This one's for you, 11pm-notes-app girl
You know who you are. Your family is asleep, and you're sitting in the dark googling "how to make money from home abroad," scrolling past the 19-year-old with the Lamborghini thumbnail, wondering if any of it is real for someone like you. A mom. An introvert. A person whose Spanish is not ready for a job interview and whose day already belongs to other people until 9pm.
I'm her too. So I'm going to do the thing nobody in that genre does: run the experiment in public and show you every number, including the zeros.
The question this experiment answers
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.
My situation, so you can compare it to yours: I'm an American mom raising 2 girls (9 & 10) in southern Spain. My husband is still working in the US while we finish getting him here. Local employment is complicated for me, and "go network your way into something" is not a strategy for me, it's a threat. If your version of this has different details but the same walls, this experiment is for both of us.
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 selling the laptop-lifestyle dream skips that part, and the skipping is why you don't trust any of them 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 that went quiet for 3 months, a free PDF, and a website that went live yesterday. If your starting line looks like this, or smaller, good. Now you have a baseline to beat, and so do I.
The 3 income paths I'm testing (steal this list)
1. UGC. Brands pay creators to film videos for the brand's own channels, which means your follower count barely matters. They're buying your face, your voice, and your real life, not your audience. A language app emailed me about a UGC campaign before I even relaunched this page, which tells you something: the demand for real moms abroad is bigger than you think, even at small size. 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. If you're tempted to build the product first and find the people second, learn from every failed launch you've ever watched: collect the people first. Products sell to people, not to platforms.
3. Brand deals. The long game. This realistically needs a 5-figure engaged following, so I don't expect this line to move for months, and I put it on the board anyway so you can watch how long it actually takes. No skipped chapters.
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, and you've probably bought one. Me too.
- The family eats first. This runs on naptime and evenings. If a week disappears into actual life, that gets reported too, because your weeks disappear the same way.
- Introvert rules apply. Every path here works without cold calls, networking events, or performing a personality that isn't mine. If it wouldn't work for you at your kitchen table, it doesn't belong in this experiment.
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 building your own kitchen-table income, follow along and steal whatever works. And if you want to see the hole this income needs to fill, what our move actually cost has every line.
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 →