Revenue Rulebreaker produces stories and events about how microentrepreneurs actually make a living online.
Here we cover hard won wins from lovable underdogs—not blowhard outliers who build their business on personality, unearned money or cons. We examine repeatable practices for business building and we enjoy lifestyle stories that feature the unconventional ways internet entrepreneurs live.
Think Apartment Therapy but for the internet business owner. Instead of peering into apartments, we're getting an insider view into someone's business.
We're focused on solopreneurs and microentrepreneurs. We are writing for businesses led by one or two people. They might have a small team or collaborators but we cater to the founders. Most of our audience is "creative entrepreneurs," meaning designers, writers, marketers, strategists, coaches, developers, and journalists. The majority run service-based, remote businesses, but many of them are developing alternative revenue streams, exploring media, digital products, memberships, courses, books, speaking and beyond.
That's what we're here to surface: fresh stories and actionable ideas our readers can apply to their own business. Revenue Rulebreaker is always practical, ruthlessly vulnerable, and on a good day, delightfully entertaining.
📥 How to pitch Revenue Rulebreaker
I am just starting to take contributors. We only have the budget for one, maybe two a month so keep your expectations low about the acceptance rate of pitches. I will aim to get back to everyone who pitches with an answer about whether we can take it right now. Current rate is $200 a story, no matter how long.
The kinds of stories I'm looking for:
- Crack open a revenue stream that's hard to tackle by giving us insider details of something you did to make money
- Give us a new way to think about our own business model within the context of our current times
- Help us learn how to make money by teaching us a repeatable strategy (with evidence and examples)
- Real talk "here's how much I made doing this" by month, quarter or year
- Inspire us with unconventional lifestyles of entrepreneurs
What makes it a Revenue Rulebreaker story:
It features a lovable underdog who operates differently. If you hit no challenges and everything was wins across the board and just so easy, that's not interesting to us. We want a little struggle. We want to know what it took to get there. And we want to know how you Frank Sinatra did it your way.
In general, stories should align with one of the topics on our topics page, but don't let that stop you from pitching a story you think my readers would want to read.
I prefer first hand accounts, written by entrepreneurs, but will consider reported or community sourced pieces too, especially from writers who have experience with the topic they are pitching.
Send your pitch via email to Lex and put "Contributor Pitch" in the subject line. Don't send full pieces. A short pitch with a couple lines about what your story would cover is sufficient. If I don't know you, include a couple links to your writing too.
🖊️ How to write for Revenue Rulebreaker
Check out some of the pieces on the site for examples of the style of this blog.
Once your pitch is accepted, here's some things to keep in mind while you write:
- Write in your voice, from your perspective. We tend to write very casually here, like we're recounting the story to a friend, but if that's not natural for you, write how you write. (See Maliha's post on membership and my post on how my summer raise went as examples)
- Assume your reader is smart, informed and can keep up with you. Revenue Rulebreaker's audience is not new to business and they are paying a lot of attention to what's going on around them. It's good to explain new concepts or link out to explanations, but you don't need to break everything down like it's a business class.
- Avoid generalizations and generic advice. We want your story or someone else's story, not vagaries about groups of people.
- Our readers appreciate radical honesty and deeper-than-social-media vulnerability, but no need to fabricate any feelings that weren't there. If you were confident you had a slam dunk the whole time, tell us! If you were crying up until your breakthrough moment, tell us that too.
- Give us all the details. We want to see screenshots of emails. Pictures of the process. Actual revenue numbers. Exactly what you said. Exactly what you did.
- Make it a fun read. Not mandatory, especially if your story offers us excellent, practical takeaways, but readers around here love when something is extremely opinionated or unexpectedly human. You can also incorporate cultural moments (like Justin Bieber "standing on business") if that flows naturally too.
Notes on your format:
- Grab the reader with your opener. Figure out why they might care about your subject and lead with that why to get them hooked.
- Use subheadings to break up sections and make your piece skimmable.
- In your closer, tell us your takeaway or what you think our takeaway should be. If possible, tie it back to your opener.
- Avoid big words that people might have to look up. Aim for 6th grade reading level.
- Use specific examples from one business (yours or someone else's)
- If talking about data, you must cite your data.
- Minimum word count is roughly 600 words. No maximum word count.
- For your contributor bio: Make sure to provide your photo, a 1-2 line bio and any links you want. Here's an example guest bio for reference.
I am not at all picky about grammar. I will run spell check on your piece and give it a light edit. We don't follow any style like AP or Chicago Style because I don't understand why I should care about this yet, but at some point someone will make me care about it and we'll pick a lane later.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for contributing to this labor of love.