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Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Can I start a brand new online business and earn $100K in 90days?

 For better or worse, this question is phrased to accept only a yes or no answer. The questioner is not asking how to start such a business, or what type it should be, or how much money they might need to invest in getting it up to speed.


Therefore, I think the only legitimate answer is "yes."



90 days is a fairly long time, depending on how you look at it. You can do a lot in that period. Just take a look at this article on Medium by Moiz Ali, one of the founders of Caskers: How Two Non-Technical Cofounders Grew & Sold Their Startup for Millions — Personal Growth


He writes:


"It took us about 3 months after launching to reach a $1M annualized revenue run rate."


Had they "earned" $100,000 by that point? Who knows? But it sure sounds like they were in the ballpark (gross sales of around $83,000/month).


This brings us to another issue with the question's phrasing: what does "earn" mean? Does it mean gross sales, or net profit? As everyone in business knows, the two things are utterly different. A company can have literally billions of dollars in sales but no net profit, and such a state of affairs can go on for years.


In this case, I think it's totally ambiguous. I really don't know what the questioner wants to know. If I had to bet, though, based on my own history, I would say they are looking at net profit.


A long, long time ago, as a boy or young man, I was hooked by a few get-rich-quick scheme ads and sent away for their "programs." This question reminds me of that mindset. It took a while, but I eventually realized that you don't start a business so that you can earn $100,000 in 90 days, or $8,000 in 30 days, or whatever. A business continues. A business is not a "program." A true business is a "going concern." It's going to last for years and years and bring you income every month and every year. You take a salary and distributions and pay taxes and have a lawyer and an accountant and work at it every day.


So the question itself is unfortunate. Because after 90 days of hustling and selling and building and writing and paying contractors and rushing around to set up your online store or whatever you choose to do...then what? Are you going to take your $100,000 profit and shut the thing down? Close up shop, buy a ticket to Thailand, lie on a beach for a couple of years drinking Singha, and then try to figure out how to make another $100,000?


I sincerely doubt it.


Taxes alone will suck up about $33,000 of that (don't quote me).


After those 90 days, you'll have customers or maybe even clients. You'll have customers on day 91, and customers who ordered from you on day 89 who are expecting their product or service on day 92. You'll have a lot of money coming in, possibly as much as $80,000 a month or more. You'll have ads running, and a website you've paid for, and maybe even someone working for you.


You're just going to stop? No way.


You're going to keep doing it. You're going to shoot for $100,000 a month, $150,000 a month--who knows, maybe even $1 million a month (after all, you were smart and hard-working enough to get to $100,000 in 90 days). You're going to get more and more sales and more and more customers. You'll probably even have an employee or two by that time to handle the money and the clients and the customer service and the returns and the emails and the website and all that stuff that you don't have time to handle anymore.


Pretty soon a year will have gone by. Then another year. Suddenly it'll be 2020 and you'll be making a wheelbarrow of money and laughing all the way to the bank, as they used to say in all the get-rich-quick-scheme ads.


Businesses are not short-lived, one-off, flash-in-the-pans (flashes in the pan?). You don't just jump in, make a bunch of cash, and get out. (I'm sure there are rule-proving exceptions to this, but so few that it's not worth mentioning.)


As far as what you should actually do...who knows? If I had the answer, I might even do it myself. One thing I do know: it's a hell of a lot easier now than EVER before to start a business. In the "old days" when I got out of college, there was no Internet or Web. There wasn't even email, really. Starting a business was damn hard. If you wanted to sell something, you pretty much had to open up a store, or start manufacturing whatever it was and try to get a sales rep. I guess you could place ads in the backs of magazines like those get-rich-quick schemes always said...


Now all you need is Shopify or a Wordpress plug-in, some products sourced from Alibaba, and a few dollars to run ads on Facebook or Google or whatever. (Yes, I'm simplifying, but there's quite a bit of truth in that.) Or an iPhone to shoot some videos, or whatever.


So even if you're not sure if you can make $100,000 in 90 days, figure something out and take the plunge. You just might create the next big thing.




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