So now ya know not having money didn't stop me at age 10... And it doesn't have to stop ANYONE! If you missed Part 2: ===>Here's the Rerun:-) In Part 2... I asked an IMPORTANT QUESTION. If the $5 or $10 I made from painting on the curb number was NOT the GOLD!... What WAS the GOLD? Why is it important? Because... People who struggle all their lives.... Struggle because they work for MONEY! I don't place blame on them. They TEACH/program/brainwash us to work for money in school and in society. Here's what I figured out as a young, geeky Ron Howard-looking kid. AFTER... I gave money to my mom. AFTER... I spent some on candy, walkie-talkies, and wrist rockets... I could go to the SAME PEOPLE I painted the address number for... ...and they were happy to pay for 💥OTHER STUFF I COULD TAKE OFF THEIR PLATES💥... 👉Weed pulling 👉Lawn Mowing 👉I even got to mow a cemetery for $100 a mow. (I thought I made it big!!) 👉Car washing 👉Light Carpentry stuff (but I sucked at that and had to stop.) The GOLD was the CUSTOMERS. PLEEEEEAAASSSSEEEE... Do NOT say, "I know. I know." Because MANY grown adults still don't know!! Who gets the GOLD if someone is selling on Amazon? The seller? Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Amazon keeps the GOLD. Who keeps the GOLD in UBER? The poor guy or gal driving their ASS off? Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo! UBER keeps the CUSTOMER! In many cases... They FORBID YOU... it's against TOS to even CONTACT the customer. That's not all. Most business owners, EVEN IF they keep the GOLD (Customer), don't do ANYTHING with the customer. And they make 1/10th the money they COULD BE MAKING.... 👉Do you know WHY? 👉HINT: It's the same BOTTLENECK I had as a kid. I didn't figure out how to remove this bottleneck until I was in my mid-THIRTIES... BY FORTY... I was a millionaire. That's HOW IMPORTANT it was and how fast I got out of the rat race. But... Again... It is too important for me to just shout out.

I was a broke, freckle-faced 10-year-old boy... I was the oldest of 4 kids... My mom was single... And broke too. But I didn't let that stop me. I figured out what I now call: "A Gravel to Gold Sitch" Let's come back to that... One of my "income streams" was painting curb numbers for homeowners and renters whose addresses were either faded or completely gone. I knew my "pitch" wasn't a pretty address number. It WAS not getting COLD PIZZA because the pizza guy couldn't find your address. It WAS the ambulance, police, or fire department that found their home when every SECOND COUNTS. I'd charge $5 to $10, depending on whether I painted one or two numbers for them. (some wanted the number on both sides of the entry) Now... My investment for materials... Was about $10 to get fresh stencils, paint brushes and black and white paint. (From memory, this was a few decades ago 😁) I could paint about 10-12 address numbers from my $10 investment. Which meant $50 to $60 + tips for revenue. A $10 investment with a $60 return for an afternoon in 1977 was pretty solid. A lot of men/women were not making that... This is what I call the "Gravel to Gold Sitch"... Paint and the supplies are GRAVEL. I had the PROCESS: Take the paint and turn it into address numbers so the pizza guy and emergency services could find homes fast. Once I turned the paint into an address number on a curb... I turned a little bit of paint (gravel) into (gold)... NOW... If You Think That The money Was The Gold... HUGE MISPERCEPTION Don't get me wrong... It bought Snickers bars, walkie-talkies, and other stuff when I was 10 years old... But that wasn't the GOLD REALLY. (Hang on tight for a sec.) So... Here was my big fat problem. I was a broke kid. My mom was broke. How did I get my "start-up" capital? I PRE-SOLD! I'd knock doors and when I got a "YES."... I just had them PAY ME UPFRONT... Then I'd bike it to the hardware store and buy my supplies! I still PRE-SELL most stuff to THIS DAY as a 58-year-old.

I was poking around a newsletter called every.to the other day… And I noticed something I'm seeing more and more. They charge $30 a month for their paid tier. But here's the thing about their paid plan… It's not JUST articles. They bundle in 4 AI tools. Writing tool. Email tool. File organizer. Voice dictation thing. Now… Are these tools some kind of revolutionary breakthrough? Not really. I've seen plenty of similar tools out there on the interwebs. But... They're just genuinely USEFUL to the people who read that newsletter. (Crazy concept, right?) If even 5% of their 100K+ subscribers are on their paid plan like me... That's $150K/month in revenue for them! And I got curious… How many newsletter creators out there would LOVE to have a reason for people to upgrade to paid? So I went looking. Substack alone has over 75,000 newsletters. Only about 27,000 of them even HAVE a paid option. Which means roughly 50,000 newsletter creators are building audiences... And making exactly ZERO from their subscribers! Sure, the smart ones MIGHT slip an ad or two in on occasion. But... 👉 Do you think ONE of those 50k newsletters might be interested if you showed up with tools that served their audience and offered to work out a deal? I'm gonna take a wild guess and say YES. AND… You don't need to land some huge partnership here. What if each deal only paid you $500 a month? Or $1,000? Then you turned around and rented that same tool out to another newsletter owner. Stack three of those up and suddenly you've got consistent royalty checks coming in from tools you built ONCE. The newsletter creator gets something valuable to offer their audience. You get paid every month whether you're working or not. I've seen this work myself. And newsletters are just ONE place you could run this play. Now… Here's where most people screw this up. They learn how to BUILD the tools… Then sit there with their thumb up their hindparts wondering why nobody's paying them.