What is this experiment?
A public test of 1 question: can an introverted mom abroad build real income from her kitchen table, with what she already has? A phone. A story. Editing skills that are, as of this writing, terrible.
Here's my situation. I'm an American mom raising 2 girls (9 & 10) in southern Spain. My husband is still working in the US while we figure out how to get him here. My work options locally are complicated: my Spanish isn't job-interview ready, and "go network" is not a strategy for me, it's a threat. So the income has to come from home, from the internet, from skills I can learn alone at naptime.
Every month I'll publish exactly what this project made: views, followers, subscribers, euros. Even when the number is 0. Especially when the number is 0, because everyone else selling the laptop-lifestyle dream skips that part, and the skipping is why nobody trusts this genre anymore.
The baseline numbers (July 2026)
| Metric | Where it stands |
|---|---|
| TikTok followers | 4,944 (from documenting our move, before a 3-month silence) |
| TikTok total likes | 58.8K |
| Instagram followers | 0 (brand new account) |
| Facebook page | 0 (brand new page) |
| Email list | 0 real subscribers (1 test signup: me) |
| Digital products | 0 for sale (1 free kit as the list-builder) |
| Income earned | €0 |
That's the whole empire. A renamed TikTok page that went quiet for 3 months, a free PDF, and a website that went live yesterday.
The 3 income paths I'm testing
1. UGC. Brands pay creators to film videos for the brand's own channels, which means follower count barely matters. A language app actually emailed me about a UGC campaign before I even relaunched this page. That inquiry is the first receipt that this path is real, and I'll report what comes of it.
2. Digital products. The free Not Fluent Yet Kit builds the email list. Paid products come later, built from whatever the list actually asks for. Products sell to people, and I'm collecting the people first.
3. Brand deals. The long game. Realistically this needs a 5-figure engaged following, so I don't expect this line to move for months. It's on the board so you can watch how long it actually takes, not because it pays rent this year.
The rules I'm holding myself to
- Real numbers, every month. Rounded is fine. Inflated is never.
- No courses about making money until I've made money. The internet has enough of those.
- The family eats first. This experiment runs on naptime and evenings. If a week disappears into actual life, that gets reported too.
- Introvert rules apply. Every income path here works without cold calls, networking events, or pretending to be someone I'm not.
Watch me learn this or watch me fail. Either way you'll know the truth.
What happens next
Report #1 lands in roughly a month with the first real deltas: what the relaunch did to the TikTok, whether the email list has humans on it, and whether the UGC inquiry became actual money. If you're a mom abroad trying to build the same kind of kitchen-table income, follow along and steal whatever works.
Start where I started, free.
The Not Fluent Yet Kit is the first thing this project ever made: a 12-week challenge for integrating abroad as an introvert, with word-for-word scripts.
Get the free kit →