I decided to create this journey to monitor my progress, and hopefully get some advice from the community, and hopefully motivate some of you guys!
Let's see where this can take me:
Background & Overview:
- In May 2024 I sold my ecommerce store for just shy of $100k
- I am not a developer and don't know how to write a line of code
- Video/File host has been in development everyday since May!
- I stumbled across this niche and always wanted to own a "software" company
- Large competitors profit $100k+ a month (don't ask how i know
)
End of January Goal:
$5k
End of February Goal:
$10k
End of March Goal:
$20k
End of April Goal:
$50k
These are some big (and delusional) goals. It could be possible, I just need to be really smart and work hard.
Here are some of our expenses before launching:
Domain: $11,000 (I regret this, but you live and you learn)
Development: $15,329
Servers: $1,275
Misc: ~$1,000
The issue with not being able to write a line of code, is that I have to wait on developers to finish certain tasks. I have so much motivation to just work 24 hours a day (It has been frustrating waiting for them to finish).
I'm thankful that I have the money to be able to hire these developers, otherwise this journey would come to an end really quickly.
I am basing my business off of Streamtape. They are a massive competitor, and we have a very similar structure and look to them.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
- Not only do we have to match them, but we need to be better in some way to actually gain uploaders.
-----We launched on January 1st of this year-----
What are you doing about Legal issues?
I didn't want to own a file host that has to worry about the FBI knocking on my door. And so, we follow all laws, which means we'll have to occasionally take down certain DMCA content.
What are you doing to grow?
Marketing is the biggest task and the most important thing to focus on (besides development & product improvement). At first, I would post a thread on forums, such as WJunction, BHW and others. In other words, I am going to where my target audience is. This has honestly not been that bad, but the growth was a burst at the beginning, and have started to fade out. So instead of having my customer go to me, I have decided to go to my customer.
I got a list of 5000+ referring domains of Streamtape and Doodstream to see all the different websites that use them as a host. I hired someone to go through each website and to retrieve and email (if there is one) and I am using an email bot to send an email sequence to each of the emails. It's hard to track how well this is doing, but it's been pretty slow tbh.
Growth/users since launching January 1st:
View attachment 411854
(Our website went down on the 8th, which is where you see that dip. And the main spike is because someone pushed a bunch of proxy traffic to the website)
We have had almost 700k+ visit from our uploaders in 13 days. This is nice, but I know that Streamtape has 3,000,000 daily users, so there is a lot of room to grow (55x).
How much money have we generated since launching?
We are using ads on the videos to generate money (mainly popads).
This is where I am starting to get scared. We have generated only $121 since launching. You might think, "oh! That's not too bad". Yes, yes it is.
We have given our affiliates/uploaders $1200 in payouts since launching. So, this is definitely not profitable (at this time). And then if you include server costs and development costs, we need to be making 10x just to break even.
Is there any hope?
Here is the good news, our CPM with our ad networks is dog-awful. I am talking $0.02 cpm. Which means if we can increase our CPM, we can start making more money (how do i do this? idk).
I have done some calculations and Streamtape makes about $.001075 for every visitor on their website. We make $.000176 per visitor. And so, if we improve our cpm by 10x, we'll be just in line with Streamtape.
- I will try and update this journey every few days, to keep track of progress and let you guys know how it's going. That's it guys. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me.
WISH ME LUCK !!!
