Kevin Pereira is a serial entrepreneur who has founded over ten companies, including NerdPilots, Wet Shave Club, GrooveJar, Innclusive, TripLaunch, and Convert27. His 2019 objective is to earn $100,000 per month. He began NerdPilots as a means to support his other endeavors, but quickly gained a large customer base. His 2019 objective is to earn $100,000 per month.
Kevin is a seasoned businessman who has started more than 10 businesses. One of them is NerdPilots, a well-known design and development firm that makes $25,000 every month. He started it as a way to finance his other ventures, but he soon grew a sizable clientele. His monthly income goal for 2019 is $100,000. Discover from his successes!
What is your background and what are you concentrating on right now?
Hey there! Kevin Pereira, the owner of NerdPilots, is who I am.
NerdPilots was not, however, where my entrepreneurial ambitions started. I’ve built many businesses in various areas over the last few years. One of the first was a house cleaning business I sold that was situated in San Jose, California. They have a business called InstaMaids, which is still in operation, and they bring in around $1 million year.
After that, I made the decision to take a small vacation before launching Wet Shave Club, a sizable wet shaving product subscription box business, with my business partner Rohan. We had around 2,000 subscribers who each paid about $30 each month. Our highest transaction with this firm was $100,000 in December 2014 or 2015.
Then, I started GrooveJar, an SAS business that I later sold.
I’ve recently been associated with Innclusive and TripLaunch, two businesses that make software for people who plan their own group outings.
Another of my products worth noting is Convert27, a powerful marketing tool for small businesses that is presently used by the majority of Launch27’s customers. And we want to add more goods to the Launch27 software.
Currently, Launch27 and TripLaunch both produce $30,000 per month, while Convert27 currently generates $3,000 or more (but this will soon rise).
Last but not least, I run NerdPilots, which makes between $15,000 and $25,000 per month but aims to create $100,000 per month by the end of 2019.
This is where I am right now, and this is where my main attention is. additional projects I’m working on include a website where I’ll sell aviation-related goods and perhaps one or two additional SaaS that I’ll introduce soon.
From my home in Big Bear Lake, California, a little mountain town about two hours from Los Angeles, I oversee all of these businesses.
But let’s move on to NerdPilots. People frequently ask me for my designers and developers since I’ve produced so many distinctive goods and websites. Therefore, I came up with the idea, “Let’s start a small agency where people can get websites built or come to us with website issues, and we’ll fix them.”
How do you manage to concentrate on so many tasks at once?
I get help from a colleague of mine named Rohan with these. But a solid team, in my opinion, is what works best. I just communicate my product idea with them after assigning one developer to one project and another developer to another project.
It takes a lot of work, though. I work constantly.
A second smart tactic is to use virtual assistants. They manage communication and customer support, freeing up my time to focus on my efforts. My virtual assistant Joan helps me run three of my businesses. These virtual assistants are either found by me through recommendations or through UpWork.
What is your background, and how did you come up with this idea?
I’ve always been my own boss. I’ve always valued running my own business and avoiding daily commutes to the workplace. Consequently, I have a strong drive to do this.
I enjoy organizing teams and working with people. And I’m always looking for new chances. I want to try everything where there is a chance to make money.
And I have no problem trying things that I think won’t succeed, like the aviation website. I think it’s very likely to fail, but we’re going to construct it anyhow. This isn’t, however, a serious problem. The most I’ll lose is a few thousand bucks, and that’s all. I’ll come out on the other side with a ton of fresh insights and information.
My first websites weren’t very successful. Many of the fundamental elements of websites, such how to make it aesthetically pleasant and how to maximize the rate of conversion of visitors, eluded me.
Wet Shave Club was a disaster as well, so we disbanded it. Despite the fact that our revenues were significant, it was very challenging to turn a profit because the product was physical. We had to invest more and more money in new items as our company grew. It became into a significant cash flow issue.
This shows that even if your company is lucrative and bringing in money, success is not a given. Failure is a common occurrence, and I approach it as “I’m just going to try this out, and if it works, great, but if it doesn’t work, it’s also fine.”
Never starting a firm until there is a strong rival in the market, I have discovered, is a great strategy to avoid failure.
However, a lot of people overthink failure and think that if they fail in business, it’s the end of the world and everyone will laugh at them. This is untrue.
And I want to underline that even if your company makes money, it won’t be successful. For instance, GrooveJar was making $1,500 each month. Although I was making a lot of money from my website, it wasn’t growing since I was spending so much time on customer service. I decided to give up on the project since I also lacked excitement for it.
Success is somewhat individualized and may take many different shapes.
Now let’s talk about NerdPilots. I made this website because I wanted to observe what people were doing and help them. I enjoy watching a company idea blossom into a workable enterprise in its early stages.
Where did you get the idea for NerdPilots?
As a result, I communicate with my principle designer and lay out my construction plan before starting any of my projects, including NerdPilots. I then email him samples of some of my favorite things from other websites. He sends the website’s design a few days later. We then spend many days polishing it after that.
After getting input from my peers, I go to my developer and tell him to incorporate the design into a website. That’s it, really.
The service concept was used in the creation of NerdPilots. People may manage their efforts on a simple backend that we had. We soon switched to a more traditional agency website once I realized we already had three clients and the site was a mess.
We completely revamped the site with the launch of NerdPilots. I didn’t like that the SaaS alternatives from the initial design had to be eliminated.
You cater to a specific audience when you provide infinite design or development, such as small companies with their own clients that need help. Dealing with them, though, was unpleasant. We also understood that it would take the same amount of time to find a client who would pay us $100 a month as opposed to $50,000 for a project.
Therefore, after obtaining a $38,000 project, I understood that bigger projects should take precedence over $69/month memberships.
Twelve team members make up the current NerdPilots roster: one project manager, two designers, two assistants, and seven developers. But there was just one team member there when things got started. I advertised the company on Facebook, but due to our weak back-end, we could only accept a certain amount of customers.
What marketing techniques did you use to grow your company?
The main consumer source has been Craigslist. We just make daily Craigslist postings and come across a sizable number of good clients (as well as a sizable number of terrible clients!).
We are actively developing a journal, a detailed guide, and social media.
One of the major problems we run across when people come us with new projects is the absence of a uniform structure. People seldom ever have a paper prepared with their ideas or examples in it. We are creating a guide to help many people who want to produce software or a website by gathering their ideas and offering them to a developer or development team because of this.
We once tried using Google AdWords, but it didn’t work out for us. I think we could succeed if we try again using a different approach.
What were the biggest challenges you faced, and how did you get beyond them?
The hardest part of my profession is dealing with my clients, who all have different personalities and demands. We now demand that every customer sign a contract defining their expectations of us and safeguarding us from grievances in order to manage these expectations.
Since I can now predict the type of client they will be and whether or not they would be receptive, I have a tendency to turn away customers.
What are your long-term goals?
The agency’s website backend is now being updated, and we anticipate launching it in two to three weeks (after which we’ll probably turn it into an SAS business). The goal of this back end is to address a problem with contemporary agencies: now, in order to request anything be built by them, you must email them. It is also ineffective.
Because of this, we are creating a platform similar to UpWork where employers may post job opportunities outlining their needs. They would essentially record it, publish the assignment (I need a website, I need this problem fixed, etc.), get bids, and the agency would start working. Clients wouldn’t need to hire anyone because development would be handled by agency staff.
It’s just a way to streamline everything and become more organized.
I chose a subscription business strategy when we originally started NerdPilots, charging customers $69 for two hours of labor each month. But we soon discovered that everyone had quite different needs. Some people simply needed an hour every two months, while others needed a developer who worked virtually full time. We changed to an agency model as a result.
But now, with this new platform, we’re trying to develop a way to help all of these different people.
I think a lot of teams, or even bigger agencies, would find this software to be very helpful for both client management and income maximization.
I spend a lot of time examining different CRMs and tools for agencies, but nobody seems to be focused on making the customer’s request for work as simple as possible. Additionally, customers who are already enrolled on your platform and are aware that they can post a job request in a matter of minutes are likely to use it repeatedly.
So, achieving this is our goal. putting in place this infrastructure and making a business out of it for our agency.
As for income, as I’ve already stated, we want to grow NerdPilots to $100,000 per month by the end of 2019, which is a lofty goal given that we presently bring in $25,000 per month.
What are your biggest flaws, exactly? What were your biggest mistakes?
The sudden departure of a poor developer who was managing a big number of clients was one of the worst things that could have happened to NerdPilots. Since we have to assign additional developers to his work during the past few months, it has become a serious problem.
But as far as drawbacks go, I don’t think we have any.
Additionally, we have lost business because we started projects wrongly or waited too long for them to provide us the information we needed. We are currently putting effort into making sure that our clientele share our high standards.
What actions would you do differently if you had the chance?
I would tell my pre-NerdPilots self to put the content first if I could talk to him. I need to create a lot more stuff.
I would also suggest that he give bigger projects priority over smaller ones.
What educational tools would you suggest for entrepreneurs who are just starting out?
I’ve established an online university called OverthinkAcademy with my business partner Rohan where I distribute business-related courses and knowledge.
I would only suggest “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis, the former publisher of Maxim magazine, as a book on business. His attitude toward money is really interesting.
Where can we find further details?
For additional information, please visit my website NerdPilots
Our NerdPilots backend’s SaaS product, TaskJoyy, will be used to manage customers and give them access to submit projects and tasks as well as to quote, bill, and manage them.
The best email address to use to get in touch with me is kevin@nerdpilots.com. If you have any other questions, do let me know!
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