I have $10,000 and a crazy idea

I set aside $10,000.

I'm giving myself 18 months.

I want to find out if one person, using every tool available in 2026, can build real revenue from absolutely nothing.

Not "passive income." Not dropshipping. Not a course about making courses. Real money. Coming in every month. From strangers who found something worth paying for.

I'm calling it 10K to Couch. My couch is where I'll be sitting if this works out. Your couch is where I'll be sleeping if it doesn't.

I'm going to document the whole thing. The wins, the losses, and every dollar in between.

This might work. It might not. Either way, you'll know exactly how it went.

who i am

I'm anonymous. On purpose.

I have a day job. I'm not quitting it. I'm not a tech bro with connections. I don't have a rich uncle or 50,000 followers or a "proven system."

I'm staying anonymous because this isn't about me. If I put my face on it, it becomes about personal brand. I don't want that. I want to know if the tools actually work when someone ordinary uses them.

The question is simple: Can a regular person, with limited time and limited capital, build real income streams with what's available to everyone right now?

That's it. That's the whole thing.

the rules

I set some rules for myself.

Every dollar gets tracked. Every hour gets logged. I'll publish full financials so you can see exactly where the money goes. No hiding costs. No pretending my time doesn't count.

Real numbers every week. Good weeks and bad weeks. If I'm bleeding money, you'll see it in the spreadsheet.

Failures get documented just like wins. Probably more, honestly, because that's where the interesting stuff happens.

If I lose money, you'll know exactly how much and why.

No selling to friends and family. If this only works because people I know feel sorry for me, it doesn't work.

what i'm starting with

Here's my entire starting position:

$10,000 in cash. Set aside. That's the budget for everything.
A computer. Nothing special.
AI tools. Same ones available to anyone with an internet connection.
About 10 hours a week. Evenings and weekends.
No audience. Zero followers. No email list.
No products. Nothing built yet.
This post.

That's it. That's what I'm working with.

the plan

I'm not betting everything on one idea. That's how you lose $10,000 in three months.

Instead: build multiple small revenue streams. Test them fast. Kill the losers. Feed the winners.

The first few experiments will probably be:

A service business using AI tools to handle production
Digital products that can sell while I sleep
An SEO play that builds slowly
Maybe a small software tool if I find a problem worth solving

Most of these will fail. Some might work. The goal is to find out which is which as quickly as possible.

One thing I realized early: even when an experiment tanks, I get a story out of it. Worst case, 10K to Couch becomes 18 months of content about trying and failing. That's not the plan. But it's not a bad backup.

how i'll report

Every week I'll post what I worked on, what happened, and how I'm feeling about it.

Every month I'll publish full financials. Revenue by venture. Expenses by category. Running total of what's left. The ugly parts too.

I'm not waiting until I have a success story to start sharing. You're going to see the messy middle in real time.

my promises to you

I want to get something down in writing before this starts. Promises I'm making to you, publicly, that I can be held to.

AI-assisted, human-approved. I use AI tools constantly and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But every word that goes out has been read, edited, and posted by me. My judgment is behind it. I don't publish anything I haven't blessed.
Ask me anything. How something works, what it cost, why I made a decision. No dodging.
Failures first. When things go wrong, that's the first thing I write about. Not the last. Not buried in a footnote three weeks later.
No revisionist history. I won't go back and quietly edit old posts to make myself look smarter. What I said, I said. If I was wrong, I'll write a new post about being wrong.
Affiliate transparency. If I recommend a tool or service and I make money from the link, you'll know.
No ghosting. If I decide to stop, I won't just go silent. I'll write the final post, tell you what happened, and close the books.
Real numbers or no numbers. I won't round up. I won't show revenue without showing costs. If the spreadsheet is ugly, you'll see the ugly spreadsheet.

giving back

One more thing.

If 10K to Couch makes money, I'm splitting it three ways. A third goes back into the next experiment. A third goes to me, for my time. And a third gets donated. Every quarter, I'll let you vote on where that third goes. And I'll publish the receipts. Not "I donated to charity." The actual receipt. The actual amount.

If I lose money, I eat the loss. That's on me. But I'll feel good knowing the content itself helped someone avoid the same mistakes.

If I win, we all win. That's the deal.

what success looks like

I'm not expecting to get rich. Let's get that out of the way.

If I break even, that's a win. Seriously. $10K in, $10K back, and I learned a ton? I'll take that.

If I build something that covers a car payment every month? That's the real goal. Not quit-your-job money. Just proof that it can be done.

If I end up with something worth selling? That would be wild. Not counting on it.

And if I lose most of the money? Then I've spent 18 months producing a very detailed guide on what not to do. Somebody will find that useful.

why i'm doing this

Honestly? I kind of expect to fail.

Not because I'm not going to try. I'm going to try hard. But I think most of the people online claiming to make money this way are full of shit. The guy bragging about his $500 win isn't mentioning the $3,000 he spent getting there. The woman showing her revenue dashboard isn't showing the refund rate, the ad spend, or the 14 months of nothing before that screenshot. And the loudest voices? They're making money selling you the dream of making money. It's turtles all the way down.

So I want to run the experiment honestly. Track every dollar. Show every loss. And see if, when you account for everything, this actually works for a normal person.

If it does, great. I'll show you exactly how.

If it doesn't, that's maybe more valuable. Because then you'll know the next guru selling you a course is probably lying.

follow along

If you want to see how this goes, here's where to find me:

Twitter: @10ktocouch — weekly updates, real-time reactions, and complaining when things break.

Newsletter: newsletter.10ktocouch.com — the longer stuff. Weekly breakdown of what I'm building, what it costs, and whether any of it is working.

Week 1 starts now. Let's see what happens.

P.S. I fully expect to look back at this post in 18 months and cringe at my naivety. That's fine. We all start somewhere.