I Have 90 Days to Make $10k/mo—Here's my plan

Key Takeaways

3 months ago I left my sixf fig data science job to pursue entrepreneurship full-time since I have a video all about why I left that role I won't get into that however here I will talk about how it's going so far and my plan for the next 3 months for how I'm going to get back to my full-time salary but now as an entrepreneur this journey started for me on July 14th 2023 which was my last day as a data scientist at Toyota when I walked out the door I had my SES on three main goals which mapped to the three key pillars of my business Consulting my community called the data entrepreneurs and content my first goal for Consulting was to land one single client that came through an inbound lead so essentially a client found me through a Blog that I wrote or a YouTube video that I made and reached out to me because they wanted to work together on some data science project the second was to get 100 people in attendance across all Q3 events in the data entrepreneurs Community third and finally was to generate $11,000 in one month from my medium blogs and of these three goals I only managed to hit one of them which was Land one client that came through as an inbound lead ironically this was the one that I was most worried about because the relationship between content and Consulting clients is a very unpredictable one while I had always known that content was a great way to generate leads in land clients it was all theoretical until I finally landed that first contract and what surprised me about many of my inbound leads is that they did not come from my most popular content in fact the client that I'm working with currently found me through a Blog that I wrote about topological data analysis which is not only an esoteric data science technique but is not even an approach for using in the project that we're working on together however the most significant takeaway of this for me is seeing this idea of cont content turning into contracts become a reality which gave me a boost of confidence and a signal that I'm on the right path as for the second goal of getting 100 people in attendance across all Q3 events I fell short of this goal while we only had 62 people in attendance I still see this past quarter for the community to be a success one reason for that is this goal of 100 attendees was very much a stretch goal and A good rule of thumb when you're dealing with these types of stretch goals is that even getting 60 to 70% completion can be considered a success this goal accomplished a higher level objective of growing the community a few metrics that reflect that are the Discord Community almost doubled in membership our email and newsletter list almost quadrupled and then our YouTube subscribers increased by 42x so we went from five subscribers on YouTube to about 210 and at this point we're even past that so this failure or success however you want to look at it really inspired ired a new direction for the goals in Q4 which I'll touch on a little later in the video and the final goal of generating $1,000 in earnings in one month for my medium blog turned out to be a bit of a roller coaster ride which I feel is very representative of my life as an entrepreneur medium is a blogging website which I first discovered through technical articles coming from towards data science I've been writing on medium for almost 3 years now putting out content about data science entrepreneurship and other things that I find interesting and if you've been following me on YouTube you probably notice that most of my YouTube videos have an Associated blog with them in June 2023 I made almost $500 writing on medium and the way this works is that anytime a medium subscriber reads one of my blogs medium pays me a portion of their membership fee coming into July 2023 my rationale was since I won't be committing 40 hours of my week to my full-time job I'll have more time to make more blogs on medium so if I double the amount of blogs that I write right I should be able to double my earnings this sounded like a good idea until in August something unexpected happened medium changed their monetization structure which took my monthly earnings from $500 all the way down to $200 even though I was putting out more content on medium and so by the end of August I had basically given up hope that I was going to hit this $11,000 goal but I still move forward with the plan of making twice as much content on medium then something unexpected happened yet again my blog series all about large language models started getting a lot of traction in the final 2 weeks of September and generated about $800 in earnings which brought me $20 Within Reach of my $1,000 goal but of course $980 is less than 1,000 so I technically did not hit this goal my main takeaway from this experience is that entrepreneurship is a wild ride and what I find helpful in the face of all this uncertainty and volatility is to find the work intrinsically rewarding and for me making content isn't about making money while that is a nice upside to it the main benefit that I get from it is that it gives me a way to structure and continue my learning which is super important in a space that is as rapidly evolving as data science and AI That's How The First 3 months went as a full-time entrepreneur now here's my plan for the next 3 months I again set three main goals for the quarter corresponding to each key pillar of my business and if I manage to hit all these goals I'll be in a place where my income will match what I made working full-time as a data scientist which was a little more than $10,000 a month I'll go through these goals one by one and talk more about why that goal is important and how I'm going to achieve it so starting with the first landing 20 hours a week of client work going into q1 the reason that this goal is important is that the overwhelming majority of my Revenue comes through Consulting this is about 90% or more of my business's revenue is from Consulting engagements My Hope Is I can hit this goal of 20 hours a week of work relying solely on inbound leads coming from my YouTube videos blog posts and other content that I put out there however given the unpredictable nature of content this cannot be my only strategy that's why if things aren't looking great halfway through the quarter I'll start an outbound campaign to try to get more clients what this could look like is reaching out to other Freelancers in my network to see if they know of any prospective clients this could be cold emailing or cold dming local businesses and finally applying to contracts on upwork the next goal is to put on 9 to 12 community events and this is about double the number of events that we did in Q3 and the idea is if we double the number of events we'll also double the number of attendees and continue to grow all the different Community channels the reason growing the community is important is because the value of the community scales with the number of members so the more people in the community the more people you can learn from the more people you can collaborate with the more jobs are listed in our job board the more projects are listed in our project board the more people showing up to networking events and all the other amazing things that can happen when you're interacting with like-minded people who are trying to go to the same place as you and while the community doesn't generate any Revenue directly it actually costs me some money and a lot of time it provides me with tremendous value in other ways and hopefully it does the same for other people too three of the biggest benefits I found through running this community are as follows first and foremost is learning you can learn a tremendous amount from someone that's just a few steps ahead of you I've learned a tremendous amount about freelancing and Consulting from data scientists who have been doing this a bit longer than me and on the flip side passing along lessons to those who are a few steps behind you in a sense I find is intrinsically rewarding and helps me solidify my my understanding of these Concepts because a lot of the lessons of Entrepreneurship you're not going to find in the textbook anywhere and I find this type of information is best learned by talking directly to practitioners the second big benefit for me of this community is support in other words sometimes it's great to just have someone to tell you you're not crazy the entrepreneurs journey is definitely not the norm which often leads to entrepreneurs being constantly misunderstood by friends family and others however that one stimulating ation with someone that gets it with someone that is on a similar journey to you makes up for the 10 conversations with people that don't understand what you're doing and the third big benefit is alignment and collaboration in other words when you and the person next to you are going to the same place that alignment naturally generates opportunities for collaboration that takes you both further even faster than you could have gone alone and the third big goal for this quarter is to keep up the content more specifically what that means is posting two blogs a week or two videos a week or one blog in one video a week posting three to five times a week on LinkedIn and posting one to two times a week on Instagram and Tik Tok while content generates some revenue for me so about $1,000 a month at this point the Main Financial upside of making content as a data scientist comes from the inbound leads that it generates for me but of course the leads aren't the main benefit of making content like I said before the key benefit of making content for me is that it gives me a way to structure my learning and keep up with the rapidly evolving space of data science and AI not only does content force me to read articles watch YouTube videos write example code do projects using whatever new technique that I'm learning but it also forces me to synthesize these learnings into a narrative which gives me a tremendous amount of clarity and understanding of these topics there's one last thing that has given me a lot more clarity and a good perspective for looking at my goals for this quarter often times with the uncertainty and volatility of Entrepreneurship things can get hard and it can be easy for me to lose perspective of why am I doing this why don't I just go back to a full-time job where I don't have to worry as much I don't have to stress as much the income is guaranteed why put myself through all this trouble and so what helps me in keeping a positive mindset is looking at all these goals through the lens of learning and giving these two aspects of learning and giving makes it easier to maintain that positive mindset which could be elusive in the ups and downs of Entrepreneurship and so when things get hard and when things get uncomfortable I can just remind myself that it's hard because I'm learning it's hard because it's new and then when I'm putting in a bunch of work for the community or I'm putting in a lot of work for content and maybe it feels like it's not worth it reminding myself that you're helping someone you're helping someone understand a complicated subject you're helping someone level up their data science skills you're giving someone the opportunity to speak to the community about their passions about their expertise you're giving a freelance client access to AI giving them the opportunity to leverage these new technologies in their business and I found that to be kind of like a superpower you know if you're just doing something for yourself it's easy to give up but if you're doing something for other people it makes it easier to stay motivated and engaged in the work that you're doing and so I'm leveraging both of these mindsets learning and giving to help me stay engaged stay productive and stay motivated this quarter if you have any specific questions about my decision- making for transitioning into entrepreneurship or how it's been so far or any questions on why I set my Q4 goals as I did please drop those in the comment section below I'm happy to share anything I've picked up along the way and as always thank you so much for your time and thanks for watching