I had a vacation in the first week of August. I was thinking long and hard about how to generate revenue for August. There was a lot of uncertainty. I knew that I had to just focus on the Agency business and get some clients, or just focus on the coaching business. It is difficult to focus on both at the same time.

If I did not have an audience already, I would’ve focused on the agency business as I advise everyone to start with. When offering services, especially digital marketing services, it is easy to convert leads into clients (relatively easy compared to a one-to-many B2C coaching model).

Since I have an email list of 200k+ subscribers, I had to make use of it. I am paying a lot to email marketing CRMs to maintain the list. So it made better sense to focus on coaching instead of agency. Though I am excited to build the agency and start having a steady stream of high-paying B2B clients, I wanted to streamline B2C coaching first and make it automated before moving on to B2B.

What Has Worked for Me Before

I was thinking deeply about what has worked well before. It was kind of obvious. And I was angry at myself for not taking it seriously. It was the cashback training model. I have trained over 10,000 students in digital marketing using the cashback model.

The idea has now evolved. Instead of training people in digital marketing, I want to train people in freelancing. Freelancing has a higher and more focused demand than digital marketing. Digital marketing is a foundational skill. You can monetize that skill by getting a job, doing freelancing, applying digital marketing knowledge to build a consulting or coaching business, or doing affiliate marketing. In my earlier program, 12 modules were focused on Digital Marketing, and four bonus modules were focused on monetizing digital marketing skills.

I observed that from this digital marketing training program, most of the success stories were from students becoming successful freelancers. I call them “Digital Freelancers” because they are freelancers in the digital marketing domain.

I have flipped the model in terms of content. Instead of freelancing is one of the bonus modules, the new “Micro Freelancer Program”. It’s a 10-week program that helps students get their first freelance client.

Sold Out in 3 Minutes: 16.5 Lakhs in One Webinar

I built the anticipation for a while and asked people to apply for the program. I told my audience how they will be able to get their first freelance client guaranteed after they finish this program. And I mean it. Anyone doing this 3-month training program will get their first client.

Check Transparency Report

We enrolled 110 students in the webinar and another 15 students in the next few days.

A total of 125 students at 14999 bringing in 18,74,875 INR in revenue.

Apart from Micro Freelancer Program we sold 100 Inner Circle memberships and also did a meet-up in Mumbai for my community.

I am not sure if we can make this kind of revenue in September 2024 because I cannot launch a batch every month, at least not right now.

We might go into a “loss” for September because I am sure that the costs will be higher than our revenue. August’s profit of 15 Lakhs is not typical for an average month.

I am planning to launch Batch 2 in October. Stay tuned for my updates.

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju

Updates from July:

• We got the website up and running for MicroStartup.com

• We got a few new agency clients, but they are not long term retainers yet

• I hired a new team member (podcast about it coming soon)

• Got our payment gateway account setup at Razorpay.

We made a total revenue of ₹2,33,220.88 for July 2024 in MicroStartup.

Where did the revenue come from:

• ₹1,60,000 from Deep Marketing Agency. Some of the clients we’ve worked with have an NDA with us so we cannot reveal the client names. We had a few clients and this is the total income from all clients put together.

• ₹23,219.88 came from Newsletter Subscription (Substack). People pay $50 a year for a paid subscription at blog.digitaldeepak.com

• ₹50,000 came from coaching.

• ₹1 because Razorpay verified our bank account. (Should we count it as income?)

Our opening bank balance was 1.41 Lakhs. We closed it with 2.79 Lakhs. Not bad.

Total profit: ₹1,38,175.40

We are updating our reports on a Google sheet.

Check Transparency Sheet

Let’s see how we perform in August. Right now the track record is not long enough to put a monthly revenue chart. That can be done once we have at least 6 months of revenue.

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju

A lot of our sales and revenue is still happening in my previous digital marketing agency and training company. I am working with experts on how to merge the two in the most compliant way possible.

Our new company MicroStartup has 4 divisions. Education, Services, Software and Platform.

We started with the education through my personal brand and distribution. We did a 2-day workshop on the topic of “Deep Marketing”.

Here’s the numbers for June 2024:

Check on Google Sheets

TLDR:

• Total Revenue: ₹1.23 Lakhs

• Total Profit: ₹1.15 Lakhs

• Cash in the bank: ₹1.41 Lakhs

Things to consider:

• No salaries were withdrawn in the month of June. Right now we are just 2 directors, and I own 99% stake in the company. My other director is my book keeper and he owns 1% equity. Because we need 2 directors for a PVT LTD company.

• MicroStartup is kinda supported by my previous company because we used the office and infrastructure and had no expense for it. So it’s not practical to say that we made 1.15 Lakh profit with no support.

• The old company will be closed or merged with MicroStartup eventually and we will only have 1 account where all the income and expense will be recorded.

Stay tuned for future reports.

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju

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