In September 2024, I made a total of $8,090 from 6 income streams.
This was the first full month of the $1m challenge and I’m honestly impressed with the results, especially since $4,516 of that came from 2 new products that I launched this month! 🤯
I also launched a brand new YouTube channel that I’m going to use to post more videos about the $1m journey.
But for now, let’s break down the income streams:
Income Breakdown
Let’s start with the old products first and then move on to the new ones.
1. 👨💻 Udemy Coding Course
Revenue: $1,601
As usually, I haven’t done much to promote this course, except mention it while sharing my journey online.
This course allowed me the freedom to focus on other income streams without having to worry much about making money actively, so I’ll take that! 😄
This was actually the revenue for course sales in August as Udemy always pays one month later. (P.S. I already know what the payout will be for October. Hint: it’s going to be bigger! 👀)
2. 👨💻 iCodeThis
Revenue: $1,720
Since I was busy getting the $1m challenge going I haven’t done much on iCodeThis this month.
I did play around with the pricing a bit as I haven’t yet found the right price that will continue to sell without having to run any discounts. Not gonna lie, it’s a bit frustrating that I have to do this to make money, but yeah… I’m still learning! 😄
Speaking of running sales… I did another one this month because we reached 50,000 members and wanted to celebrate. As usually, this brought in more revenue.
3 & 4. 🎥 YouTube and 🐤 Twitter Ads
Revenue: $253 ($121 on YouTube and $132 on Twitter)
This last revenue category from the “old products” - meaning products that were already launched before the $1m challenge started.
Although the revenue comes from 2 sources (YouTube and Twitter), I put it in the same category: ads revenue.
It’s not much, but it’s still nice to have considering that:
- The videos on YouTube were created years ago (this was my first channel) and they still bring in views and revenue every month (although it’s been steadily declining).
- I would be posting on Twitter for free anyway, so getting paid for it is a really nice bonus!
5. 🟪 The $1m Grid
Revenue: $3,000
To be honest, I’m quite surprised that this made $3,000 already! It all started from a silly simple idea that I had to track my revenue using this visualization grid.
While sharing the grid online people mentioned it resembles the Million Dollar Homepage so I thought it would be fun to allow companies to buy a square in my grid for $1,000 and put their name and link in it.
To my surprise, 3 companies bought the squares! 🤯
I made a video about the entire experience on the new channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32-X3rtF4jg
6. 🚀 Indie Action Community
Revenue: $1,516
Another idea I had for a long time is to create a paid community for indie hackers / builders. I wanted a place where we can hang out, share ideas, help each other, and most importantly: ship! 🚀
We often spend a lot time talking about what we want to build, but very little time actually building, so this community’s main goal is to get things done!
But before creating the community I wanted to see if there are other people interested in joining, so I wrote a simple tweet explaining the idea and put a stripe payment link underneath.
I decided that if it sells 20 spots I’ll create the community, otherwise I’ll just refund everyone and move on because it would mean that there are not enough people interested in this.
To my surprise the 20 spots sold out in 2 hours!
And within 3 hours it generated over $1,000 in revenue! 🤯
I’ll write a more in-depth article about the entire experience soon. Stay tuned!
Plans for October
My main goal for October is to continue to improve my skills. I feel like this will pay the highest dividends in the long run hence why I’m focusing on this for the forseeable future.
I even made a progress dashboard to track things like:
- articles written
- videos created
- products launched
without getting distracted by things I can’t control like income generated. 😄
I’ll also plan to add some updates to iCodeThis and I want to turn the Indie Action Community into a nice web app where we can share more things about our journey.
Will keep you posted on the progress!
Thanks for reading and see you in the next report!