How I made $54k in a single month selling WordPress Woocommerce Sites.

It was early 2017, I had just gotten married. So I took a break from work to spend some time with my wife. I was also burning through my savings faster than I can replenish it ( Nigerian weddings are expensive 😂 also taking too much time off work after a wedding wasn’t a great idea )

Anyways back to the story… like every success story, it begins with an epiphany. I was bingeing through YouTube one day, when I saw this video by Patrick Bet-David from valuetainment about time compression. Check it here ->

Here’s an overly simplified version — He basically talked about how reducing the time it takes you to deliver your service, from the moment you get the order to the final execution can increase your revenue. The idea is — If you can do it in less time, you can serve more customers. Which in turns means you make more money.

At this point in time, it usually takes me 3 weeks (meetings, design, and building) to deliver one website. On a good month, I max out at 6 clients a month. I was charging an average fee of $600/website. My clients loved my work, I was getting recommended all the time, but I just couldn’t keep up. So the villain here was time.

The discovery:
After I watching Pat’s video, I sat down to brainstorm how I can reduce the time it takes me to deliver one project. While examining my old projects, I noticed, I was building a lot of e-commerce websites and they all had similar structure. Apart from the branding, almost everything else was the same.

The breakthrough:
That was when I thought to myself; what if I built an e-commerce template and sell it for half the price of my custom designed websites? The color would be black and white, you pay extra to customize the colors, I do the setup (It takes 30s to clone from source. Content swapping takes 20 – 40 minutes), you upload your products with screencast video that I would send to you.

Boy was I right! The customers didn’t care if they had a template design, they just wanted a functional website where they can sell their products. Although the first one month wasn’t great, I only managed to get one customer from twitter.

Things picked up and went viral from there after I ran a Facebook ad. “An online store with everything you need” only for x price. With option to make a deposit and finalize payment at a later date. My WhatsApp was blowing up with orders. I had so many orders that I wasn’t able to tell who paid for what domain, or remember their balance or product categories.

For days I was going through WhatsApp chats sorting and matching customers order to domains and servers. I just wasn’t ready for it. I setup an excel sheet to help me stay organized. Even that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t find anything at the time to solve this problem for me.

I needed some sort of digital folder / customer account tool: where I can store my customers data, invoices, drop notes about the customer’s order, set reminders of due dates, etc.

That my friends was how I came up with the idea for UsePaperCloud.com But that’s a story for another time.

In conclusion — What did I do right?

My final take is — There’s a huge market for people who want services to be performed for them. Tap into that. Not everyone is tech savvy to setup something as simple as a Shopify store. Also figure out how you can reduce the time it takes you to deliver your service.

If you enjoyed this post please do checkout UsePaperCloud.com it’s a simple small business CRM toolkit.

Thank you for reading through 🙏🏽.