- Jackie Chow
- Runs a portfolio of small internet businesses doing around $250K per month.
- Started an SEO agency in 2015 and has run it for more than 10 years.
- Built content sites that performed well before Google’s late-2023 algorithm updates hurt that business.
- Rebuilt around a diversified portfolio that includes an SEO agency, B2B SaaS products, and other revenue streams.
- Portfolio
- Runs Indexsy, which does about $85K per month and showed $500K over the last 12 months in Stripe alone.
- Runs Local Rank, which started last March, showed $454K, and does roughly $50K per month.
- Runs Advise, which showed $300K over the last 12 months.
- Runs Trackings.ai, which does about $25K to $30K per month.
- Has seven to eight other smaller revenue sources ranging from about $170 to $5K per month.
- AI and SEO disruption
- Lost major content-site revenue after Google’s helpful content update and AI overviews.
- Described AI overviews as a zero-click problem because users can get recipes and answers without clicking through to content sites.
- Saw the agency as the thing that kept the business alive when content sites were hit.
- Believes diversification is necessary in the AI age because LLMs and platform changes can damage businesses quickly.
- YouTube as an insurance policy
- Had been posting on YouTube for two to three years before the disruption.
- Credits the YouTube audience with saving him.
- Says Local Rank’s $20K MRR launch came 80% from YouTube even though the launch video had only 1.8K views.
- Says the X launch had about 30K views but produced only 20% of the revenue.
- Gets about 1K to 2K views per daily upload, which he views as a small but valuable audience.
- YouTube playbook
- Start in a niche you can fully own, such as local SEO, AI SEO, marketing for lawyers, or SEO for plumbers.
- Commit to daily uploads for a set period, such as six months, with one long-form and one short-form video per day.
- Use daily publishing to lower standards, ship more, and learn faster than by making a few perfect videos.
- Provide solutions to problems the audience already has, including problems you are actively solving yourself.
- Use a clear hook in the first five seconds instead of wasting the opening.
- Optimize for trends and search, especially around new AI and LLM topics.
- Build a simple funnel from video to newsletter, lead magnet, and later product or service pitches.
- Make YouTube part of a routine until not publishing feels unusual.
- Strategy and lessons
- Uses daily YouTube videos that almost nobody watched at first to create a reliable acquisition asset.
- Treats narrow, consistent audience trust as more valuable than large but weak impressions.
- Sees multiple products as different ways of serving a related customer rather than unfocused randomness.
- Advice
- Do not blindly listen to people who insist on focusing on only one project.
- Diversify revenue because it can protect a business from AI and platform shocks.
SaaS •Entrepreneurship
I Make $250K/Month From 13 Businesses (After Losing Everything to AI)
Starter Story • • 11 min • #144
Jacky was making $500K/month. Then AI and Google's algorithm updates wiped out nearly everything. This is how he rebuilt to $250K/month across 13 different businesses... and the one distribution strategy that made the comeback possible.