I can't believe I'm launching a blog in 2025.
Last year, I said blogs were dead. I thought newsletters killed them. But I was wrong.
Revenue Rulebreaker started because I shut down my membership and was trying to figure out what was next. I knew I wanted to be a creator—meaning that I wanted to write, make tools and host events—but I couldn't quite see how I was gonna do that yet full time. So I started writing about what I was wrestling with in a newsletter that went to a few people who already knew what I had been up to.
And then, to my own surprise, I launched a new community. What's now Legends.
Even more surprisingly, people said yes.
All the sudden, I had a new subscription business. My creator path became clear. Build an audience-backed media business. Maybe find a sponsor or two who sees the value in what we're doing here. Keep speaking and teaching as I go.
I was starting to see how these three revenue streams—subscriptions, sponsorships and speaking—could come together and provide enough income to do this full time.
The reason this website is called Revenue Rulebreaker is because people kept telling me I'm doing things the wrong way:
- You don't have a big enough audience to be audience supported.
- Audience subscriptions is never going to work full time.
- You're not going to get good rates from sponsors until you're bigger.
- No one cares what you're doing because you're too small.
- You can't make a creator career with less than 10,000 followers.
But I keep finding that none of this is true. You can do these things and people do care. So much of building an internet business is really up to you, and if you position things as valuable to the right people, they will join you for the ride.
So far, 127 people have trusted me enough to be part of this crazy dream. That's not including the members of my other project Journalists Pay Themselves and three great partners too
Overall, it seems to me that the signal is pretty damn good.
I look back at past similar projects like LA Pays Attention, a political newsletter that got lots of acclaim from news outlets, or even my membership for Growth Designers, a community that I started that's now being monetized by a dude who basically stole it from the rest of us...and I think I didn't take these projects seriously enough. I didn't keep going long enough. I didn't try hard enough.
I guess it took me a lot of years to realize just how much effort this stuff really requires. Everyone makes their success look easy, and when you ask them how they got there, they majorly downplay what it took. I love when people say it's about consistency because there's tons of people who are consistent and never get anywhere with their project. That's. Not. It.
So what I try to do here is both debunk the bullshit vanilla vagaries that plague the creator economy and also light a path for other small audience creators to make a living. I'm also planning to add more contributors to the site and feature more of the Legends too, because they are doing damn cool stuff.
Some of the stuff I've covered here includes:
- Just how many emails it takes to sell a promotion
- How I got my first paid speaking gigs
- How I book partnerships now
- Why I changed my pricing (and went so much lower)
- Some of my audience growth channels, as someone bad at social media
As I write this, most of RevenueRulebreaker.com is behind a paywall, but I will be putting a few more pieces here so you can check it out if you're new.
Get on the newsletter if you want to keep up with what we're doing and if you want the inside track, join us as a Legend.
