Inayah McMillan, a 21-year-old from St. Louis, Missouri, used her YouTube channel to share her experience and guide those who desired to follow in her footsteps, making cool money from Airbnb.
The nine-minute video, which has received close to 900,000 views, is titled “How I Made $3 Million in 6 Months as a 20-Year-Old Female Entrepreneur.”
In the video, she discussed how she initially experimented with other income streams, such as eCommerce, drop shipping, and stock trading, before deciding that Airbnb was the best fit for her.
She said, “I started by renting; I didn’t own any properties. I now have 11 Airbnbs that I rent.
“From that, I learned how to do rental arbitrage, and at first, I didn’t understand it fully. But I was learning as I went, and as I went through the mistakes and learning curves, I figured out what worked and what didn’t.
“Then everyone started seeing this 20-year-old girl making five figures a month, making forty thousand dollars, fifty thousand dollars, and sixty thousand dollars a month from Airbnb.”
Soon, she received several requests from people asking her to share her secrets for success.
She and her partner, Bryson, decided to launch a coaching business to assist others in this industry.
She said, “We made up to sixty thousand dollars in a month from Airbnb, and then we started getting students who were also getting results. So we started an entire coaching program, and I was able to hire a lot of my family to work with me to keep scaling this coaching business.”
Inayah was so sure of her company’s success that she even informed her brother that she didn’t think he needed to attend college.
Inayah and her partner’s business reached its first million-dollar milestone in October, and it has since expanded.
“June 2022, I made a hundred thousand dollars; that was my first six-figure month,” she said.
“After that, I told my brother, ‘I’m going to make two hundred thousand dollars this month’. In July, we made over two hundred thousand dollars. Our revenue just kept increasing as we started making more and more of an impact on more people.
“In October, I and Bryson were like, ‘We’re going to make a million dollars this month’ and in October we made a million dollars.
“In November, we made a million dollars. Finally, at the end of the year, we generated over three million dollars from our Airbnbs and also from our coaching.”
She continued: “The intentional actions, the positive mindset, and living in what you say you’re going to do—that’s how we made three million dollars.”
One of the lessons she’s taken away from this is that when you have money, you don’t become a different person. Instead, it gives you ‘more freedom’ and ‘more opportunity’.
However, as she also described in the clip, Inayah’s entrepreneurial journey wasn’t entirely without its challenges.
She admitted that despite being an honours student and having few friends, she never ‘fit in’ at school.
She said: “It was a little bit hard to fit in: I’m black, I’m Hispanic, I’m Muslim.”
She remembered her brother Jamil giving her a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People when she was 16, and they lived with their father.
She even remembers seeing a whiteboard in his room with the words “I will be a millionaire by 22” written on it, where he had promised it would help her “become successful.”
She said, “In my head, I was thinking, ‘Where’d he come up with that? We’ve never seen a millionaire in our lives.
“Money was never something that we grew up seeing, it was never something that we were familiar with. My family never had a lot of money in any aspect.”
After her eldest brother passed away, she said it changed her ‘whole perspective on life’.
