From $13.55 to a First $100 Month: A Solopreneur Experiment

My scoreboard reads $13.55. That is what my newest site has earned in commissions so far.

I am not embarrassed by it. I am excited, because $13.55 is my starting line and every line has a finish.

The plan

Each week I will run one small experiment on my own online businesses and report it here: what I tried, what it cost, and what came back, in real numbers. The first target is a $100 month. I think it is closer than it looks, and I would like you to watch it happen. When I hit it, I pick a bigger one.

Most success stories I know begin with a long list of things that did not work. The people in them tried many ideas, dropped most of them fast, and kept the one that grew. I have dropped a few already, and each one taught me something the next one used.

Being wrong costs me a few hours and a few dollars. That price lets me keep going.

Your first experiment: the Tiny Bet Card

Before you start anything this week, write four lines:

1. The bet: one sentence on what you will try.
2. The cap: the most money and hours you will spend.
3. The deadline: the date you will look at the result.
4. The signal: one number that tells you it is working.

Keep the bet small enough to lose and laugh about. A bet you can afford to lose is a bet you will run.

I use this card on my own projects. Next week you will see one filled in with real numbers, including a bet that did not go my way.

Free tools to start your first bet

Two places to begin this week without spending a dollar:

• Beehiiv has a free plan for starting a newsletter.
• Systeme.io has a free plan for a landing page and an email list.

These are affiliate links. If you sign up, I earn a commission and your price stays the same. That money funds the next experiment, so every signup moves my scoreboard toward $100.

Coming up

• Volume 2: The day I found 46 broken product links on my own site, and why I left them alone.
• Volume 3: Three websites I shut down this year, and the one lesson all three handed me.
• Volume 4: What happened when my AI assistant wrote "I tested this" about a product I never touched.

A note on how these posts get written: I draft them with Claude, an AI assistant, and I edit every one before it goes out. The numbers come from my own dashboards. The AI helps me write faster. It does not run my experiments.

Subscribe below and you get Volume 2 the day it ships.