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Do Things That “Won’t” Work

My most successful project in the past 10 years was something that everyone else thought was a bad idea.

This bad idea went on to have a 5-year run earning over 7 figures with consistent months in the $30-$50K range.

Had I listened to everyone else, who knows where I’d be today.

Yes, getting feedback is important, but sometimes you’ve just got to go with your gut.

Be Careful What You Believe In

When I entered into my 20s, I believed in and followed a similar undergraduate and career path as I imagine many of my millennial-peers did, which was: get a degree, get a job, work your way up through merit, hard work, and good ideas.

My degree was in Journalism back when the death of the newspaper was well underway and the integrity of the industry was starting to crack, but I liked to write and it felt like a practical way to keep doing that and getting paid for it.

I wish I only knew that getting paid for it would mean making less than I used to while lifeguarding the quiet neighborhood pools while I was in high school.

That was the first crack in that belief system I’d subscribed to.

My first real job I found that paid OK was as a content writer for a big online publisher. It was my first peek behind the curtain as to what was possible with an online business.

My task was writing and updating content pages and blogs. We’d get assigned a number of new and existing pages to work through each month.

I’d blow through mine and happily inform my manager I was ready for more.

He'd sigh and chuckle, as I think he was well aware I hadn’t come to the realization that at the end of the work only lies more work, and a lot of it is bullshit.

My speed nor quality didn’t get me any raises or promotions, but I did find myself with some other tasks.

Among them, being the newly minted SEO guy and being invited to sit in on some cross-departmental meetings for broader initiatives.

In one of those meetings I shared my idea to build out a certain section of the site and create it in Spanish as well.

The existing pages did really well, and the data showed there was a ton of opportunity left.

Nobody wanted to touch it. If I remember correctly, some of the reasons included:

• We’ve tried that already.
• Too much work.
• Too difficult.
• It just won’t work.

I tried to bring it up a few more times, but still couldn’t get anyone on board.

So I dropped it.

To scratch my own itch one weekend, I built a little V1 prototype of the idea on Wordpress with a crummy plugin just to show myself that it wasn’t that hard to do. Satisfied that I was right, I left the site to run and didn’t look at it again.

If I hadn’t been so stubborn, I’d probably still be in some SEO role I didn’t enjoy today.

You Never Know What Your Seeds Will Sprout

You already know my first business attempt was a total failure if you’ve read any of the previous issues of THE SLAPPY WEEKLY.

Once it was clear that I was going to need to pivot to something else, I remembered some of my old prototype projects that were out there somewhere on the World Wide Web.

One of them was that bad idea nobody liked.

I logged into Google Analytics and was surprised to see the traffic graph steadily rising up and to the right. The site was about 2 years old at that point and I hadn’t done anything to it aside from the initial pages and features I launched it with.

That’s when it hit me that if I could help other businesses grow their websites, why couldn’t I just do the same for my own?

With nothing but my content writing skill, SEO knowledge, and rudimentary Wordpress experience, I dove head first into building and monetizing that project.

Turning on the Money Printer

I set up some simple display advertising, and I remember watching the first $10 month turn into the first $100 month and then the first $1,000 month.

I built the site up to about $3-4K/month on display ads alone.

After that, I expanded monetization with some choice affiliate offers and quickly eclipsed my first $10,000 month.

I continued to work on the site, build other ones like it, and expand into new projects.

None of that would have been possible had I decided to listen to everyone else that the original idea was not worth pursuing.

Ideas are Worth Whatever You Make Them Worth

Look, there are no guarantees that your ideas will work. In fact, most of them will probably fail.

But there’s also no hard rule that “good ideas” will outperform “bad ideas.”

I can see how the idea that drove my first 7-figure online business was bad from different perspectives:

• There were existing, established players in the space.
• The traditional way to get something like that done would have been time-consuming and expensive.
• Monetization of it was not clear.

Lots of reasons not to do it.

On the other hand, you really are never going to know if something will work or not until you give it a try.

You'd be surprised what an okay or even poor idea can do when simply executed upon.

Testing, Testing, Testing, NOW

Small tests win the day for me every time, and I believe this thinking can be applied to a lot of different businesses and business contexts.

Whether you’re a solo maker, a small team, or part of a larger organization, finding ways to get a lot of little ideas out there will likely benefit you in the long run.

The first version of the big thing you have in your head can be small and shitty. If it can get you data and send back signs of life, that’s really all you need.

If you are a solo founder or a small team, this method also allows you to run extremely lean and get extremely profitable when things do work.

Which is exactly the point of the SLAPPSHELL project.

Print Money Faster with SLAPPSHELL

SLAPPSHELL is the result of my last 10 years running small experiments and scaling winners.

Every product and service that you’ll see in the lineup is designed for a targeted use-case that I’ve seen work for myself.

If you’ve got an idea that aligns with the use-case for a given SLAPPSHELL product, you can launch, test, and validate virtually instantly.

You do that enough times, and you are bound to win.