FBC – 283 – How to find your own personal goldmine

Today, we are going to talk about the process you need to follow to find your very own personal goldmine. Yes there is a method and a logic to it and we are going to cover that in this episode. This is going to separate you from the people who give up inches from the Promised Land…

If you want to discover how I can afford to travel all year and have a kickass life, click here: https://martinebongue.com/profit-machines

When you're running campaigns to basically get some people in the door and stuff. It's very frustrating. And it's very hard to wrap your mind around the fact that your first campaigns are not going to be profitable. But this is something you have to understand and to accept and to, well, actually implement.

So, when you are looking for your ideal customer or you're looking for customers, you have to understand that there is the first phase and it's the discovery phase. OK. So this discovery phase is expensive. It is expensive, but it does one thing. It helps you discover stuff.

Because. Let's say you have 100 people and in the beginning. You don't know who's likely to buy your stuff. So you need to do some questioning or something before you can actually find who's actually super motivated. And that takes time. You have to question everybody, and take them to lunch, etc. until you identify the good ones.

The beginning of the campaign, as frustrating as it might be, is a discovery. So you're going to need to accept the fact that you are going to spend money. You're going to overspend. You're going to pay more than what you should, because that will give you the knowledge.

You know what? I've found two people that I need in these hundred people and then afterwards, once you get these, this is how you make the big bucks. And it's a simple thing when you're running ads.

So just to give you an idea of what I'm doing, I'm using a platform. It's called Isoprene. Pretty cool platform. I'm going to, you know, put a link in the podcast for you.

But on this platform, you can track everything. You can track the country, the region, the city. You can track which network operator people have, like T-Mobile or something like that. You can track what time of the day they're connecting and converting. You can track all sorts of things. It's absolutely insane. All right.

So in order to track down and to have a cluster of data reliable, then you need to send some data there, you know, and the data you will actually cost money.

How to find your own personal goldmine

So right now, I'm running some campaigns and I've been able to identify people. So I know they're running on mobile, but they don't want it on tablet. They're not converting. So I can skip the tablets. Right. Then afterwards, I realized that the conversions I had were on, I think it was T-Mobile.

So I'd just shut down all the other ones. And then I looked at when are people converting the most? So I'm not saying that every single conversion came at that time, but the majority. So it came between, I don't know, like six a.m. and 10 p.m. or something. So I will focus only on this.

And I'm refining, refining, refining until afterwards when I'm running the campaign. It's going to be a success. And down the road, I'll be able to recoup the money that I spent doing the testing. And this is something that’s counter intuitive.

You have the impression that you are wasting money. You're not wasting money. You're getting knowledge. You're getting data that will help you make a lot of money afterwards. OK. So that's very important.

So one other thing that I'm doing is from what I heard about some statistical data of some people running ads and stuff. And they said that the most profitable or profitable states in in the U.S. were X, Y, Z and stuff. Which is not something I actually thought about because when you want to run an AD, what do you do usually?

You know, some people do just globally, bam. You know, let me target everybody. If you know your stuff, you're going to focus on one specific country. But within that specific country, you can actually and especially the U.S., you can drill down by state that you could actually drill down by city as well.

I mean, there are some cities where people have a lot of money there, millions of people in there. You could drill down just to these cities there, but you could start with the states.

Because there are some states that convert better than others. So what I did was I focused on a few states and once I have the data, now I've optimized the campaign and it's scheduled to run during the timeframe that I specified.

So I will see the results tomorrow morning. It seems to be converting well. So I've excluded all the mobile carriers that I didn't want, the times that I didn't want and stuff like that. And then afterwards, if it works, then I may extend to another state to see if I can convert more, because that data works the same way on the other states and stuff like that. And eventually I might end up covering all of the U.S. or something like this.

But this is the kind of things that you can you can do. But you have to understand, in order to be able to get that data, you will have to spend some money, to be able to acquire the knowledge. And then this is knowledge that you have forever. Right?

But, yeah, it's very interesting stuff, to be honest.

And I really don't think that its money wasted. Sometimes you might come across people saying, oh, you know what, I have this campaign. The campaign is killing it. I'm on top of the world and stuff. And people will tell you, dude, oh, you're so lucky. Right.

So I want you to understand that there is no luck involved. It’s testing and knowledge of the customer base in the beginning which will lead you to your own personal goldmine.

Your goldmine is usually the boring thing you already do well

People hunt for a personal goldmine like it is buried on another continent. It almost never is. In my experience it is sitting in the one skill you undervalue because it comes easy to you. I have taught this to 2,000+ students in 49 countries, and the breakthrough is always the same moment: they stop chasing a shiny new niche and start selling the thing they already do without thinking.

Here is the test I use. Write down the task friends ask you for help with for free. That is the ore. Then build a repeatable system around it so it earns without your constant presence, which is exactly what I did turning marketing automation into a business I run from Bali. Harvard Business Review has argued for years that focused specialists outperform generalists chasing trends, and HubSpot keeps showing that the operators who systematize win the time back. I dig into finding your edge on my growth hacking series and in The Diary of a Virtual CEO. The goldmine is close. Stop digging far.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a personal goldmine in business terms?

A personal goldmine is the intersection of a skill you already have, a problem people will pay to solve, and a market that is large enough to support a business. It is not a secret idea. It is the visible overlap between what you know, what others want, and where the money already flows.

How do you find your own personal goldmine when you feel like you have no special skill?

List every task you have been paid for, every favor friends ask, and every problem you have solved for yourself in the last five years. Cross reference that list with active forums and subreddits where people complain about the same problems. The overlap is the goldmine. Most people miss it because they discount what feels easy to them.

How long does it take to confirm a personal goldmine is real?

Confirmation takes about thirty days of focused validation. Run ten conversations with ideal customers, collect five paid pre-orders or deposits, and ship the smallest possible version to those buyers. Real money beats survey answers. If five strangers pay before the product is finished, the goldmine is real and worth scaling.

What is the biggest mistake when searching for a personal goldmine?

The biggest mistake is searching outside instead of inside. People chase trending niches, copy other creators, and ignore the skills that already live in their own resume. The goldmine you can defend long term is the one you already know more about than ninety percent of the room. Start with what you have, not what looks shiny.

About the Author

Martin Ebongue is the founder of martinebongue.com, an online business and lifestyle design blog focused on helping aspiring entrepreneurs build location-independent businesses. Since 2014, he has been creating and scaling online ventures across multiple niches , from digital products and affiliate marketing to SaaS and content platforms , while traveling the world. He shares the real-world strategies, tools, and systems that work, with a particular focus on AI-powered automation for solopreneurs. Follow him on YouTube, X (Twitter), and Instagram.

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