fbpx

Making a Million Dollar Out of Thin Air

It sounds surreal. A million dollar out of thin air? How can you create money out of nothing. You can’t. But you can create money without having any money. Like you do in an employment. Although, you probably can’t make a million dollar with employment. Then how can you make a million dollar without investing any money. Only a few people can imagine something like that. Let me assure you, it’s possible. Not just possible, I personally know dozens of people who have done it.

You start with doing work that has no associated cost. The only cost would be your time and effort. Like starting a YouTube channel with your phone. Just like my friend ZSM did. Or you could work as a freelancer on UpWork / Fiverr and build your way up to becoming an agency or creating a product. Or you could just write a blog. Or create a following on Instagram or Facebook to be an influencer. Or you could sell arts and crafts, or T-shirts and hoodies on Etsy, or TeeSpring or Printful. If you’re a developer, you could be selling services on Fiverr and eventually start making plugins, apps and themes for WordPress and Shopify creating a product and a value-asset.

Let me assure you, I’m only scratching the surface here. If there are 99 ways to make money online without investment, I only know of 1. And I’ve written about what I know here. My brother recommended me this channel. May be you’ll find a lot more options to kick-start your internet journey there.

In summary though, there are hundreds of ways to make a living on the internet. Hundreds of things that need no capital to start. And hundreds of them that can eventually make you a million dollars. Sure, you’d most likely need to pivot at some point, but you can most certainly get there. Let me talk a bit more about the pivots below.

Suppose you start as a T-shirt designer on Fiverr. You sell time and skill to make money. Eventually you pivot and also start selling your designs on Etsy and use a print on demand to fulfil your orders. Once you get the hang of it, you now want to hit a larger audience or a global market. You pivot again and you take your designs to Shopify. You now invest a lot of money that you have made thus far in audience acquisition using ads on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest etc. You find more print on demand services in different countries so you can locally fulfil your orders. Eventually, you’re doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. You have created a million dollar value-asset. All with sheer hardwork and no external funding or investment. You have successfully turned $1 into $1,000,000.

I don’t want to mention names here for the sake of privacy, but I know at least one millionaire in Pakistan from each of those categories: an influencer, a designer, a blogger and a developer.

The question is do you just like reading articles with a million dollar in the title, or are you gonna take actions.

How VC Funding Can Kill Innovation

A few days ago, I published a blog post about my views on the future of the open internet. The post mostly focused around Twitter which went from being a very open platform to becoming a very centralized platform completely killing 3rd party apps that it stole innovation from. I believe all these decisions were financial and were driven by pressure from the investors.

Twitter & 3rd Party Apps

A lot of features that we see today on Twitter were actually originally developed and created by 3rd party apps. In fact, the first twitter client for both Mac & iPhone were developed by 3rd parties. Some of the clients got acquired by Twitter including TweetDeck & Tweetie. TweetDeck’s support was killed from all platforms except for Mac. Thousands of other apps were ruthlessly killed by discontinuing API supports.

Financial Decisions

Twitter said the decisions were made to discontinue support for “legacy APIs” at the same time acknowledging that no new APIs will be created. In my opinion, the decision was a financial one, and largely driven by what the investors wanted off Twitter.

Fred Wilson, a VC who invested early-stage in Twitter said in a blog post he wrote in 2016

In the early days of Twitter, there were third party applications (Summize for Search, Tweetie for iOS client, etc). These were all built on Twitter’s API. If Twitter had imagined itself as a protocol instead of an application, these third party applications would not have had to compete with (or get bought by) Twitter. But at the time, there wasn’t an obvious way for Twitter’s founders and management team to benefit from a protocol-based business model.

Fred Wilson

Posterous & Twitter

But the damage wasn’t limited to Twitter clients. Twitter acquired and closed other services too.

Posterous was an ultra-simple blogging platform with focus on social media integration and ultra-easy mobile blogging using emails with support for many forms of media.

Posterous grew at a very fast rate and had over 15 million users by 2012. They ran a wide-spread campaign asking users from smaller or dying platforms to import their blogs to this new dead-simple platform. Anyone who did that most likely regretted that decision as Twitter acquired Posterous in May 2012 only to shutdown the blogging platform, and all blogs hosted on it in the next 6 weeks.

All for financial reasons.

It’s Not Twitter

I don’t hate Twitter. I love it. But everything that Twitter has done was done in the financial interest. And somehow I don’t think it is what Jack wanted off Twitter. If he did, he would have had built Twitter like this from ground-up. But he didn’t. Because he had different plans for Twitter. Plans that obviously changed as financial concerns got in to the picture.

And it isn’t Twitter alone. I only expressed my thoughts with reference to Twitter in continuity of my original post about the open internet, which was also written with Twitter in mind.

All large tech companies have killed platforms and services, acquiring only to shutdown, for financial gains.

And while it looks sexy to say that we’re trying to change the world, with decisions like these we’re actually just trying to change our own lives and those of our investors’. As killing innovation isn’t how you change the world.