// transcript — 301 segments
0:00 Intro
0:02 This is Justin. He built his online business to $1.7 million a year, working
0:07 only five hours a day. And the crazy part is he runs it all by himself.
0:11 I don't have any employees. What's even more insane is the story of
0:15 why he decided to quit his job to do this. Screaming, crying, hallucinating. Didn't
0:19 know what was happening. In this episode, we met up in downtown
0:23 New York City, and he showed me exactly how he makes millions of dollars with
0:26 zero employees. Last year, my business did about 1.7 million. Uh, and this year I anticipate
0:32 that it'll do around two and a half. He also told me the secrets to getting
0:36 hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter and LinkedIn. It's not as complex, I think, as a lot
0:42 of folks might assume that it is, and how he runs his entire business on
0:46 less than $700. The total cost of my business is about 620 bucks a month.
0:51 This interview is a master class on how to build a multi-million dollar
0:55 oneperson business from scratch. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story.
0:59 How he makes money
1:01 All right, Justin, can you explain to the audience exactly what you do and how
1:04 you make money? So, the the easiest way to describe it is I have sort of a portfolio of
1:10 products that I sell. Uh my main portfolio is what you would just call
1:14 online courses or information products. I sell two of those. One on how to use
1:18 LinkedIn effectively to build a business and the other one on how to build your
1:21 own content system. A secondary way that I make money is I have a newsletter
1:26 that's approaching 100,000 subscribers. So, I sell sponsorships to companies who
1:30 want to get in front of, you know, their ideal customer if that person or or
1:34 group of people happen to be my readership. And then a third way that I
1:38 make money is I have a subscription email that I send out where every month
1:42 they'll get an email from me that shows them uh copywriting techniques for for
1:46 writing better copy on social media. So all in all, everything that I do is
1:50 based on knowledge and uh I most commonly refer to myself as a knowledge
1:54 entrepreneur when people uh you know don't know exactly what I do.
1:57 Based on all these products, how much money do you make total?
2:00 Uh last year my business did about 1.7 million. Uh and this year I anticipate
2:05 that it'll do around 2 and a half. So I think it's it's hard for some
2:08 people to comprehend that one person, you're just one person, no team, can
2:13 make $1.7 million a year. How is that even possible? I think the most
2:17 important thing to think about if you can commit to getting on social media,
2:20 choosing a topic you're passionate about, really educating yourself about
2:24 it, and then going out and writing consistently about it every single day
2:29 on multiple platforms, sometimes two to three times per day, then you can build
2:32 up this audience. And then it really becomes a numbers game, right? If you
2:39 have a million followers and 1% or 2% of your 1 million followers buy a product
2:43 that you offer at a few hundred, well, suddenly you see that this becomes
2:47 relatively possible when you add to the mix tools, systems, and processes. It
2:52 becomes significantly easier. So, you can't just wake up every day as a
2:55 oneperson business and say, well, what do I do on Monday? What do I do on
2:58 Tuesday? What do I do on Wednesday? When I wake up every morning during the week,
3:01 I know exactly what I'm doing. And then it's a lot of tools, right? like
3:05 publishing tools which allow you to schedule your your social media
3:08 publishing, tools like notion which allows you to stay organized and have
3:11 all your ideas in one place. Tools like Trello which allows you to, you know,
3:15 move projects forward and these are things that I leverage, you know, on a
3:19 regular basis for my business. And I know you have a pretty unique
3:22 background. Can you tell me about what you were doing before this and the
3:26 journey that led you to where you're at today? Yeah, prior to going online and
3:31 and building a business, I was in technology and ended up at a really
3:35 small tech firm in New York called Zakdoc. And um I was successful out of
3:39 the gate and spent 5 years at that company eventually reporting to the CEO
3:44 and I parlayed that into my very first executive role at 33. I was the VP of
3:48 sales. I was hired on, but I was the VP of sales of one person in a company that
3:53 had no revenue. And I thought I would do maybe 1 or 3 million in ARR and they
3:57 would go get like an inexperienced person to come kind of take over that
4:01 that role. Hired some good people. A lot of things just went my way. And the
4:04 company grew to about 50 million in recurring in 4 and a half years. The
4:07 problem is that when you work at a company like Zachdoc, which was really,
4:11 really well known for like very cutthroat, very, very deep and intense
4:15 work ethic, and then transition into becoming an executive, you go 10
4:20 consecutive years of high anxiety, high stress, board meetings, targets, and
4:25 after 10 years, um, I burned out really badly. And that all culminated in this
4:29 massive panic attack that I had on December would have been December 16th
4:34 of 2018, um, where I just thought I was dying. For people who have had panic
4:37 attacks, your fingers go numb is the first thing. Then you get very confused
4:42 and like I was on all fours, screaming, crying, hallucinating. Didn't know what
4:47 was happening. Uh so my wife called 911 and uh the EMTs came out and told me
4:51 that I was not dying and uh things subsided over the next few hours and
4:55 that was the end of my career in tech. Basically, that was how I ended up
5:00 trying to build my own thing on social I know you run a oneperson business, so
5:12 you can't spend too much money. What do you spend money on and what don't you
5:14 spend money on? Yeah. Um, I spend mostly on software. So, um, I try and keep my software stack
5:22 as lean as possible. I use a a piece of software called Kajjabi, which is sort
5:26 of like an all-in-one marketing solution and website solution for, you know,
5:30 solarreneurs, creators, coaches, things like that. So that is the primary meat
5:35 of my cost, 399 bucks a month. The total cost of my business is about 620 bucks a
5:39 month. Uh so I have things like testimonial.to, I've got Tapio, I have
5:44 Hype Furious, some publishing tools. Uh almost everything that I invest into my
5:49 business is tools. I do not spend any money on paid ads. So I've never run a
5:53 paid ad before. I don't have any employees. Um I very very rarely work
5:58 with freelancers and contractors. But I really spend most of my money on
6:02 software and things that make creating content easier for me cuz my business is
6:06 really content driven. All right, let's get tactical. I want to
6:09 talk about marketing. You've reached millions, potentially billions of
6:12 impressions on social media and you've sold millions of courses. What's your
6:16 marketing strategy? It's not as complex, I think, as a lot of folks might assume that it is.
6:23 Really, it's content driven. Most of my strategy is to show up on two platforms
6:29 every single day, two to three times a day. And those platforms right now are
6:33 LinkedIn and Twitter. And the way that I do that is sort of a few different
6:37 things. The first one is what I call discovery. And that is just getting
6:42 discovered by new people at the top of funnel. So on Twitter, on LinkedIn,
6:46 people who have never discovered me, who have no idea who I am, who have never
6:49 seen my name and face before, I want them to find me on those social media
6:53 platforms. The second thing that I want to do once people have discovered me,
6:56 and this is sort of the second part of my I guess you could call it funnel, but
6:59 I don't really like to think of it as a funnel, is trust. And trust to me comes
7:04 from really showing people how your brain works. And the easiest way to show
7:08 someone how your brain works is through longer form content. So what that is for
7:12 me is my weekly newsletter and the guides and articles that I produce on my
7:16 website. So every day what I'm trying to do is move people from Twitter and
7:20 LinkedIn onto my website. Once I do that, it's pretty simple. Discovery,
7:24 trust, expertise, and authority. And then it's a presentation of an offer.
7:27 And my offers aren't aggressive. It's not like, "Hey, you need to buy my
7:31 course right now. Urgency." It's just like if you enjoyed this piece of long-
7:35 form content, if you believe I'm the person that can help you solve the
7:39 problems that you have in your social media content or your online business,
7:43 then here are some affordable options that I have right now. That's my funnel.
7:49 Social media for discovery, longer form newsletter for trust, authority, and
7:53 expertise, and then asking people to buy something. Pretty simple.
7:56 All right. So, Justin, you post a ton of content on social media. How do you come
7:59 up with so many new ideas for great content? Yeah, I have a bunch of
8:02 different ways that I I think of ideas. Some really common ones for me is I
8:06 subscribe to a lot of aggregator newsletters. So, every morning in my
8:09 inbox, I get, you know, some of the biggest stories. I get some of my
8:13 favorite creators bringing some of their things into my inbox. Uh, I look at a
8:16 lot of YouTube channels that are relevant to to what I do, and I look at
8:20 their most popular videos because if it's a popular video on YouTube, then
8:24 it's probably going to resonate with my audience. I'm always looking for things
8:28 that I can put my spin on, right? You don't want to write the same thing that
8:31 somebody else in your industry wrote. You want to take popular topics. You
8:34 want to take things that are challenging to my ideal customer. And I want to put
8:39 my spin on those things. I take ideas from everywhere. Podcasts I listen to.
8:43 When I go on a walk, things pop into my head. So, I use my phone to capture
8:47 things. I I'm always trying to be cognizant that ideation is around you at
8:52 all times. And if you let it slip by without noting it down, I can never
8:56 remember them. So, I just try and keep track of them as they're happening.
8:59 What's a typical day in the life look like for you? My days are relatively regimented. I
9:05 wake up 5:30, 6, sometimes 6:30. I have a standing date with social media every
9:09 morning. So, my content comes out at the exact same time every single morning,
9:13 8:15 Eastern time on both platforms, LinkedIn and Twitter. And I make it a
9:16 point to engage with my audience almost every single morning for at least 45
9:20 minutes to an hour. Once I'm done with that, my wife and I, we got to go to the
9:25 gym. And so we drive about 20 minutes down to the nearest town called Stone
9:29 Ridge and we go to a gym there. So we might spend 9:30 till, you know, 11 at
9:36 the gym and driving. And then we eat lunch, you know, around 11:30, 12. And I
9:41 don't really start doing creative work till normally around noon or 1:00 p.m.
9:46 each day. And I'll try and do like a really intense 3 or 4 hours. And a
9:51 typical uh, you know, day for that might be Monday. I'll spend that time writing
9:55 my newsletter. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I'll spend that time creating
10:00 content. And Friday, I'll work towards more strategic projects. So, building a
10:05 new product, um, you know, standing up a new service, working to meet interesting
10:09 and unique people like you or like other folks who I uh, you know, admire on
10:13 Twitter and LinkedIn. That's usually how I spend my Fridays, but that's a pretty
10:16 The fastest way to learn and grow
10:23 It's really impressed me how fast you've built this business. How do you level up
10:28 and how have you been able to grow so quickly? Back in 2018 when I first started giving
10:33 this a swing, Russell Brunson was really popular, so I bought a lot of his books
10:37 and that kind of gave me the fundamentals or the foundation for
10:41 understanding why people change, why people buy things, how to tell stories.
10:46 The way that I have leveled up is I'm a hypothesisdriven creator. Same thing I was when I was a
10:52 sales leader in my my previous career, which meant making a hypothesis, testing
10:56 it, seeing if it worked. If it did, doing it twice as much or three times as
11:00 much or five times as much, and if it didn't, completely eliminating it. So,
11:04 what I always encourage people to do is try a bunch of stuff. Try things. Throw
11:08 everything you can against the wall. That's the easiest path to getting
11:11 better at this very specific business. Yeah. What advice would you have for
11:13 someone that wants to do something similar or wants to get started building
11:14 Advice for new solopreneurs
1:55 Revenue
1:57 Based on all these products, how much money do you make total?
2:00 Uh last year my business did about 1.7 million. Uh and this year I anticipate
2:05 How to become a solopreneur
2:05 that it'll do around 2 and a half. So I think it's it's hard for some
2:08 people to comprehend that one person, you're just one person, no team, can
2:13 make $1.7 million a year. How is that even possible? I think the most
2:17 important thing to think about if you can commit to getting on social media,
2:20 choosing a topic you're passionate about, really educating yourself about
2:24 it, and then going out and writing consistently about it every single day
2:29 on multiple platforms, sometimes two to three times per day, then you can build
2:32 up this audience. And then it really becomes a numbers game, right? If you
2:39 have a million followers and 1% or 2% of your 1 million followers buy a product
2:43 that you offer at a few hundred, well, suddenly you see that this becomes
2:47 relatively possible when you add to the mix tools, systems, and processes. It
2:52 becomes significantly easier. So, you can't just wake up every day as a
2:55 oneperson business and say, well, what do I do on Monday? What do I do on
2:58 Tuesday? What do I do on Wednesday? When I wake up every morning during the week,
3:01 I know exactly what I'm doing. And then it's a lot of tools, right? like
3:05 publishing tools which allow you to schedule your your social media
3:08 publishing, tools like notion which allows you to stay organized and have
3:11 all your ideas in one place. Tools like Trello which allows you to, you know,
3:15 move projects forward and these are things that I leverage, you know, on a
3:18 When he left his 9-5
3:19 regular basis for my business. And I know you have a pretty unique
3:22 background. Can you tell me about what you were doing before this and the
3:26 journey that led you to where you're at today? Yeah, prior to going online and
3:31 and building a business, I was in technology and ended up at a really
3:35 small tech firm in New York called Zakdoc. And um I was successful out of
3:39 the gate and spent 5 years at that company eventually reporting to the CEO
3:44 and I parlayed that into my very first executive role at 33. I was the VP of
3:48 sales. I was hired on, but I was the VP of sales of one person in a company that
3:53 had no revenue. And I thought I would do maybe 1 or 3 million in ARR and they
3:57 would go get like an inexperienced person to come kind of take over that
4:01 that role. Hired some good people. A lot of things just went my way. And the
4:04 company grew to about 50 million in recurring in 4 and a half years. The
4:07 problem is that when you work at a company like Zachdoc, which was really,
4:11 really well known for like very cutthroat, very, very deep and intense
4:15 work ethic, and then transition into becoming an executive, you go 10
4:20 consecutive years of high anxiety, high stress, board meetings, targets, and
4:25 after 10 years, um, I burned out really badly. And that all culminated in this
4:29 massive panic attack that I had on December would have been December 16th
4:34 of 2018, um, where I just thought I was dying. For people who have had panic
4:37 attacks, your fingers go numb is the first thing. Then you get very confused
4:42 and like I was on all fours, screaming, crying, hallucinating. Didn't know what
4:47 was happening. Uh so my wife called 911 and uh the EMTs came out and told me
4:51 that I was not dying and uh things subsided over the next few hours and
4:55 that was the end of my career in tech. Basically, that was how I ended up
5:00 trying to build my own thing on social I know you run a oneperson business, so
5:01 Costs to run a one-person business
5:12 you can't spend too much money. What do you spend money on and what don't you
5:14 spend money on? Yeah. Um, I spend mostly on software. So, um, I try and keep my software stack
5:22 as lean as possible. I use a a piece of software called Kajjabi, which is sort
5:26 of like an all-in-one marketing solution and website solution for, you know,
5:30 solarreneurs, creators, coaches, things like that. So that is the primary meat
5:35 of my cost, 399 bucks a month. The total cost of my business is about 620 bucks a
5:39 month. Uh so I have things like testimonial.to, I've got Tapio, I have
5:44 Hype Furious, some publishing tools. Uh almost everything that I invest into my
5:49 business is tools. I do not spend any money on paid ads. So I've never run a
5:53 paid ad before. I don't have any employees. Um I very very rarely work
5:58 with freelancers and contractors. But I really spend most of my money on
6:02 software and things that make creating content easier for me cuz my business is
6:06 Content Marketing Strategy
6:06 really content driven. All right, let's get tactical. I want to
6:09 talk about marketing. You've reached millions, potentially billions of
6:12 impressions on social media and you've sold millions of courses. What's your
6:16 marketing strategy? It's not as complex, I think, as a lot of folks might assume that it is.
6:23 Really, it's content driven. Most of my strategy is to show up on two platforms
6:29 every single day, two to three times a day. And those platforms right now are
6:33 LinkedIn and Twitter. And the way that I do that is sort of a few different
6:37 things. The first one is what I call discovery. And that is just getting
6:42 discovered by new people at the top of funnel. So on Twitter, on LinkedIn,
6:46 people who have never discovered me, who have no idea who I am, who have never
6:49 seen my name and face before, I want them to find me on those social media
6:53 platforms. The second thing that I want to do once people have discovered me,
6:56 and this is sort of the second part of my I guess you could call it funnel, but
6:59 I don't really like to think of it as a funnel, is trust. And trust to me comes
7:04 from really showing people how your brain works. And the easiest way to show
7:08 someone how your brain works is through longer form content. So what that is for
7:12 me is my weekly newsletter and the guides and articles that I produce on my
7:16 website. So every day what I'm trying to do is move people from Twitter and
7:20 LinkedIn onto my website. Once I do that, it's pretty simple. Discovery,
7:24 trust, expertise, and authority. And then it's a presentation of an offer.
7:27 And my offers aren't aggressive. It's not like, "Hey, you need to buy my
7:31 course right now. Urgency." It's just like if you enjoyed this piece of long-
7:35 form content, if you believe I'm the person that can help you solve the
7:39 problems that you have in your social media content or your online business,
7:43 then here are some affordable options that I have right now. That's my funnel.
7:49 Social media for discovery, longer form newsletter for trust, authority, and
7:53 expertise, and then asking people to buy something. Pretty simple.
7:54 How to find ideas for content
7:56 All right. So, Justin, you post a ton of content on social media. How do you come
7:59 up with so many new ideas for great content? Yeah, I have a bunch of
8:02 different ways that I I think of ideas. Some really common ones for me is I
8:06 subscribe to a lot of aggregator newsletters. So, every morning in my
8:09 inbox, I get, you know, some of the biggest stories. I get some of my
8:13 favorite creators bringing some of their things into my inbox. Uh, I look at a
8:16 lot of YouTube channels that are relevant to to what I do, and I look at
8:20 their most popular videos because if it's a popular video on YouTube, then
8:24 it's probably going to resonate with my audience. I'm always looking for things
8:28 that I can put my spin on, right? You don't want to write the same thing that
8:31 somebody else in your industry wrote. You want to take popular topics. You
8:34 want to take things that are challenging to my ideal customer. And I want to put
8:39 my spin on those things. I take ideas from everywhere. Podcasts I listen to.
8:43 When I go on a walk, things pop into my head. So, I use my phone to capture
8:47 things. I I'm always trying to be cognizant that ideation is around you at
8:52 all times. And if you let it slip by without noting it down, I can never
8:56 remember them. So, I just try and keep track of them as they're happening.
8:57 Daily routine as a solopreneur
8:59 What's a typical day in the life look like for you? My days are relatively regimented. I
9:05 wake up 5:30, 6, sometimes 6:30. I have a standing date with social media every
9:09 morning. So, my content comes out at the exact same time every single morning,
9:13 8:15 Eastern time on both platforms, LinkedIn and Twitter. And I make it a
9:16 point to engage with my audience almost every single morning for at least 45
9:20 minutes to an hour. Once I'm done with that, my wife and I, we got to go to the
9:25 gym. And so we drive about 20 minutes down to the nearest town called Stone
9:29 Ridge and we go to a gym there. So we might spend 9:30 till, you know, 11 at
9:36 the gym and driving. And then we eat lunch, you know, around 11:30, 12. And I
9:41 don't really start doing creative work till normally around noon or 1:00 p.m.
9:46 each day. And I'll try and do like a really intense 3 or 4 hours. And a
9:51 typical uh, you know, day for that might be Monday. I'll spend that time writing
9:55 my newsletter. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I'll spend that time creating
10:00 content. And Friday, I'll work towards more strategic projects. So, building a
10:05 new product, um, you know, standing up a new service, working to meet interesting
10:09 and unique people like you or like other folks who I uh, you know, admire on
10:13 Twitter and LinkedIn. That's usually how I spend my Fridays, but that's a pretty
10:23 It's really impressed me how fast you've built this business. How do you level up
10:28 and how have you been able to grow so quickly? Back in 2018 when I first started giving
10:33 this a swing, Russell Brunson was really popular, so I bought a lot of his books
10:37 and that kind of gave me the fundamentals or the foundation for
10:41 understanding why people change, why people buy things, how to tell stories.
10:46 The way that I have leveled up is I'm a hypothesisdriven creator. Same thing I was when I was a
10:52 sales leader in my my previous career, which meant making a hypothesis, testing
10:56 it, seeing if it worked. If it did, doing it twice as much or three times as
11:00 much or five times as much, and if it didn't, completely eliminating it. So,
11:04 what I always encourage people to do is try a bunch of stuff. Try things. Throw
11:08 everything you can against the wall. That's the easiest path to getting
11:11 better at this very specific business. Yeah. What advice would you have for
11:13 someone that wants to do something similar or wants to get started building
11:18 a a brand online and and selling products? The first thing I would I would do is is
11:23 really think kind of deep and hard about what it is that you love doing that
11:27 you're also very competent at. So figure out what that thing is. Talk to your
11:30 friends, talk to your family, and go start talking about it online. The
11:34 number one piece of advice I have for people is start. Everyone wants to learn
11:38 everything. Everyone wants to read every book or listen to every podcast or do
11:43 whatever. Starting will teach you a hundred times more than reading my story
11:48 or listening to what I have to say because your journey and everyone else's
11:52 journey is going to be very different than mine. All advice is contextual,
11:58 mine included. Start, learn, try.
