I'm challenging myself to make $100,000 in the next 100 days with my business. Right now, I have not made that much all year. In fact, my business has lost money this year. I've only made a few thousand dollars in the last 100 days, maybe $10,000 in the last 100 days. So I'm challenging myself to 10x the amount of money I made in my business, in just a little over three months. If I can't do this, I'm looking at having to move in with my mother. I'm 42 years old and a single father, so there are real consequences if I can't do it. What I'm going to describe to you here is my thinking behind this challenge.
What Triggered This: $20,000 Stolen From My MetaMask Wallet
What triggered this is that I had $20,000 worth of crypto stolen this week out of my MetaMask wallet. I launched a meme coin named Jerry. I don't currently hold any of it, but I'm planning on buying some more soon, once I get a secure MetaMask wallet set up. I put $5,000 into this meme coin, and within three hours what I put in was worth $20,000. Then the attackers got into my MetaMask, stole all of it, sold it, and rugged the coin. The MaxFi team was incredible, stepping up and keeping the token alive, and I'm planning to get back in.
At the same time, that was a wake-up call for me. I've talked about this in my previous videos: I have $90,000 in debt in credit cards alone, and another $120,000 or so in business loans. I borrowed this money after getting divorced last year so I could take the time I needed. I had deleted my YouTube, all my content creation, and all my income last year, right before I got divorced. I thought I was in a situation where my wife would support me and help me discover a new career. Instead, she divorced me, and then I had no income. There's no child support or alimony or any of that either. I'm on my own.
I've been working all year to build up a business from zero as a content creator. I have made over $100,000 in less than 100 days before, but most of that was a decade ago, in 2016, when I was on Udemy. I also made around that much in crypto a few times over the next few years. I haven't done it lately, though.
How You Think About Money Matters Most
Here's my thinking behind this, because when it comes to money, what's really important is the way you think about it. I noticed that as I gave my mind this target, it started doing some very efficient thinking. What a lot of us do, especially in crypto, is go around chasing coins and trying to make little profits, but we're not looking at the big picture. We're not asking: How much time am I putting into this? How much is that time worth? How much money am I making? How much money am I losing? We're not doing all those important calculations.
For some reason, taking my daughter to school this morning, I started explaining all of this to her. I talked about how I got the idea, the conversation that led up to it, and the conversation with my mom, on my Jerry Banfield channel.
Most of us in crypto are trying to make money, but often there's not a lot of thought behind how much time and how much money it takes. The way I'm seeing to make $100,000 in 100 days starts with analyzing the money, analyzing my thinking, and maximizing my time efficiency. This is where a lot of people, in crypto especially, go wrong: they're not maximizing their time efficiency.
Breaking Down the Possibilities
If I want to make $100,000 in 100 days, the first thing I need to do is break down how that could happen. I could make $100,000 with one single deal over the next three months. That's one way. I'm not going to make another meme coin, but I could buy into my meme coin for something like $5,000, it could 20x, and I could dump all of it at the top and make $100,000 that way. That's not a good plan long term, though. I hate my followers losing money, so that's just an example. I could put $5,000 into a coin, it could 20x, and that could happen over 100 days.
What I don't like is having to depend on other people to do a bunch of stuff that's risky or theoretical. I believe in putting liquidity into MaxFi and farming it. I believe in launching a meme coin and standing behind it over time, like Jerry on Robinhood, or JBBJ, which I'm getting back into on ICP. I believe in that. But expecting to buy somebody else's meme coin and hope it 20xes, or even hoping and doing everything I can to promote my own meme coin into a 20x in the short term, doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
What I need is a real business system. To build one, I need to think: What am I going to give, from me to you, that makes you want to spend money, where you feel good about the money you're spending and good about what you're getting? I want to feel good about it too, and I want even people from the outside to be interested. There are a lot of ways I could make $100,000 in 100 days that would not fall into that category. I want to make $100,000 in 100 days doing something that feels good.
What's cool is that initially I was thinking I only need to make $20,000 or $30,000 in the next 100 days to not move in with my mom. Then I thought, okay, why don't you aim higher? What I was explaining to my daughter is that a lot of us think about money, but we don't factor our time into it, and we don't think of enough possibilities.
I could make $100,000 in 100 days with one single $100,000 deal. I could also make $100,000 with 100 transactions of $1,000 each. I could make it with 10 transactions of $10,000. Or 1,000 transactions of $100, or 10,000 transactions of $10. All of those are different levels of sales, different possibilities, and different offerings. So then I'm analyzing how to fit that into what works for me, because if you're just wandering around hoping to make money, you're often not looking at the time.
A Concrete Example: Cameo Videos
Let me give you a concrete business model. I've been selling videos on Cameo for around $25 each, and I only actually get about $17 to $20 out of each one. These videos take about five minutes to make. If I want to make $100,000 in 100 days, the easiest math is that I want to make $1,000 a day. So my question is: What do I need to give you so that you collectively want to give me $1,000 a day? It comes down to how much time I actually have, and then how I'm even going to sell whatever it is.
I don't want to trick people into buying stuff they don't need. I want to give something truly valuable. While I'd like to make $100,000 in 100 days, I want to give millions and millions of dollars' worth of value. So how do I do that? I'm going to go into more of the business details on Jerry Banfield for Creators, but this is about breaking down the income and the time, because a lot of you who are trying to make money are not thinking about how much time it takes.
Why Investing Alone Isn't My Plan Here
That's why investing can be so fantastic. If I had $10,000 or $20,000 to invest, which I could certainly scare up right now by borrowing it or pulling it together, I could put it to work. I have $5,000 liquid and ready to go right now. I could just try to buy a meme coin, hope it 20xes, and dump all of it when it does, whether it's mine or somebody else's. I'm not going to do that to mine, but I would do that with somebody else's.
The problem with that, in my experience, is that you're adding the variable of risk. What if it doesn't 20x? I want something that has a very high probability of actually making $100K in 100 days, so I need to include probability and risk in my thinking. By losing $20,000, I set myself back. I could easily have needed to make maybe $30,000, but now I need to make $100,000 because I lost $20,000. Investing can be awesome if you pick investments that go up over time, but the safest investments often don't go up very fast either. I don't see an opportunity for me to easily take a few thousand dollars and turn it into $100,000 in 100 days without it taking a bunch of time. This is just my own situation and plan, not financial advice for yours.
I also want something repeatable. I don't want to just hit a 20x on a meme coin with five grand and then look at 2027 wondering how to do that again. I want to start making $1,000 a day on average, every single day, because that would be ultra sustainable. So my baseline goal is: How do I make $1,000 a day, do it every day, and give value?
One Destination, Not Someone Else's Platform
Then let's go into the time. Say I were to make $1,000 a day on Cameo. Usually what works best is to have one offer or one destination that brings in the majority of the money. For example, the last time I made $100,000 in 100 days, almost all of it came through udemy.com. Then when I got banned from udemy.com, everything I would have made there in the future vanished. They pimped me out and kept most of it. My earnings stopped, but they kept all my customers.
I want to make $1,000 a day this year. I want to get to that point this year, and then in 2027 I want to keep making $1,000 a day and more. To do that, we need to calculate the time. This is where it's really good, with money, to run through all these different scenarios. This is what a lot of people don't do, and what I haven't done a lot with money: use your brain to play out all these high-level scenarios and see what they look like on a day-to-day survival basis.
Too Many Offers, Not Enough Focus
Right now I've got all kinds of stuff you can buy. You can buy a Zoom call, a Skool membership, a Cameo, lifetime chat with me, dating coaching, a book, or a game. I need to simplify things. It does make sense to test things, and you do need to test. But the question is: Where can I consistently make $1,000 a day? More than likely, there's going to be a single source for most of that money, and it's going to need to be time efficient.
Let's use Cameo as the example. Could I sell 50 Cameo videos a day? After Cameo takes its fee, that would be about $1,000 a day. Is that sustainable? Each Cameo video takes about five minutes. Five minutes times 50 is 250 minutes, and divided by 60, that's over four hours a day I would need to spend on Cameo to make $1,000 a day. If that were in isolation, it might be fine.
But we have to think about how I'm going to sell $1,000 a day in Cameo videos. How am I going to get 50 people to pay me $25 to make a video, every single day? I'm going to need to make YouTube videos to get that initial traffic. I'll need to crop Shorts. How many people do I need discovering me every day, with Cameo in every single video, to get 50 different $25 orders a day? I'm probably going to need hundreds of thousands of people a day watching my videos, and I'm going to have to show Cameo in every single one of them. Then I can probably get 50 Cameos a day.
Is it realistic to think I'm going to film videos for six different YouTube channels, take Shorts and put them everywhere, and also film four hours of Cameos a day? No. I'm going to be burned out.
You might ask why I'm thinking at this higher level instead of just offering Cameo alongside 50 other things. Ideally, I want one single call to action in every single video. This is what I told my daughter: if I'm going to make $100,000 in 100 days, and $1,000 a day, it's probably going to happen by mentioning the same thing a hundred times, making videos every day saying the same thing. If I said Cameo in every single video, Cameo, Cameo, Cameo, I could probably get 50 Cameo orders a day. But it's not realistic to think I'm going to film four hours of Cameos every day and also film hours of other videos every day. That's just too much.
I could lay out more individual examples, but Cameo is a very good concrete one. So I'm going to skip to the end of all my analysis of the different business models, because the point here is how you think about money and time, and setting a very clear goal for making money. When it comes to being a creator, there are all kinds of different business systems I could use, and they could all work together. But I need one way to simplify and bring everything together, because telling people to go to Cameo and Zoom and all these other places has not worked. The more I complicate things, the more the average person just does nothing.
My Website Should Be Bringing in $1,000 a Day
Someone asked me, "Jerry, quick question. I thought it had all the merch, digital items, or at least links. Why do I have to find them only on the home page? The store is looking weak." And I realized my website should be the place bringing in $1,000 a day.
My website is built with AI on the ICP blockchain, so it can't be banned the way I was banned off Udemy. Practically speaking, the Network Nervous System could in theory take my canisters off, but that's extremely unlikely. So I can build a business system I can absolutely depend on with ICP. I can sell courses, books, shirts, almost anything directly on my website.
I can also turn my website into an entire social network. As soon as you make one purchase, you get access to DM me, DM everybody else, have private chats, make groups, see a leaderboard, have a profile, and make public posts. My website will be a hyper-local social network, with links to all my channels and links to every single thing you could buy from me, and then I can keep creating content.
The Mechanics of Time: Digital Content
I was talking to my daughter about the mechanics of the time. What would be ideal is to sell more digital content, because I can take one hour to make a funny little comedy routine and sell it for something like $10 on my website. Even if I sell only a hundred of those over time, even if only one sells a day for the foreseeable future, I'm setting myself up to make $1,000 a day doing an hour of work every day. That's what we need to be doing.
In the short term, I might not hit $1,000 a day immediately. But I need to point my entire business system toward something that can easily make $1,000 a day, where I don't have to slave away doing four hours of Cameo videos. I can also sell things like Cameo-style videos directly on my website. That way, if somebody buys one, I'm not getting scraped for the gigantic percentage that Cameo takes, and people can DM me afterward. I want my website to be a place people naturally share and come back to every single day. That's the bottom line: seeing what products you might want to buy, who's chatting about what, and being able to DM me with any feedback.
Right now there's an email address on the home page and on my Jerry Banfield date page. Instead of having all kinds of random emails, it would be ideal if a woman who really wanted to date me could buy something and then have the ability to DM me after that. It would filter out the scammers, spammers, catfishers, and all that stuff. And there would be a real community. I don't want to be sending people over to Skool and all these other places when they should all be on my website.
Going All In on My Website
It's amazing what happens when I think in those terms. Okay, I want to start making $1,000 a day so I don't have to move in with my mom. Then I just look at my thinking, and I see exactly what I need to do. I need to go all in on my website. That's going to take hours and hours with the AI, on a $250-a-month AI plan, going back and forth until the website is right, plus hours uploading the stuff I already have and building out all these features. Even while it's being built, it's in position to earn. Once it's built, I'm in position to start making $100, $200, $300, $400, $500 a day off my website, with everybody in the same spot.
People can start off buying a course for $9, or a comedy file, or a game. All of a sudden my website becomes this thing where I can crank out games, comedy files, and inspirational lectures. I could even offer events. I could sell clothes. I could sell almost anything I want on my website. People coming back every day will have all these micro-transactions, little pieces of content to buy for around nine bucks, and then I can have the coaching and the calls, all of that directly on my site too.
Somebody could, in one transaction, buy a couple of comedy files, a game, a call with me, and a shirt, all in one single checkout on my website, paying with crypto or with Stripe. Then they'd have indefinite customer support and community, and the ability to post and use my website like a social network to connect with everybody else in the whole world who has bought in.
Leveling Up My Thinking About Money
It's funny how getting hacked and ripped off for $20,000 this week, dealing with the fallout, and facing having to move in with my mom, which I talked about on my Jerry Banfield channel, has gotten me to level up my thinking about money. It's like, all right, you all play games? Okay, I'll play with you. Say hello to my new plan. I'm tired of playing games.
I want to make a hundred grand in a hundred days, and I appreciate your support in that. Every call to action, everywhere, all the time, is going to be this: go to jerrybanfield.com, buy something, and DM me. I'm going to get all of that set up.
I'm going to keep track of my progress and show you how this goes over time. I'm going to share the results, and I'm going to build a dashboard on my website that shows all the money coming in. If you want to follow along with more of how I think about money, debt, and building income, it's all in my Money playlist. It'll be beautiful.