Last month, Jacky Chou made $374,000. Spread across 13 different income streams.
The catch? It took him 11 years to get there.
He started in 2014 doing SEO for $450 a month, getting clients off Craigslist as a one-man show. By 2025 he hit $225,000 a month. Then November rolled in at $374K.
And in between, he got "clapped" more times than almost anyone I know. Lost 15 websites in one go to a manual penalty. Watched a $240K/month store collapse to $100K. Sold it for $150K and only saw $100K of it before the buyer went bankrupt.
I sat down with Jacky Chou on the Profitable Founder Podcast. Here's the full playbook.
From $450 a month to feeling invisible at $55K
Jackie's first client was a buddy who worked at Yellow Pages. "You've been reading a lot of Black Hat World posts, can't you do SEO on the side?"
He could. That buddy started feeding him clients off Craigslist, and Indexy (his agency) was born.
The numbers from there: $450/month in 2014 → $10K in 2017 → $55K a month in 2018.
He was in his early 20s in Berlin. "With 50K a month, you're on top of the world. I did all the partying, all the drugs. I thought I was unstoppable."
The biggest catalyst wasn't a tactic. It was moving from Vancouver to Berlin for an internship. "Getting out of your comfort zone really helps. Not just monetization growth, a lot of personal growth too."
Getting clapped: the part nobody posts about
"Clapped" is Jackie's word for getting humbled. And he's been humbled a lot.
The worst one: 15 websites gone overnight. "I was in the middle of Australia, barely had reception, just getting the emails. Manual penalty, manual penalty, manual penalty." That was early 2024.
Then the drop shipping disaster. The store ran at $240K/month with 40% margins for a year and a half. Then they got lazy, kept drop shipping instead of pivoting, and got destroyed by the Facebook iOS update.
→ Revenue: $240K/month → $100K/month
→ Margins: 40% → 5-10%
→ Exit: sold to private equity for $150K, collected $100K, buyer went bankrupt
"That one did not feel good," he told me. (Understatement of the episode.)
Why diversification saved him while everyone else got destroyed
Here's the line that stuck with me. During COVID, tons of people piled into content sites. "99% of them are completely destroyed right now. Down 90% in enterprise value."
Why? They never took money off the table. "Several of them I personally told to sell. They just diamond-handed and got clapped."
Jackie did the opposite. He's had four low-six-figure exits, the biggest a $350K content site flip he held for two months before selling to Thrasio.
That's why he runs 13 income streams now. When his revenue took a 60% haircut (from $500K to ~$180K in three months), the diversification is what kept the lights on. "You have to reorganize your team, run projections, break out your credit card statements. This needs to go, this needs to go. Unbelievably painful."
The SaaS playbook he runs on repeat
Most of that November revenue is new. The software line item didn't exist 12 months ago.
The pivot came from his daily YouTube videos. After a year of making local SEO content, he could see the holes in the market. Then Cursor came out, and with his partner Peter Wang he started shipping SaaS. Local Rank did $20K out of the gate.
The playbook is dead simple, and it's the same logic behind how to build a micro-SaaS that actually sells:
→ Get deep, real knowledge of an industry (local SEO, Reddit marketing, LLM citations)
→ Find the problem YOU keep hitting
→ Solve it with software (90% of the time others have the same problem)
→ Market it to the audience already watching your videos
→ Stay in B2B, sell to people who speak your language
The kicker: he can sell the service 1-on-1 himself because he's an agency owner. "My LTV on Indexy is like $1,000. Agency owners have massive switching costs. They're the easiest customers to keep happy."
His 90-day plan to go from zero to $10K a month
I asked: if you're starting today with no skills, no network, just a Twitter account, and you need $10K a month, what do you do?
"Agency. 100%."
The 90-day lock-in (his words, "no one's going to do this"):
→ Cold email every day
→ Cold call every day
→ Two TikToks a day, two Instagram reels
→ One long-form video
→ Post on X every single day
The offer has to be high ticket but no-brainer. "Performance-based. If you don't hit these parameters, you don't pay." Do the work yourself. Work a shift at McDonald's to cover the tools if you have to.
"You're telling me in 90 days you won't make any money? Impossible."
I interview founders like this every week → Watch the Podcast
The 2026 SEO tips: listicles, Reddit, and Chrome signals
Jackie got cited by ChatGPT in 24 hours and ranked number one in 10 days. His take on 2026:
"2026 is the year of the listicle." His move: get 20 indie founders together, everyone writes "best [keyword] 2026" posts, and you all rank each other at number one. Show up at number one consistently, and the LLMs decide you're number one.
For ChatGPT specifically, it's Reddit. He says a recent study of 35K cited URLs found roughly 50% had zero traffic. "ChatGPT still hasn't figured it out. These are the golden years of LLM citations. Very easy to game."
His Reddit SOP: search your keyword on Google, find the Reddit post that ranks (it's there 90% of the time), comment your brand, wait two weeks, buy upvotes. Upvotes cost about a cent each. If the post is locked, start a fresh question post, buy 500 upvotes, ride it to the front page, then edit your answer in.
And the Google one almost nobody talks about: Google uses Chrome data. Take a page ranking positions 5-20, blast real human traffic at it, and it climbs. Pull the traffic and it holds, as long as your click-through rate is genuine and people aren't pogo-sticking back to the results.
The biggest lever, and the biggest lie
When I asked what people get wrong about entrepreneurship, Jackie didn't hesitate. "Passive income. There's nothing passive about this. It's pretty painful."
His A+ skill? Consistency. He credits it, half-joking, to grinding Runescape as a kid. "If you're willing to cut a video game tree for six hours a day at 12, you're going to do great things."
And the single biggest lever in his business is video. When Local Rank launched and did $20K, 90% of that revenue came from YouTube, where his launch video did 1,000 views. His launch tweet did 50K views and drove 10%.
"I'll take the 1K views on YouTube any day. A thousand people in the US, with buying power, mostly agency owners, coming back every day. If you sell them a product, it's one and done."
The one stream he'd keep if he could only pick one? Not the cash cows. His community, Advise. "By far the easiest. It's just a place where I genuinely want to chat with people who speak my language."
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Jacky Chou?
Jacky Chou is a Vancouver-based SEO and affiliate marketer who started his agency Indexy in 2014 doing SEO off Craigslist for $450 a month. Over 11 years he built 13 income streams across SEO, SaaS, affiliate networks, and a community, reaching $374,000 in revenue in a single month.
How much does Jacky Chou make?
Jackie averaged around $225,000 a month across 2025 and hit $374,000 in November 2025. He's clear that this is gross revenue. His net margin is about 40%, and take-home after taxes is lower. His net worth after 10 years sits around $10 million.
How did Jacky Chou build his income streams?
Through diversification across SEO, affiliate networks (Binance, OnlyFans traffic, Mediavine, FanFuel), multiple SaaS tools like Local Rank, his Indexy agency, and a paid community. He repeats one playbook: build deep expertise in a niche, build software that solves a problem he hit himself, then sell it to his YouTube audience.
The lesson from Jackie's 11 years: take money off the table, never stop posting video, and when you spot a real opportunity, go in hard and let everything else wait.
