$1M Guide: How I’m Scaling a Content Business to 7 Figures in 2025 | 042

In this episode, we get very tactical on how to grow to $1 million and beyond in 2025.

We have 75,000 email subscribers. I've been worried. I've been stressed. Our revenue has dipped.

Something I see over and over again with professional creators is that usually their new subscribers are coming in a lot slower than before.

We've made pocket change on affiliate offers, sponsorships on the podcast, but really the overwhelming majority of our revenue has come from course sales. That's the thing that has always worked.

What's your confidence level in hitting $800K in course sales?

Man, that's a tough question.

What's going to give me a ton of confidence goes back to a lot of fresh people coming into the audience. The things that I would focus on as you pursue this million-dollar goal, get really specific on the audience, because I think one way to solve this revenue problem is—

So now I feel like there's a much more clear plan for how to boost our revenue. I love it.

It's great. Paula, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me back on.

Yeah. So the last time we recorded this, we were in front of, what, 1,000 people at FinCon? Yeah.

Yes, that was an incredible experience. That was also on my birthday, so that was a wonderful birthday treat to get to spend it with you and with this audience talking about my favorite topic.

Yeah, which is business.

Business, content, content creation, all of this.

Yeah, so you've been a content creator for a long time. I feel like you and I got started at, you know, very similar time. When did you first start creating content and then when did you go full-time?

I started creating content in 2011. And I, at the time, was a blogger. I blogged for 5 years, and in 2016, I had a large enough audience that I realized I had the capacity to go full-time, but in order to do so, I would have to drop all of my freelancing clients. So 2016 was when I dropped the freelancing clients, went full-time as a content creator with no freelancing, and started a podcast.

Yeah, so what was the revenue back in 2016? Like, you know, how are you making money?

And yeah, so between 2011 to 2016, um, I made my money as a freelance writer, but a lot of my projects as a freelancer came through the attention that I got from being a blogger.

So you're using services to monetize that attention?

Exactly, exactly. In 2016, that was when I directly started monetizing by selling products to my audience rather than to third parties who found me through my content.

Right, that makes sense. And so what were those first products that you sold?

So the first and primary product is an online course. It's called Your First Rental Property. So as the name implies, it's aimed at beginner rental property investors. Our whole goal is to get you from zero rental properties to your first.

Yeah, I love that. Okay, so you're creating a lot of personal finance content. Give the really quick spiel on Afford Anything and like the angle that you take.

Sure, so Afford Anything is a brand that embraces the idea that you can afford anything, but not everything. Every choice that you make carries a trade-off, and that applies not just to your money, but to any limited resource that you need to manage, like your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. And so truly it's a brand about how to make the most of your limited resources. And in that regard, It's a brand around smart decision-making and critical thinking and thinking from first principles told through the lens of money. In fact, the name of our newsletter is First Principles.

So I like that. Okay. So yeah, you mentioned the newsletter, the podcast. What are some of the numbers from an audience perspective of like, you know, downloads, newsletter subscribers, just so people can frame like the size of audience that we're talking about.

Yeah. So we have on Kit, we have 75,000 email subscribers at around a 40% 40, 41, 42% open rate right now. So is that good, by the way? Is that decent as an open rate?

Yeah, especially at that size, right? So open rates, some people will say like, oh, I have an 80% open rate. And I'm always like, how big is the list? And they're like, 300 people. And I'm like, okay, that makes sense. Right. And as you get up into these, you know, 20,000 to 50,000 subscriber ranges, unless you're like very actively cleaning the list, you know, you're going to see those numbers drop. 40% is really solid. Oh, thank you. That's what I aim for. for my newsletter is basically that, that 40% mark. But your newsletter is twice the size of mine, so.

Oh, wow. Well, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So, so we have 75,000 subscribers at a 40% open rate. We, in terms of the podcast, have over 30 million downloads cumulatively since we started. We're averaging probably around 400,000 downloads a month, I'd say.

That's awesome.

And the YouTube channel has 50, as of the time of this recording, 53,000 subscribers. So the YouTube channel is where we're putting a lot of our effort, but it seems to be the slowest growing.

Right.

You know, the hardest to crack that algorithm.

Yeah, that makes sense. That's also, I mean, for this show, we're spending a lot of time on YouTube and just thinking about, I mean, you and I were talking beforehand, that's so much of where podcast is going.

Right.

One of podcasting's fatal flaws is that it doesn't have a discovery algorithm, right? Like, yes, there's the top charts and things like that, but it's hard. And so that's why people relied on distributing clips on social so much. But YouTube is interesting because people watch long-form content or listen to, you know, often they have the video, you know, YouTube in their pocket playing in the background, but they consume long-form content on YouTube. And podcasting is taking off like crazy on YouTube.

Right. You know, there's a great chart. It was made by another kit enthusiast, Brian Feroldi. And can I draw it out?

Yeah.

All right. All right, so credit for this goes to Brian Feroldi. But he has this chart of like discoverability and, Loyalty.

Okay.

And so you've got certain platforms that are really high in discoverability but really low in loyalty, like TikTok. And then you've got other platforms that are low in discoverability but high in loyalty, like podcasting.

Yep. Email is—

Yeah, exactly. And newsletters. And so what I've done with Afford Anything is I have spent almost all of my time and attention here in the high loyalty, low discoverability zone.

Right.

What's great about YouTube is YouTube is right in the center. And so I think there's a lot of, you know, it kind of captures the best of both worlds, you know? And then there's sort of an open debate as to like X and Instagram where—

Well, sometimes they change a bunch.

Yeah, exactly.

Like especially with X as people are playing with, As the team there behind the scenes is playing with the algorithm.

Right.

It changed a lot. One thing that I really like is having a combination of both of these, right? Where, like, I think of it as a hub and spoke approach, right? Where, you know, my newsletter is going to be the hub and then I'm going to have these spokes come out that I'm investing in. Like for me, YouTube and X, are kind of the biggest spokes that come out where I'm trying to go get new people on YouTube and X and then bring them back to the newsletter at the core. 'Cause then it also allows me to, when I have something coming out on YouTube, I can take my biggest fans and direct them to the YouTube video. And then guess what? They watch through, which YouTube goes, oh, I guess. Okay, so we could probably talk about algorithms and all of that for a long time.

Right.

But I'm curious more of your business, right? We're standing here at the whiteboard, like, all right, we can plan out anything. What would be a win for you, you know, at the end of this hour if we were able to brainstorm something for your business?

So I would love to talk about the fact that my business has, and here I'm going to keep drawing, should I?

Yeah. Do you want to talk it out? Like, should we map the revenue?

Yeah. Yeah.

I can start up here. Where do you want to?

I'll even show just at a very, very high level. I'm gonna do this on the fly so you can see my terrible art skills. So I would say broadly speaking, the trajectory of my business has, it was initially sloping up and to the right and then it kind of plateaued. And then in, all right, in terms of newsletter subscribers, this is what the chart looks like. In terms of revenue, the chart looks like that. You know, so.

Okay, so this is interesting. You're actually representing two different styles of charts. One is cumulative and one is, right, is, you know, net new, right, or net for that period.

Exactly.

So we would represent those, I guess we're hanging out down here, right? If we're going, you know, a bunch of bar charts, you know, and you have something like this and, you know, we're trying to then bring it back up, right? But it's important to look at 'Cause people will do something where they'll say, my subscribers are still, have this trend. But that's a cumulative graph.

That's a cumulative graph, yeah.

And so it's really important of saying, okay, who's new coming into the audience? 'Cause if we were to graph subscribers in a net graph, by new per month, you might see, it might trend very similarly.

It might trend quite similarly, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're exactly correct.

So let's maybe run up here just to get a sense of revenue over time. What have you noticed if we, if we just go by year starting, what makes it 2018?

Yeah, I'd say 2018. So 2016 is arguably when I went full time with the, as a content creator. And 2018 was when we did our first full launch of our flagship course, our signature course, which is Your First Rental Property. Yep. And that is a cohort-based course at a relatively high price point. We launched it initially at $1,000 and currently it's $1,300.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. So if we were to map this out, let's say, I don't know, you got $1 million up at the top and then I guess we'll just say, you know, zero down here on this axis. What are we at as far as, uh, where was 2016? Like close to zero?

Uh, no, 2016 it was probably around 200,000-ish, somewhere in there.

Put that down there. Uh, 20— well, let's just jump ahead to 2018.

So 2018, which is when we start, when we actually did our first launch of Your First Rental Property, 500 $800,000-ish.

Okay.

And then I think—

19, 20?

Yeah, 19, 20, 21. So our first million-dollar year was somewhere around there.

Yes. 2020, you think?

Yeah, sure. Let's, let's put it at 2020. I can't guarantee that that was a precise year, but it was.

Yeah. In that time period.

Yeah.

And so what started happening was 2021 also pretty high.

Yes. 2021 was also pretty high. And then 2021 might have been our highest, actually. Yeah, that might be the peak. Yeah, I think 2021 was—

And that's right at a million.

Yeah.

And then 2022?

Ah, okay. So here's where the story gets a little bit complicated or a little bit different. So 2022 and 2023, the second half of 2022 and the first half of 2023, I intentionally took a 1-year sabbatical to go to grad school. And that was not a financial decision. That was just a bucket list thing that I'd always wanted to do. There was a particular program that I really wanted to go to. So I quite intentionally took time off. So by design in 2022, we only did one launch rather than two, and we made probably about half the revenue. So roughly around $500,000 that year.

Okay.

Same thing, 2023, again, we intentionally only did one launch instead of two, and we made, I'd say ballpark about $500,000 that year as well.

And then 2024 is trending a little bit less. Yeah.

This is the part that concerns me. 2024, which is my first full year back after having gone on that sabbatical. And if we do nothing different, if the year trends as it has, I think we'll close out this year at between $300,000 to $400,000.

Yeah. So that's— I'm going to put that there and then we'll do the dashed line.

Yeah.

Right, so that's interesting, right? So we'll say we're trending $350.

Yeah, perfect.

So that's where you— what everything up until this point, this graph makes sense, right? Because going full-time, scaling, scaling more, you figure things out. Um, maybe in here, you know, these are ballpark numbers, but, um, Maybe you optimize more in the business. Here's a very deliberate move where we're like, okay, prioritizing something else, which is an amazing thing to do as a creator where you're like, actually, these numbers don't always have to go up. Like, let me spend my life the way that I want to.

Exactly, yeah.

So these two make sense. And then 2024, it's like, all right, we're going big. And then all of a sudden it's like, okay, this isn't how the story was supposed to play out.

Exactly, exactly. It was supposed to intentionally go down here and then it was supposed to go back up.

Right. Yeah, and this is something that I've heard a lot where a lot of creators that maybe got their start somewhere, really anywhere in here of the 2016 to 2020 range, and then hit it big in 2020. Yeah, right, where, you know, maybe they had a cohort-based course that did half a million or $2 million in revenue or something, and they had this steady increase then found this like big dip and in maybe late '21, 2022, and a lot of it had to do with I think a couple of factors. First, their audience wasn't growing to the same extent. The total—

The cumulative total.

The cumulative total was still large, but the net new was small.

Right.

And they were thinking a lot about launches based on conversion rate of the whole list. I have 100,000 subscribers, it converts at this much, here's the sales. But they weren't really thinking about it like, oh, of the 100,000, they have now been through all of that 100,000, or 90% of that 100,000 have been through 4+ launches of the same product.

Right.

Right, there's not the same steady stream of net new people coming in. The second is that COVID, right, we were all inside and we're like, what am I gonna do?

Yeah.

I guess I should learn something, right? Maybe I'm done playing video games or watching TV or bingeing Netflix. All right, let me actually make the most of this time and let me go learn how to level up my finances, you know, a new skill.

When Tiger King is over.

Yeah, exactly. We watched all of Netflix. Let me do something meaningful with my life now. And so, you know, we don't have that same intention anymore.

Yeah, well, certainly after the reopening in 2021, I, like most people, wanted to go outside, you know, touch grass, as they say. Like, you know, the last thing, having spent a year and a half looking at a screen, a lot of us, myself included, did not wanna look at a screen anymore, you know?

As you think about this arc and from your own experience and talking to other professional creators, are there other factors that you can think of beyond, you know, the audience is not growing at the same rate and then also the COVID aspect?

Yes, so the other major factor is, mortgage interest rates. So my course, of course, Your First Rental Property, during the zero interest rate policy era, which is called the ZIRP era, which is really dates even, it predates this chart.

Right. But it got wild in here.

Yeah, during this entire era when interest rates were zero or near zero. And so you could get a mortgage at 2% or 3% or 4%, you know, if it was high, 4 or 5%. A lot of people were really interested in buying rental properties and in homeownership generally because mortgage interest rates were so low. Now in 2024, mortgage interest rates are 7.5%. Right. And home prices spiked in 2020.

And have not really come down.

Exactly. Depending on the market, but. Exactly, exactly.

So I think as we're trying to be creators that endure, right? Yeah. We're saying, hey, this pursuit as a creator, it's not something that we're doing for a year or two to see what's up. Right. We're going to do this for multiple—

forever.

Multiple decades, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I intend to be Betty White. I'll be 99. I love it. Back in the Kit Studios.

You know, we'll have one in New York by then.

Oh, amazing. Excellent.

A slightly shorter commute for you.

By the time I'm 99. You heard it here first.

I can promise you that.

By my 99th birthday.

Yes. We celebrated your 40th together.

Exactly.

In New Orleans. We can celebrate your 99th in the Kit Studios. So as creators that endure, you have to pay attention to these broader trends, right? Because we look at our businesses in the, you know, the micro environment. What's happening with subscriber growth? What products did we launch? All that. But it's like, okay, what are people paying attention to? What are the things like mortgage rates, you know, that actually affect this? And if our product portfolio is very heavily skewed towards something around like buying rental properties, then what are these other trends? And I could see that across, you know, a lot of other content, right? Like if you're making a— if your content is around paleo recipes, right, right, and something happens in pop culture to make paleo as an interest go way up and then it flatlines, right, your audience growth is probably going to flatline, right? You have to pay attention to those bigger waves.

Right, right. Exactly.

There's kind of two things to go from here, right? We're halfway through 2024 and you don't want to have— if I understand it correctly, you don't want to have 2024 end where it's trending.

Yeah, exactly.

You're not resigned to that fate.

Yeah, no, I'm— we've still got— it's currently August as of the time that we're recording this. So we've got some time to pull it around.

Yep. Absolutely. And then there's also this goal for 2025 where we want to go. What would be a good revenue number? For 2025?

2025, I'd like to hit a million.

Okay. Yeah. If we think about a few different factors here, what— let's really look to 2025 and then we'll see what comes out for 2024. So if I'm looking at 2025, what are the factors that you think are going to make you hit a million in 2025?

So what we have seen historically is that the bulk of our revenue has come from course sales. And we make some money, we make some ancillary money on sponsorships on the podcast. We've made pocket change on affiliate offers, but really the overwhelming majority of our revenue has come from course sales. And that I think is where, that's where my focus is because that's where I, that's the thing that has always worked. And so we're building a new course.

Okay.

Yeah.

So are you going to continue selling the existing courses?

Yes.

Like, what's the course? What courses will you be offering in 2025?

So let me add a little bit of context around Afford Anything in order to explain the answer. So Afford Anything, it's a personal finance brand and I use the acronym FIRE, but with two I's.

Okay.

To describe kind of topically what our content is based around. So F is for financial psychology, increasing your income. The next I is investing, stocks, index funds. The R is real estate. And then the E is entrepreneurship. Okay. Do you remember the word that got you out of spelling bee?

I was homeschooled, didn't do spelling bees. I just read everything, and so my problem was I knew endless words and I didn't know how to pronounce them because there were so many words I'm like, I've only seen that in a book, I've never heard someone say it out loud.

I used to say ETC for etc. You didn't know you were supposed to say et cetera. I always read it as ETC. So I said that verbally.

I was like, there's that ETC.

Exactly.

Okay, so as we're looking at FIRE here, right, in the afford anything world.

Yeah.

Then, so you're thinking about, basically as I understand it, you're structuring content and then courses around these pillars.

Exactly, exactly. And so one thing that even before our revenue declined, even back in our heyday of 2020 and 2021, One issue that I long noticed is that we, our primary, our only product revolves around real estate. It revolves around this particular pillar, but it doesn't have anything to do with these other pillars. And there are two, when you kind of take a look at—

Which makes you vulnerable to the mortgage rate, like to a macro trend.

Yeah, exactly.

Because you weren't diversified in— the content that you're making money from.

Exactly. And not just that, but also the product that we are offering appeals to a subsection of our audience, but not the entire audience. So of the 75,000 people who are on our email list, a subsection of them are interested in real estate. And we actually do have a segment that is specifically people who have raised their hands and opted into joining a very real estate-specific segment. And that's about 18,000 people. But all right, that means that every time we launch, we are hyper-targeting 18,000 out of the 75,000 on the email list. So then the bulk of the people on the email list are not, or I guess they're called newsletters these days.

Either way.

The bulk of the people on the newsletter are, you know, they're interested in financial psychology or they're interested in learning how to make more money or maybe in the stock market. And we don't have a product that we offer them. So even in our heyday, I recognized that was an issue. And there were two directions I could go knowing that that was an issue. I could either lean entirely into real estate and make that the central brand, right? Which is what a lot of people were encouraging me to do. Or I could develop additional products for the rest of these pillars, which is what I actually want to do, right? Because I don't want to be a real estate brand. I want to be comprehensive. 5 or—

Yeah. Okay. So as we bring that back to then courses, what courses are you offering in 2025?

Ah, so I'm building a new one right now. I've actually never publicly stated the name.

Okay.

So here's— Oh, you didn't say it? No, we're gonna break this here. So the name of the new course is Your Next Raise.

Okay. I like that. So there we're touching on the increased income.

Exactly. Exactly. And in terms of the why now, you know, 2024, we're living in a period where we have been hit with high inflation, you know, and there's a lot of people feel like their salary has not kept up with inflation. Groceries are more expensive. Insurance is more expensive. Everything feels more expensive. And a lot of people feel like, okay, my salary has not kept up. How do I ask my boss for a raise? And so I think that there's a demand for this, particularly in this moment.

Right, going back to those macro trends.

Right.

Right, there's something of like, okay, what demand can I create within this audience?

Right.

Or what waves are already coming through that I could surf? You know, and I like, it's sort of a wind at your back versus, creating this on your own.

Exactly. Exactly.

That makes sense. Okay. So when are you planning to launch this product?

So the—

Later this year or next year?

Yeah, later this year.

And then, so you'll still have your first rental property?

Yes.

Right. Is there— are these the main?

Yes. Those, those will be the two main revenue drivers.

All right. And so, you know, for breaking down $1 million in revenue, Are course sales gonna be 80% of it, do you think?

I would bet so, yeah.

Okay, and then podcast?

Yeah, podcast sponsorships right now we're bringing in $200,000. I think we might end up with like $225,000 this year. So we'll say ballpark $200,000. I don't have any reason to believe that that will substantially increase. Yeah. I think that—

Is there an other category that makes up more than $50K or is it?

No, not really.

So it's really going to be these.

Yeah, these two.

So we're saying we're going to hit effectively $800K in core sales and $200K in podcasts. Exactly. You know, straight 80/20.

Exactly. Exactly.

Okay, so then really this, what's your confidence level in hitting, uh, $200K in podcasts?

Uh, high. Very high.

Yeah. 90, 80, 90 plus percent.

Yeah, exactly.

So let's not spend any time there because that's That's gonna happen. So what's your confidence level in hitting $800K in core sales? And then we'll unpack why.

Man, that's a tough question.

50%? 80%?

Yeah, let's give me a 50% confidence level.

That sounds good. We can dig into that.

Yeah.

All right, so 50% confidence level. Let's focus on that. What makes you say 50%? What, yeah, what, What's the uncertainty?

So in the heyday of your first rental property, I remember exactly our single best launch. We had 505 students enroll. Okay. And I think the price point at that time was $1,300.

Okay.

So that math, that's, that was like a basically a $600,000, $650,000 launch. That was, that was the out. I mean, that's when we look at the range, that was the top end of the range. That was the absolute best. And that was, I think, 2021, if I'm not mistaken.

Okay, so the best ever is about $650K.

Yeah.

And then what's your lowest launch?

$99,000.

Okay.

Yeah.

Where you're like trying to get one more person to buy this. Yeah. Which, to be clear, $99,000 is a lot. But when you're— yeah, when you know you can do better.

And we have salaries to pay. This isn't— it isn't just all like I'm not like Montgomery Burns on The Simpsons, just like using it to support my bastion of hounds, you know?

Yes. That's something that I think listeners to this podcast understand well.

Yeah.

Because we'll throw out numbers like $100K for this, $500K for that. And some people will listen and be like, why are you not happy with these numbers? And you're like, no, no, no. You know, we're running a business.

Right.

There's a lot of—

We have salaries.

Yeah.

We have health insurance. We have, you know, I offer a retirement plan, right? You know, to my employees. Yeah, yeah, I know, right?

Yeah. As you're taking care of people and all that.

Exposed!

Yeah. That's what the E stands for. The exposé.

Exactly.

Okay, so our highest and lowest launches. Obviously, if you do a single launch, you know, that's $650, we're going to coast our way off of the other products.

Yeah, I don't see that happening.

Yeah. And so let's dig into that. What—

Again, 2021. We— mortgage interest rates. I know I keep going back to this and I don't want to like blame society.

No, but like these macro factors really matter.

You know, 2021 mortgage interest rates were rock bottom low. And so there was so much enthusiasm around buying rental properties because why?

It was perfect timing.

Yeah.

But you had exactly a product, audience, and timing Fit. Yeah, you nailed all three parts of that Venn diagram. Do you think your next raise and your first rental property, are they going to be split evenly in revenue, or do you think that, you know, we'll have another like a 60/40 split?

Or let me just think through this out loud. Um, the— okay, your first rental property, I do think we can get it above $100,000 per launch. Um, let's say that we can improve that to $150,000 per launch multiplied by 2 launches a year. So let's say we can bring in $300,000 for your first rental property. That means the other $500K would have to come from your next raise. And part of the question mark that's happening in my brain is I don't know what we're going to price your next raise at. So if we, to hit this goal, want $500,000 to come in from your next raise, How many, how many people do we need and at what price point?

Do you have— what are the price points you're trying to decide between?

The ballpark in my head was like somewhere in the $500 range, although there was part of me that was also thinking maybe I should start a little bit lower.

And let's go with $500 and let's work with that. So that means we need to sell 1,000 to get to that, right?

Yeah.

So we need 1,000 Sales. When we're looking at this, well, let's look at confidence again. Your first rental property, $150K per launch twice.

Mm-hmm.

Confidence level that can happen?

I would give myself a 75% confidence level there. And the reason that I say that is a fewfold. Yeah. Number one, this $99K, that was this year, that was 2024. And A, there was in 2024, the shock of interest rates having just spiked so much so recently. You know, people hadn't normalized to the new interest rate normal yet. So I think that really hurt us. The other thing, and so this is part of my direct circle of control, my launch strategy, my launch planning was just not as strong.

You know how to do it better. Than—

Yeah, you know, like the 2021 launch, that was like, we had a lot of tailwinds, but also we put a lot of effort into a really well-mapped out strategy, like launch strategy, you know, in terms of the emails that we were sending out and how we were targeting each one. And, you know, like—

That's another thing that I've noticed is as creators go on this, trajectory, it's often you start to learn, you know, you are figuring out what works, you're testing it, you really learn what works. And then, you know, the next one you're like, okay, I've got all the best practices. But somewhere in here of the launches, not only are you starting to tire out that audience 'cause you don't have as many fresh people in it, but also we tend to run the same launches on autopilot a little bit. And we might reuse sales copy that worked, but it might not be as relevant in this year as it was last year. And so I've noticed a lot of that of like launch 4, launch 5 of a product. People will often not, even they won't have the same energy behind it. You're like, oh, I did Instagram Lives every day along here, or I taught live webinars, and this next time I'm like, maybe the live webinars didn't add as much in direct sales, and so I back off of those. But what comes through to your audience It's just less enthusiasm from you over the launch. And that translates into fewer sales.

Exactly. Exactly. And so that was also a big part of our low in 2024 in terms of that was our lowest cohort ever.

Yeah.

But yeah, you know, we had all of these headwinds. And in addition to that, we ourselves just didn't put that much effort into launch strategy, launch planning emails. We didn't do any webinars for it. We just, we didn't like, A lot of the emails that I wrote, rather than that email being like, today, today, the goal of today's email is X. A lot of the emails that I wrote for that one, I was like, you know, here's something that's been on my mind that relates to real estate. And, you know, so it was just really off the cuff.

Yeah. Not as structured.

Yeah.

Okay. So even as we map this out, you know, implementing you know, like better launch strategies and all of that, pretty good confidence that we can get to the $300K. As we go to the $500K, I think if we really focus on that, so if we're talking making 1,000 sales, what goes into like high confidence that we can hit 1,000 sales? Or maybe what's the, you could even, could invert it and say what makes you skeptical that 1,000 sales, whichever way makes more sense.

Right. I don't need to sell anyone on the benefit of getting a raise, right? That part is obvious.

Yep.

So I think what I would need to convey is why I'm the best person to teach this and why an investment of— let's say the price point is $500— why an investment of $500 would have a, you know, that ROI. Yeah, would have that ROI.

Like, yeah, so it's look really in that sales pitch.

Yeah, like people would need to know that they're not just flushing $500 down the toilet. And think further, thinking through that out loud, all right, what would, as an audience member, if someone were to come to me with, you know, all right, I would think that I was flushing $500 down the toilet If either I thought that I had an employer or an employment situation that just made getting a raise impossible, and so spending $500 is just throwing good money at—

No matter how good I am, it won't result in a raise.

So either I would have to, as an audience member, either I would have to think that, I'd have to feel like I was in that type of employment situation, or it would be the opposite. I'd have to feel like, getting a raise is just so inevitable that why do I need to—

Why bother?

Yeah, why do I need to pay to learn this?

So you're targeting the in-between, which is someone who believes that a raise is possible, but it's going to take the right work.

Exactly.

So in that, I mean, what you're getting at is—

Or a bigger raise is possible, but it's going to take the right work.

So yeah, the audience clarity. Trying to think of how I would map it out, but it's that middle cohort.

Yeah.

I believe I can get a raise. But it's going to take work and the right tactics.

Right.

So one thing I'm noticing in this is we've started to narrow our target audience from everyone who is employed into people who have these characteristics and maybe even people who are in these industries.

Right.

Right. So something that we need to do, going back to this, what I'm thinking about is what's going to give me a ton of confidence in hitting 1,000 sales goes back to this. I want a lot of fresh people coming into the audience.

Right?

And so now as I'm thinking, how do I get a lot of fresh people coming into the audience, right? The total list size growing. Well, I should be clear on what the right people are. 'Cause it'd be terrible if I had a TikTok go viral about how does, Save money on lattes, I don't know. And then that got email subscribers, and then I launched this and it went nowhere. But what would be excellent is if I found, okay, these industries, I'm the best at getting people raises in these industries, people in these demographics. And then we start to say, okay, I am targeting, even if we went crazy specific, women between the ages of 35 and 45 who work in marketing. Right? Because if I— and you'll have to look through your case studies and your material and all of that, but then I'm not— someone's not coming in and reading a generic article about, you know, how to get a raise. There's a thousand of those written on the internet, right? But like, this is what gets people raises in marketing. This is right. And as you get really specific on the audience, That clarity, then it drives your sales pitch, and then you can really think about, okay, where on the entire internet do I go and get people, you know, because of this gap, that are really trying to get a raise within this very specific niche? Does that make sense?

Right, right, exactly.

Well, I'll go to my own example, right? Teaching software design, right? If I'm teaching design in general It could be graphic design, logos, software, anything. But then as I narrow it into software design, that's a little more specific. But then if I get into designing iPhone applications, there's a very specific set of podcasts that I can go on, places I can guest post, right? And then people say, oh, that is exactly for this type of thing. And so I think the more narrow you go in your target market, not only does your sales copy get more clear, but it's way easier to attract new people.

Right, right. So how would you do it? So for something like your next raise where I guess we're going for knowledge workers in the private sector.

Okay. That's still a huge—

Yeah, that's still huge.

But we're starting to narrow things down, right? Yeah. How would you narrow it down further? Here's our little person. This is our target.

Knowledge workers in the private sector. Well, I haven't tested this, but my gut says either beginning or mid-career.

Okay. I'd push back on the beginning career because you have a $500 price point. So you can't be like ultra beginning.

Right.

So you gotta think about when does that kick in?

Yeah.

But maybe we'll just say mid-career for now.

Okay, mid-career. Let's say maybe like ages 30 through 50. Ballpark.

Have you had any clues in your audience, or could you poll your audience of what their industry is? Actually, that's a new kit feature. You could plug in a poll and say, you know, what, what industry are you in? And that might be interesting, and then we could segment off of that. Okay, because it sounds like there's not an industry that, you know, as I'm throwing out examples, you're not like, oh, it's this, right? Right.

Yeah, it's, it's more there are certain industries that it's not. And the industries that it's not are, you know, I think these would primarily be government jobs, but any job that has a very fixed rung of, you know, you make this much based on this set of circumstances and there's no room for negotiation.

You know, one other thing that you can do in all of this is there's a creator named Brennan Dunn and he had a course for freelancers very specifically called Double Your Freelancing Rate.

Ah, yes, I've heard of that.

And he found that, you know, so he's teaching a lot, like that would be in the entrepreneurship category, right?

Right.

Where he's teaching a lot of how to position your proposals, how to, you know, establish credibility, all of those things, right? And he found that across the categories of freelancers, he had very different results. Designers, developers, copywriters, et cetera. The same material would work for all of that, but someone would see developer examples and be like, oh, I'm a copywriter, this isn't for me. And he's like, no, no, no, it, it works for that. And so what he ended up doing is tracking in his newsletter, right? Because if we go loyalty and discoverability, we've got very loyal people who we gradually know more and more about, right, as we run the industry poll, other things. He started tracking what industry, or what freelancer type they were. And then he would change the testimonials that he would show. Every testimonial he collected, he would categorize by freelancer type. And then he would match that up in his automated emails. Right, this launch that he's running multiple times. And so then he would say, okay, I'm going to write about how to get a raise, in our example, and then I'm gonna map their industry to a testimonial in that industry, and then people are seeing like, oh, this is made just for me. So in his case, someone's learning about writing great proposals, and that's growing into a sales pitch, but the testimonial calls out copywriters because the person reading it is a copywriter.

Right. It's interesting 'cause what you're talking about is, Increasing segmentation.

Yeah.

The frustration that I have had with segmentation in the past has been that as we've segmented, we've created more and more content that's been seen by fewer and fewer people.

Oh, yeah.

So again, going back to the launches that we've run in the past for your first rental property, there's some stuff that we have sent out to the entire list. But a lot of, a lot of what we've sent out, we have sent out specifically to the real estate subsection. And even within that, for a little while, I eventually gave this up because it was too much work, but even within that real estate subsection, we had further segmented into, are you interested in Airbnbs versus are you interested in long-term rentals? You know, we had further sub-segmented into that, and then we were just spinning our wheels creating all of this content for the Airbnb segment on the list is 3,000 people. So I'm like, why am I putting this much work into a piece of content that's going to be seen by 3,000 people, which is, you know, relatively speaking, a very small proportion of the overall list?

Okay, so there's two different things as you're talking that made me think of segmenting versus personalizing. And so segmenting What we're doing is if we have a single audience and then we split them into 3 groups, we're sending 100% different content to each of those groups. And that's what you're describing of like, I gotta write all of this and then I gotta write all of that and I gotta write all of that and—

Triples the workload and each piece is seen by a third of the people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, our effort versus income, effort versus— results graph is inverted from what we want.

Yeah, exactly.

Personalizing is something a little bit different. It's related, you need data, right? But personalizing might be sending the same email and it just changes itself based on who it's going out to. There might be something that's entirely dedicated to real estate, right? But you might have an extra section that's that is just for the real estate people. Like you might say, hey, here's a high-level article on real estate, but then there's a section that's just, 'cause you know they are going really deep into it, that you might add to the email, right? 'Cause you can put an if statement in your email that says, hey, if they're in the real estate segment, add this in. Or for example, what we were talking about with testimonials is we could say this will always be a testimonial, it will just decide which of the 5 to show based on what we know about them. And that's something— what's really cool in Kit is you can go and create, um, snippets. And so then you could have this series of snippets, which are pieces of content that you write separately, and then you can just tell it which one to insert in. And so you might have a snippet that is all of your, in Brennan's case, he would have a snippet that's all of his copywriting testimonials and it's just set up to automatically drop one of them in based on that. So then you end up creating this library that works for you instead of making tons of one-off content.

Right.

There's two sides to this equation. If we're thinking about the audience growth, and one side is, I'm just gonna say pre and post, but if this is when they join your list, subscriber, not a subscriber. And we can think about personalization and choosing a niche and all of that in both equations. So if I get really specific before they're a subscriber, Then I'm thinking about what's gonna attract the right kind of person in my audience. Where do they hang out online already? Whose podcast can I go on as a guest? Because to hit this number, we're going to have to have a lot more audience growth. So you're gonna have to be less inward-focused on your community and more outward-focused. How do I bring the right new people in? So getting really clear here, Well, getting really clear here on who it is will help you understand where to find them and how to attract them. And then you can use that knowledge post them joining your list. What happens is now I can talk to them differently based on the goals that they have, what industry they're in, et cetera.

Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. So if I'm thinking about the personalizing, it means So I'm thinking through the workload. So the workload involved is first identifying, you know, which of these categories we're going to focus on, then developing out a library of content for each of these, which is still, you know, it's a little bit of— yeah, but, but yeah, it's certainly— I guess it's better because the library circulates, um, kind of like in the way that people— I don't think they do this anymore, but used to build out a library of content that just circulated on Twitter.

Right.

You know?

Well, maybe let's focus a little less on this, and I think what I want you to get really clear on is who, and maybe write out 4 or 5 avatars or something, but who is the ideal buyer of your next raise? And get really clear on that, and then think about this equation of what, where do they live on the internet? How do I reach more, many more of them, etc.? Because I think one way to solve this revenue problem is a lot of new subscribers, right? And so it's who are we trying to reach? How do we go find them? And then once they're on the list, then we can think a lot more about, okay, How do we convert them better? Right? What's the higher quality launch that we can do? How can we message to them specifically?

Right.

But if I were putting these problems in sequence, I would really focus on how do I get clear on who I'm serving and really go out and find a lot more of them.

But yeah, no, I see it. The industry podcast for people in the esthetician industry.

Right?

Right.

Yes. You start to say, okay, I'm actually just here to help I'm here to help mechanical engineers get a raise, right? Or I'm here to help finance professionals get a raise. And you'll be more broad than that.

Yeah.

But you could take all of your general tips that work.

Right.

And you could write a guest post on an industry publication that doesn't talk as much about how to get a raise, because they have their own course or whatever, if they're all about how to get a raise. But if it's the software product managers, right? There's a blog for software product managers. And you say, hey, I will write for your community about how exactly software product managers should get a raise, which is 80% your overall content because the principles are the same.

Right.

You just made sure to find 2 stories and interview 1 person in that exact industry. And so now you're able to go out into, like, pull people in from a specific niche and get in front of new audiences. That normally you wouldn't, and you're not in a crowded market anymore because no one is talking about what you are in this sub-niche.

Right, right, right.

The craziest example that I saw of this is we had a migration to Kit come through the other day and it was someone who was doing like fitness and mobility for dental hygienists. Oh. And I was like, this is the most narrow niche I've ever seen. But then I was thinking about it and I was like, oh, There's gotta be some weird—

Right.

I bet you end up with some weird wrist pain and, you know.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, 'cause you're holding your body in very specific ways, yeah.

And so if you think about it—

And you're on your feet, yeah.

Yeah, if I'm doing personal fitness for everyone, giant market, how are you ever gonna stand out, all of that. But if I'm doing it for dental hygienists, oh, okay. Every single blog and podcast that talks about it, every, you know, I'm like, Okay, how do I go in where people are taking these classes in person, right? How do I come and teach a, you know, a class of 50 dental hygienists about this? How do I, you know— and some professor is going to be like, uh, yes please, come in, you know, Tuesday at 10 and teach this. It becomes so much easier, right, to reach my target audience when I go specific like that, right? And to be clear, you have a very large established brand. So you don't have to say, all right, forget it, scrap afford anything. We're not for all of these people. We're only for this narrow niche. You don't have to do that. You can just choose, you know, 4 or 5 niches that you want to go into.

Right.

And then tailor your message to that. We did this when growing Kit, where first it was like, you know, email marketing for professional bloggers. And then we started to go very specific and we're like, all right, for coaches, for fitness bloggers, for, And we would make sales pages that were 90% the same, but the testimonials were different. The copy was a little different, and it was written just for authors. And people were like, wait, there's an email marketing platform that's built just for authors? It was like authors and coaches and, but in our marketing, it was very, very narrow.

Right. Well, I'm specifically seeing a gap here when it comes to people people who work for large companies, which I think are generally kind of underserved by content creators because there's a lot of content creators are entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small business owners, freelancers themselves.

Yeah. So they write what they know.

Yeah, exactly. Which means there's this huge subset of the population who work for mid-sized to large companies who aren't really served by a lot of content creators.

So it's interesting about that. Yeah. So we're getting into some industry things. We're getting into company size. How large of companies are we talking here? Like 500, 1,000 employees?

I'd say anything 500 and up, you know, because then that's enough people that you don't know everybody.

I'm thinking about headlines that would get someone to click. What's the name of a company? Like, let's say something out there that would be 1,000 employees. Anything come to mind?

A company that would be around 1,000 employees. Yeah.

I mean, some of these are way bigger, you know, but—

Yeah, because you can immediately think of the biggest companies.

Right, it was like KPMG or, you know, like these big consulting— but say that's it.

Okay, sure.

If we're going— they're much bigger than that. But if the headline was how to get a raise at KPMG.

Mm, right.

Right? Like, if I work there, I'm probably clicking that.

Ben Jerry's, you know, or a distributor who serves Ben Jerry's, like the cookie dough distributor that serves Ben Jerry's.

So what's interesting is you could then, this is not very scalable, but you could write an article that's so targeted that you could then have someone on your team DM it on LinkedIn to everyone who age, right, all of that, who works at that company.

Right.

Right, and the article might be, Again, 90% the same advice, 10% personalized to that audience. And so, you know, I'm not sure what targeting Meta lets you do, right? How narrow it lets you get. But if some of these companies are big enough of 10,000 employees, Meta might let you run an ad just to people who work at that company. Or you might be able to get directionally close to it. And what's interesting is when you go very narrow like that, it actually, it feels like it excludes people outside of it, but then it doesn't because people see that and go, oh, well, that's not me, but—

Right, right.

It's like, I don't work at KPMG, but I work at Ernst Young.

Right, right, right. I don't work at Ben Jerry's, but I work at Van Leeuwen, you know.

And so you get some of these—

Haagen-Dazs. Yeah.

Yeah. And so people will try to find, if you go broad, people will say, oh, that's not for me. If you go specific, they'll often try to find how it's relevant for them.

Right.

I guess if I could give you a few things that I would focus on as you pursue this million-dollar goal in 2025, they would be, first, I would think about the quality of the launch, right? What you talked about here, you know the differences between like a great launch and one where you're kind of on autopilot.

Yeah.

The second thing is I would get really specific with who you're trying to serve. Whether it's industry or something else, like create 5 avatars of these are the people that are going to be the best fit for the Your Next Raise course. Because then we're going to get really specific. In who we serve, and that will drive copy and everything else. And then the third thing is I would really think about where those people, where those ideal customers live on the internet, and I would aggressively go out and find them. Because if we can go, if we can grow that audience, thinking again about the net new subscribers versus the total subscribers, if you can get tens of thousands, even to say 10 to 20,000 totally new people to the community who are in the right target demographic, then this launch is going to do really, really well.

10 to 20K highly targeted new subs.

Yep, there we go, you fit it in. Okay, how does that resonate?

That makes a lot of sense. It, it makes a lot of sense. It also makes me think I need to pull somebody onto the team whose job is entirely to project manage this.

Or someone whose focus is purely on subscriber growth of the right people.

Yeah.

And what metrics could you put around that? That's a bigger conversation that we could get into another time.

Yeah. 'Cause it sounds like a really good plan. It also sounds like Like the primary objection that's coming to my head right now, and it's not really an objection, but it's just thinking through how to do it. The primary thing coming to my head right now is I'm already creating so much content.

Right.

And project managing so much else with 2 podcasts a week, with trying to scale up YouTube, et cetera, et cetera, that to really do this well, the targeting and the personalization, I would need to bring someone on the team. Let's focus on that. And their first assignment would be watch this video. But yeah, I would have to pull somebody on the team whose job was to project manage exactly this.

Yeah.

Which I'm willing to do. But, you know, yeah. Who is that person? How do you find the right person?

Right. What I think I would do, we went down some good paths with segmentation and personalization of like exploring those ideas. I would pull back on that. Because I think you're identifying, like, that's a lot of work.

Yeah.

And it's hard to do and it's hard to get right.

Right.

I would think of it at a higher level of what does it look like to just get very clear on these avatars of who we're serving and then just naturally bring that through all of our content. Right, so when you go to plan out a podcast episode or a guest post or something like that, You're just thinking, okay, does this serve Sally, my fake avatar of a person that I've identified, or even real people, right? If in your polls, or send something out to your list and say, hey, I'm gonna be creating a lot of content about how to get a raise. What's your biggest struggle with learning to get a raise? Or with getting your next raise? What's your biggest objection, fear, any of that? Hit reply and let me know. And then you get to the real people and you start to see, okay, this person who replied, let me go find them on LinkedIn. What are they, like, what industry are they actually in? And start to understand your audience. And then maybe even get to real people. And 'cause that lens, I just think you're teaching such a broad topic that you have to find a way to make it specific. And if you do that, You'll drive, like the conversion rate will be so much higher because people will say, oh, there's no way I could buy this other course or this other content out there. You know, I have to buy from Afford Anything because they're teaching to me specifically.

Right.

They get my industry.

Right.

All right, so we've covered a lot. Let's sit down and, you know, kind of talk through some action steps and look at our pretty drawings. I'm noticing a decent amount of hesitation on aspects of it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Where are you feeling hesitation and where are you feeling excitement?

I think the biggest level of hesitation is, is the clear level of workload that's involved in everything that you've just outlined. Not— it's not that I'm not— I'm obviously happy to work, right? But it's, it's just that I am so maximally tasked already And so I'm already putting in long hours. I'm already kind of doing the grind that this— I think it's a great plan, but I think it requires growing the team. Now, that said, I am happy to grow the team. In fact, that big goal is to grow the team. The challenge is simply it's the eternal to grow the team, you need revenue, right?

Yep. That chicken and egg situation.

Yeah, exactly. So that to me is the biggest hesitation right now. There's probably some degree of shyness that has come from all of those years starting in 2018 when we were heavily segmenting, and segmentation was just, again, you're doing triple—

it can be a huge amount.

Yeah, triple the work seen by one-third of the audience, you know.

Yeah. And so I think it's good that we went down that path because it's something that's easy to get into and it can be powerful. But as you're calling out, it's so much work. And so I really like— I'm not going to do it because it would make the graphic not look as pretty, but I want to like draw a big X through the segment and personalize because what the way that I want you to see it is instead, how do I get clear on who my target customer is so that I can go find them out in the world? Like something I see over and over again with professional creators who have been doing it for years and years and have had some kind of a dip in revenue is that usually their new subscribers are coming in a lot slower than before.

Yeah.

And so the thing that I'm always trying to push them on is go back out into the ecosystem. And like often people will switch in the early days, they're 90% of their time is about reaching new audiences and 10% is engaging their current audience. And then usually around this time it's flipped and they don't realize it where 90% of their time and content is going to their existing audience and only 10% is about reaching new audiences. And so what I want you to do is to really take those personas that you figure out and like find who in your audience can you most help and then who's like them out there and to really not focus a lot of time on like the nitty-gritty of segmentation or all of that, but instead to take this persona and like go out into the world with it and say, okay, because we're reaching 70,000, 80,000 people right now. We could, you know, 5 to 10 times that is definitely possible. We don't have a total addressable market problem talking about personal finance, right? We can go much bigger. And so you just have to find, What are the avatars? How do you reach them? Where are they hanging out and what copy resonates with them?

Right, right. I like the idea of 5 avatars. That makes a lot of sense to me. And I also like the idea of using polling to figure out, all right, you know, of the existing audience. All right. Tell me, what's your company size? What's— what industry are you in? How big is your company?

Right.

What are the biggest hesitations? You know, what are the biggest challenges that you face in terms of getting a raise? And then also using the beta cohort to, to refine those avatars as well as to generate some case studies.

Yeah, that sounds good. Well, there's some clear next steps there, and I'm going to be really curious. You have to text me, send me an email with, you know, how this works and how it unfolds, because—

thank you.

Yeah, you've, you've built a great business that's impacted really a lot of people, and I'm excited to see you like continue to be like a beacon for how you like build and create and endure for a long time.

Oh, thank you. Thank you.

So if people are saying, all right, I want to, you know, get a raise, I want to learn about real estate, you know, any of these things, where should they go to follow you?

Well, you can subscribe to my newsletter hosted by Kit at affordanything.com/newsletter.

Sounds good. Thanks for coming on.

Of course. Thank you for having me on.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to the YouTube channel. Just search Billion Dollar Creator. And go ahead and subscribe. Make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also who else we should have on the show.