I've studied 100+ founders who turned personal brands into $10M+ businesses. Now I’m launching 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗜𝗣𝗢 (with beehiiv🐝), a podcast where the founders all over your feed share their playbooks. Sam Parr, Justin Welsh, and all of our guests share one thing: Obsession. Some of them dropped out of college and moved across the country with nothing. Others left cushy 6-figure finance jobs for ideas Wall Street said were stupid. All of them stayed in the game, built amazing companies, and created their own luck. 1. 𝗦𝗮𝗺 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗿 sold The Hustle for $27M and co-founded Hampton, a peer network for founders 2. 𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻 𝗪𝗲𝗹𝘀𝗵 just crossed $10M in revenue single-handedly creating the category of solopreneurship on LinkedIn 3. 𝗝𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲 𝗣𝘂𝗷𝗷𝗶 has launched five separate 7 and 8-figure businesses firing off viral posts from his phone 4. 𝗗𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗶𝗲 𝗕𝘂𝘀𝗵 ditched Wall Street to build a $700k/month hold-co training the next generation of digital writers 5. 𝗧𝗶𝗺 𝗛𝘂𝗲𝗹𝘀𝗸𝗮𝗺𝗽 has quietly built 1440, a newsletter doing $20M/year 6. 𝗜𝘀𝗮𝗮𝗰 𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗵 sold a viral short-term-rental portfolio for $7M in his mid-twenties after an Airbnb delisting nearly bankrupted him 7. 𝗘𝗿𝗶𝗰 𝗦𝗶𝘂 bought a biz for $1 and turned it into a 60-person SEO agency and top marketing podcast 8. 𝗗𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗲𝗹 𝗙𝗮𝘇𝗶𝗼 bootstrapped a $1M/month portfolio of community and SaaS businesses by 28 years old And we're just getting started. The first episode drops Monday! 𝗧𝗼 𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗯𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗜’𝗺 𝗴𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗮 𝗛𝗨𝗚𝗘 𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗱𝗼𝗰 𝗼𝗳 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗴𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝘀' 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘀, 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹𝘀, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲. 𝗬𝗼𝘂’𝗹𝗹 𝗴𝗲𝘁: - Justin Welsh's sales emails behind Creator MBA's $1.6M launch - Dickie Bush's funnel (landing pages, emails, and automations) from Premium Ghostwriting Academy ($500k+ per month) - Jesse Pujji's sales call blueprint, responsible for 3 separate $10M+ companies - Sam Parr's original cold emails to advertisers from The Hustle’s first year - 1440's top 40 longest-running Facebook ads Want access? 1. Like this post 2. Comment "personal IPO"] I'll send you the Notion doc via DM today.

Andrew Madison, ex-head of ops at Ship 30 for 30 (~$2.5M/yr writing business), shared the email framework they used to book sales calls (people paid $8,500 for this information): Andrew shared that every Sunday, they sent a 4-part proof-based email: • Here's a problem we ran into with a client last week • Here's why it mattered • Here's how we helped solve it • Want us to help you do the same? Book a call That's it. The goal is to prove you can solve a problem they have. Instead of saying, "Book a call with us," you're showing them why they should. This filled his calendar from Monday through Wednesday. Andrew also shared a second tactic: the hand-raiser automation. When someone clicks your call-to-action but doesn't book, trigger an email sequence that explains your offer, shares proof, and invites them to take the next step. Only send it to people who've already shown interest. Two takeaways: 1. Send story-driven CTA emails on Sunday to fill your calendar early in the week 2. Follow up with people who've clicked but haven't booked Stop just asking people to book a call. Show them why they should.

Your newsletter’s thank-you page could help pay for every new subscriber before they read a single issue. 5 negative CAC tactics I use with our clients making $50K-6M/mo: 1. Recommend other newsletters Use SparkLoop to recommend partner newsletters to new subscribers. The average newsletter using SparkLoop earns around $0.53 per subscriber you acquire. 2. Stack multiple recommendation platforms Most creators stop at SparkLoop. I’d add other platforms on top of it, like beehiiv Boosts. In finance, I’d also look at IMS and After Offers. Each platform gives you another way to monetize the same subscriber. 3. Add affiliate offers You don't need to negotiate a direct partnership to start earning affiliate revenue. You can join programs behind any tool like ElevenLabs, beehiiv, Base44, etc., then use Lovable to build a simple page explaining the tools, their benefits, and any available discounts. 4. Negotiate direct cost-per-click deals Once you understand your audience, approach companies that want to reach them. For example, The Assist has direct relationships with Notion, Miro, and Mondaydotcom. After subscribers complete a survey, they see an offer wall featuring these partners. The newsletter earns revenue when subscribers click through. 5. Survey new subscribers and personalize offers I want to know who's joining my newsletter and what they're interested in. A welcome survey helps me understand my audience, deliver more relevant offers, and identify potential sponsors. It can also help me figure out what products my own audience would buy. The goal is to build a negative CAC stack: multiple revenue streams that offset the cost of acquiring each subscriber. Don't treat your thank-you page as a dead end. It's one of your first opportunities to turn a new subscriber into revenue.

Pumped to be speaking at @andruyeung's Outliers Summit alongside Sam, The Media Mafia, and a bunch of other buddies. 12 months ago my best friends and I were building our companies out of a gym lobby together. It's been a ride. @oliverbrocato @joshsuggss @mattepstein @lukethorburg @shamusmadan @Jacobsklug

Dan Shipper’s newsletter makes $7-8M/yr. He just said newsletters are dead. I’m starting to worry he’s right. Unless you’re building one of these 3 types of newsletters, AI could kill your growth: Over the last month, I’ve been reading fewer emails and using Claude to manage my inbox instead. I’ve trained it on how I think by reviewing its replies and correcting them. Now, I can batch-reply to 30 emails in about 15 minutes. Will we even use email inboxes in 3 years? A buddy recently sold his AI implementation agency for many millions. His team now builds tools for companies paying $150K/month. They’re building directly inside Claude rather than as traditional software with a front end. Crazy! If Claude becomes the interface for both work and email, publishers will have to rethink how they earn attention. That’s bad news for newsletters that summarize broad news I can already find on X or ask Claude to surface. But there are 3 types of newsletters I still actively read: 1. Deep industry-specific curation Example: I read @LetterlandLive because it covers my industry: newsletters. Its content is directly relevant to my work. 2. Curation from people whose taste I trust Example: I read @ShaanVP's Five Tweet Tuesday. I’ve listened to Shaan on other platforms, so I trust his judgment about what’s worth reading. 3. Original content based on real experience Examples: 1. @denk_tweets's Big Desk Energy for raw stories about building a company 2. @SecretCFO for his beautiful case studies on finance 3. @danielfazio for insights on offers and advertising What do these newsletters have in common? Their authors have real-world experience and judgment I trust. And that trust has commercial value. I’d buy products they create/recommend because I trust their judgment. If your newsletter only provides curated information, you’re competing with an abundance of free alternatives. But if it builds trust in your judgment, you can sell your own products or recommend others' products. This shift won’t happen overnight. Most people aren’t using AI to manage their inbox as some of us do. But over the next 2-3 years, newsletter operators will need to get much clearer about why people should read their content. Getting someone’s email address doesn’t guarantee you have their attention. The question is why anyone should keep opening your emails when they can get the same information somewhere else.

I scaled from 0 to $1M ARR in 10.5 months using a stupidly simple LinkedIn outbound playbook. It’s simple enough that you could do it today: Step 1: Build a targeted lead list Go into LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Add ~50 companies you want to work with. Then filter for the people who can make the buying decision. For us, that meant director-level marketing leaders and above. A list of ~2,000 people became 200 likely good-fit leads. Step 2: Ask if you could send a Loom lead magnet My message was: “Hey, I took a look at your ad account. Do you mind if I send you a 60-second Loom walking through what I think we would improve in your funnel?” The important part: No Loom until they say yes. Step 3: Make the Loom Keep it <2 minutes. Then use it to book calls. Don’t hesitate to send cold messages because you think it will annoy people. You only need to do a lot of volume. Most people will say no or won't respond. That's normal. We send tons of DMs. We ask people for intros. We make a lot of asks. I used to worry about annoying people too. But whether that fear is true or not, it doesn't serve me because if it makes me do less outreach, I'll book fewer calls.

We just boosted a newsletter’s open rate from ~45% to 59.3% and CTR from 2.4% to 4.9% using a little hack I invented that tricks Meta into only sending A+ quality subscribers: When you optimize ads for signups, Meta learns to find people likely to subscribe. But subscribing doesn’t mean someone will actually read your newsletter. So we started sending engagement data back to Meta, showing it which subscribers open the emails. How? 1. Capture the Facebook Click ID When someone subscribes through Meta, we save their Facebook ID with their beehiiv/kit/substack/etc. subscriber data. Now we can connect the subscriber back to the ad that acquired them. 2. Track engagement We use your email platform’s API to pull subscriber opens. We match the data against the subscribers we acquired from Meta and store it in a database we set up for you. This lets us identify: “Did this subscriber actually open the newsletter?” 3. Send the engagement data back to Meta Every few hours, our software: • Pulls opens from beehiiv • Matches them to subscribers • Matches those subscribers to the Meta campaign/ad • Sends the engagement event back through CAPI Now Meta gets a signal that says: This person didn't just subscribe. They actually engaged. 4. Optimize for engaged subscribers Instead of optimizing purely for signups, Meta can use those engagement events to find more people likely to read the newsletter. This campaign costs a little more per subscriber. But you’re getting higher-quality subscribers who are more likely to become customers. Over time, that could make your acquisition costs lower.

I just shared 4 AI sales workflows that made me $5M+. My buddy’s reaction? “Some of the things you said… people don’t even think are possible.” Steal ‘em before I take this down: 1. Get an AI briefing before every sales call Every morning, AI gives me a report with: • CRM context • Previous conversations • Open follow-ups • Objections • What I need to do to move each deal forward Instead of digging through the CRM before every call, I get the context and next steps handed to me. 2. Turn sales calls into LinkedIn/X content I have a skill that pulls content ideas from my sales calls. This is useful because your sales calls are already full of content: • Questions prospects keep asking • Objections you hear repeatedly • Problems customers are struggling with • Insights I explain repeatedly So instead of sitting down and asking, “What should I post today?” AI can mine ongoing conversations for ideas and turn them into potential LinkedIn/X posts. (This post is an example) 3. Use AI to coach your sales team My buddy has tools that analyze sales-call transcripts and flag important moments in the conversation. Imagine seeing exactly where a rep mishandled an objection, clicking into that moment, and reviewing what happened. You can then show the team how a top rep handles the same objection or what the rep could have said differently. Instead of telling your sales team to “get better at handling objections,” you can coach them on specific moments from actual calls. 4. Automate the work between sales calls I typically use two calls to close a prospect. Between call #1 and call #2, I send the same prospect an SLA deck outlining the proposed engagement. I built this deck before AI tools were this capable, so I don't currently automate it. But the process is a great candidate. I could give AI a sanitized example deck, the instructions, and the prospect’s answers from call #1. It could then generate a customized version for call #2. Most of the deck stays the same. Only a few details, like pricing, need to change. That's the type of work I'd look for first. Don't just ask: “What can AI write for me?” Ask: “What happens repeatedly in my sales process that AI could handle?” A good place to start: • Find repetitive work • Look at the data you already have • Find processes that follow a pattern • Pick one workflow • Give AI the examples and tools it needs to build it

I hit $1M ARR before posting a single piece of social media content. 4-step process ANYONE can use to close their first $1k-$10k/month client: 1. Create a ‘Trojan horse’ newsletter I sent LinkedIn DMs to people we wanted as customers and invited them to an invite-only newsletter. These people would have never said yes to a sales call. But they said yes to joining my newsletter (the Trojan Horse!). I sent valuable emails for 4-6 weeks. They saw we knew what we were doing. Then they booked calls. Woo! Example LinkedIn DM message I’ve used: “Hey [name], I run a private newsletter where I share growth tactics for media operators. Founders from 1440, The Rundown, and Red Ventures read it. Mind if I add you?” I used this to build a small list that includes founders from 1440, Superhuman, and virtually every top newsletter brand. 2. Put a CTA around the newsletter Every newsletter had a PS with a CTA to learn more about the agency. We also added a link to the agency at the very top. So the content was sandwiched between two opportunities to learn more. 3. Sell when it makes sense I didn't want every newsletter to feel like a sales pitch. So whenever I wrote about something where mentioning the agency was relevant, I did it. For example, we helped a client generate $270k on a 15k-person newsletter. I wrote a newsletter breaking down how we did it, included the results and their reactions, and then naturally mentioned that we could help others achieve the same. It didn't feel like an ad because the agency was relevant to what I was writing about. 4. Follow up with readers This is probably the most underrated part. After someone had been reading for 3-4 weeks, I'd reach out and ask if they wanted to talk. And it worked because I wasn't cold anymore. They'd already been reading my ideas for weeks. I STILL do this, 2.5 years in. This is literally working right now: I invited the Head of Growth of a $35M/yr newsletter brand. He read it for about 2 months. Then I emailed him and asked if he'd be open to a call. He said yes. We had the call, and now they're reviewing a work agreement with us. That's why I like newsletters so much for selling services. You don't need millions of followers. You need the right people reading your stuff consistently. Then give them enough reasons to eventually say: “Yeah, let's talk.”

I’d bet $10,000 that 90% of curation newsletters are screwed in the next 5 years unless they do these two things: I run a newsletter accelerator that 800+ operators have joined, and I see the same problem constantly. People use AI to summarize and curate information. But they don’t add much of their own thinking. That’s becoming a bigger problem as AI makes basic curation easier. You have to be in the top 1% to be a curator. Look at Shaan Puri’s Five Tweet Tuesday. He’s essentially curating tweets. Yet I read it every week, and he makes good money from sponsorships with companies like beehiiv and Mercury. Why? Shaan has developed taste. He consistently finds a great idea, a useful mental model, or a tweet that changes how you think about your business that you probably wouldn’t have found on your own. So how do you develop taste? 1. Build an exceptional content diet You can’t develop good taste by consuming mediocre content all day. It’s like trying to lose weight while eating five burgers after every workout. You must read and watch people who are already excellent. Start with curating your X and Instagram feeds around useful information. Eventually, the algorithm starts doing some of the work for you. I recently came across a video from Daniel Iles about ad formats. He's a social media marketing expert, made $5M last month, and spends $1M/mo on Meta ads. The video broke down ad formats he thinks will work next. I didn’t search for it. X showed it to me because someone I followed praised his content, and Alex Becker, a proven entrepreneur, agreed. I watched it and immediately sent it to my team because it gave us ideas for formats we could test with clients. That’s what a good content diet does. It pays consistent dividends. 2. Actually create something Consuming good information isn't enough. You have to apply it. Write, curate, build, or produce anything. When you have to turn what you've learned into something other people will consume, you start developing judgment. For me, that's my newsletter. I know people from teams at Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cody Sanchez, Jay Shetty, The Rundown, MarketBeat, and others are reading it. That creates useful pressure. I have to put something good. That's how taste compounds: Consume great work > apply what you learn > develop judgment > produce better work. AI can help you produce faster. But it can't replace the judgment that tells you what is worth producing in the first place.

Started working with Tyler 2 years ago on his newsletter growth. Been an epic journey, awesome to see him hit 150k. Next stop 200k!

My buddy’s street-interview agency EXPLODED - $0 → $10M in 18 months, the fastest-growing agency in 2026. You wouldn’t believe how simple their playbook is: @lukethorburg runs StreetTalk, the agency working with Athletic Greens, Dollar Shave Club, Birkenstock, and 150+ D2C brands. What worked for them? 1. Acquisition: Optimize for qualified leads If you send every lead back to Meta as a conversion, Meta learns to find you more leads. It doesn’t care whether those leads buy from you. So, they qualify leads based on revenue, ad spend, and ICP fit, then feed those qualified events back to Meta. They also don't spread ad budgets too thin. For a high-ticket B2B offer, they’d rather spend $500-$1,000/day for 7-14 days and get enough data to learn than spend $100/day for a month. 2. Sales: Sell the mechanism before selling yourself On their sales calls, they first explain why the prospect should care about the mechanism: • Why street interviews? • Why this type of content? • Why does it solve a problem that other channels don't? Once the prospect believes in the mechanism, selling the company becomes much easier. They also use the time between booking and the call. Confirmation emails, reminders, nurture content, and social proof keep the prospect engaged and make sure serious buyers arrive already educated. 3. Operations: Prove the process before you document it A common mistake is documenting every step too early. Luke’s team first figures out what works in practice, then turns the proven process into an SOP. Their Notion is organized by role: • Project managers • Creative strategists • Video editors Each role has its own SOPs and handoff points. 4. Client communication: Catch problems before they become client problems You can do good work and still lose a client if they don’t feel taken care of. So they never let clients wonder what happens next. They built a Claude + Slack workflow that monitors client health: • Has the team responded? • How long did it take? • Is the client showing negative sentiment? • Are they hitting the relevant KPIs? Clients get categorized as active, needs follow-up, or urgent. If a client hasn't received a response in 1 hour, it gets flagged. At 24 hours, it becomes urgent. Every morning, the team gets a recap. For urgent issues, it includes a summary and even a quote from the client. 5. AI: Automate the 80%. Keep the important 20% human StreetTalk's value proposition is having authentic conversations with real people on the streets. But behind the scenes, AI is doing a lot of the work. For scripted content, their AI can handle roughly 70–80% of the briefing and scripting. The human still has to choose the idea. They have a curated list of concepts and formats they already know can work. Once someone picks the idea, AI can build the brief and script. Then a human massages the final 20%.

I talked to the CMO of a $10M+ ARR SaaS company. He broke down one of their best-performing ad hooks. It was based on 6 principles: 1. Call out your exact ICP @nielskle started by naming the exact tools his target customer was already using: “If you're still using ClickFunnels or GoHighLevel…” Then he called out the use case: “…to build quiz funnels for your clients…” In one sentence, he identified: • The products they use • What they're using them for • The type of business they run The more specific the callout, the more qualified the person who keeps watching. 2. Call out the problem they already feel He followed it with: “I assume you like playing agency service delivery on hard mode.” It's a jab, but it's intentional. If you're an agency owner already frustrated by the problem, you immediately feel like the ad is talking to you. 3. Remove the biggest objection before it appears The ad then says: “Give me 31 seconds…” He's answering the viewer's next thought: “How long is this going to take?” Then he immediately gives them the payoff: “…and I'll show you how Perspective can shave 50% off your service delivery time.” So within the first ~10 seconds, you've got: ICP > Problem > Time commitment > Payoff. 4. Rehook immediately Then comes: “By the way, if you watch until the end…” And there's another payoff: successful funnel templates they can copy and paste. So even after the initial hook, there's another reason to keep watching. 5. Don't kill a winning creative; squeeze it When they find a breakout winner, they don't just move on and make something completely new. They turn it into Lego blocks: • Same winning body + new hook • Same hook + new creator • Same idea + different environment Their creative director will make 6-12 variations of a winner in the same week. Sometimes a new combination becomes the next breakout winner. 6. Stop assuming ads need to be short ~80% of their video ads are longer than 1.5–2 minutes because they tested it and it worked. For a product that needs education, a longer ad can actually qualify and educate the prospect before they ever reach the funnel. And they deliberately start deep in the funnel. Instead of trying to convince everyone they have a problem, they call out people already using competing tools. They're targeting the 5-7% who are educated and ready to buy. Then, once that audience is saturated, they broaden out. This is how they can profitably spend $250K-$400K a month on ads.

I’ve been talking to newsletter operators doing $10M-$100M and AI transformation consultants. 5 no-BS AI use cases that will make or save you a lot of money: 1. Create avatars of your founders Rowan at The Rundown went from 48K to 480K Instagram followers in 18 months using his AI avatar. Earlier, it took him hours to record content. Now he spends almost no time and still gets millions of views per month. Use this stack to get started: • Fish Audio for voice cloning • HeyGen Avatar 5 for the avatar • Higgsfield for b-roll stills • Kling 2.6 for animations People follow people, and this removes the bottleneck of getting the person on camera. 2. Build AI-powered editorial tools MarketBeat cut editor review time from 30-45 minutes per article to 10-15 minutes. That gives its editorial team 40+ hours back every month. They built an internal portal that: • Scores article pitches • Pulls factual claims from drafts • Checks those claims against MarketBeat’s own content • Cross-checks them against the broader internet And the whole thing was built with Claude Code. You no longer need to hire a six-figure engineering team to build internal tools. 3. Build dashboards that improve your growth decisions One newsletter operator spending ~$400K/month on acquisition used AI + his ESP’s API to build his own dashboard. Instead of optimizing for cheap subscribers, he started assigning sponsor revenue based on how much each subscriber opens and clicks. Then he modeled that value back onto his acquisition data. His LTV went from 2x to 5x+. 4. Let advertisers grade their own sponsorships Your sponsorship renewal rate depends on how well your advertisers perform. You already have the data to help them improve: • Which sponsorships work? • What copy converts for your readers? • Which is better: a lead magnet v/s webinar v/s direct offer? MarketBeat turned that into a tool that compares an advertiser's CTR against the benchmark for other sponsorships. It can show advertisers what separates high-performing creative from average creative. That does two things: • Reduces ad ops work • Gives advertisers a reason to renew 5. Give your ad sales team AI battlecards One AI transformation company I spoke with has agents building sales assets that save reps 4-6 hours a week. For newsletter ad sales, you could use the same idea to automatically: • Build media kits customized to each prospect • Analyze where an advertiser has bought before and identify similar audiences • Analyze the company's current marketing campaigns • Identify strategic priorities your newsletter can help with Your salesperson walks into the call already knowing what matters to the buyer. That's a much better use of AI than asking ChatGPT to write another cold email. Time-audit your team. Find the repetitive, expensive bottlenecks. Build around those. That's where the real AI advantage is.

MarketBeat makes ~$1.75M/mo from SMS. Now everyone wants to copy them. Bad idea. You’re wasting your time and burning money unless these 2 things are true: The reason SMS works for MarketBeat is that their business has two things most publishers don't: 1. Extremely high value per message MarketBeat can send someone directly to an offer they can buy immediately, and that's worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. That makes SMS worth the cost. For a publisher selling $25-$30 CPM sponsorships, the economics are completely different. You might get incredible engagement from SMS, but engagement doesn't matter if the revenue per message isn't high enough to cover the cost. 2. A legitimate reason to text people frequently MarketBeat sends stock alerts, and speed is part of the value proposition. If a stock moves, you want to know immediately. So sending 5-7 texts a day isn't necessarily annoying. Their readers want that. Compare that to a business newsletter. Nobody wants 7 texts a day about business news. If they did, they'd probably just use Twitter. So, if you're considering SMS, I see two situations where it can make sense: 1. You sell a high-ticket offer through a webinar If you sell a $1,000–$2,000 information product or a $5K+ offer through a webinar, SMS can help increase your show rate. The SMS isn't necessarily selling the offer. It gets more people to show up to the webinar where you make the offer. 2. Speed is core to your product If your audience needs to act quickly to capture an opportunity, SMS becomes much more valuable. Stock alerts are an obvious example. Markets swing every minute on news, so people care about the 6-7 messages MarketBeat sends. That's a fundamentally different value proposition. MarketBeat has built an incredible SMS business. But that doesn't mean every newsletter should start texting its subscribers. Before copying a channel, ask: Why does this work for them? Then ask: Do I have the same underlying conditions? If the answer is no, you might just be copying the tactic and missing the strategy.

I respect the hell out of ‘hybrid athlete’ founders like my buddy Oli. $10M DTC brand -> $1M B2C SaaS -> $6M B2B SaaS/Service before 25. He’ll be worth $100M before 35. Calling it now.

Last month, my buddies and I made $3M+. Literally 18 months ago, half of us were broke & sleeping on couches. 5 lessons on how to figure sh*t out and make your first $1M: 1. Burn the boats People rarely change because they want to. They change because they have to. My buddy @jakewilliammo quit a $120K/year job with no business idea, plan, or income lined up. He spent months trying different things until he found a model that worked. He’s on track to hit $1M, and was just featured in The Wall Street Journal. I’m not advising you to quit your job recklessly. But you must remove the comfortable fallback that's keeping you from taking the problem seriously. 2. Selecting the right project > Doing the project right You don't need to marry your first idea. Run small experiments. Try a different product, audience, or market. Then pay attention to where you see unexpected demand. My buddy @mattepstein was running an e-commerce agency at $2M+ a year when he noticed a new market emerging around launch videos. Instead of protecting the business he'd already built, he pivoted into the market that was pulling him in. He’s now doing $15M+/yr in revenue. 3. Sell to rich people Sometimes the same skill is worth 5x more when you sell it to a different customer. A LinkedIn ghostwriter might charge $3K/month to an agency owner. Sell the same capability to a VC-funded B2B founder whose company can generate $100K+ from a customer, and the economics change completely. That’s how @shamusmadan is making $2M/yr. But the bigger benefit isn't just charging more. Better customers can actually extract more value from your service, which means better retention. 4. Ask who is the answer, not what is the answer Instead of spending 10 hours trying to solve a problem yourself, find someone who's already solved it. @oliverbrocato paid Alex Hormozi’s team $35K to audit his business and learn what he could do better. He also spent ~$40K more to learn from operators running much larger companies. One piece of advice from Alex’s team changed his pricing model and created an ~8% revenue lift with essentially no additional cost. 5. Proximity is power When I started my business, I moved back to Ohio and grew to ~$1M ARR in 10.5 months. But I was alone and unhappy. So I moved back to New York and started spending time around ambitious people. That eventually became the friend group I'm around today. Being around people who are doing what you want to do changes your perception of what's possible. You see them win. You see them struggle. You see them figure things out. And suddenly, your own bad days don't feel so catastrophic. You don't need 100 new friends. Get active online. Reply to people. DM them. Get on calls. Talk to 50 people. You'll probably find 2-3 you genuinely connect with. Then find a way to get in the same room.

My buddy @nielskle runs webinar strategy for a $10M company. Here’s how he designed a 1 hr webinar that generated $1,349,646 in sales: 1. Win the first 2 minutes Start with 4 things: • The promise: what will they learn? • Proof: why are you qualified to teach it? • The rehook: what will they get if they stay until the end? • The roadmap: what are you going to teach them? Start with high energy and get people involved immediately. Welcome people by name. Ask them to say hello in the chat. Get them participating before you get into the content. 2. Sell the mechanism before yourself You don't want to spend an hour convincing people that you are great. First, convince them that the mechanism is the right way to solve their problem. For example: “Cold email can work. Content can work. But here's why this webinar is better for your business.” Once they believe the mechanism is right, the product becomes much easier to sell. 3. Build the content around belief shifts The content has 3 jobs: • Educate them • Excite them • Qualify them Every section should move them closer to: “This is the right solution for me.” His framework was essentially: Problem > New mechanism > Proof > New belief. Instead of just giving information, you’re reframing how they think about solving the problem. 4. Knock down objections before the offer Think through the objections they’ll have before they reach your offer. For example: • “I don't have the skills” > Show them how simple it is • “I don't have the tools” > Show them the tools/templates • “This won't work for my business” > Show examples from different niches • “I don't have time” > Show them how quickly they can implement it By the time you reach the offer, you're not introducing a new idea. You're presenting the logical next step. 5. Make the content qualify the buyer Your content should also signal who the offer is actually for: • What are you teaching? • What assumptions are you making about the audience? • What stage are they already at? 6. Then handle the classic offer objections Once the mechanism is sold and the internal objections are handled, you can address: • Price • Timing • Payment structure • What's included • Why act now He mentioned tactics like naming the offer well, discounts, useful add-ons, scarcity, and urgency. But those come after you've done the harder work of making someone believe the mechanism is right for them.