We’re three months into the project now and whilst it’s still early days, that means there has been time to experiment with a few different ideas. Admittedly with wildly different levels of success.
The bad news is that we haven’t managed to claw ourselves out of the red we found ourselves in previously. The good news is that some revenue streams are proving to be sustained and others have been added.
There are a couple of different approaches that are apparent. One is to have several small-ish income streams that are added to over time and eventually we have enough smaller income streams adding together to be making some decent monthly profits – I suppose you could call this the “trickle” method. The downside of this is that maintaining these smaller income streams is often quite time consuming and the effective hourly rate on some can be paltry.
The other approach is to dream big and land the big fish that will make a serious difference all in one go. The upsides here are obvious -a big payday could make a huge difference to the funds, especially at this early stage. It also tends to be a less time intensive method in the long run (at least based on an hourly rate). However, the risk is that the “big fish” never bites and leaves you sitting forlornly on the banks with only your tin of maggots for company. It’s entirely possible I’ve stretched this analogy way too far…
In any case, probably more by accident than design, we have each found ourselves pursuing slightly different strategies at this stage which have combined the two approaches.
User Testing
In September Chris was in hospital for a planned operation (no, he’s not selling his kidney for this venture… yet). The recovery time put him out of action for a while so he didn’t get to do much in the way of BeMyEye missions, but still banked a tidy £15.00 from a couple of jobs he picked up post-recovery in this App.
On the plus side, being laid up for medical reasons did mean that he was near his computer for longer than usual, which meant that he picked up a couple of User Testing jobs and he’s apparently going to be writing an article about this income source in the very near future and sounds very promising. Look out for that.
We also banked a penny as we set up our PayPal account to pay directly into our HSBC bank account. PayPal send a test transaction with a code on it, which is where the penny comes from. Not exactly riches, but we’ll take any pennies we can get at this stage!
Stashbee
Ben has been bringing the bigger dreams to the table so far with Fat Llama and more recently setting up with Stashbee, a site for renting out spare space to those that need it. As of yet he hasn’t had any bites, but we’re confident some day soon someone is going to need to hide a body in a loft, and Ben will be laughing all the way to the bank.
If this is to come off, it should prove to be a tidy bit of ongoing income for not too much hassle which is the dream really.
Airtasker
This is an app I stumbled upon and thought it seemed like it had potential. It’s essential a gig-economy microcosm where it’s possible to post a job advert for anything you need, and have people bid on it. Jobs I’ve seen so far range from a simple audio recording task right up to weekly gardening and even setting up someone’s online business (for an asking price of £300 – jog on matey). Ben and I have had a little look and bid on a few things, but as of yet haven’t been successful. We’re a little unsure about it but plan to explore it further.
Once we’ve got a handle on it, there’ll be a blog post along about it. That’s assuming I haven’t been chased out of town by someone who I promised I knew all about how to plumb in a dishwasher… it can’t be that hard, right?
| Income | £39.31 |
|---|---|
| Kantar / TNS | £12.08 |
| Be My Eye | £15.00 |
| User Testing | £12.22 |
| Other | £0.01 |
Again, the old mantra of having to speculate to accumulate rang true and there were some fairly minor expenses incurred in the completing of the BeMyEye missions. The happy news is that our expenses are certainly dwindling as the weeks go on.
| Expenses | -£3.00 |
|---|---|
| Be My Eye | -£3.00 |
Overall total
Amount at the start of the month: -£76.93
Expenses: -£3.00
Income: £39.31
Total value of the Fund at end of July: -£40.62
So, charting our progress since we started, we’re only slowly climbing back up to the zero we started at. Worse still, £24 is of the fund value is held in stamps – not exactly the most liquid of assets (if you want to buy some stamps, get in touch – seriously).
Plan for October
The goal was to clear our debt during September. That didn’t materialise so obviously first and foremost in October we’ll be aiming to reach the break even point. At the current trajectory that should be comfortably achievable. However, we are likely to incur some expenses as we club together for a bit of a 3-way challenge against each other.
I don’t want to give too much away just yet as we’re only just getting started, but the idea is to fight it out to make the most profit on a certain task. There’ll be more to follow on this next month as we get ready to fight it out like three ‘roided up WWE superstars of the finance world.
Speaking of which… below is an accurate representation of Chris celebrating being able to make £12.22 this month from the comfort of his sick bed without even having to flog an organ.
Good write-up Dave! I have no idea what we are going to do with these stamps that we’re accumulating, but every little helps!
Looking forward to our October challenge that you briefly hinted at towards the end of your post. I consider myself to be the Randy Macho Man Savage (who even came up with that name?) of this blog and am looking forward to the showdown we’re going to have.