How I Turned $41 and 24 Hours Into $1,600 a Month
What a clickbait of a headline.
But it’s true.
A quick weekend idea and two simple investments (that cost me a grand total of $41), ended up generating $1,600 a month in recurring revenue.
I didn’t write this oversimplify the process of making money or starting a business. It’s hard. At times it sucks. To be build something both profitable and sustainable is always a challenge. Will this be scalable? Be profitable long-term?
I don’t know. But that’s not the point — the point is that there is quite literally no better time in history to build something out of nothing. No matter your background, skillset, network, or capital. This proves it’s all possible.
This is the step-by-step guide on how I turned a weekend idea and $41 into a business that would generate $1,600 a month.
Finding the Problem
There’s one thing that’s unequivocal about any business. It exists to solve a problem. No matter how big or how small, businesses are born out of problems and continue to operate because the solution is in demand.
That’s how this idea was born.
On Friday, there was a food truck posted up in our neighborhood. Not a proper food truck that you drive around, but a food trailer pulled by a Jeep. Supporting small, I bought some lunch.
Do not ask me how I connected the dots on this next part…
As I was opening some of the food, I thought about the brown cardboard box it came in (the business in me never leaves). Ten seconds later I was thinking about restaurant supply logistics. And five seconds after that I thought about the pain my uncle (who operates a food truck called Dave’s Dogs in Northern Virginia) has shopping for said supplies.
Imagine Charlie from Always Sunny connecting the dots on that corkboard. That was me. Looking absolutely insane at how I arrived at the problem.
I thought back to my uncle’s pain point — restocking absolutely sucks when you can’t get access to a major food service distributor (think Sysco or Performance Foods). Instead, you’re leveraging a wallet full of membership club cards to places like Costco and Sam’s Club to buy your products. And naturally, as a business, you’re price conscious. You shop around. But by the end of it, you’re spending eight to nine hours, one day a week, running around to different places stocking your food truck for the week.
Notice: start with the problem, not the solution.
Instacart’s killing it. The model is proven. Why doesn’t that exist for small food businesses? On-demand delivery for weekly restocking.
Validation
I knew two things needed to happen to validate whether there was a need. I needed to talk to potential customers and I needed to figure out what a solution looked like.
But first, I need to talk to people. The market. Food truck owners.
I knew I needed to talk to more people outside of my uncle and hear experiences beyond his, so I did a little digging. I went to Facebook. I searched “food trucks near me.” Richmond has a pretty good food scene, so I had lots to choose from.
I went one by one down the list and pulled down the emails that were publicly listed on their page. I found nine. Took me about six minutes.
Next, I knew I needed a bit of street credibility. Needed to seem official, like I actually knew what I was doing (spoiler: I didn’t). So I did what any online entrepreneur does when they get an idea (half kidding). Buy a domain.
Went over to my trusted domain supplier, Google Domains, spent five minutes ideating a name that wasn’t awful but also didn’t require a full-time branding agency. Not going to expose the name here, but went ahead and purchased the domain for a whopping $12.
Total invested: $12.
Google Domains has a free month of Google Workspace (their email service, previously G-Suite) with any domain so I grabbed logan@[domainhere].com and went to my inbox.
One by one, I copied and pasted a cold email to each of those 9 individuals. I’m no copywriter, but I have a bit of experience in pitching and positioning emails in a way that grabs someone’s attention. If you’re looking for a great resource on cold emailing, check out Sam Parr’s Cold Email lecture. It’s a gold mine.
Here’s a simple breakdown of how I like to think about sending cold emails…
- Give an enticing hook in your subject. Get them to open it.
- Do not introduce yourself right out of the gate. No one cares (sorry).
- Demonstrate the problem they have, explain how you’ve got the solution, and prove you know what you’re talking about by then talking about yourself (if relevant to the service or industry).
- People want to have their problems solved. Give them an easy way to say yes.
About 30 to 40 minutes after I bought the domain, I had sent nine emails to nine food trucks. I logged out, went out to dinner with some friends, and came back a few hours later.
I had four unread emails.
“Yes, sign me up.”
“Give me a call so we can get this set up.”
“Would love to give it a try.”
“Can you call me in the morning at … so we can talk pricing?”
An almost 45% response rate on cold outreach (albeit a small sample size) is stupid good.
I knew I had something that was worth diving deeper into. So that night and the following morning I had conversations with each of these four. Without ever continuing to pitch the solution or service, I asked questions about their pain points and the theme was the same as my uncle’s. Restocking sucked. And it was a problem they wanted solved.
I then asked what they would be willing to pay per week for something like this.
The average? $100. Some said more (a lot more) and some were on the lower end (lowest was $75).
I said I’d follow up next day (or in some cases, same day).
I got to work.
Getting to Building
Now, a lot of people get roadblocked at this part. Especially young entrepreneurs or founders that “have this great app idea but can’t afford a developer.”
Let me let you in on a little secret: no-code.
No-code changed everything I know and preach about entrepreneurship. It’s what my full-time company, byDesign, is built on. The company that has clients pay five figures annually and has zero true developer on staff.
No-code is all about building, well, without code. The days of spending tens of thousands on developers is over. And it’s largely due to the rapid rise of companies like Zapier and Bubble.
A great resource on no-code is Makerpad.
I knew I could use no-code to build and test a solution 1.0 of the idea. So I jumped into Bubble.
And built a simple homepage, login, account system, saved credit cards function (integrated to Stripe), order form, and dashboard for customers. All in five hours.
If you want to learn how to use Bubble in under three hours, check out this course from Copilot (it’s free).
By 3pm, I deployed version 1.0 of the web application, sent it to the four people who got back to me, and all had them set up their profile with a commitment to at least one delivery. Bubble on a custom domain is $29 a month (but you can also launch for free to bootstrap it even further).
Total invested: $41.
Will there need to be improvements? Absolutely. Do password resets work? Absolutely not. But it’s not about perfection. And this is a great example of that.
If your market wants or needs the solution that bad, it won’t matter how pretty what you build is.
Executing
Now the question becomes…
How the !*#%& am I going to be doing the shopping, delivery, and management of this?
Well, the short answer is: I’m not. I’m not even sure if I’m going to pursue the idea. But if I do, I’m going to use the power of delegation. An art I’ve spent time mastering. Read on.
Let me preface that by saying: the first few weeks, if I do pursue it, would (and should) be just me. I think it’s important for anyone to go through the actual business processes and functions themselves to understand the nuances of what they’re providing so they can train someone else later on. From the ordering, to customer support, to delivery. Handling things to end to end.
Say I didn’t grow further (did no outreach, no word of mouth) and completed weekly restocks for four food trucks at $100 a piece. That’s $400 a week. Or $1,600 a month.
How would I do it?
Every week, I’d receive the orders through Bubble. Sent directly to my email, or maybe let’s make it even easier and say a Google Sheet. I’d bundle the items by stores (Costco, Sam’s Club, BJ’s, Restaurant Depot, etc.) and place an online pick-up order for all the items needed from that specific store. One day a week, I would go to those four stores, and pick up the orders.
One by one, I’d go to each food truck and drop off their order. Charging their card (that we already have on file inside our five hour application) on the spot for delivery.
If I was doing all that on my own, I’d say it’d take me about seven or eight hours a week. And I’d pocket the full $1,600.
Now a few weeks later, let’s take me out of the equation and talk delegation.
I’d take that same Google Sheet that houses all the orders, have it forwarded to my virtual assistant, and have them place all the orders and coordinate pick ups.
3 hours. $8 an hour. $24 a week.
Now, I’d hire someone to do the actual deliveries. Have their name put on the order, have them pick it up, and then deliver it. Just like I would.
5 hours. $20 an hour. $100 a week.
That would mean without me touching it, I’d make $400 in revenue, pay out $124, and profit $276 a week. Or $1,104 a month.
Are there other considerations? Operation costs? Insurance? Customer support down the line? Marketing? Absolutely. But for the sake of this experiment, I wanted to break it down as simply as possible.
And to bring it all home: prove that starting a business…
- doesn’t require a ton (or any money).
- doesn’t require a built up network.
- doesn’t require a ton of technical know-how.
- and doesn’t require a ton of time.
Will I actually pursue it? Who knows (hit me up if you’re interested in taking it on).
Conclusion
The point I want to emphasize is how easy it is to start and validate an idea. A tweet from Domm Holland, the CEO of rapidly (no pun intended) expanding Fast, asked the public, “whats your top advice to new founders?” Two pieces of advice that immediately came to mind were…
- You don’t have to re-invent the wheel.
- Your 1.0 doesn’t (and shouldn’t be) perfect.
These two pieces of advice are the foundation of what I did here. I took a problem I found, built a stupid simple solution, and attempted to validate it. All in under 24 hours.
All while having some fun along the way.
Have any questions about business, no-code, building, or entrepreneurship? Shoot me an email at deyo@hey.com. Always happy to help!
