The $500 a Month Challenge

Can you make even just a little money from the web

I devoured it.

I read The 4 Hour Workweek it in just a day or two. The book spoke to me. I was astounded at the success of Tim Ferriss as he was able to create a functioning business that provided more than enough income for his life. I finished the book and immediately went online and registered for his online community the 4 Hour Workweek Forum. I logged in and began looking to find other hard working people that had already built profitable online businesses. Within a few weeks of using the community I made this post asking if anybody was making $500 a month with their small business (“muse”).

My original post in The 4 Hour Workweek Forums posted January of 2009

But a funny thing happened

The truth was that there weren’t many people that were making any money. In fact out of the 507,230 views and 46 replies only 5 people had shared that they had been able to create a functioning business that brought them even not a full time income, but over $500 a month in profits.

507,230 views and 46 replies to the thread

The truth was that there weren’t many. In fact out of the 500,000 members of the forum only 5 had been able to create a business that made them even just $500 a month

So here are my theories

• Many many people want to be able to simply create a business that brings them in some good money
• However most people aren’t able to successfully able to build a business that brings them a full time income
• In fact, most people aren’t even able to build a business that brings them even just $500 a month
• In order to make a basic website that makes $500 a month you have to have an incredible amount of traffic. Almost 200,000 visitors a month.

And as it turns out, building an online business is incredibly difficult. It sounds great on paper but the reality is that most normal people can’t just go to the web and start creating enough value that can be exchanged for $500.

I don’t believe that most normal people can just go to the internet and start making even just $50o a month

The $500 a month challenge

So are you working on an online business? Have you been able to achieve the $500 a month challenge? If you have or if you are still working on it, feel free to head over and share with us your thoughts on this Quora post. I would love to hear from you.

http://www.quora.com/Internet-Startups/Does-your-Web-Startup-make-at-least-500-a-month-in-profit

Now I am not discouraging people to give it a try. In fact I would love to try to help you grow your small business in any way I can. I am just trying to take a healthy and focused look at what many people attempt to do. Feel free to hit me up on twitter @DaveCraige .

Building a business is incredibly difficult. And about 90% of businesses end up failing and many don’t even make it past the $500/month mark.

A few additional notes

• It’s possible that many of the readers who had already created profitable online businesses didn’t take the time to register for the forum creating a bit of a selection bias
• It’s possible that there were more individuals that had created online businesses that were making them money but they didn’t want to share.
• In addition to The 4 Hour Workweek Forum and Quora, I also posted pretty much the exact same question to the Warrior Forum. They deleted the thread almost immediately. Here is where the post used to reside in this picture.