How to Make Your First $1,000 Online

In this video, we're gonna break down the 1K ladder for the step-by-step approach to make your first $1,000 online. If you actually just follow the instructions in this video step-by-step, then I guarantee this will help you start your journey to entrepreneurship, and you might even make $1,000 from actually just following the advice in this free YouTube video. Now, in case we haven't met, hello, my name is Ali. I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur. I've been documenting my journey of making money on the internet since 2017, when I was a broke-ass medical student at Cambridge University. And a few months ago, we ran a thing for our audience called the 1K Challenge, where we had loads of people all around the world join a six-week challenge to attempt to make the first $1,000. A lot of them said that the experience of actually making the first dollar, the first $10, the first $100, was completely life-changing. So the whole idea behind this journey from zero to $1,000 is not that you're suddenly gonna get rich off of $1,000. The point of it is to give you the baby steps to teach you the skills of independent income generation, from you actually doing it, rather than just watching videos about it and hoping for the best. In this video, we're gonna break down exactly how to make your first $1,000 online, hopefully over the next 30 days. Even if you've never made money online before, and even if you don't have an audience that you can sell stuff to. Now, there's lots of different methods for making your first $1,000 on the internet, but the one that we like to teach to our students, I think of it as the 1K Ladder, and it's based on four missions. Mission number one is to make your first $1. Mission number two is to make your first $10. Mission number three is to make your first $100, and you can see where this is going. Mission number four is to make your first $1,000. And the reason I like to go in this sort of step-by-step mission-based fashion is because it allows a beginner to the world of entrepreneurship to dip their toes in one small step at a time. All right, so let's start with mission number one, making your first $1 online. Now, the execution of mission number one is really straightforward. All you basically need is a way to accept payments on the internet, and you just need to send a link to someone and ask them to support your business for just $1. This is the very first thing we got all of our students to do as part of the 1K Challenge. Literally, you just need to sign up for a payment processor, and you just need to send a link to your friends, being like, hey, will anyone support my entrepreneurship journey? It's just $1, and some people will pay you money. For example, we've got Marcy, who said, today is one of the best days of my life. I didn't think that $1 could bring tears to my eyes. It's just mission one for me, but it's already changed my life because I will not be the same again. We've got Sydney, who said, they weren't kidding about this being emotional either. The first $1 brought tears to my eyes. And then we've got Luca, who said, it might seem small, but for me, this is huge. That $1 represents action, commitment, and proof that I'm on the next move. I'm beyond excited, full of energy, and ready to take on what's next. These are the sorts of feelings that happen once you make your first $1 on the internet. For me, I made my first $1 on the internet when I was like 12 years old, when I did like a freelance web design project for some dude I met over the internet. And that completely changed my life and was my gateway drug into entrepreneurship. So how do you actually make your first $1 online? Well, as we talked about, you basically sign up for a payment provider that you can use to send a link to family and friends and either ask them to support your business for $1. Stan's Store is generally the one that I recommend for complete beginners getting started with making money online. We have like an affiliate deal, free trial type 30-day thing with them. So if you want a free trial, there'll be a link somewhere down below. Stan's pricing is around $29 a month, right? So if you are serious about actually making money on the internet, I'd recommend signing up for Stan. It's sort of like Shopify, but for like selling online products primarily. But if you are in fact just dipping your toes into the world of entrepreneurship, you can sign up for a platform like Gumroad, which does not have any monthly fees, but they do take a 10% cut of any transactions you make. And so for some of our students who are taking this seriously and who have some disposable income, $29 a month is absolutely nothing. And so you just sign up for Stan. But for others of our students who are like terrified about the thought of losing money and don't want that like monthly subscription going out of their pocket, they sign up to Gumroad and they're okay with just giving away 10% of their transaction volume. In addition to signing up with one of these things, you will either need a Stripe account or a PayPal account. Now Stripe is accepted in a bunch of different countries. This is the list of countries that Stripe is accepted in. And so that would be my recommendation. But if you are not in one of these countries, then Stripe is not yet accepted in your payment region. And you can probably sign up to PayPal, which is accepted in like almost every country on earth. But this is where we get the first hurdle of entrepreneurship. There is some level of friction associated with actually signing up for a merchant account that lets you receive pence. But trust me, you wanna push through the friction of the process because this is how you get started with making money on the internet. You need a way for people to actually be able to pay you. And the reason when we were doing the 1K challenge, we made this the very first mission is because this friction is a gate that holds so many people back. Just literally the logistical path of signing up for an account for Stripe stops people for years, for like even thinking about making money on the internet because it seems scary and it seems hard. It's like, oh my God, do I have to like register a business and stuff? You probably do not have to register a business. In most countries, you can probably just make some money on the internet if you really wanted to. And then once you get to a certain revenue threshold, at that point you think about registering a business. Honestly, I would just take your situation, ask ChatGPT, it'll actually give you very reasonable financial advice on this. So the idea is step number one, you sign up for a payment provider. Step number two, you sign up for a platform like Stan or Gumroad that lets you sell stuff. And you create a product called something like support my business and you price it at $1. And then you go to your friends and family and you say, hey mom, hey dad, hey spouse. This is kind of random, but I am dipping my toes into the world of entrepreneurship. Please can you support my business for $1? And then they'll be able to pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay or their credit card or whatever. And now congratulations, you've got a dollar into your account. Now the way we ran this in the 1K challenge is that you had to submit a proof screenshot that you've actually received at least $1 before we unlocked mission number two, which is to make your first $10. We sort of did this progressive unlock thing and our students really appreciated having this progressive unlock because it literally forces you to actually take action. Obviously we don't have progressive unlock in this sort of video, but if you're actually serious about making your first $1,000 online and you don't yet have a way of accepting payments and you haven't yet made even a single dollar, I really would recommend just pausing the video right now and doing that before you progress on with the video because otherwise this video is just gonna be one of those other things, one of the other hundred videos that you've watched about how to make money on the internet and yet you still haven't actually made any money on the internet. So what we did is that we got our students to post about how they get mission complete and we had an automation behind the scenes that as soon as someone posted mission complete with a screenshot, then it would unlock the next mission that they could take part in. For example, we've got Gina who's an intensive care nurse in Toronto whose partner wired her like the $1, $2 or whatever and this is the screenshot that she made. This is the revenue screenshot from one of our students in Greece whose husband wired her the $1 and so she's made a dollar online as evidenced by her Stripe account. We've got this guy called Kevin who's a high school student whose mom and one of his friends supported like this $1 support my business type situation. Just receiving that $1 and like going through the friction of setting up the payment account is like genuinely life-changing for people. So if you haven't yet done it, I would 100% recommend. So that is mission number one. Congratulations, you are now a one figure entrepreneur. All right, so before we move on to mission number two, there is one thing that often trips people up along this ladder, which is at some point, you actually have to tell people about the thing that you might be selling and that is where a lovely little tool comes in that my team and I have been using for the last several months. It is called Stanley and they're very kindly sponsoring this video. So Stanley is basically your AI head of content. What it does is that it connects to your LinkedIn, your Instagram, your ex account, your threads account and it learns how you tend to write on those platforms and then it helps you come up with new ideas for content that could resonate with your audience and it even helps you create first drafts of the posts themselves. And the thing that we use it personally for is repurposing. So I will record YouTube videos, I'll write my newsletter manually and I do all of these live sessions for our Lifestyle Business Academy that we then have transcripts of. But then if we wanna take the stuff that I've already written or said and we wanna just sort of package it up into different formats, that previously used to be a manual process involving a team member, like going through the transcript, figuring out what the key points are, turning it into an Instagram carousel on Canva. But now we actually get Stanley to do most of the heavy lifting for this because it can just take the transcript and it can already create a first draft of a carousel, which saves my team quite a lot of time, which means all the team have to do is the quality control, making sure it's legit and then running it by me to make sure that this is actually a reasonable representation of what I actually believe. And so for example, you can use this for carousels, which generates short punchy lines and you can also use it to write whole long form LinkedIn posts or Twitter posts, for example, and that gives you the content in more of a fleshed out way. Obviously, I still go in there and change a little bit of stuff, but it's super nice having the first draft to be able to edit rather than having to write it from scratch. The other cool thing about Stanley is you can actually just straight up text him. So if for example, I'm out on a walk, I can literally send an iMessage to the Stanley phone number. And so if I've got an idea somewhere, I'll just text that idea to Stanley and then Stanley will already have a first draft in my voice based on how I write on social media platforms that will give me more inspiration for what I actually wanna say in that post. So if you're into this whole repurposing thing, and if you spend absolutely ages rewriting the same idea that you've sort of said in one format and trying to rewrite it for other formats, then a tool like Stanley can save you a load of time. If you'd like to check it out, there's a link down below and thank you so much Stanley for sponsoring the video and let's get back to it. Next, we come to mission number two. You put a product on Kickstarter and people give you money for a product that is not yet created. They essentially pre-order the product and Kickstarter is a good way for entrepreneurs and businesses to validate a product idea before actually building it. And so basically for mission number two, we are applying the Kickstarter method and we are selling a product for $9. This can be any kind of digital product you want. We're selling it for $9, but crucially we are not yet building the product. We are just trying to get one person to pay us $9 as a pre-order for a product that we have not yet created. And then obviously we'd tell them it's a pre-order. And then once we get the money, at that point we'll spend a week or however long it takes creating the product and we send it to them with our thanks for them supporting our business. Again, you go on Stan's store, you create a new product, you figure out what the product is gonna be, you whip up the sales page, you price it in $9 and then you send the link around to friends and family and see if anyone wants to buy this thing or pre-order this thing before you actually build it. And by the way, if you're struggling with ideas for what this $9 digital product is gonna be, don't worry about it. We have made a custom GPT just for you. Well, it's not actually just for you, it was actually for our students in the 1K Challenge, but that's long gone now. And so you just talk to the custom GPT, it'll ask you a bunch of questions about like your background, your experiences, your passions, et cetera, et cetera. And then it will give you a bunch of different ideas and it will even help you write the pre-order page or the sales page for your $9 product. So I don't have any ideas, should absolutely not be an excuse and a reason for you to not take action on this thing where I'm literally handing it to you on a platter and not even asking you to pay any money for it. So here are some examples of some of the products that our students in the 1K Challenge made. For example, we have Mingyao. Mingyao is like an endurance runner or something. And so he built this sort of three by three endurance focus formula pre-order thing. He says, when I published it in the morning and sent the link to a few friends, I had my doubts, but within the hour, I already had my first sale. I thanked my support and kept busy for the rest of the day. I didn't check the income page until late in the evening. It's still a pre-order, but the response surprised me. There's actually a demand for my offer. 16 people have put their trust in me. And the last count, it was approximately $120. So in Mingyao's case, he literally made his first $100 without having created the product yet because he just offered a pre-order link to his friends and family. And the friends and family were like, oh, this looks sick, sign me up. They paid him the $9. And then he spent a week like actually putting together the product and sending it out to them via email. And they were all happy. And he was happy because he got the money and they were happy because they got the product and they got the chance to support a friend. We have this post from Grace, who made $10 from a digital product. What I created, your first 90 days in Dubai, an ebook on the rookie mistakes I made when I first moved and how you can avoid them. It's everything you need to know before booking that ticket to Dubai. I'm sharing all of these as like real life examples of real people just like you who decided to try and take a leap and decided to actually try and make money on the internet. And no, I'm not trying to sell you any course on this thing. The 1K challenge was like a one-off thing that we ran last year. We might run it again this year at some point. So if you're interested in maybe joining, you can sign up for my email list. A video like this is kind of targeted at the complete beginner that's probably been thinking about starting a business for a while and trying to make money for a while. But if you haven't yet taken that first step, what I'm hoping is by seeing these kinds of stories of real people, it will inspire you to actually take action. Don't wait for us to do the challenge before you actually take action on this, if you are at this point in the video. Anyway, Grace's biggest fear going in, that I wouldn't get a single sale. At one point, I even thought about buying it myself. I'm glad I didn't. What actually happened, I told myself I only needed one sale to start. So I pitched it to my mom and she bought it. Did Grace's mom really wanna spend 90 days in Dubai? Probably not, but she did it to support her daughter. And so her daughter now made $10 on the internet. Amazing. Obviously, pitching to your mom is not a viable business strategy for building your million dollar lifestyle business over the longterm, but it is a great way to get started. And again, the idea here is we're taking baby steps to make that first dollar, that first $10. Another example, this guy Tobias created this thing called the Gentle Boundary System. How it felt, he felt excited and nervous. His biggest fear going into this was nobody would care. What happened? Almost nobody cared. But after stressful days of rewriting my entire pre-order sales page over and over, I finally posted it on Instagram and almost immediately an old friend bought it. Turns out she just mainly wanted to support me, so I'm not sure it really proves there's a market there, but hey, baby steps, it's all part of the process. Exactly, this is 100% true. You could just start a service-based business and just sell a $1,000 product to one person. But a lot of times, especially if you're a bit of an overthinker, especially if you like to do things right first time, and especially if you're a little bit more risk-averse, entrepreneurship can feel very scary if you just plunge into the deep end, but it becomes very manageable if you just get $1, and then nine, and then another few, and then another small steps here and there. We've got Alessandro who sold 18 days to better sleep and less stress. We've got Vicky who sold a guide to polycystic ovarian syndrome for women, where her first sale came from a friend who recently got diagnosed. We've got Dominic who made a simple app that lets you organize folders on your Mac. We've got Susan who made a 13 kg weight loss meal plan that she sold to her friends and family. And so you can just see that a lot of these are just like random products where someone has taken a thing that they've done already, or that they have some level of experience in, and they've packaged up their knowledge or their insights into either a Notion template, or a PDF, or a worksheet, or a mini app, or super simple things like that. Crucially, in mission number two, you are selling the product before you build it using the Kickstarter method. We had some of our students in the course being like, wait, but isn't this a scam? Like how can you possibly sell something before you build it? I was like, well, it's only a scam if you're like misrepresenting it to people, right? You're telling them, I don't yet have this built, so this is a pre-order, but you'll get it within seven days. And then once you get a sale, it gives you a good reason to actually build a product within the 70s, right? Easy enough. So at this point, we are one figure entrepreneurs because we've asked friends to support us for a dollar. And we are now two figure entrepreneurs because $1 plus $9 equals $10. So you've now made $10 on the internet when you hadn't made any money on the internet before. This again is absolutely life-changing. Now, mission number one and mission number two are really, really, really straightforward. Almost everyone in the challenge got through mission number one and mission number two. Mission number three is where things actually get hard because mission number three is you're gonna take your $9 product, which you've now built because, right? Because, you know, like someone pre-ordered it and then you built it within seven days by, I don't know, using whatever you needed to build it. You now have a product that you can actually sell. And so to become a three figure entrepreneur, to make your first $100 online, you are gonna sell this to 10 more people. And so you need to find 10 people to buy your $9 product. This is where loads of students in our 1K challenge lost their minds because they were like, oh my God, I can't possibly find 10 people. You probably can because you can just message people that you know, your friends and family, people in group chats. If you have a network on LinkedIn, you can post on LinkedIn. You can post on your Instagram stories. You can post on like WhatsApp groups. For example, we have a Sue who says, I can't believe I did it. This one was hard because I pivoted and I had to do two products, but we did it. The feeling is so surreal. And I actually teared up a bit. She made $113. We asked, what advice would you give someone struggling to reach the $100 mark? She says, reach out to people. I know it's intimidating and getting a no is soul crushing. But oddly enough, once that happens, you get over it super quickly and it will no longer matter. Completely agree. Next we have Omar who did this alchemy type product. Turn everyday items into 10 unforgettable experiences that spark curiosity and connection with your child or something like that. So he's like a parent and so he's doing this sort of parenting product. He said, I've hit the $100 mark and become a three figure entrepreneur. How it feels, honestly, it's a bit mixed. I'm proud of the consistency, but it's been tough. All my sales came from warm outreach to friends and family. I haven't yet sold to a stranger and that's been the hardest part. Seeing views and clicks, but no unknown buyers. Still, I'm pushing on. Welcome to the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship. Advice for others, just keep doing things and learning. If you can't get a warm outreach sale, it might meet a rethink or it might just be a niche audience thing. For me, I'm still aiming for that unknown, first unknown customer and we'll celebrate it when it happens. Then we have Vernon. Vernon had a cool product. What was Vernon's product again? I think it was this like mini guide on how to speak up at work. He says, I'm blown away. I completely created my offer a few days ago and started watching Mission 3 videos over the weekend. I got to the sending messages lesson and made sure I emailed at least five people. In the end, I shared it in a few group chats. I sent a few one-on-one DMs. I posted on LinkedIn and even logged into Facebook for the first time in ages and shared a post about it there. It definitely helped that I managed to make three sales and doing mission number two, but I've reached the goal in less than 24 hours. We asked Vernon, what was the most difficult part of mission number three, i.e. trying to get 10 sales for your $9 product? I was completely and utterly unstressed about posting, very, very relaxed, but now more sales have come in. Holy ----. The stress levels have increased beyond all recognition. Now I'm more worried that everyone will think the product sucks. Plot twist, it sort of kind of will because it's my first digital product and that's okay, wonderful. And that bugs me because some of the people who have bought aren't just professional peers, they're actual peers. What was the most useful thing from the course so far? One of the many recurring themes from all of the different calls, Ali's calls, the expert session, the freedom calls, was the thing you want is on the other side of the thing that you are avoiding. There is no escape from doing the thing, nah. What advice would you give to someone struggling to reach the $100 mark? Similar to the lesson I shared from mission two, are you sure you've told as many people as you possibly could about your offer? And don't worry about sharing or posting online. The majority of people aren't even trying to achieve what we set out to do. Don't let the reason we don't achieve our goals be that we were too worried about other people's opinions. So super simple, right? For $1, you just like ask a friend to support you for a dollar. For $10, you just create a pre-order page for a $9 digital product. And then for $100, you just try and sell it to 10 people. And yeah, this takes a little bit of a hustle. And like, this is, you know, the skill that you're developing as an entrepreneur here is the skill of actually reaching out to people and trying to sell a thing and putting yourself out there on the line. And this is really scary. And if you haven't done it before, it's even scarier. And you're gonna think, oh my goodness, what are my colleagues gonna think? What are my friends gonna think? What's my family gonna think? All these people are gonna laugh at me behind their back. All the students we had in our challenge had those worries. And then the ones that actually posted and did the thing and made the money, they were like, oh, no one actually cared. I was just massively overthinking and like overworrying about what the people think about me. And just no one gave a flying ****, which is amazing. So liberating when that can be the way that you make money when you enter it. So now we finally come to mission number four, which is the hard part. How do you go from 10 random people in your friends and family and network buying like a crappy $9 digital product to actually making $1,000 online? Well, you gotta basically make $900 more. Now at this point, what I introduced people to in our little challenge is the price versus people matrix, shall we say. So this is price and this is people. So let's say $1,000 just to keep the numbers round. How do you make $1,000? Well, you can sell one product for $1,000 to one person. Right, you can sell a $1,000 thing to a single person. Or you could sell a $500 thing to two people, easy enough. Or you could sell a $330 thing to three people. Or you could sell a $250 thing to four people. Or you could sell a $200 thing to five people. Or you could sell a $10 thing to a hundred people. And it's really hard selling. You know, if you thought selling your $10 digital product to nine people was hard, like good luck trying to sell it to a hundred. I think one of our students in the challenge actually managed to do that, but she already had like 50,000 followers on Instagram. And so like was able to just post on her Instagram and like 120 people bought her PDF thing. And she made $1,000, amazing. I suspect you don't have 50,000 followers on Instagram. So it's probably not the position that you're in. And so firstly, people's minds were absolutely blown by this very simple graph that like, if you wanna make $1,000, there's actually, you know, it's just a case of like how much are you charging and how many customers are you getting? And the way that we encourage people to make this $1,000 was basically to do one-on-one coaching where you basically sell your time on a Zoom call and you become a sort of mini online coach for anything that you are an expert in or that you think that you're good at that other people might potentially be willing to pay for your expertise in. For example, this is a cut post from Kelsey. Hello everyone, I'm officially at 1,185 pounds, meaning I've completed the 1K challenge, amazing. I freestyled a bit and quoted 400 pounds for a 90-minute coaching session with me or 1,500 for six 60-minute sessions. The 750 pounds you see below is my first 1,500 pound client who agreed to pay in two installments, amazing. This is the most I've ever made online after over 10 years of trying to make money online. I'm so grateful for the skills I learned on this course. Interestingly, Kelsey then later joined our Lifestyle Business Academy and she's actually recently quit her job and is now making tens of thousands of dollars online with this similar-ish kind of coaching offer. Then we had Susan. OMG, I can't believe it. With a week and a half left of the challenge, I've met the target of $1,000. Five weeks ago, I was overthinking everything, scared of asking for money, scared of how I was gonna do this alongside full-time employment, scared of posting on me, talking to a camera on Instagram, but I was determined that I will put all my into it and do whatever Ali tells me to do. Thank God he didn't ask me to jump into a fire. I made a decision that I will overrule my fear and doubt and just follow the instructions even when I didn't want to. I feel like I jumped off a cliff, massively out of my comfort zone at every stage and still out of my comfort zone, but I'm learning so much, including do it, even when it makes you cringe. The Instagram posts, the asking for money, the follow-up emails, the first Zoom calls. So in her case, the $1,000 consisted of sales of my $10 product, which was the meal plan, a couple of psychotherapy clients, because she's a psychotherapist via the one-on-one Zoom call thing, and about five fitness clients that paid me 100 pounds for a month's worth of accountability, including through Zoom calls, and for me to help them get started with weight loss. Don't let your mind, your doubt, the self-fear stop you. So many times I've had to say to myself, I don't give a flying **** I'm doing it anyway. I know you can all do it too. Amazing. Then we have Aman, who says, this feels unreal. I hit the 1K mark last night, one month into the challenge. My mind is still expanding with what's possible. I put together a coaching package. I posted on LinkedIn and I did some shameless outreach. One of these got a DM response. We hopped on a poll, and now he's my first Hightaker client for speaking coaching. Aman is good at public speaking and he was offering public speaking coaching to whoever wanted to buy it, and he made his $1,000 that way. And so the whole idea behind mission four is that instead of trying to sell a scalable digital product, you're taking that pre-existing expertise and you're offering tutoring sessions about it. Like I used to do private tutoring back in the day. I was good at passing exams when I was in school. And so I helped younger kids with their maths exam preparation and their physics preparation and stuff. One of my friends was really good at the piano. And so he offered piano tutoring back when we were kids. And so like, you know, this stuff is not hard, right? Like you already have a thing that you're good at or a series of things that you're good at. There are people out there that will totally pay for you to be a mini sort of coach or teacher for them to help them out with the thing. You don't need to be an expert in the thing. You just need to be a couple of steps ahead of where they are. And this is how a bunch of our students in the 1K Challenge actually made their first $1,000. Again, if you have no idea what your expertise is, there's a link to the GPT down below. You can check it out. And so there's no excuse for not doing this, but this is the 1K ladder. This is how you make your first $1,000 online. Now, obviously the way you make your first $1,000 is very different to the way that you might want to make your first $100,000. And so if you are interested in the step-by-step plan for how to actually make $100,000 on the internet, other than just $1,000 on the internet, there is a video over here that breaks down the plan in the sort of step-by-step details. So check that out over there. Thank you for watching, and I will see you in the next video. Bye-bye.