Breaking Down Peter Zeihan's Business Model

You probably don’t know that I do this, but I do. I look you up. Whenever I’m tired of my own ideas, I scroll through subscribers or twitter followers and see what all of you are up to.

It’s a lot of cool stuff.

So just wanted to start this with a quick hey to Brandi Nicole Johnson, and Sophie Bujold who both started reading recently. Both are building very cool businesses. Sophie’s name (Cliqueworthy) is perfect for online community consulting, and I was impressed to see that on top of all her work as a founder, Brandi has volunteered to lead The Girl Scouts at all levels (local to global) for more than 20 years. Incredible.

On Tap This Week:

We’re lookin’ at Peter Zeihan to see what he can teach us about being a high-priced creator/consultant.

If you don’t know Zeihan, he’s a geopolitical analyst who’s gotten famous over the last few years for his opinions on China, the US, and the future of globalization (namely, that there isn’t going to be one).

But my fascination with him has less to do with his public opinions, and more to do with how he spends his time.

He seems like the paragon of a paid thinker…

• Author of several books and a near-daily newsletter

• Lives in the mountains of Colorado, close (but not too close) to Denver

• Long hikes every day to think and record Youtube thoughts

• Travels often to give paid speeches and seminars to big companies

• Likely doing 7-figures in annual revenue without much of a team

• Doing well enough to donate 100% of book proceeds to charity

• Funny

Basically, when I grow up, I wanna be like Peter.

So this week, I spent a few hours digging into his business to uncover any key learnings. We’re going to look at three:

1. Business Model

2. Ideas > Optimization

3. Chosen Relevance

1. Peter Zeihan’s Business Model

Before we dive in, remember that all media companies essentially make money in one of three ways: Free products (which are monetized via ads and affiliate deals), front-end products, and back-end products.

More on those here.

I’ve been dissecting all sorts of creator-led media brands in public and private for years now, and have yet to find one that doesn’t fit this model. Peter is no exception (although he is using some interesting products we don’t see often in the typical newsletter space). Let’s dive in…

Free Products

The core of Peter’s media footprint includes two key properties: his newsletter, and his Youtube channel. Both are free, but that doesn’t mean they don’t earn money:

• His Youtube channel is monetized, and averages ~1.5m+ views per week. At an estimated $5 CPM, that’d be ~$7.5k per week from Youtube alone

• Both the newsletter and Youtube include plenty of calls to action selling his other products (below)

One smart thing: In videos, lectures, podcast interviews, and writing, he continually emphasizes the fact that both his newsletter and Youtube videos are, and will-always-remain, free. That’s a good way to help growth.

If you read my piece on how $1m+ newsletters maximize email signups, you know that emphasizing the “free” aspect is an easy and important tactic many miss.

Front-End Products

Traditionally, front-end products are paid products that run roughly $50-$100 (cheap enough to be impulse buys).

Technically, the only thing Zeihan offers in that regard are his books.

However, he also does something I haven’t seen a solo-creator do before: He sells high-ticket webinar recordings. He’s got more than half a dozen webinars priced $650-$750/ea., and covering topics from inflation to the Ukraine War’s impact on energy, food, and materials industries.

I’m going to lump these in as front-end products for two reasons:

• His remaining products are likely much, much more expensive, so relatively speaking, these are still his “low barrier to entry” offerings

• The corporate clients these are designed to appeal to are less price sensitive than typical consumers (more on this soon). So again, in relative terms, these are “low priced”.

Back-End

Finally, on top of these, Peter also does:

• Speaking: He’s represented by several speaker bureaus, and in this interview with Joe Rogan said that he did 179 seminars last year. Hard to know if those are all in-person or a mix or live + online, but either way, it’s a lot.

• Executive Briefs: I’m not quite sure what these are, but I’d imagine they’re high-ticket, highly specialized research projects undertaken for execs at a specific company. Maybe something like this PDF he wrote back in his days in private intelligence.

• Consulting: Always a mystery.

2. Ideas > Optimization

I don’t know much for certain about how much money Peter makes each year. But I do know…

1. From this podcast that he’s looking forward to retiring soon.

2. From this newsletter (posted Friday) that he’s doing well enough to donate 100% book proceeds to charity.

So he’s doing well. And yet, anyone who’s spent time focused on growing an audience would look at the website and see at once that it’s kind of stitched together - not really optimized for conversion.

There are plenty of email capture forms. But they don’t really flow, the pages are just a little chaotic, and there are clear gaps in the funnel.

For example, there’s no nav button for the webinars. The only way to find them is by clicking through random newsletter, or Youtube video archives. Maybe they’re not a priority. Or maybe it was just overlooked.

And yet, my conservative estimates place his annual revenue in the seven-figure zone when you factor in speaking and consulting fees.

So what’s the point?

The point is that even if you don’t optimize every last detail of your site, you can generate more than enough money by getting the big things right:

• Own your audience with an email list

• Be an expert in your space

• Share interesting ideas in public

• Understand how to monetize

Speaking of monetization, that brings us to the next interesting lesson I feel Peter’s work has to offer us all as professionally curious people…

3. Chosen Relevance

I’ve mentioned a few times now that a lot of his time is spent speaking to, consulting with, and writing for executives. Specifically, executives in the agricultural, industrial, and energy sectors.

a.k.a. People with deep pockets.

These are big industries where a lot is at stake. And there’s an important lesson there: Zeihan has purposefully found a way to make his passion (geopolitics) relevant to big companies who can pay him lots of money to hear how his research can make/save them even more money.

Let that sink in for a second.

He purposefully figured out the link between what he was interested in, and what big companies are willing to pay to learn, then used that as the foundation for a (likely) multi-million dollar publishing and consulting empire.

I don’t know about you, but this has me thinking questions like…

• What big industries would care a lot about topics I like researching?

• What are the specific angles they would care about?

• How much is on the line for them? What’s it worth?

• What would they need or want from me? (in terms of webinar topics, executive briefs, etc.)

To take things one step further, he’s even found ways to have a positive impact on some of these major industries by showing them where there’s incentive for them to go greener, or more local.