full week of work to build this (7 full days, since we all had jobs, these 7 days were spread out over 2 weeks).
- After launch you can’t spend more than 4 hours a week maintaining it (think real 4 hour workweek).
- Initial budget to build it couldn’t be more than $250
- Goal is to hit $1k/month NET profit by month three.
- Fastest to hit $1k wins.
- Every week all participants are required to write down their progress and what tactics they used.
- Every two weeks there is an all-hands google hangout to share ideas, discuss strategy, help each other out.
- All side projects must be legal in the jurisdiction where the participant lives (i.e. no selling drugs or prostitution, which could generate $1k in a night).
- All side projects had to be new products, no extending an existing product.
So what did everyone build? I’ll link to each person’s project once they go live. Our deadline was October 15 at midnight.
What did I build? I’m toying between launching either an ebook product (need to find a writer to help), or my smoketest site lavado.co a laundry service.
Do you have any similar ideas/projects you’ve been itching to build, but never got around to it?