The $60K/Month Business AI Can’t Replace

This couple makes over $60,000 a month sending these. A letter shows up handwritten in your mailbox each month. We're going to show you exactly how they did it so you can learn too. Tell me exactly what your business is. What do you guys do here?

Every single month we send out a 1-ounce letter to our subscribers. It has a written letter by me and then a bunch of just little paper-designed goodies.

How did this happen? That's just a wild idea. I would've never thought could've gotten to $60,000 per month. It kind kind of happened by accident.

I was getting into making jams at my house, and I really wanted to meet my neighbors. I was craving connection, and so I sat out in my front yard. I was selling jams to people in my neighborhood. People outside of the community started to want to be a part of it, and so I thought, what about a 1oz letter? And the first month I just posted it on social media, and 50 people signed up.

How many followers did you have on social media at that time?

I think I had just under 3,000 followers.

And you had 50 people sign up?

50 people signed How much did they pay? They paid $11.

That's wild. So you just kind of thought, people seem lonely, they might wanna get a letter in the mail instead of just ads all the time?

Yeah.

And you really had no data to do that, you just thought, I think this might work.

I was the target audience, so I was like, I would love this, I would love to receive this in the mail, I think there's other people that would too.

I want you to walk me through revenue month by month. My idea here is that somebody watching, you can see what the progression of a business looks like, and how do I copy your homework?

So the first month was August. I just had a regular printer, $50, and I used old stamps from my wedding invitations and old envelopes. And so I made back everything immediately.

Let's fast forward a tiny bit. October, where are we at?

October was a really big month for us. We hit 1,200 subscribers.

Dude, that's amazing. So you're making like $13,000 a month.

Yes.

What was the big jump that got you from $50 to thousands?

We had one viral video happen on TikTok and it completely changed our lives. Our January month, we hit about 3,000 subscribers and we were at about $33,000 in revenue.

Wow. And how did you stair-step in that way? Was this just more videos on social media?

Yes, it was just circulating. People were sending them to each other. We had a lot of people posting what they were getting in the mail and then it was causing more people to sign up. A lot of word of mouth. It was really just social media.

Cute.

Okay, then March, which is basically fast forward to a month or two ago. Now we're sitting at how many?

5,000.

Wow.

And this is how we get to like the $57,000, $60,000 a month.

Yes. This next month we'll be sending 5,200.

Now we've got a little workshop in your house. What did you start with?

It was incredibly low cost. I designed things myself and then I would send it to a printing service. And they would send it to me, and then I would just pack it in a 1-ounce letter.

Nice, okay. We had a printer. We probably had stamps. We had like a little extra add-on thing that you might have there, an art print or something.

Yes, so art print, a small business card that has our social media or our music playlist.

Yeah.

And then 2 stickers, a recipe card, and a little paper goodie, and then a miniature little tarot card.

So you're probably all in costs are like what? For the beginning of this business? $1,000. $1,000 bucks. Yeah. All right, let's get down and dirty with the actual numbers. We're ready to go, right? Active subs, what are we looking at?

5,200.

Subscription price?

$11 a month.

Gross monthly revenue?

$57,200.

Okay, now let's talk about how much it costs you to produce each letter. Yeah. This is super important because when you start a business, usually you're not thinking about the costs. You're like, show me that revenue, and that's how you can lose all your money. So materials and postage?

About $4 to $5 every month.

Fulfillment labor?

75 cents.

Which means the actual cost of people being employees and doing the work. Cost of goods sold, $5 to $6. Basically the combination of the two. Gross margin, $5 to $6. Nice. Which means your gross margin percentage is 55%. Now, there's a bunch of stuff we don't have in here. We're not talking about net margin. Net margin is what this means. This doesn't include things like taxes. It doesn't include things like rent. It doesn't include things like probably your salary that you and your husband take from the business. So this is gross, not net, but you know, We're not the IRS here. We can't ask her for every single dollar that she's keeping.

Okay, so total revenue of the business?

$60,000.

That's pretty hot. Oh, I love this. We're talking about a 55% gross margin business, which means that you can start this business with $50, basically. Let's say $1,000 max. And Wall Street would say that businesses like this, they actually sell for 4 to 6x EBITDA, or the amount of money that you take home. What's interesting though, is that I think these margins are so clean. It's a subscription business. It has recurring bringing revenue that if you had this business and you got it big enough to the tune of millions of dollars or $10 million plus, this is not a side hustle. This is a sellable asset. What's yours? So now you're running this full-time. What does a day-to-day look like? This isn't passive income. It's not mailbox money, although it literally is mailbox money. What does a real day in the life look like? So somebody watching can be like, do I want that or not?

Well, what I love about it is that every single day is different. We only do one send-off a month. And so Really, our most intense week is the week right before send-off where we're in here every single day for between like 3 to 4 hours and we pack about 1,000 letters. And that takes about a week. And then we do one big send-off day at the USPS distribution center. Outside of that, the biggest thing is my design work. I do the designs for everything, but you could outsource different ways for that. And then that's basically it.

What advice would you give the person who is listening right now and figuring out how to go all in on their thing?

I think it helps if you go in with someone else, obviously, um, but it's never going to feel easy. People are always looking for that moment, like, okay, it makes sense to do it now. That never comes, but it's just kind of a leap of faith. You got to do it at some point.

Here's the thing, Hannah had zero data and basically no money. You may be in the same place. If you're running a business and staring at a slow month thinking, I need more customers, you actually probably don't have a lead problem. I think this is a problem of you asking, which is why my team and I made a growth kit with HubSpot called 2X Your Customer Base, because distribution beats product. So referrals always beat advertising, and a simple, consistent follow-up cadence beats any marketing campaign you're gonna run. The owners who win aren't the ones with the best branding. They show up, they ask, they follow through. And this kit is the system that helps you double your customer base without spending a dime on advertising. You get 3 proven lead channels and exactly how to start each one this week, a follow-up tracker so leads stop falling through the cracks, and instructions so AI writes your cold emails and call scripts for you. Deals don't die from your bad pitch. They die from nobody even following up about it. So if you fix that, you'll outearn your competitors twice your size. And I think one of the biggest lies is that you need money to start. You don't. You can start with a kit, all free, made by my team at HubSpot, who's sponsoring this video, and start growing your business with the right customers.

Everybody wants to know when to quit their job, and honestly, one of the dumbest things that you can do is get rid of the thing that is funding your next side hustle. Now, you can't be a bad employee. You can't not execute on things. And if you're in a fast-growing startup, it's probably too hard to do. But if you're in a corporate job and then you want to do a side hustle on the side to get out of it, that is the path that most people do. In fact, I was at a corporate job. I was working like crazy, and I bought a laundromat on the side. Then I bought another one. Then I bought another one. And you guys, these weren't like big expensive things. You should have seen the mathematics of my first laundromat. I mean, I'm talking about a tiny little thing that wasn't making a ton of money but ended up when I put it together with many of them replacing my income entirely. So remember, these tiny little steps can lead to your exit plan from your business. Use your salary to actually fund your future LLC. That's the play. So I think one of the coolest parts about this is I opened this thing and thought, oh my gosh, this is UGC. This is user-generated content right here. I bet a bunch of people create videos of this because you pull it out and you're like, look at all 'Look at all the cute things I got today!' And then they're showing them, and it shows up in pictures and then quotes on their Instagram. Your product is your ad, am I right?

Yeah, it's so aesthetic already, and it's curated, and so all I have to do is take pictures of it and videos of it, and it kind of sells itself.

That's wild. And so the idea is you don't need an ad because if you create great videos yourself, then that becomes the ad. Other people share it, they post it.

Yeah.

So what is the marketing strategy for you guys? You have one?

I don't have a marketing strategy, but what has been working is I post my story, I share why I started this, and I post it to my own personal TikTok and Instagram, and then I show what I make and people sign up.

And you're really just showing, not telling. You're documenting, you're not creating. You don't have to come up with this social media strategy because you're just highlighting the thing you're already doing every day.

Yeah, and I think like because consumers are so smart and my generation is getting so smart with, with what they're being sold that we're kind of tired of that. And so we want to just see the behind the scenes of someone, see why they start their own like endeavors, and then also watching us be able to quit our jobs and experience this, people are so supportive of that. And so for $11 a month they can just support that mission and That's incredible.

It's actually really smart because one of the things we've seen everywhere is that the more produced something is, the less it's trusted. And so you don't actually have to have this big crew, a bunch of stuff to produce. It's actually a little bit better if it feels native and like you're just doing it in the moment and it's kind of down and dirty.

Yeah, all of my best videos have always been like the grimiest, like least planned, and it's— that's the strategy, is like just showing up every single day.

That's hot. Here's the mistake most people make in starting their business. They think, how much is it gonna take? I have to save up. Can I do this? As opposed to thinking, who funds the amount? As you can see here, they use the least amount of money possible and then thought, how could somebody else help me fund this? In this case, it was actually the customers that did pre-orders for it. But this is the biggest lesson that new entrepreneurs need to learn, is that creative is always better than straight cash. You have more opportunity than you think and than your bank account says.

7 steps to take you to your next million dollars in revenue if you have a subscription business or you want to create one like theirs. Step 1, we've got to move them off. Right now, they're on something called Webador and they have Stripe link. You gotta get onto a real subscription platform. It does all the work for you. So, this is like Shopify plus a recurring app. This is really gonna help you do win-back emails. It's also why you can't see your churn today in this company. Second, I want you to start doing email capture everywhere. So yeah, you know, you have these free things that you send out, but then you go to the website and there's no email list. So put it in your bio, pin the comment, do it on the site. Stop letting 99% of the viral viewers vanish on social. Instead, have them link not just to buy something from you, but to give you their email. 3, raise the prices. I know, not on your old subs, your tried and true, but try it on new subs. Maybe $14. I think it's underpriced at $11. Grandfather existing members in so nobody's upset, but raise the prices, and you can do it 50 cents, a dollar at a time. Then I really would obsess about making prepay the default. AKA, right now you have a 3 to 6 month option and a buy one time. Why don't we just make actually the prepayment 12 months, the go-to. You also, I think, should really optimize for gift options, but they look identical button-wise. I would also show the savings on there, like 6 months for $54, save 20%, and then you can make gifting really loud and seasonal and have pop-ups. In general, your landing page is the most important thing that you have. On theirs, you can see there's no testimonials, no unboxing photos or videos, there's not a price plus prepay math up front. And there's not a lot of urgency, like, "Wait until you see what's coming out next month," or, "Only so many options for next month." I would play with scarcity too. You wanna send, like, emotionally primed viral traffic to a cool page, not a flat page. You know, anything that increases your conversion there is just free money. 6, I wanna track churn and LTV. When you move the platform, like we want you to do up here, then you're gonna know how long a subscriber stays and what they're worth. And then you can safely buy growth then, but you can't do it until then. And lastly, I would add some more social channels like Pinterest, plus I would systematize my content. So repurpose winning videos to Pinterest. It's like a search engine built for nostalgia, recipes, crafts. I would also do more YouTube Shorts. And then later, I'd put spend behind your proven viral videos so you pre-validate the creative as a cheap shortcut. That's the math to get to your first, I think, $5 million in revenue.

This type of business is what I call a gateway business. This is your first little foot in the door to the life you want to lead. I think there's a huge misconception that you have to go all in, burn the boats, quit the jobs. No, you don't. You could just start with a tiny print, just like they did. A jar of homemade jam, a couple hundred bucks for a printer, And a letter now equals a $60,000 a month business. What is your Main Street Millionaire business going to be? Tell us in the comments. Maybe we'll cover yours.