What I Learned Researching Justin Welsh's $1m+ Solo Biz

Author

Ethan Brooks
June 25, 2023

There’s nothing I like more than when I find someone who’s making way more money than I expected, and doing it on their own terms.

Justin Welsh is one of these.

In a recent interview with Noah Kagan, he revealed that his one-person business does well over one million dollars per year in revenue with no employees. (this vid - starts at 4:04)

Instantly fascinated, so I dug in deeper, listening to hours and hours of podcast interviews, reading other deep dives, and buying his course to see what I could learn from the way he’s grown.

This week, I’ll break down the main things I found, including…

  1. TL;DR

  2. Superpowers

  3. Background

  4. Business Model

  5. Growth

  6. Tech Stack

1. TL;DR

In 2023, Justin Welsh will do ~$1.7m from his solo creator business…

  • About 76% of that comes from sales of his courses ($150/ea.)

  • The rest is a mix of consulting, ads, and affiliate/subscription sales

  • All of this is powered by his LinkedIn, Twitter, and newsletter

2. Superpowers

After reviewing a lot of his work, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s got two main superpowers:

Systems Thinking: The thing that stood out most to me is that Justin has an incredibly dialed-in system for writing and distributing content (more on this in a bit). He’s a total mercenary here, with systems designed to let him produce consistently, even when he doesn’t feel inspired. This is huge.

He also comes across as a bit dispassionate, observing what works and cutting what doesn’t, without getting caught up in the mystique of being a “creator.”

Playing A Long Game: This is the part that’s hardest to internalize, but he’s willing to spend a year or more building up an audience somewhere before ever selling to them. For anyone starting this journey, this is torture to hear. But it’s also a common thread you see with a lot of successful creators.

3. Background

The first thing you need to know is that Justin isn’t a writer. Or at least, he wasn’t…

He was a sales guy. But after more than a decade in high-stress high-growth startups led to drinking, an overwhelming panic attack, and a visit from EMT’s, he started planning his escape.

The background in sales is important for two reasons.

First, it should give you hope if you don’t consider yourself a writer either. This trade is learnable, for the most part. It’s not as precious as some would lead you to believe. Justin’s an example of just how much is possible, even without a “writer” background.

Second, you’ll see how it informs his approach to the business (I believe this is one of his unique advantages).

At any rate, about seven months before he left his job as a sales exec, he started publishing to LinkedIn with the idea of eventually landing consulting gigs to replace his job.

It worked. And as his audience grew, people started asking him more and more about how he was doing that. Today, most of his work actually focuses on helping people grow their own audiences.

4. Business Model

Remember, the main business model for these kinds of media companies is simple: They’re monetized via free, front-end, and back-end products. (More on each here)

It would be tempting to focus exclusively on the part of his business that does most of the revenue – the courses.

But if you do that, you’d miss the bigger picture. So instead, let’s go through the bullseye model in-full.

Free Products

While Justin has built an audience across LinkedIn, Twitter, and a newsletter, he currently only monetizes ads on the newsletter:

Look at how simple this sales page is.

He runs up to two ad spots, both at $3k/issue. And each ad is text-only, up to two sentences.

What that means is that the ad business is set up in such a way that it doesn’t take much of his time. Advertisers likely buy, submit their ad text to him async, and he schedules/runs without much else.

According to the interview he did with Noah Kagan, of the $1.7m he’ll do in revenue this year, ~$30k will come from affiliate deals, and ~$120k will come from the ad system above.

If you’re doing the mental math, $6k/wk times 52 weeks is a lot more than $120k. I chalk the difference up to one of a few things:

  1. That estimate could be old, based on lower pricing (the price was $2k until very recently)

  2. He may have <100% fill rates. Many newsletters do, so plan accordingly

  3. Ads may not be a priority for him (with 75%+ of revenue coming via courses)

Of these, I lean most toward No. 3.

Front-End Products

As a quick reminder, front-end products are primarily defined by their price. They can be one-time payment (like courses) or subscriptions, but typically hover in the $50-$100 range. Low enough to be impulse buys.

This is where the bulk of his business sits, and it’s comprised of two major revenue streams:

  • Courses: He sells 2 courses on Gumroad for $150/ea.

  • Subscriptions: He runs a paid newsletter ($9/mo) where he shares the social media templates he’s using to drive traffic.

These are both comfortably in “front-end” territory. And between the two, he’ll do ~$1.4m this year (the vast majority of which is represented by course sales).

The paid subscription is an up-sell for members of his course, and I want to take a second to point out how smart this is.

One of the most important and often overlooked aspects of paid subscriptions is that they give you recurring revenue.

To understand just how great this is, let’s pretend you’re selling a course, and like Justin, you’re able to sell $1m worth of seats this year.

That’s impressive. But do you know what you need to do next year?

That’s right – sell $1m worth of seats all over again. More if you want the biz to grow.

Now, pretend you make $1m selling a subscription product, and 50% of those people renew for a second year. You start year two with $500k in the bank, and even if your ability to sell stays capped at $1m in sales per year, your overall revenue continues to grow.

More money for the same work. That’s the magic of paid subscriptions.

His model is a little different. I believe the paid subscription is billed monthly, which changes some of the math.

But the big idea here is that it’s smart as a course creator to experiment with value-added subscriptions and recurring revenue.

The other thing he did well… when designing the paid subscription was to focus on different rather than more.

Newsletter writers often struggle with this when deciding when/how to take their newsletter paid.

The option many default to is to offer more. (E.g., Free subscribers get one email a week, but paid members get two or more.)

That’s a mistake.

Generally speaking, unless you’re sharing verrry valuable information that’s directly tied to your reader’s income, they just aren’t that motivated to get more of your emails. For the most part, they barely have time to read the ones you already send.

So a more strategy will always limit your income to only your most dedicated readers.

But if you sell a subscription that offers something different from the free newsletter (ideally something valuable, that helps them make money, save money, or save time) it becomes harder to resist.

Social media templates to grow your solo-preneur business is a great example.

Back-End Products

Similar to front-end products, back-end products can be one-off or subscription-based products that are primarily characterized by their price (typically $500 and up).

In media, when you talk about back-end products, most people think about high-ticket subscriptions. But I tend to lump consulting and coaching into the back end as well, because…

  1. It’s a higher-ticket, higher-touch service

  2. It can be sold using free or front-end products

According to his interview with Noah, Justin does ~$150k in coaching each year.

He doesn’t talk a lot about what kind of coaching that is. It’s not clearly available on his site. Nonetheless, it’s a good example of how building a large audience brings valuable opportunities. Even the side income is a great salary on its own.

5. Growth

I’m actually not going to spend too much time writing about how Justin grows for two reasons…

First, many others have already done a great job deconstructing his process. Here are a few of my favorites:

But more importantly, the topic of how he grows is the main thing Justin himself writes about.

It’s the topic of both his current courses, and he’s also broken it down in detail for free many, many times. (Like here)

I took his Content Operating System course. It’s great. Specifically for anyone who knows what their niche is, but isn’t sure what they should do day-to-day to grow their audience on Twitter or LinkedIn.

If I were to break down my personal takeaways, they would be:

  • Promotion > Production: After writing an article, he finds about a half-dozen different ways to package and share insights from the piece (e.g., contrarian take, listicle, etc.) then uses a tool like Hypefury to pre-write and pre-schedule that content on his social channels over 6-12 weeks. I like this ratio of promoting much more than you publish.

  • Regular Growth C2A’s: Every week, he promotes his newsletter once the day before the email goes out (“sign up to get XYZ tomorrow”) and once the day after. I’ve already begun testing this at Hampton and it’s extremely effective, sometimes driving more clicks and signups than even our most popular and helpful Twitter threads. That’s a big deal because the threads take way longer to write.

  • This is a business: An aspect of Justin’s work that I think often goes over-looked is that he’s not here to “have fun.” Sure, he’s having fun. But his business functions like a machine – the newsletter is short and to-the-point, it’s written on a schedule, promoted in the same ways each week, and those posts publish consistently, at the same times. In a world where many people romanticize being a “creator”, I find this refreshing.

There is, of course, a lot more to get from his course. But these were the things that had the biggest impact on me.

6. Tech Stack

I was a little surprised by the tech stack Justin’s using – I hadn’t heard of most of the tools on it.

Kajabi does most of the heavy lifting, powering his site, courses, and email list. The rest is mostly tools for pre-scheduling the afore-mentioned social media content and analytics.

One thing I’d love to know is more about how he uses his analytics suite. If you go back through enough of his work, it’s pretty clear that he tests things pretty systematically. I’m guessing that’s a holdover from his days leading sales teams.

It’d be interesting to learn more about how he tests, and what he tracks.

One cool thing to note is that he’s also become an affiliate for several of the companies whose tools he relies on to run his business.

It’s not a huge income (Roughly ~$25-$30k according to Chenell Basillio’s breakdown of his business).

But that’s enough to go on a few killer vacations a year. All for passively recommending tools he already uses.

It makes me think about how all of us have some similar opportunity. No matter what you do, chances are there’s something the people around you know you for. Something they ask you about.

You don’t have to be a business owner to benefit from this.

Even if you’re an employee, and you write about the work you do at your job. It wouldn’t take much to put up a simple tools page with some affiliate links.

Actually seems like a great first-step for people trying to build a personal following around a topic they already know well. Having the affiliate links up would allow you to monetize without having to build an entire course, and can free you to focus on publishing.

The income would likely be small at first, but its growth would be a good indicator of the trust you’re building with your audience, and more important, a signal that people are willing to buy things from your recommendation. Once you have that, you can build and launch products much more confidently.