January 13th, 2021
This is an excerpt from the Starter Story newsletter
I just heard about this product called “Newsletter OS” created by Janel from Barcelona. She reported having made over $30K in a few weeks.
What is it? It’s an instructional wiki for people that want to start their own newsletter.
She reported it took her about 150 hours to create. She made $1K on the first two days after launch. By my calculation, she’s now made over $30K.
This can be replicated over 1000s of topics & industries
This concept would be successful over lots of more ideas. For example, you could create an “OS” for:
- Learn to code
- Get into a good college
- Get into law school
- Getting into coding bootcamp
- Get started with tennis
- Running a marathon
- Getting set up as a therapist
- Buying stocks
- Starting an e-commerce store
- Email marketing
- Woodworking
- ANYTHING from our 3,000+ business ideas
- I could go on for hours. You get my point…
All you need is some specialized knowledge about the topic.
How it works
It’s super simple.
I love this as a side project
Whether you’ve got a full-time job, or you’re running a bigger business, this could be an easy side project to:
(1) make some money selling knowledge you already have, and
(2) grow your audience by helping others
You’re just selling your notes
Do you already take notes and do some writing for yourself? Well, this project is essentially just open-sourcing your notes to the public.
I realize there is more work than this... but not much.
Also, knowing you may open-source your notes can be motivation to write better (and become smarter).
You can validate in days
I don’t even think you need to spend 150 hours as Janel did.
As long as you’re an “expert” in some small, specialized topic, you could start selling & validating in a few days.
And even better, your “wiki” is a work in progress, being updated as you go. As you promote and sell, you can add more stuff, create fancy graphics, etc.
It’s “open source”
What I also like about this project is that it has the benefits of open source.
By using a tool like Notion, you can invite friends, collaborators, and more experts to improve the content.
Easy to repurpose content
Don’t have an audience? Well, the content of the wiki will build your audience.
Take your notes (or the pages) and repurpose them to YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, or even when someone emails you a question about XYZ.
It’s a good SEO play
And lastly, you can have lasting sales with SEO. You can convert your Notion project to a website with something like Super.
That way, customers can find the content of the wiki directly through search engines and then buy the product to get the “full suite”. Try to collect emails on these pages.
Want more?
If you liked this business idea, I’ll be sending another business idea like this tomorrow at 12:15PM EST to our premium newsletter. Sign up here to get it for 35% off, ends today.
P.S. Credit goes to @csallen for this idea from the Indie Hackers podcast.