The last few weeks have included some very positive developments.

Successful Launch

On November 8th, I set up a WordPress site at SixFigureCoding.com. My idea was that my next project would be teaching job search skills to developers.

I was able to leverage my existing AngularOnRails.com audience and immediately get over 100 subscribers at SixFigureCoding.com.

I wanted to get to my first dollar of revenue as fast as possible. So, on November 17th, I did a launch. What I sold was access to a Slack group for $19 and a coaching call for $249. Nobody bought the coaching call but 8 people did buy the Slack access. My total revenue for the launch (which took place over the course of 3 days) was $152. The first sale took place on November 17th, meaning it was only 9 days between the time I set up SixFigureCoding.com and the time I made my first dollar.

This is an improvement over Angular on Rails which took me 2 months to monetize. (And actually, Angular on Rails existed as an unmonetized blog for about 2 years before I made any real money off of it, but during that time I wasn’t really trying yet.)

And it’s a big improvement over the 18 months it took me to make my first dollar of revenue from Snip (my failed hair salon scheduling software business).

Next Steps

My planned next steps for Six Figure coding include:

• Guest on career-related and coding-related podcasts
• Guest post on relevant high-traffic sites
• Write articles on SixFigureCoding.com to build up a body of useful content
• Launch a light, relatively low-priced ebook

Something I’ve learned relatively recently is the wisdom of tapping into other people’s audiences rather than trying to create my own from scratch. A year or two ago, my traffic strategy might have been to write a whole bunch of blog posts to try to get traffic. That probably would have worked but it would have taken needlessly long.

This time my approach is different. I figure that when I guest on podcasts, I’ll get at least a little inflow of traffic as well as a backlink in the show notes which will have SEO benefits. Similar deal with the guest posting.

My thinking with the ebook is that it will have two particular benefits. First, it will get the feedback loop started early. I know that my first attempt at an ebook will not exactly be a bullseye. I’ll probably be at least slightly off the mark and I’ll have to go back and adjust based on buyer feedback. Since the first incarnation of my product will be imperfect and there’s nothing I can do about it, I might as well launch that first incarnation in a low-key, low-stakes kind of way.

Second, I expect that having an ebook, even a very small one, will do something to put my name on the map and lend me some credibility when I’m doing my outreach campaigns to podcasts. I’ll no longer be just “Jason Swett” but “Jason Swett, author of [whatever I decide to call my book]”.

Long-Term Vision

I’ve long been a fan of patterning off of successful people’s business models. For this one I intend to do a hybrid of Brennan Dunn and Ramit Sethi, mostly Ramit Sethi.

My understanding of Ramit Sethi’s products is that they’re mostly high-ticket items in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. Right now I’m thinking it could make a lot of sense for me to offer a program that is, say, $97/mo for 6 months, with the idea being that by the end of that 6 months you have a better job (or your first coding job).

Ramit’s “authority piece” is a published book. Brennan’s authority piece, on the other hand, was just an ebook. In the beginning, I think it was even just like a 30-page ebook. That’s the model I plan to pattern after because it seems a lot more achievable, especially in a short time span.

So several months from now, my product ladder might look like this:

1. $49 ebook
2. $599 job search program

That’s probably too big a gap between the tiers so it might actually look something more like this:

1. $49 ebook
2. $299 job search program (“light” version)
3. $599 job search program (“pro” version)

If I can sell just 200 copies of something that costs $500 (just to pick numbers that make the math easy), then that’s $100K per year. That’s actually my #1 2018 goal, to earn $100K from SixFigureCoding.com.