Share

SLAPPSHELL BUILDS MONEY PRINTERS

The last 10 years have been a journey in entrepreneurship and experimentation in online business that all started in a 100-year-old basement in Salt Lake City.

It began with stitching together upcycled wetsuit beer koozies, 3D-printed surfboard fins, and homemade t-shirts and selling them on a Wordpress/Woocommerce site.

It has evolved into a digital assembly line of money printing machines, which like 3D printer calibrations, have some quirks of their own.

When I started WAVE ARCADE, it was nothing more than a creative outlet to escape the monotony of my day-job as an SEO and my nighttime MBA program.

A decade later, it’s my primary source of income and responsible for countless new experiences, skills, and ideas.

SLAPPSHELL is the distillation of all of that.

So if you want to build money printers of your own, you’ve come to the right place.

Into the UNKNOWN with Enthusiasm

If you’ve ever wanted to start your own business and then actually began heading down that path, you are well aware of all the unknowns, obstacles, and failures that you’re bound to face along the way.

All of those things are guaranteed in one form or another, in varying degrees of volume and intensity.

But every good story begins with a challenge.

Most people quit before they even get to experience their first major failure or setback.

Just the thought of the unknown is enough to scare most people away.

If you want to build money printers, you’re going to need to learn how to welcome the unknown - even enjoy it.

We’re not literally building “MONEY PRINTERS,” but we sort of are

We may as well be building money printers since the output is ultimately cold hard cash after some set up and calibration exercises.

So yes, I like to build what I refer to as money printers. And that’s exactly what you’ll find here at SLAPPSHELL.

Money printers just mean projects that make money with little day-to-day input from me.

You have to assemble the money printer upfront, during which time it’s not printing money, but when you calibrate it right and perform the manufacturer’s recommended maintenance routines, it starts humming along.

Sure, sometimes they break down or stop working, but then you just fix it or build another.

Start with the parts of the blueprint that you know are working, try something new for the parts that failed.

How to Build a Money Printer: Step One, Do or Do Not.

Since 2018, I’ve been self-employed with the majority of my income coming from my own projects and businesses with a small side of client work.

That’s not at all to say that month after month or year after year have been barnburners.

In fact, a good chunk of those months and years have been extremely lean.

But, when you have a even just a handful of months that exceed your prior W-2’s annual salary, the leaner times are much easier to weather.

I’ve lost track of how many failures I’ve had since I started.

Here’s the thing I learned, if you really want whatever you’re after, you’re going to have to stop thinking of failures as these big negative, must-avoid events.

They’re just part of the experience.

The formula for success is simple:

-Figure out what you want. -Develop an idea to get it. -Pursue that idea relentlessly. -Iterate and adjust as new information and new situations evolve. -Pursue new ideas and variations of your original idea when appropriate. -Stay curious and continue.

The iterate and adjustment stage is where you’ll be experiencing your setbacks and failures, but that’s not a bad thing.

Your skills compound, your thinking evolves, and you move forward.

When I started on my own journey of entrepreneurship, I went all in. I quit my job, cashed out my 401K, and started right into an idea that I was interested in.

I did little to no market research and basically no validation other than it was an idea I wanted to try out.

Probably not the smartest of approaches, but there turned out to be something valuable in just jumping in the water.

While failure was obviously waiting for me right around the corner, there wasn’t much else for me to do at that point aside from dealing with it.

I was already doing it, and failing is just a normal part of it.

As cliche as it may sound, the fear of failure and the unknown is worse than the experiences themselves. Eventually the fear of it goes away, and it’s just a matter of how you manage your reactions to failures.

Bad Ideas are Cool

My first idea sucked as a business.

After about 6 months of iterating on it, that fact was becoming quite clear.

I’ll reminisce on the details of that some other time, but for now, all you need to know is that almost any idea will do as long as it gets you moving.

When I realized it was time to pivot, I had two main options:

-Try a new idea. -Get a normal job again.

As I took stock of what I’d accomplished over those 6 months and what my life looked like, option 1 sounded most appealing.

When I started, my work experience was mostly limited to content writing and SEO.

Day in and day out was mostly the same thing.

After 6 months of “failing”, I gained experience with things I’d never gotten the chance to do at work.

This included building and designing websites, running an e-commerce business and dealing with customers, creating and selling products (albeit a very low volume at that time), managing ad campaigns, and some Javascript and Python.

Some of you will read that paragraph above and say to yourself, ‘I don’t know how to do any of those things' (or whatever mix of things you think you need to know).

I didn’t either. I learned what I needed to when I needed to.

And you don’t have to learn it all yourself or all at once.

Ask someone who does, hire someone, partner with someone, pound your keys until the AI does it, or equip yourself with the right tools.

Open your mind and welcome the new experiences.

With that, the potential set of options and ideas that were available to me now were much greater than if I never started on my “bad idea” in the first place.

Even if your idea totally sucks, the experience and repetition of just starting and putting it out there still gets you closer to success than waiting for that “perfect” idea or right time.

Learning How to Build Your Money Printer

I realized a couple of things through my early failures.

First, don’t fall in love with your ideas, but don’t abandon them too early either. See where they lead.

If they lead to a dead end or a direction that doesn’t align with what you’re trying to achieve, salvage what you’ve learned and move along to the next.

When something shows promise, follow it. Peel back the layers and adjust as you learn.

Second, you don’t have to do just one thing, and you don’t have to know everything either.

My success came through testing a bunch of different ideas quickly. When one of them showed promise, I’d focus on it and expand upon it.

I’d do this by deploying little feeler versions of what I had in mind. You can call it a minimum viable product, MVP, or whatever you want, but the important thing is that it’s out there gathering data and feedback for you.

In other words, launching your idea is the most important step you can take.

When something shows signs of life, then you know where to spend more time.

After that, it’s a matter of taking a step back to understand the broader systems and flows that are making this particular successful idea work.

If, for whatever reason, you don’t think you can scale it, oftentimes you can replicate and repurpose the broader systems to create a spin-off version of the successful idea.

And just like that, you’ve built your first money printing machine.

Money Printer Blueprints: Get ‘em While They’re Hot

My curiosity and approach I’ve described above have led me to work on a few main types of businesses over the past 10 years. These have included:

-Physical, digital, and print-on-demand product sales. -SaaS Subscription sales. -Lead capture, servicing, and lead sales. -Affiliate marketing.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

When I stumbled upon the first plans for a money printer, it was a pretty manual process.

In the beginning I was doing mostly everything on Wordpress. So, I’d pull up a window with the successful idea and copy over the settings, plugins, external tools, etc. to the new Wordpress instance and start creating the new variation.

While I’ve always tried to keep my overhead and plugin-stack low, I was starting to notice some drawbacks to my system.

-Dashboards were often sluggish depending on the plugins and nature of the site. -Overhead would creep as I’d need higher licensing tiers to support new projects. -External plugins and tools were either bloated with things I didn’t need or missing a small thing I did.

I started to notice that I was spending a lot of time managing the Wordpress setups themselves, tweaking plugins, and doing all these nitty-gritty admin tasks that, while necessary to keep things running, were not at all core to the project’s success.

At that point, I had some more programming experience under my belt and a curiosity for some capabilities that I felt were outside of what I could achieve with Wordpress.

So, I decided to step back into the unknown again and try something new, and I’m very glad I did.

I started with another feeler version of an idea to test my theory. It was essentially a revamp of a previous project that I had built. The previous version was a Frankenstein-version of a SaaS product I’d been trying to cram into Wordpress for a while.

The new version was built with NextJS, Supabase, and Stripe. I was able to test it pretty quickly with some redirects from the old project, and sure enough it worked.

This project wasn’t designed to pay the bills, but it did do exactly what I was hoping.

I could now build my money printers faster and more efficiently than I ever had before.

The initial test was almost exactly a year and a half ago. The idea for SLAPPSHELL came about 6 months after that. Here we are a year later and I’m finally doing something about it.

Introducing SLAPPSHELL by WAVE ARCADE

So yeah, all my talk above about just starting your idea and launching it quickly and I still sat on this one for a year.

Raising a toddler while trying to juggle a mix of different projects has dramatically changed my perspective on my own time and energy to get things done.

Which is why I’m very excited to finally start sharing and working more on the SLAPPSHELL project.

What once took me days to weeks to launch a new project, I can now do within hours (or less if I’m particularly focused).

Not only that, but I can start running traffic to it and tracking conversions almost instantly.

Plus I also know it’s got all the core SEO, information architecture, speed, and responsiveness that I require from any site I build.

Oh, and I can now automate a bunch of things that I used to have to click through a bunch of screens and dashboards to do within Wordpress.

So, yeah, I’m excited and having fun again.

SLAPPSHELL is going to continue to evolve, but it’s essentially designed to help you launch ideas faster, run online businesses leaner, and spend less time working on the things that are not core to your project’s success.

The two main flavors that it comes in are:

-Self-hosted NextJS boilerplates that you can remix and build for yourself or clients. -Managed-service versions of those same platforms where SLAPPSHELL // WAVE ARCADE takes care of the setup and maintenance for you, so you only need to focus on running your business.

Those come with extensive documentation and tools to get up and running as quickly and easily as possible.

In addition, you’ll find a growing suite of free resources and tools with ideas and time-savers you can apply to your own projects, whether or not you're using SLAPPSHELL's.

Finally, you can enjoy what I’m calling “THE SLAPPY WEEKLY,” which will serve as the mostly-weekly catalog of ideas, progress, and case studies from the SLAPPSHELL project aimed at attracting a wider audience.

So hello and welcome to SLAPPSHELL - a place to launch your ideas faster, run leaner, and work on what matters.

Come along for the ride, bring a friend!

If you’ve liked what you’ve just read, be sure to subscribe and follow along on the SLAPPSHELL socials.

Let me know what you’re working on and how SLAPPSHELL might be able to help.

Tell a friend, pet your dog, feed your fish.

And, to borrow a slogan from the very beginning of WAVE ARCADE:

EXPERIENCE. EXPERIMENT. ENJOY.