#4 - Part 2 - KDP Business Case Study to £100K Update
Feb 24th-20th March Update
I wasn’t planning on writing a part 2 of this project so soon after the original idea to track everything from day 1 (22nd Feb), this is only 3 days later and my mind continues to be blown away by how powerful the convergence of skills, tools and concepts can be.
Throughout the coming parts I’ll be outlining in detail each of these, but for now here’s the core ideas;
Leveraged overseas workers - Who have a good work ethic, proactivity and a good manager / SOPs / Training processes.
AI Software - Chat GPT, Claude, the data analysis side in this, Midjourney, Dalle 3, all just crazy good already.
Business opportunities - This is what seems to be missing, combining the opportunities together. Individually these software and people don’t do anything, but combining these in a creative way towards an opportunity leads to extremely productive and quick business growth.
Work Ethic - Putting these things all together, building systems and creating the business as a real business from day 1.
What’s already apparent is that this is going to be a very heavy unstructured and structured research process.
Unlearning a few things as well as developing systems and processes (for both team members and myself) to reach these goals pretty quick.
What’s promising though is that the main issue I foresaw before starting this challenge (or before even diving down this massive, Alice-in-wonderland sized rabbit hole) is that I wouldn’t be able to find a project that both excited me and had the commercial appeal that I didn’t see others leveraging from Ai.
Luckily that is not the case and it’s now flipped.
There’s too much to learn, integrate, do.
More team members needed to be hired, trained up and scaled.
And more business models to try, refine and iterate on.
Exciting but that anxiety feeling of overwhelm is real.
25th Feb: Decision & Interviewing Team Members
As I’m looking to go very quickly with this challenge/case study I’m hiring some overseas VA’s to help.
This is a skillset I learnt very early on, and something that is terribly taught by a lot of books and YT videos.
When hiring overseas team members you need to remember a few key things:
They are just like UK/USA employees, so you’ll get good ones, lazy ones, hard working ones, unethical ones, skilled, entitled and the list goes on, but on average the skills and value add per unit of cost (dollar) is so so so much higher.
As of the end of the 25th Feb, I have 2 of the best applicants working through a test-task (another key part for hiring overseas team members), so we’ll see who comes through.
We also have an existing VA/team member working full time on the KDP opportunities now as well, this is making progress pretty quick and we might be pretty close to getting our first KDP product launched fully in the next few days, albeit this will be a pretty basic book, it’s not one that’s been created to make a profit, instead its created to learn the ropes.
As well as all the work into KPD, Etsy and hiring, today was also an unstructured research day into more AI applications.
There are a ton of cool AI tools on the market, but a lot of these are still in the “toy” phase, rather than benefiting business processes for anything very specific.
Trying to draw key lines from tools that look great, to actual applications that can make money, this is proving to be a little more difficult, but using ChatGPT & Midjourney we’re optimizing the process to create medium-content KDP products (lower word counts - think colouring books, puzzle books etc) that may or may not be successful once launched.
Only time will tell.
20th March Update
Interesting developments over the past 3 weeks or so.
It’s only about a month since day 1, but as this is only a 12 month challenge, I do want to front-load workloads and developments. Going from £50/day to £100/day is going to likely take the same amount of time as going from £0 to £10/day, but of course, the upside is so much more.
The primary rabbit hole research process had to be paused for a couple of weeks during March. This was due to creating a massive 11,000 word and 20+ video course in early March whilst working on analysing another business concept, so this project slowed due to this.
Some other unforeseen elements also happened in this time.
2 VA’s left, including one that had been performing really well over the past few months and was going to be a big part of this business. Weirdly he never officially quit, just one day I never heard from him again. AWOL.
These type of things can happen but having hired close to 100 VA’s at this point, only once before had this ever happened in the past 15 or so years, again this was with a good team member so it was quite annoying that they just went AWOL without any warning, despite being incredibly social/friendly and productive only days before this.
Weird one…. But we move.
But an update into everything.
First an easy but interesting one - Etsy
The stores we built to test proof of concept have just not gained any traction, Etsy is also not in my wheelhouse of skills so this test actually worked really well, because it was so bad…..
Sometimes things working a little bit can be an absolute killer to long term overall personal success.
It’s more difficult to walk away from a business doing £1,000/month profit, than it is to move on from one doing nothing.
So Etsy is killed and gone from this case study.
What’s good is that even during the 40 or so hours of Etsy business research, I managed to utilise some of the concepts for the KDP business and build this out even further.
KDP Business update:
On the KDP business side we’ve split into 2 separate brands [Later this was combined back into one brand for ease of accounting/tracking etc], currently they are still quite vague, but one is going to be aimed at kids products, puzzles and more medium content books.
The other is higher content in a mix of higher quality recipe books and full non-fiction books in the 30,000 word range.
These second brand books are more difficult to build but longer term should be more profitable and stick-able (in both profit, rankings, reviews etc).
Currently we have launched 1 KDP product which is a colouring book for kids. This was primarily created by Midjourney and a VA, so it’s a very efficient creation process, but the product is probably not good enough to rank and earn profits monthly on its own, so this is basically being used for just testing for the time being.
The 3 main products that are going to be developed (all 3 of which are in-development as we speak) are:
Puzzle book for adults - cross words, sudoku that kind of thing, simple product but good search volume.
Air fryer recipe book - complete with Ai creation imagery that looks great, calorie and macro information and a strong design concept. This niche looks good and the keywords are high search volume.
ADHD guide - a 30,000 word ghost-written and medically proven scientific self help book. Similar titles in this field do very well, if we can get the rankings and reviews this should be a good angle.
In the next update I’ll get into how we are going with these and the specific numbers if we have started making any sales and profit for any of the titles.
As mentioned in the intro, the primary concept is to develop a digital asset that we can then earn from in the future without any additional day to day work.
Again, as per part 1 of the doc, the whole idea is to create this 6-figure digital business in only 12 months and maybe sell it for this amount or at least have the ability to sell this if required.