How Much Money I made in September
September is officially over and you can wake up now. On September 1st, my wife and I launched Apetech LLC. After a month of trying to grow our very first company, let’s review what we did and at the end, we’ll talk about our October plans. Let’s jump in.
First, we spent most of the Summer creating websites for three clients. We did these pro bono for two reasons. First, we wanted to create case studies for our new company. We wanted to build credibility and show potential new clients that we had the technical skill set to serve them. The second reason was to validate the idea behind Apetech and help us determine if we wanted to commit to this or not.
Money Earned: 0. Money Spent: 0
Our first client was super easy. We had previously built their website many years ago, so all we did was modernize it using the latest technology in web development and updated their logo. The next two clients have been more challenging. For our second client, we created a full online commerce store. After trying to build a shopping cart from scratch, we realized that it was much smarter to use existing ecommerce solutions and just customize for our clients. Once we made that pivot, the second client site was created and launched. The final client has been our biggest challenge. We finished the website, but haven’t been able to launch because of the sensitivity of the client’s business. This has really helped me learn about the different types of businesses out there and how unique each one can be with their own set of rules they need to abide by.
After creating all the client sites, we created and launched https://www.apetech.me/. We launched even though the website wasn’t completely ready, but over the course of the month, we kept fixing things and we finally got to a point where we are happy with the end result.
Money Earned: 0. Money Spent: ~1,000
My wife and I then created and updated our github profiles. As engineers, Github is a great place to “show off” your code. https://github.com/aortiz1989 . https://github.com/bortiz1986 . Creating these profiles was great because it gave me the opportunity to create banners that represent our skills.
After all of that, we rebranded the Apetech logo and updated all our existing graphics.
So, why did we do all of this? Well, we wanted to be ready to receive clients. We didn’t want to do all this promotion and spend countless hours building our network and not have something to show them. We wanted to make sure that if and when people found us online, they could see our story, get to know us, and most importantly, know what they as potential customers could receive from us. Now that we had a landing page to receive folks, it was time to go looking.
The first place we decided to grow in first was Twitter. Twitter is a POWERFUL tool to grow your business. Let’s see how the result of September.
As you can see, we did A LOT! 158K impressions and 31 new followers. These numbers are small compared to others, but when compared to previous months, we had exponential growth!!
We also rebranded our facebook brand page and updated all of our social media links to reflect the apetech brand. https://www.facebook.com/apetechtechnicalsolutions Here we post our blog posts, youtube posts, and podcast episodes. We have 51 likes so far and get dozens of page views every week.
We launched a podcast. https://anchor.fm/apetech. We launched 3 episodes all about cyber security topics. Specifically passwords.
We rebranded our Youtube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa1PORa4d-rJ5SLsp3rnviQ. We grew to 182 subscribers, posted 3 videos on cyber security and 1 video on how to use Scratch.
So, after a month of working every morning at 5 AM to work on this side hustle, we’ve made a grand total of 0 dollars. We’ve invested a lot of time during September and plan on basically doubling our efforts for October.
Here’s our October plan: 1) I will not be reading books in the morning anymore. I read through 2 different books in September which ate a lot of my time. 2) Going to hit the blog game twice as hard. I’ve been writing a lot of scripts for the podcast episodes, but need to convert those into blog posts. Goal is to write about 15 blog posts during the month of October. 3) Record and publish 15 episodes for the podcast and for Youtube. Create 5 Scratch Tutorial videos and get those posted as well. 4) This is perhaps the most important one, and the area where most, if not all of our focus will go into, we are going to be participating in 6 coding challenges. This will allow us to potentially bring some money in if we win but also get our name out there. Whatever products we create, we can put for sale and also talk about them on our social media, further driving attention.
While I don’t have a plan to make money just yet, I would like to end the year having made at least $1000 to cover our start up expenses. See you all in November!!
