Captain FI

Progress on the landscaping project 💪

Rather than spending hundreds (or thousands?!) on machinery I’ve taken the slow and steady (and safer) route

with the cooler weather lately we are taking advantage of crisp mornings and cooler afternoons to hand rake and level some fill into the retaining walls.

Great to cool off afterwards with a dip.

Some of my mates think I’m mad, but it is somewhat cathartic and helping me deal with some stress at the moment.

Once we get our bays incrementally filled, levelled and compacted, we are going to shift the water tanks down which will free up space for…

* drum roll *

The BIG FRIGGEN SHED (BFS)!

This is going to house our honey processing facility, workshop, and storage area

I don’t regret a single thing about doing that either. It was some of the most meaningful time we got to spend together

Last week, I asked my readers to reflect on things they might have been taking for granted.
ㅤ
One of them can’t even squeeze in a shower most days but is grateful for time with their mom.

A few recent photos from around our little hobby farm. Enjoying the days becoming a bit cooler allowing us to get stuck into garden projects ☺️

My neighbour bought a really, really expensive pizza oven for their back deck and it’s absolutely brilliant.

She’s nailed the sourdough pizza dough fermentation (and the whole process really!), so we take any opportunity to go over for a visit - trying to make ‘pizza Thursdays’ a thing 🤣

We want one too but you know, frugality and cozzie livs and all that. please send free merch 🤣

Double-banga ‘nana from the garden! Woohoo

First proper banana harvest! Had the pleasure of giving away most to our friends and neighbours and still left with way more than we know what to do with 🤣

This is the first bunch out of seven currently ripening - looking forward to the red Dacca bananas and trying all the other different varieties too

IMHO the Agency model probably works better now than the content marketing affiliate model.

You charge businesses $5,000-$20,000 to build a basic website and then charge them $500-$10,000 per month to maintain the website, optimise SEO, track outcomes and add content (depending on level of complexity).

At the end of the day, the money is in your account sooner, you build an ongoing revenue stream, and you can systemise, outsource or automate most of the process.

You also transfer basically all of the risk to the client, as compared to affiliate / pay per lead where you accept all of the risk and are only paid per successful outcome (ie conversion or purchase).

Personally, I haven’t done the agency model but I’m considering pivoting into this.

What’s been holding me back is I don’t really like the idea of, nor want to be accountable to a client. That’s literally it, I’m lazy and don’t want a client calling me or complaining about a site down or performance not meeting expectations… lol

I have a friend that’s doing this, I think he has about 10-20 clients and now regularly quotes out $100k+ websites with a small team (1 aus + 2 overseas devs).

I believe he pays himself a decent salary, and I’m assuming he will eventually sell his business to a roll up / acquisition to a larger digital agency (3x yearly profit multiple?)

Affiliate marketing and lead gen still works, but compared to 3 years ago I have found the competition is higher, margins are skinnier and you need to keep a closer eye on things and adapt/pivot where required.

If I have to manually change another affiliate code due to companies ‘updating’ them, I think I will have a menty b. (Thankfully there are plug ins for this now).

I’ve slacked off a fair bit and overall my revenue has dropped (but still earning $5-6k a month). To earn a bit more money I have been doing more ‘manual’ or ‘active’ money-for-time campaigns such as sponsored posts and content production- it’s not exactly passive but it still is a good income source.

Ultimately, high quality, human written content from a subject matter expert will ALWAYS outrank AI slop.

This is why the CaptainFI blog has, and will always outrank corporate AI slop, even from super expensive parasite SEO campaigns by competitors and in house marketing teams designed to push my reviews and content down the search engine rankings.

When it comes to flipping websites, I can’t comment too much as I haven’t done it - I’ve only build from scratch and sold a handful , so probably Matt and Liz Raad would be your best info source - they run the digital investors podcast, or I’ve actually interviewed them multiple times on my podcast (CaptainFI financial independence pod) which is worth a listen.

IMHO it’s still a no brainer to be tinkering with online business on the side, given the asymmetric risk profile. Similar to how some people believe in crypto or other high risk investments

I personally wouldn’t be liquidating all your assets to flip websites, but certainly a small percentage for starting capital (

When you’re 5 years old, a year is 20% of your life. And when you’re 50 years old, a year is 2% of your life. This is an explanation given why time speeds up as you age. It’s called Janet’s law.

It states you’ve experienced roughly half of your perceived life by 20 years old. Or to put it another way: A summer holiday for a 5 year old feels as long as the 10 years from 40 to 50 years old.

But Janet’s law can be broken with high agency.

You have agency over the speed time. You’re not a passive victim. A better explanation of why time speeds up as you age is because you have fewer new experiences as an adult, so your brain deletes the memories.

If you take agency over your life, do new things and create memory dividends, time slows down.

If you live your life on autopilot, you may die at 80, but feel like you died at 20 years old.

If you take agency over your life, you may die at 80, but feel like you died at 200 years old.

10/10… best part was I didn’t have to catch it myself 🤣

Cherry blossoms in Osaka

Well, Mum always said quality is remembered long after the cost is forgotten 😅😳