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Month: April 2020

Here’s How I Flew Business Class For Free

For years I had read tens of blog posts of travel hackers paying a tiny amount of money for flying business and first class flights. It does sound mythical, right? It even seems like a cheap way to get clicks to generate ad revenue. I thought so too, until I made an effort to actually try it.

Just a few days ago I wrote about this strange money rule for the wealthy. A few months ago, I also wrote about why credit cards are great for internet marketing. But if you use both these concepts together, you can create even more value. Read on to find out how.

If you have read this blog before you may know that I spend a great amount of money on Facebook ads for my e-commerce stores. For every $1 I spend, I get 1 loyalty point on my credit card which is worth 1 cent. Not a lot, right? I’d need to spend $100,000 in order to get 100,000 points that could be worth $1000. But that’s what the points are worth if I use them to make purchase directly from my credit card.

The points can be worth a lot more if I move them around as airline miles and so I made an attempt to do so.

I bought an economy class ticket for $772 while the business class was for over $1800.

I then moved 20,000 points from my credit card to Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles program. I earned these points by spending over $20,000 on Facebook ads. At the rate of 1 cent per point, these points had a face value of $200. But since I used these 20,000 points to upgrade my economy ticket to business class, I received $1028 in value from these points.

Since I’ve never paid for the business class I’m not sure if I’d feel good about flying one. I’ll probably be confused between the value received in comfort vs the cost incurred. With miles however, it’s a no brainer.

180 Days Streak – And An Update On My Life

I have been writing now for over 180 days. There are many things that aren’t great about life right now. But in comparison, there will always be more things that are right and less that aren’t and that means we need to always be grateful and keep moving forward.

Mental Health

The COVID-19 situation has surrounded us for too long and this will probably stay around for much longer. I have not been able to see the few friends I have in a really long time which was the best part of my day everyday and one of the biggest advantages of the freedom given by online businesses. I miss that and it’s affecting my already feeble emotional health.

There are other things affecting me too. I had an insanely good business a few years ago, which over the years isn’t as good as before. There are many friends and colleagues who weren’t there for me during this time. For this, I’ve learnt to realize that everything is my own problem and no one owes me anything. If anyone offers support, I need to be grateful. If someone doesn’t, that’s okay.

During this time I have also had colleagues whom I offered a lot of support to, but they have deprived me of both business and happiness. I’m trying to learn to deal with this too and hopefully I will.

Blogging

Some of the days I didn’t want to write at all. Somedays I’ve done it just because I had to do it to keep the challenge going on and somedays I’ve put my heart and mind into writing this blog.

There are many reasons that I continue to keep this challenge alive. Some of them concern me, and some of them concern you.

For the reason that concerns you, I have continued writing despite being down many days, on a holiday somewhere in between, and not having enough time many days, is because I want to showcase the # 1 most important thing about life and businesses to stay afloat: consistency.

Whether you’re building a business or just trying to stay alive, you gotta try every single day. You can’t take a single day off. I hope my year long effort can showcase that to the readers with my own example.

Appreciation

I can not appreciate my wife enough during this time of COVID-19, emotional crisis, professional crisis & more. She has stood by me, which she has always done. But not just that, she’s working many extra hours because our daughter is home-schooled by her now as schools are closed. Our domestic help is on leave because of COVID-19, and she has taken care of most of the household responsibilities in addition to many that she already had.

Like me, she also works online and is a freelance graphic designer. She has also given up on her work which not only affects her income, but also her future prospects of work, as well as her rankings on many freelance platforms. She has been the mother and the wife I hoped for. Thank you.

Gaming The System & Little Tricks

I finished yesterday’s blog by asking if gaming the system is a good idea to make money or not. I have gamed the system all my life. When I ventured into internet marketing, the first platform I drove traffic from was Digg.com

It was a social news site kind of like reddit that doesn’t exist in its original form anymore. It was an insane source of traffic and Zeeshan mentored me well on how to really make the best out of it. We could get most stories to the front-page on a daily basis. We drove 10s of thousands of unique visits. Not just that, our content reached the eyes of editors of the largest publications in the world which would often result in backlinks and further traffic as well as SEO juice from them. I built my blog SmashingLists almost entirely out of Digg and sold it for a pretty hefty amount back then.

I loved it. It wasn’t just traffic, it was really high quality traffic. After the demise of digg and trying a few other things like StumbleUpon etc, I ventured into viral Facebook marketing. I did that briefly for about 3 months. It certainly was the darkest shade of grey. I don’t encourage anyone to choose this shade in their lives. It’s not worth it.

After that with my co-founders Saad and Zeeshan, we leveraged the organic traffic from Facebook by building and acquiring Facebook pages. Very white hat and we did it for the longest time. We built many websites and made a ton of money.

In summary, gamification of the system has been the heart of our internet marketing journey. I’ll go on to the point to state that if big tech companies claim that they haven’t done it to “hack growth” they lie. Wasn’t Facebook built by scrapping off the student list of all Harvard students? Aren’t AliExpress affiliate ads served on Torrent website popups? I have seen all these mainstream apps like ride-hailing, food-delivery, pretty much everything, capitalizing the grey areas.

Growth hackers study the systems, the AI, find the shortcomings, and capitalize on them. That’s what they are designed to do.

But some people suggest gamification is a small guy game. A few days ago, PG published this tweet

I agree with him.

I have seen or known 100s of people who have made millions and tens of millions all by capitalizing the “little tricks”. It’s totally possible. It works. There are probably a million case studies of millionaires who made it through beating the system.

Although, really big money, the unicorn status, the billions, are not made with little tricks and gamification. They are made by solving a problem so big that it helps millions and tens of millions people use the service or the product. I’m still willing to bet though, that the growth of these companies are still carried out using the “little tricks”.

Since people from emerging and under-developed world are often not so well off, to them $100 seems like a big deal and they would happily settle for little tricks and gamification as long as it provides them the opportunity to make that $100 and a road that would eventually lead them to become somewhat wealthy.

To finish this off, if you game the system, you’ll make it. If you build a product or service that helps millions of people, you’ll make that every hour what you’ll make with gaming the system in your lifetime. But even while you build a product or service that helps the people, don’t forget to game the system along the way.

Why Patent Office Is The Favorite Hangout Spot For Many Of My Friends

Many of my friends keep a sharp eye at the patent office. No, they aren’t coming up with genius design ideas that needed to be patented. They are also not patent trolls that are registering patents left and right only to troll inventors and extort money out of them. Then why do they hang around in the patent database so much? I’ll explain.

One of my friends who is a tech reporter uses patent office in order to find out the upcoming releases by the tech companies. It is obvious that if Apple is working on an upcoming feature, they will patent that first before it goes into production. This way, my friend is often able to get some super early scoops.

Another friend of mine who is an internet marketer uses patent database to get a better understanding of “policies” instead of simply reading the policy page of whatever services that he use. The policy page is almost always a guideline and you can not understand with full clarity what you can and can’t do. For example, if you’re trying to understand what ads you can and can’t run on Facebook, a policy page could be a good place to start from. But if you like to play on the line, Facebook ad patents could get you a better idea of the inner workings of the platform.

These are obviously seriously advanced use cases but a great resource for people who rely on tricks and hacks to game the system. Whether one should game the system or not, I’ll write more on this tomorrow.

How Me And My Co-Founder Ended Up Doing Hajj

I planned to perform Hajj with my wife in 2014. Two weeks before we had to fly, we found out that we were expecting our daughter. After consulting doctors, we were advised that my wife shouldn’t be commencing this journey. I had paid $15,000 for the two of us and our travel agency had already made all bookings. They couldn’t issue a refund for her at this point in time.

I called Saad and told him about the situation. I told him that there’s no refund for my wife so may be if he ever considered Hajj, he might want to join instead. The best part about his reply was that he didn’t say that he will call me back or he will let me know or that he needs time to think. He said “sure, just let me know what to do”.

There are three takeaways for me from this.

  1. Like they say Hajj is destined for each individual, I started believing that. He was meant to do it and he was meant to do it at that time.
  2. That for him a sacrifice of $7500 both for his Allah and his co-founder didn’t mean a thing.
  3. If my co-founder hung together with me during a time like that, there’s nothing he can do more to prove that he’s worthy of being a good co-founder.

Often in life, someone may present you with opportunities that seem great. They may appear instantly rewarding and they might even make you very wealthy but “If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. – Naval Ravikant“.

The Strange Money Rule For The Wealthy

As strange as it may sound, the rich can buy the same things as others at a discount. Not just that, the rich can buy certain things at no cost at all. There are many examples to showcase this, but one example would be parking your money in a bank in a country of your choice to get citizenship. Just for placing your money in a country and financial institution of your choice, with no cost to you.

Similarly you could be flying businesses class upgrades for free or have access to business lounge access at various airports, just for having certain amount of wealth. While those who do not qualify for this threshold are asked to pay instead.

The weird thing about this is that rich are able to afford much of what they are given for free while the poor can not afford much of what they are asked to pay for. But the reason this happens is because money is a tool that is used to make more money. When you park your funds with a financial institution, they can use that to generate money for themselves and pass on a fraction of that to you in terms of certain benefits.

This is just a tiny example of what the wealthy get for their money. The real reason why I wanted to outline this today is because the wealthy generally never spend their principal. They always use money as a tool to generate more money for them which they can use for all of their expenses. They don’t use time as a tool to make money like most other people do. They use money as a tool.

Sure, you will need to trade time to make money if you’re just starting off. But if you want your end-game to look like the one outlined here, you should be making every effort to save that money to use as a tool.

$3000

On my twitter feed, someone’s trying to raise $3000 so that he can pay for his mother’s cancer treatment.

On my Whatsapp, someone’s looking for financial assistance because he only made $3000 an year and is out of work now.

In Canada, they are paying $3000 each month as financial assistance to those who lost their job due to COVID-19.

80% of the world population would be incredibly happy if only they could make $3000 a month for their family.

Someone somewhere is just shy of making $3000 each day. Because he’s not quite there yet, it’s stirring bit of anxiety in him. He has bartered a big part of everything good about him to be there. Yet, he’s just a little short. He probably needs to trade more of himself. Because he wants it bad enough, he’ll get there. Will it be worth it in the end? That’s for him to decide.

You Only Have Finite Number Of Tries

For the past 21 days, I was working on one of our kitchen related e-commerce stores despite that the economics weren’t working in my favor. I usually know much sooner when to scale and when to drop but I hung around with this one longer for only one reason: I knew this could scale really really well. The caveat was, I couldn’t scale it profitably and so I spent 3 weeks trying to turn it around. I can launch 7 new stores in this time-frame.

Yesterday, a video popped up in my email inbox. Garry is a really smart guy and has experience working with and assisting hundreds of startups. The video was relevant to me and it was about timeboxing. You only have finite number of tries. Don’t waste them.

I’ve stopped chasing that store now.

Here’s the video

My Friend Showed Me An Obvious Opportunity Hidden In Plain Sight

Zeeshan introduced me to Sajawal about an year ago. I think Sajawal has a bright chance that he’ll make it. Not because he’s the smartest guy I know. But because he’s a curious guy. In the past year, no one’s asked me as many questions as him.

Sajawal sent this chart to me yesterday and it’s unsurprising.

The sales for books have increased by up to 300% as everyone’s stuck at home. People have been selling face masks and sanitizers left and right but I won’t touch that. We started a store selling home fitness equipment as people continue to try to stay fit during the lockdown but I didn’t think of an obvious behavioral change and that is people are reading more books as they are stuck at homes.

Selling books right now is not only interesting because there’s demand for them but also because they can be shipped digitally.

Starting today, I will be exploring this area to find something worthy of selling.

Happy selling.

A Billionaire’s Advice [Part 2]

Yesterday I wrote about a meeting that I had with a billionaire in NYC and some of the advice that he gave me. When we met him, our situation was unique and it made us feel invincible. So I asked him some questions that a lot of other people probably wouldn’t. Because we had a unique relationship with him, he was very kind to us, and wanted to genuinely help us so he welcomed all questions.

The unique situation that we had was that we had successfully setup the US infrastructure including a company, payment gateway and access to other business tools that weren’t available to people in Pakistan. We were at the top of our game with regards to the revenue that was being generated and like other Pakistanis we had extra-ordinary tax benefits available for IT services and IT related services. So when he recommended that we move to US, a natural question came up that we’re able to use most American infra without paying any taxes, why would you ask us to move to US, bear higher costs of doing business and also pay insanely high taxes.

His answer was tax is what you pay for the privilege of doing business in the US. The privilege that you think you have is not nearly enough compared to the privilege that you will have once you’re here. He was vague like that. He didn’t give any specifics of what privilege other than what we already have.

He reminded us once more, “I was going to be a teller at a bank 5 years ago but I’m not. The US has something to do with that”.

I didn’t follow his advice. I’m still here in Pakistan. I know I missed a lot of things. As a digital nomad, that’s okay. But if you’re looking to build the next big thing and want to amass insane amount of wealth, you should give his advice a thought.