Contributor Guide

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

Send your pitch via email to Lex and put "Contributor Pitch" in the subject line.

Do not send full pieces. A short pitch with a potential headline and your nut graph (what your story would cover) is sufficient. Current rate is $200 a story, no matter how long.

Make sure to include in your pitch:

• Who the story is about (name names—you or other people. Tell me who you are covering in this story and what your relationship is to them, if not about you.)
• What the angle is. Where's the story going? What's your perspective? What's the audience takeaway? Don't just pitch a topic.
• At least 2 published writing samples
• Your bio and links to learn more about you

If you want to pitch multiple stories, you can put them in the same email. Remember that how you write your pitch tells me a lot about whether or not your writing style will work for this publication.

Please share more about you and how to find you online in your pitch. I need to know you are a real person and that my audience can trust you. If I can't figure out who you are, what your business/expertise is, it's very hard to accept that pitch. Show me you exist online and let me do my own research about your work.

The kinds of stories I'm looking for:

• Have a genuinely unusual or rarely heard perspective
• Crack open ONE 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 one repeatable strategy (with evidence and examples)
• Inspire us with unconventional lifestyles of entrepreneurs

A few great examples from our archives:

• The email that saved my business: How one bold ask tripled my rates overnight
• I just launched a new group program. Here's exactly how it went.
• Want to start a creative collective? Read this first.
• I ran an experiment to see if I could get people to pay me to pitch them. Here’s what happened.
• Why entrepreneurial journalism is the next era of content creation (and why it makes sense for 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.

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. Your story should, however, be about running an independent business.

All stories should be timely, based on something you just did, the time of year or news that is happening. Consider why now is the right time to tell this story. In general, I don't publish "here's how my whole business works" stories and I don't publish stories that are just pitches for what you sell. Instead, pitch a more strategy-specific or timebound story. Think about a story you'd be excited to read.

I prefer first hand accounts, written by entrepreneurs, but will consider lightly reported or community sourced pieces too, especially from writers who have experience with the topic they are pitching. If you pitch something about someone who is not you, tell me who that person is and share a link so I can learn more about them.

Common reasons I don't accept a pitch

• Ignoring the instructions on this page
• Pitching me anywhere but in my email like I asked
• Sending full stories (don't send full stories!)
• Sending me their whole life story or a story about how their entire business works instead of a single story pitch with an angle
• Pitching super generic stuff or topics like "memberships"—I need to understand what story you are telling to accept it. It should have a beginning, middle and end.
• Not including who the story is about. You must explain who the story is about to have a story pitch. A vague concept is not a story pitch.
• Sending story pitches that have nothing to do with business. This is a business publication.
• I can't find you anywhere online and I cannot validate you are who you say you are (my audience needs to be able to learn about you and trust you.) Include links!

🖊️ 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:

• No AI is allowed in your writing. You cannot use AI to draft any language in the final article. If I find out AI was used in the writing, I'll pull the story. You can use AI to brainstorm or organize your research, but you can't let it write for you.
• 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 Taiwo's post on rate raising 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.

Requirements for getting paid:

It's important to me to pay you quickly and I make every effort to do so. I pay on story receipt, not on publication, but you need to follow my invoicing guidelines to get paid fast:

• Send your invoice with your draft. Your invoice MUST arrive in a separate email from your story. I do not pay with PayPal or Venmo.
• Preferred method of invoicing: Use Stripe or another digital invoicing tool like Wave, Harvest, or QuickBooks to email me a payable invoice. Enable credit card payment if possible (much preferred) and if not, include bank transfer as an option through your invoicing tool where I can add my bank details directly and avoid having to do a wire transfer.
• If that's not possible: Set up an account on Wise and email me a PDF attachment invoice (NOT an editable document) with the subject line "Invoice: Your story title or name." Be sure to include all of your Wise account information so I can pay you (Wisetag, Full name on account, Your address, Bank name, Bank address, Account number, Routing number, Account type). Account must be under your name.
• By submitting your invoice, you are warranting that you're an independent contractor and that you're responsible for all your own federal, state and local taxes.

Read more in our Contributor Agreement.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for contributing to this labor of love.

🎲 Lex

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