I set out to be a full time creator. Here's how it's going...

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You know how kids these days all want to be pro YouTubers?

It’s me. I am the kid.

In June, I told you I wanted to try being a full time creator for the summer.

By that, I didn’t really mean YouTube. I meant this newsletter, my other newsletter and the revenue streams that originate here.

My friends in LA laughed at me. Contrary to what TikTok would have you believe about Hollywood, they all have real jobs.

So, how’s it actually been going?

Well, I was wrong about pretty much everything.

I forecasted the reader growth wrong.
I projected the revenue wrong.
I changed my mind about stuff I thought I would like doing.
My partners and clients landed in completely different places than expected.

It’s weird because I have personally never been more on my game.

I feel like 2017 Kevin Durant wondering why he has to ride Steph Curry’s coat tails to get a championship ring.

In today’s issue, I explain what I wanted to do and where it went wrong. A little behind the scenes of a (wannabe) creator business.

Behind the scenes of this very newsletter business

BEFORE we get into these goals and numbers which I think you’re going to find shockingly low…

I want to remind you that my first month in business I made nearly $20k (and I cleared six figures my first year.)

So my goal has never been “$5k months” or “$10k months.” I have always known that was possible depending on who I was willing to work for and the kinds of work I was willing to do.

I’m less interested in hitting a revenue number. I am not a wealth chaser. I just want to pay my bills, not go into debt and do stuff I actually like. I’m after freedom.

So that number is $6k/mo and it can drop as low as $4k occasionally (meaning that I might dip into savings a little). That’s revenue, not income to myself, but the majority of the revenue goes to my salary.

What I set out to do

It’s my goal to get out of consulting for good in the next five years. That doesn’t mean that I would never take on a client again. I just want to primarily make money other ways.

I want to write, speak and teach about finding your buyers.

For the last two years, I was running a membership but that wound down in June. And that led me to come up with a new plan for how I was going to make money, starting this summer.

The plan: use the 2 newsletters to drive 6 revenue streams.

On the Low Energy Leads side (the newsletter you are reading right now)

• Sell more one off live sessions and digital products

• Increase sponsorship rates

• Add paid subscriptions

On the Journalists Pay Themselves side (my other newsletter)

• Consult with newsrooms → to be published in the newsletter and to be turned into a repeatable playbook (probably to sell)

• Add paid subscriptions

• Seek grant or fellowship funding

In addition to these two plans, I do get some inbound speaking requests usually to the tune of a few thousand dollars a year ($5-10k total per year) so I was counting on some of that too (roughly $2-3k over this summer).

Shout out to my favorite business coach Matthew Fenton who looked at this business model deck with me and made similar predictions to what actually happened. That’s why I love Matthew. He says it like it is, but he’ll always let me have my little dreams!

What actually happened

Revenue Stream 1: Sell more one off live sessions and digital products

• I sold two events over the summer: this workshop on finding clients and the 100 subs quest. That brought in a combined total of $1975

• I promoted my Stay Booked Roadmap a bit and the shop made $397.60 (June/July)

• I believe that all of the above was well priced. Some people recommended I raise prices but I don’t really want to. The point is to keep stuff accessible while being adequately compensated for my time. Several of you wrote me with your budgets for classes/trainings and I am taking that into account moving forward so thanks for that!

• Total: $2372.60 (June/July)

Revenue Stream 2: Increase sponsorship rates (Low Energy Leads)

• Sponsorship rates are on my Passionfroot page and they range from $19-79 an issue and so far in June/July, that’s totaled $226

• The rates are calculated on a mix of CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per thousand impressions) so that’s why the rates are so low.

• I grew the list by 22% over the summer through organic recommendations, more LinkedIn promotion and paid boosts with beehiiv but overall clicks stayed eerily flat.

• This is why I got more aggressive about list cleaning 

• Long story long, I can’t really in good faith raise the rates unless I can actually measure the impact for partners with something other than CPC/CPM.

Revenue Stream 3: Add paid subscriptions (Low Energy Leads)

• I haven’t explored this yet but it’s something I’m thinking about for this fall. I have this idea for a book of 100 Recipes to Find Clients and a paid subscription could be a cool way to develop that with anyone interested.

Revenue Stream 4: Consult with newsrooms (Journalists Pay Themselves)

• I did my first project of this sort in the spring and initially it went really well, but towards the end I realized it actually wasn’t going that great. I wrote about that at length in this post.

• The Business Manager in the newsroom I worked with asked me for an additional proposal but we sort of mutually decided it was a no.

• I have talked to two other newsrooms but I don’t think it would go differently so I’m heading to a couple journalism conferences (one next week!) and I’m moving this project back to research phase.

Revenue Stream 5: Add paid subscriptions (Journalists Pay Themselves)

• Haven’t even started thinking about this.

Revenue Stream 6: Seek grant or fellowship funding (Journalists Pay Themselves)

• I did apply for a few sub-$5k grants—in particular to fund my conference expenses and research expenses like data analysis tools I’m using as well as training for things like conversion copy (for me and for the reporters I’m working with)

• No grants have come through yet and I need to decide whether or not I’m going to prioritize this.

Revenue Stream 7: Speaking

• I had 2 inbound speaking opportunities for this summer, expected to bring in around $3k.

• One fell through but is still paying $1k. The other is moved until the fall.

• I have 1 outbound speaking opportunity that came from a sponsorship (meaning I pitched a sponsor a speaking gig), estimated to bring in $2k.

• I haven’t taken speaking seriously in years and I need to. It’s probably the most likely revenue stream for me to nail that I actually enjoy.

Revenue Stream 8: New client work

• The invisible revenue stream that is always in the back of my mind is taking on clients. I hadn’t worked with clients 1:1 since 2022 and the newsroom client was my first one this year.

• It was extremely fortuitous that at the time I was thinking about who I might want to work with, Olly at Senja and I started talking about what they’re up to and I couldn’t invent a better fit if you asked me to imagine one.

• Even in a world where I’m not really doing client work, I would want to work with Senja because I love what they’re doing and how they’re doing it so much. We are on the same wavelength about how important word of mouth is and how much creators, entrepreneurs and founders vastly underleverage it. Olly and Wilson (the cofounders of Senja) have created some of the best software I’ve ever used to help us do that.

What I’m doing next

The verdict right now is that without Growthtrackers operating as a membership (which brought in roughly $4-7k/mo), I can’t run a creator-style business full time.

The good news is that my work for Senja is basically all the things I love doing: writing, speaking and teaching. And we’re focused on the same topics I think and talk endlessly about.

Based on selling the two recent events, one off events aren’t really a viable revenue stream here yet and I’m better off chasing paid speaking gigs.

I’m going to explore digital products and paid low cost subscriptions next and otherwise, take some space to think about how I really want this to go. There’s no such thing as easy money for me right now. (In 2020, I was offered $3k to do a no-prep, one hour virtual Q&A about analytics and that was probably the easiest money I have ever made, I thought it was a scam!)

Maybe easy money doesn’t exist or maybe it doesn’t exist for me. Either way, I’m grateful for every day that I have the freedom to figure it out.

The Stacking Up Subs Challenge: Our Winners!

Our theme for the month of July was 5 ways to grow your email list and to keep it interesting, we were running a live challenge of who could add the most subscribers to their list!

🥁 Drumroll please…the results are in!

Our winners are Melissa, Cee and Elizabeth! All of them added over 100 subscribers to their list last month. Impressive stuff! Each of them will get a featured plug right here so look out to learn more about them soon 🎉 

Here’s where we started…

…and here’s where we landed!

We added a total of nearly 4000 subscribers between all of us. Think of the amazing things that could happen if we started co-promoting more 😉 

Check out the comments on this thread to get those promos going!

P.S. Want to know my weirdest habit? I listen to the song “Heart to Heart” by Kenny Loggins on single track repeat when I write this newsletter. Don’t ask cuz I don’t know why either.