Repeat after me
Foreign local seo (outside of the US) is the easiest way to get to $5k/mo
Here’s a case study of how we took a business in HK to #1 in just 5 days (bookmark for later):
My newest SEO SaaS (https://t.co/xIY7pMHP5P) made nearly $4k in 3 days
In that time I shipped over 20+ new features
It all started because I needed an alternative to Keyword. com because it was buggy af
It's joever for you nerds, the future of saas is byok
Gun to my head, if I needed to get a client in 90 days with zero case studies, here's our playbook:
1. stop chasing the industries every guru tells you to chase. if "industries that need SEO" already has the niche on a listicle, it's because every agency already ran it dry. the real money is in boomer industries — industrial, commercial, the most unsexy niches you can think of. tristan's rule: ask claude for industries where the average owner is 65+. one guy tested the list cold calling and converted at 3X his residential rate. ticket sizes are 2-3X higher with a third of the competition.
2. the no-GBP cheat code. got your google business profile clapped for using a PO box or coworking space? build a service area page for every service in every surrounding city. austin agency targets georgetown, round rock, pflugerville — "tax prep pflugerville," "bookkeeping pflugerville," "financial planning pflugerville." scale it to 200-300 pages, link them all internally, and you collect every lead outside the GBP radius. organic SERPs are localized now so you rank for the broad term too.
3. this also wins AI search. chatgpt weighs relevance as heavily as authority, and nobody's spamming listicles for local queries the way they do for ecom. reverse engineer the long tail — someone types "i have two W-2s, a 1099, and stocks to sell, who helps with that" — and put all of it on your service page. tristan tested it: page goes up, prompt gets pulled, you show up in the answer.
4. never pitch on the first call. get them on a second call to qualify. how many SEO agencies have they used? above three is a red flag. figure out their ticket size, then send an audit showing exactly how much revenue they're leaving on the table. price local SEO at $1,500/month minimum, up to $3,500-5,000 for lawyers and competitive markets like dallas or houston.
5. first 90 days is offense and defense at the same time. defense: lay out a week-by-week game plan so they know exactly what they're paying for. offense: fix all the money pages first, then show leading metrics. impressions is the easiest early win — page starts ranking, impressions jump, and you can show "up 300% month over month" by end of month one. months two and three are content and links.
6. the biggest agency mistake both of us made: taking clients you can't service. jacky took a $10K/month client he didn't have capacity for and it gave the agency a bad rap in their whole industry. tristan's churn killer: stop assuming the client knows SEO. lead every deliverable with "this is a first draft, we need your feedback" instead of dropping a link with no context. that one habit cuts churn by 25%.
bonus: systems are overrated. you can brute force an agency to mid-seven figures with five URLs, some spreadsheets, a phone number, and an AI subscription. tristan fired two people he'd built systems around and hired one killer instead. it's never the systems — it's the people.
second eps with @TristanZheng watch/listen ↓
📈 I made $364,016.89 in May 2026
⚡️ Indexsy — $146,021
🌐 LocalRank .so + Trackings .ai + IndexChex .com + RankTack .com — $60,901.14
💻 Version .so — $35,849
📦 Amazon — $31,163.19
🏢 STR Lisbon — $30,287.54
📘 Advise .so — $20,602.08
💰 0f — $19,991.30
🔗 Misc. Aff — $12,647.11
📺 Mediavine — $2,676.81
🔗 Bonds — $1,800
💸 Binance — $1,529.47
🌐 Revive .so — $548.00
📈 Revenue was up 17.30% ($53.6k) from April, biggest month since March 2024.
Indexsy had an absolute monster month at $146k, a new all-time high.
Amazon and STR Lisbon held strong with back-to-back $30k+ months, and Misc. Aff spiked to $12.6k.
SaaS cluster pulled back to $60.9k as Trackings and LocalRank cooled off, but IndexChex held everything up.
I have been tracking my revenue since January 2022.
If you want to see the full historical revenue, comment "JIMMY" + like this post and I will DM it to you (must be following).
a $100M founder is using his mom's facebook account to run ads because meta flagged him so hard his CPMs hit $800. here's everything else from this week:
1. tony's wartime CEO arc is getting results. pulled up vessi's AOV mid-sale by moving the free item threshold from $200 to $225. conversion rate went up. launched a 7-pack sock bundle that should've existed months ago. his team was too slow to ship it so he started running daily standups with open invite — anyone in the company can join and pitch ideas. that one change unlocked more velocity than any reorg.
2. tom's meta account is cooked. every ad — UGC, AI scripts, image ads, broad targeting — all hitting $300-800 CPMs. his theory: meta flagged his domain early on because he ran aggressive before/after ads on a brand new page. so he's running the ultimate A/B test: mama wang's fresh facebook profile, new domain, new pixel, new everything. warming it up slowly with organic posts before spending a dollar. early CPMs already looking better.
3. jacky hit $1,800/day revenue on the stealth consumer app and just crossed six figures in 30 days on indexsy. his strategy is stupid simple: launch an offer, send it to the email list, see if it works. if it does, scale with ads. if it doesn't, bury it and move on. some flopped hard — AI thumbnail tool did three sales. but the ones that hit keep compounding. tom's take: "your followers will literally buy whatever you drop on them."
4. the million dollar AI business ideas segment went crazy. tom's pick: AI creative agency for e-com brands. deliver 5 static images and 5 videos per week to their inbox. all AI avatars, all AI scripts, ready to test on meta immediately. position it as revenue generation not cost savings — that's the B2B sales cheat code. jacky added: just slap "AI" in front of any existing agency model and it converts better. they tested this in cold email. it works.
5. tom's sleeper idea: an AI golf coach. he's already using it himself — records voice notes after every hole describing his shots, mental state, misses, what went right. feeds it all into claude for post-round analysis. the insight: AI output is only as good as your input, and golfers will pay anything to shave a stroke. 850 million museum visits in the US per year, but the golf market might be even better — high buying power, obsessive audience, zero ego about spending money to improve.
6. the openAI hardware prediction game was fun. leaked form factors are "gumdrop" (ipod shuffle sized, screen-free, wearable) and "sweet P" (AI earbuds). tony's framework: winning hardware has low friction adoption + high value. it won't be revolutionary — form factors barely change. TVs are still screens after 50 years. phones still look like the iphone 1. the winning device will just make an existing habit 10x more convenient.
ep 6 of NGMI with @itstonyyu and @tomwang24 watch/listen ↓
this guy lost $500K on real estate, got scammed on a development deal, and still exposed his entire portfolio.
here's every investment three founders have ever made, ranked S tier to F tier:
1. tom's hedge fund is the sleeper pick nobody talks about. found it through his accountant, audited by KPMG, returning 30% net per year since 2020. more than doubled his money. meanwhile he lost $500K on US multifamily real estate because he bought post-2020 right before rates exploded. the lesson: timing matters more than the asset class.
2. jacky's TFSA is up 127% all time just buying S&P 500 and holding. no trades. no options. no stress. his exact words: "buy S&P and chill." he keeps telling tom this and tom keeps ignoring him to buy penny stocks that drop 40% in a bull market. the oracle of richmond BC vs the inverse indicator — every episode this gets funnier.
3. tom put $100K into physician's choice — now the #1 probiotic company on amazon doing $300M/year in revenue. already got his $100K back through special dividends in under 3 years. potential 5-6x bagger on exit. his angel investing rule going forward: only invest in companies already profitable. zero pitch deck companies ever again.
4. crypto tier list was wild. jacky hit 20-30 baggers during covid, took profits, bought an entire building in portugal with the gains. tom's wife christina is the actual crypto queen hitting high conviction 10-20 baggers. tony somehow broke even after 10 years in crypto which is genuinely impressive in the wrong direction.
5. airbnb is printing for tom. three properties — vancouver island and vancouver — pulling 80-100K/year revenue each. one tenant left drugs in the couch and cat shit everywhere but the cash flow is still A tier. jacky's lisbon 8-unit building did 20K euros last month on 5K costs. short term rentals still hit if you're in the right market.
6. the investment nobody expected: watches. jacky is up about $100K realized on watches but says a guy doesn't need that many. tony quietly sitting on a batman GMT and a VC. the spread on buy/sell is brutal though — their dealer alex takes 20-25% every time.
7. the universal F tier: penny stocks, friends' businesses, and NFTs. tom's penny stocks go down 40% while the S&P rips 15%. tony's angel investments in friends are "effectively dead." jacky made his mutant ape his phone wallpaper, his facebook photo, AND his whatsapp photo. his wife still roasts him about it.
ep 5 of NGMI with @itstonyyu and Tom Wang — full tier list rankings in the episode.
watch/listen ↓