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I recently passed 200 paid subscribers. This was not an accident. It was a goal.
Last year, I set a goal to have 500 active paid subscribers by the end of this year. It all started with a revenue target I needed to hit to fuel this project. And because that revenue target felt VERY LOFTY, I knew I couldn't just hold it out at arm's length and look at it longingly and hope it happened.
I needed a plan.
I needed smaller bits and pieces to work on in order to actually hit 500 active contributors.
The Quarterly or Monthly Plan
I took my yearly goal and divided it into quarterly goals.
Monthly goals could also work here, but I find they are too short and prone to timing issues outside my control. For example, it's August as I write this. I'm taking a lot of this month off. It's back to school or summer break for much of my audience. August is just not going to remotely compete with September as far as numbers.
Quarterly goals give me a 12 week span to do something meaningful. I can weather weird seasonal shifts and personal failures to pretty much always come out on top (or close!) at the end of a quarter.
With my 500 paid subscribers goal, that broke down to having:
- 125 active subscribers in Q1
- 250 active subscribers in Q2
- 375 active subscribers in Q3
- 500 active subscribers in Q4
I have 12 weeks to achieve these marks. I started capturing activities that will drive paid subscribers.
Some of those activities included:
- Onboarding subscribers
- Hosting an event
- Running subscriber drives for 1-2 weeks
- Offering a promotion
- Producing a particular issue
- Setting up an automation
- Getting feedback from canceled subscribers
I prioritized my ideas based on what I think will work (using past evidence of what already has). Some things I'll only do in a specific quarter (like an event or a subscriber drive). Other things, I do every week like onboarding subscribers or getting feedback from canceled subscribers.
The Weekly Plan
Now I had a yearly target, a quarterly goal and ideas of what I can do to hit that goal. I turned that into my weekly plan.
Up until this point, I'm just using a Google Doc or even a piece of paper to think through my plan. When I want to start working on it, it has to go into my planner, Sunsama.
I draw from the prioritized idea list of what I think will help me reach my goal. I load in no more than 3 of those ideas as "objectives." You can add all the priorities for the whole quarter if you want to, week by week. I don't do that because I'm kind of lazy and because I secretly know I won't operate by a fixed 12 week plan.
But I will follow my own one week plan.
The Daily Plan
Some of the weekly objectives that fit into my quarterly goals are clear tasks and others need to be broken into smaller bites.
That's where the daily plan comes in.
Let's use one of my real weekly objectives as an example: "Plan September subscriber drive." This objective has a few parts to it. I need to write out the strategy. I need to coordinate timing with my main collaborator. I need to get some audience feedback. I need to create graphics to promote it. I need to write some messaging to promote it. And as I start working on it I will uncover more stuff I need to do.
I can just add these as tasks and connect them back to my objective.
Because I began this whole process with a yearly goal, I know that this task and its objective are all part of the plan. And I know exactly what they are meant to drive for my business.
125 active paid subscribers at a time.
This makes what to work on each week SUPER EASY because I already know where I'm going and what's going to get me there.
I'm also able to easily adjust this plan if it's not driving the numbers because it's all movable in Sunsama. I'll bump stuff that's not performing and switch out ideas to try week by week.
I used to keep a lot more of this in my head, but the more serious I take my business, the more of these tasks and objectives need to be written down in order to get executed in time. The truth is that I'm hitting my goals because I'm looking at them a lot and because the plan to achieve them is sitting right in front of me.
If you've been dragging on stuff you want to do, check out Sunsama. It changed how I worked and it could change how you work too.
I'll be back with a fresh edition of Revenue Rulebreaker on Sunday. See you then!
🎲 Lex
