Let's Start At the Very Beginning

When I started this blog about 18 months ago, I had a specific premise:

The idea was to create a fake travel site similar to Orbitz or Expedia using LLMs as my guide.  I didn't expect that the LLMs would provide targeted, insightful information, but I did want to document where the LLMs were successful and where they were a little less useful.  

I'll admit that I thought I'd be able to mine them for a little more information than they ultimately provided me, but the entire experiment did help me launch this blog, so I derived some value from the effort, even if the direction provided by the LLMs was little more than the equivalent of the stock motivational posters hanging in the interior conference rooms of every dreary semi-successful corporation.

My readership has since increased significantly.  My most popular post (currently chiming in at 1066 views) is Words Matter.  On average, I'd say my viewership is around 250-300 people.  This is way higher than the 25-30 people that inspired my initial awe over reaching an audience about a year ago.  That's almost enough people to allow me to hold Bot Dog Con in the lounge of the local Holiday Inn (coffee's on me, everyone!).

I'm happy with the meandering journey of the blog and its content, and, even though I've been able to knock out 4 posts a month - with one exception (I guess even blogs suffer from February doldrums), there have been a few weeks where I had to dig for inspiration rather than let it simply hit me in the face (I guess my muse is way more violent than most).

When I started researching niche businesses last week, I quickly realized I had another solid source of material that calls back to the blog's original intention - documenting my journey through the business underworld.

So, in addition to the rando posts that this blog has come to embody, I'm also planning on writing about the process of discovering a potential niche business.  Assuming that's successful at all, I'll continue writing about getting the business up, running, and maintained.  I don't anticipate that the tone of the blog will change much (ok, it won't change at all), but I'm back to having a central theme around which to organize my content and help me generate even more content especially when February comes rolling back around that doesn't originate with me from picking random words from the last known physical copy of a dictionary on the planet.

If I reach a modicum of success, I'll also have generated a how-to manual for bootstrapping a niche business that others can follow without needing to attend a dubious webinar at $199 a pop (instead, you'll be able to buy my book at the low, low price of $9.99 a pop)!

I'm literally at the very beginning of this journey, so you'll be able to see the entire process, warts and all.  For those of you wondering what I'm planning on doing with Exhibit Meh, don't worry.  I don't expect it will be the niche business I'm searching for (for reasons that will become obvious in a minute), but it's still something that's generated positive feedback and has the ability to generate some income as well.  I'll make time to continue to put effort into that site while exploring newer ventures.  In the worst case, I'm planning to post every week (enough to have Insta shame me in noting I "haven't posted in a while"), but, because the framework is in place, the effort to post content (outside of the research component) is fairly minimal, so it's not difficult to keep up-to-date.  I'm also planning on exploring the premium content option I mentioned in the last post, but I don't expect it to hit my revenue targets, so I'll need to complement my portfolio with other services/products.

Here's my exact starting prompt - I know exactly how much effort I want to put in and how much money I want to make, but have no idea how to create a business (yet!) to accommodate this desired lifestyle:

Hey Guggle. I'd like to create a niche business possibly exploiting "boring" tasks. I have a software engineering background and am looking to operate a 1-person 15-20 hour per week business with a target user base of 250 people and revenue of $25 per user per month. While I'll entertain ideas for specific niches, I'm more interested in concepts of how to identify niches, market appropriately, and execute the business. Assume a budget of no more than $10/mo. to get me started. Do your thing, oh magic mechanical beast!

If you don't want to math, that's a yearly income of $75K working half-time.  I have no idea if this is realistic at all.  Keep in mind, assuming federal and state taxes of about 20% and payroll taxes around 20%, I'll net about $45K.  Infrastructure costs will be higher, because I'll need a database and support tooling and systems for more complex offerings, but I'd be shocked if that costs more than $5K for the style of operation I'm attempting to run.  So, from a gross perspective, I'm hoping to clear $6,250 in gross monthly recurring revenue or $3333.33 after everyone else gets their cut.

[I've since revised my target down, because I still have a hard time imagining I can create a business that people want to pay for, but here's hoping I'm pleasantly surprised with what I'm able to offer.] 

And with that...away we go!

Until next time, my human and robot friends.