He "Did Nothing" for Years and Still Built a $42K/Month Business

Sometimes you're doing something even when it feels like you're doing nothing. Sounds weird, right?

It's funny, because whenever I'm writing one of these intros, or telling a stranger what I actually do, I get the same reaction: "Wow, you do a lot." And in my head I'm like, no, not really. This is nothing. It's not enough. It's not getting anywhere. I don't know if anyone else has that voice, but it's a real one for me.

This week, we're talking about someone I found online who built something real off a small daily effort. Not a grind. Not a launch. Just showing up, a little bit, but with consistency.

First time reading?

Upload a file, make money. Apparently, it's that easy.

Angus Cheng took a personal, boring problem and built a product out of it, all by himself. As of last year, that product is doing $42,000 a month. He built one narrow tool for one narrow problem: turning a PDF bank statement into a CSV or Excel file. Not something I'd ever want to build myself. But he named the domain and the content exactly what people already type into Google.

The growth is organic search, not ads. He tried Google Ads early and lost money on it, the same thing I keep hearing in my own newsletter cohort: don't waste money on ads early, wait. The people who find you through search are already pre-qualified. They typed the problem themselves. They're more willing to pay before you've said a word to them.

There's a reason for that beyond just "they wanted it already." Nobody likes being sold to. The second your spider sense feels a pitch coming, some part of your brain throws up a wall. But when you find something yourself, you typed the problem and the answer just showed up, there's no pitch to resist. It doesn't feel like marketing, it feels like discovery.

Here's the marshmallow to your s’mores: he frames his own involvement as doing nothing. To me, doing nothing is lying in bed watching Netflix. He kept writing blog posts. He published a book about the business. It's not zero effort, it's low daily effort relative to the outcome. Small, boring pieces of effort, stacked over a couple of years, add up to $42K a month.

So when you're feeling like I do sometimes, like you're not posting enough or moving fast enough: you don't need to post daily to make progress. Two to four times a week still moves the ball down the field. That's literally how Angus got here. Slow, boring, maybe a little ugly, but consistent.

The move to steal this week: pick your own narrow, even boring, specific problem, and name the page after the literal search query, not a clever brand name. It's not exciting, but it still works.

Look at your own product, or the idea sitting in your head. Does the name match what someone would actually type into Google? Or does it require them to already know your brand? Are you spending your energy building a brand with a cool name, colors, and fonts, or building something people find because they're already looking for it? It's okay to be a little boring.

👋 I’ll see ya next week! — Dana

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