She Turned 5800 Followers Into $1 Million Per Year

You want to hear something that's going to blow your mind? $1 million in profit from less than 6,000 Instagram followers. What I want to walk you through is a story of a business owner that I just recently met doing those exact numbers from a tiny audience, and what you can use from those strategies for yourself to get started making big money, even if you have a small audience. I had the most insane thing happen last night, and. And it has had me at a loss for words. I was actually at a loss for words, like, speechless, befuddled, bewildered. And I was like, what is going on? And it took a concept that I kind of believe in, and I've made some moves around it, and it took it to the absolute hyperbolic extreme that you could imagine, and it still held true. And I think that for business owners who are listening to this, for people who make content, we're listening to this. But just in this is going to. I mean, it has slightly nudged how I see the world, and I'll just put it that way. And I feel like a lot of the beliefs that have around the world are still relatively. I hold on. I believe them pretty strongly. So here's what happened. So we had a company come in, and the lady who owns the company is a registered dietitian. And I'm not gonna shout her. I would shout her out because I wanted to get all the kudos in the world, but I. But I don't want it to mess up what she's doing, and so that's why I'm going to keep it anonymous. So she's a registered dietitian. She takes home just under a million dollars a year helping other registered dietitians bill insurance correctly. And so it's super niche in terms of what she's really good at. So she knows how to be an RD and help people bill insurance goods properly. And so the average, I think, Dietitian adds like, $100,000 in income using just like, her kind of coding system for billing them. Right? Crazy niche. Crazy, crazy niche. And so I spent. I spent some time with her. We talked about her business and things. I was like, hey, I think if you move this stuff around, and I think that the business could probably do about 3 million a year to 5 million a year in profit if she just moves some of the things around that we talked about. And so I was like, cool, this is great. And so we had dinner, and I was like, hey, let me see your. Your, Your. Your Instagram. So I just wanted to pull it up because I was Going to make a point about something because I assumed that she had. Like, I wanted to see what kind of content she had. I ass. She had at least a relatively large following. I honestly hadn't looked. Shame on me. And this is what happens. I pull it up. Number one, her account is not verified. And I'm like, this is your number one source of income and you are not paying 1499amonth. Like, what are you doing? What are you doing? And after yelling at her for that, I then was then drawn to the next natural, absolutely unbelievable thing that I'm going to say to you. She had 5,800 followers. Her average post got 19 likes and like one comment. And 100%, 100% of her acquisition came from her organic Instagram with just under 6,000 followers. I pulled up her account stats because I was losing my mind seeing the amount of sales that she was making off of this account. Her, her account, her reach for 30 days of her account was 2,800. That was her reach. 2800. Like for context, I do about 20 million a month. Context. And I was like, what is happening right now? Like, what am I, what do I not? What is, what is going on? How is this possible? And so she's doing 10 plus sales a day at a low ticket price and doing 3ish sales a week at a higher ticket price. And when I say higher ticket, I'm talking like, you know, four or $5,000 type price point and then a lower ticket thing for just like some cheat sheets of like, here's all the codes and this is how you can do them, whatever. And a 10 a day. A day. Okay. And so this is, that's, that's the big story. Now I'm going to zoom out and I'm going to say what I think is so cool about this. So she says this. And I was like, how are you doing this? And she was like, you know what? I got my first sale when I had eight people on my email list. Eight, eight. And I was like, that's nuts. And she was like, yeah. So it was really confirming for me that there's people who are listening. And so I was like, well, how big is your email list now? And she's been doing this for a few years. I told 2,900 people on her email list and she makes sales from emails. And it was such a great reset for me. It was such a good nudge. As a reminder that the view count you have on the other side, the 19 likes, like there's a real Person on the other side of this that is watching your clip that has five views, there's a real person who's opening up your emails when you have a list that has 5, 300 people on it. Like, people are watching, people are listening. And the thing that was unique that I found about her, I'll say two things and I think that there's a really good meta concept here. One is her content was consistent and she said, yeah, I do one post and I do one story every day. But she was super proud of it. I was like, this is adorable and also crazy. But the post that she talks about, 100% of them are about billing insurance as a registered dietitian, like, could not be more niche, couldn't you couldn't even think of one, right? Maybe I couldn't even imagine one. And despite that, she's making the sales that she is. And so I'm going to zoom out on this because I think it's really interesting. So if you, if you go to my Alex's homepage, right, like as a user of Instagram, my user page, I've showed this to people because people are like, this is really weird. All I have is philosophy stuff, comedy and gym equipment. Like, that's my whole feed. I have no news. I have it's philosophy, comedy and gym equipment. Because that's what I look at. And what's interesting is that the philosophy is kind of, a lot of those are kind of like mid sized. The comedy comedians are mass markets. A lot of those guys are bigger, but I get tiny comedians, like 5,000 follower, 10,000 follower comedians get shown to me all the time because Instagram knows I like comedy. And equipment dealers and equipment manufacturers and metal fabricators, not always the best marketers. And so like these accounts that I follow there have like 500, 1,000, like 2,000, like they're not huge accounts, but I get served everything in that space on Instagram because that's what I'm into. And so I think that there's a couple of really interesting things here. One is that I think that niche content will make you a hell of a lot more money if that's what you're actually selling. And I have, here's the thing. I have learned this lesson twice. So I like to, you know, I like to pretend that I'm, you know, I, I like to think I'm a fancy businessman who learns all these lessons, but I, I have messed this up two times. Not two times. And so I tell the story about how my podcast was getting you know, 2,3000 downloads per month, which is like 100 downloads an episode. Not a lot, right, but. And that was for like a few years. But I don't tell you this other part of the story, which is that my podcast started growing in numbers when I started talking about general business. It also started growing in numbers even faster once we sold the company for gym launch. But there was a period of about 18 months prior to me selling where I just talked about general business. Cause I was like, I'm tired about talking about gyms, I just wanna talk about business in general. During that period of time, our organic sales went to basically zero. And it took us like six months to figure out that the reason that that had happened was because I stopped talking about gym shit. And gym owners were like less interested in my content than generic business content. That makes sense. Like if you, if you're just, if you're a business owner, you're going to listen to business stuff in general. If you're a dentist, then you're going to get a lot out of a dentist only podcast, right? But there's not that many dentists, so you're not going to get a lot of listens. But the listens in terms of relevancy is going to be through the roof. And so we started making less sales, but I was getting more views, more listens right now. I ended up wanting to go in that direction, so it was fine. And I'm talking about general business now, right? I made that mistake second time. Not necessarily a mistake. We learned, right. Three to six months ago, we were like, let's experiment with some wider content. And by experimenting with wider content, we sure as hell got more views, more, more. A bunch of other vanity metrics. But the number of business owners that was watching and the way I measured that was our CPMs on our videos on YouTube, the amount of people who opt in at acquisition.com, the number people who buy our books, all of those, all of those metrics were actually down despite our views being up. And so this little story that I have of the dinner that I had last night blew me away because it just showed how much you can really make if you have a die hard audience that doesn't need to be big. Less than 6,000 followers, her account reaches less than 2,800 accounts per month and she's taking home almost a million dollars a year. That's income, not revenue. I'm just talking profit. And right now if she just makes the couple of obvious changes that she could make, should probably make somewhere in the three to five million dollars a year range. Income, Income. And if you're looking to make your first dollar online or monetize your audience, no matter what the size is, school.com games is the easiest way that I know how to do it. I take a call once a week inside of that community to answer questions for people who are getting started. I have a step by step course that lays out what exactly to do to make your first dollar online. And once a month I drop eight hours of, of training from the top 10 community business owners showing exactly what they're doing to scale their communities. Today, School.comGames you can start for free. And I say this because there's two angles on this, right on one side people are like, well, I don't want to start making content because what if I have low numbers? I believe now the algorithms are so good that if you make it about one specific type of thing, it's going to show to those people. And right now, by the way, like, the guy who runs Instagram talked about how he's actually favoring smaller creators now. So that's a good thing if you're, if you're trying to get into it. But beyond that, I think there's so much power in. And when I talk to her, she's like, I just want to show up. She's like, I show up whether there's no one, there's one person and I just, I show it like, like it's a whole auditorium. She said this thing and I have just noticed this with fucking winners, right? It's like they're doing it because of what they. Because she's a missionary. She just genuinely wants to help. Richard Dietitian. She's like, I get it. I worked at the hospital doing 100 hours a week and like I was under, you know, understaffed, underbuild. And I had to start making this business work on my own, doing one day a week. So I had to figure out how to do this quickly in terms of all this billing stuff. And she, she gets so passionate when she's talking about it. I have confidence she's not going to change industry. She's been in 20 something years. Like, she's not going anywhere. She loves this stuff. And the people who stay in the game the longest, like the game they're in. And so I have this thing that I heard from Last Dance, which is the Michael Jordan documentary, which if you haven't seen, you should totally see it. And they're interviewing Jordan and they're like, why do you. You like, you bring such a high intensity every single time you show up to the arena. And he says this line, and I remember getting chills when I heard it. He was like, I just never. I know that there's one guy who's bringing his son, and they saved up for months to go to this one Bulls game, and that's the one. It's not going to be some primetime night. It's just going to be a random Tuesday game in a series. He's like. And that's the only time they're going to see me play in their lives. He's like, and I want. I want to perform for them, for that kid, for that. For that dad who wants to impress his son. And like, that. That, like, I almost get choked up when I tell that story because, like, that's so real for me. And the way that she brought the energy, like, the energy she brought in terms of how she wanted to show up when there's eight people on her life or two people on her life, or when they were eight people on her email list and she made her first $39 sale, I was like, this is real and people need to hear this. Which is why I wanted to tell the story. Cause I think it's absolutely insane. And it just. It put, like, I say what I say, right? Which is, hey, guys, like, start making, you know, start making content. Start promoting yourself. If more people know about your stuff, you're gonna make more money, period. Fight me, right? That's. That's what it is. But you just forget sometimes that, like, when you have 10 views on a YouTube video, that's 10 people. And I remember when I was in the gym world, If I had 10 people that I could talk to, I was stoked, right? And the fact that we can do this from home behind a camera, my God, how amazing is that? And so, like, If I had 25 people, my God, that's like. That's like a talk. That's like a. That's like a workshop. You a lunch and learn that you do as a business owner trying to get business. The fact that you can make a niche content, Instagram will serve it to only people who are interested in that. I only like gym equipment, and I get gym equipment stuff all the time. They've got like 13 likes on it. But I see it, right? I see it because Instagram knows, and the algorithms only get better. And so I wanted to cover all that stuff because I thought it was really important. And from a. How do you make this. She has endless sources of content because she just literally answers their questions. They just keep. She was like. I was like, so where do you get your stuff from? She's like, oh, they all have questions. And so I just. I just make my posts answering their questions. That's it. And I will say this, I think she could do a lot of things better, to be clear. But, like, she just had. Every other post just had a. By the way, there's a link in my bio that has more stuff that you might like. That was it. That was the whole strategy. And she was doing a million dollars a year take home just under. And so I was just blown away by this. And I find it actually one of the most hopeful messages that I have seen in. In person in a very long time. And so people have, you know, like, unless I have 100,000 followers, not be able to make money unless I have tuned the. The thing is, is that people seek the followers with the idea that the followers are gonna make them rich. The followers will make you famous. Understanding business will make you rich. She understands business. She's like, I'm just gonna talk to the people that I wanna serve, and I'm only gonna serve them, and I'm gonna answer all the questions. And the way she talked about her, she's like, I just wanna be useful. She's like, I just wanna help them out. And so if you're coming into the frame, rather than like, I want this piece of content to perform and think there's eight people on their side, I just want them to be better off and hopefully answer their question from this piece of content they're making. You will get raving fans, even if Your audience is 5,000 people. But there's a book. I can't remember the guy who wrote the name of the book, but he says you only need a thousand true fans. And I think that, like, a thousand fans. Like, you can do whatever you want with a thousand fans, even at 10 bucks a month, right? Like, you can make $100,000 a year if you just do that, right? Thousand true fans that are die hard. And you can make a lot more than that with a thousand true fans. And so people think because we have this 8 billion people in the world, that you need to be. You need to be the Brock. You need to be Kim Kardashian. You need to be Mr. Beast. And sure, with massive numbers like those, like, you're going to get famous, Those things are required. But, like, you can make an absolute killing just talking about what you're really good at. And that's the other piece here, is that I'm, I'm half, I'm shouting this at myself too, which is like, we, we, we made piece of marriage content, a couple, you know, a couple relationship stuff, a little bit of fitness stuff. And the thing is, it's like there's, there's no relationship billionaire. Like, the only objective measure of if your marriage is good just from a society standpoint, is that you are not divorced. That's it. And then it's that measured by how many years you put up with each other, that's it. And I don't like that because it's one of those crappy things where everybody's been in a relationship, so everybody has an opinion, and there's no objective proof that one thing is better than another. And so, like, I hate, I don't like making cotton in that space. We tried it out because, like, we have a unique relationship, Layla and I, and we like what we do, and it's worked for us well. But I would say that I have more credibility in business. And so she has credibility in not just, she doesn't talk about nutrition at all. She just talks about how to be a registered dietitian and bill insurance properly and get credentialized and do this whole process that apparently is a big pain in the butt. And so if you are somebody who has a very specific niche that you're, that you're good at, I would highly encourage you to just make the content that gets 40 views, that gets a hundred likes that you know, for sure will help a very specific person, because when you do help that very specific person, they will like you a lot more than many people who like you a little bit. And the people who like you a lot are the ones who buy from you. And that's the thing. And I, I, I'm making this because I need to remind myself of this, which is like, you can either be rich or you can be famous. You can obviously be both, but honestly, sometimes it's a lot faster to just get rich. And many of you get in the game because you want to make money from social media, from making content, from things like that, from advertising the business. You want to do more of that, get your face out there, whatever, but you start chasing the views because the views is what the algorithm. Right. Encourages. But the business side, and this is why I'm trying to make this point, is that the metrics don't necessarily follow the, your business metrics don't follow your vanity metrics. There. And so just because you get more views doesn't mean you get more revenue. Just because you get more subs doesn't mean you get more opt ins, right? For your website or for whatever it is that you, that you sell. You don't get sales from that stuff. Subscribers don't mean sales. And so there are, there are tons of stories of tiny new channels. We have, we have an insurance brokerage that we own and the head of the insurance brokerage has like when we invest in the company, had I think like 5,000 followers on Instagram or sorry, not Instagram, on YouTube. And the business is doing many millions of dollars a year. I'll just be that be very clear there, many millions, not just one or two. And it's because he talks about a very complex structure of insurance that he specializes in. He's one of the foremost experts and his videos get like 100 to 500 views. But those 100 to 500 views are people who are looking for incredibly high end, very specialized insurance products. And so don't be afraid of the empty room. Very low views doesn't mean low revenue. It just means that it's more specific and that you're talking to a more specific person. And a specific problem being solved for a specific person is how you make big money. And so I thought this was one of the most hopeful messages that I had seen in real life in a long time. And it was really confirming for me. It also doubled down on the direction that we're doing, which for those who said, I said mistake, made the mistake twice. We have come back to going back to business, baby. Only business only, Alex. Only business. Only for the fans. Just kidding. And I hope this at least encouraged you to just divorce yourself more and more from the vanity metrics around it. Because I am now leaning so hard to this because our business metrics and I have a big long thing that's coming out soon have skyrocketed since we stopped going anything that's not business. And so I feel so confirmed in this direction that I want to encourage as many of you as humanly possible to just toss out the vanity metrics because they do not fucking matter. If you're trying to make money, if you're just trying to get famous, then yeah, by all means, it's a great metric for fame, right? And so, yeah, just do that. Be willing to have a thousand fans make stuff that has 19 likes. Because you know that the 19 people who liked it were like, this was unbelievable for me. And they will take the next step and they will purchase from your business. Keep being awesome. Have an amazing day.