Why I killed my Marketing Agency to start a Paid Newsletter instead
2020 was a mess and a blowback for all of us. It completely changed the way I perceive my family, my work, and it totally destroyed my work-life balance. I don´t know exactly when I noticed that I was literally working 24/7 with no weekends.
Working non-stop while parenting and homeschooling two elementary school kids with the support of my amazing wife was definitely taking a toll on me and our relationship.
I was constantly on edge, fully stressed out, and well on the way to burnout.
I needed to stop what I was doing immediately and take back control of my life as we were on a trajectory that would lead to disaster soon. We were constantly fighting each other and I wanted to be able to restart and enjoy my life with my family again.
We started by minimizing our household and selling all the junk that we had lying around but never actually used anyway. You wouldn´t believe how good it feels to just let things go. And it made our piggy bank really happy as a side-effect :)
Luckily, the Christmas holidays forced me to take a full-stop break and reflect on my chaotic situation.
If nothing good came from the Corona year 2020, it sure had some eye-opening effects on people and challenged the way we work remotely (hopefully forever). So it came to pass that Covid blew up some of our six-figure investor deals right in our faces and I was stuck with a long-time startup project that didn´t seem to make any progress for some time because of reasons completely outside of my control.
Also, there had been some really demotivating issues with Corporate Clients From Hell, and another long-time project that I have been working on for nearly six years now has all but run out of the fun it once was. I already had stopped most of my client work in favor of our own award-winning startup project FakeScouts.com and I realized that somehow I had not done any live workshops for some time and was non-stop working 80+ hour weeks without any light at the end of the tunnel. And for most of that work, I couldn´t even charge anybody.
I had long crossed the line of trading working hours against money again.
Something that will only bog you down and leave you underpaid, undervalued but at the same time overstressed, and deeply unbalanced.
But if need to know only one thing about me it´s that you may never get in the way of my motivation!
Whenever there is something outside of your control you need to find other ways to take back the steering wheel. In my case, when those investor deals blew up, I suddenly had too much time on my hands and aside from binging a series or two on Netflix, I kept digging deeper into my favorite hobby, which is bootstrapping startups. And a big part of that is keeping an eye open for new tools that create shortcuts that were previously not easily available or affordable.
I had already stopped using WordPress after 15 years of building websites with duct-tape in favor of the all-in-one marketing suite Kartra.com. What shall I say? Yes, it´s more expensive, but everything is perfectly connected to each other and just works out of the box. I agree it is a waste of money if you cannot monetize it. Yes, it has a bit of a learning curve and the detailed setup takes some time to complete, but that is to make sure everything is connected the right way and you don´t forget half of the important stuff. It really just works perfectly together.
With WordPress, you always stand the chance that nothing will work together or that the next forced update will kill your website for no other reason than your 50+ plugins from different developers are all wrestling each other. And speaking of costs, most people think WordPress is free, but it´s really not. It´s not only hosting but if you really want to work on a professional level with WordPress, you need to invest in a ton of premium plugins that will all sum up nicely at the end of the year.
I even calculated that Kartra can substitute 16 other tools and I will save more than 380 Euro each month!
To make a long story short, I felt like I had to ditch all that overclocked and underpaid agency work for something that is more fun again.
I wanted to restart my startup and tool reviews newsletter for some time now, as there is so much great stuff to discover, share and recommend to fellow startups and marketers, that sometimes I feel like bursting with news. I already had plans to do it with MailChimp but something always held me back. That is until I discovered Substack (you are reading on it right now) and recognized the beauty of it. Sure, it´s super minimal, but it has a big benefit in its favor:
Substack is a popular discovery engine for paid newsletters.
So why reinvent the wheel? On Substack people are already familiar with paid newsletters and are able to discover your content through a keyword search in the news directory. Going solo is tough enough, but if you start a standalone newsletter it´s the same as with any other e-commerce shop or website. You just don´t build it and people will find it all alone. No! It´s just not working like that. It´s more like standing in the woods shouting your lungs out and no one cares!
Promoting your content is a BIG part of starting anything online, no matter what.
As I happen to know my way around content marketing, think putting some work into sharing my expertise and best-practice sales and marketing processes will not only keep me sane but at the same time benefit all my 12.000+ course students and newsletter subscribers together.
So I am putting my trust in Substack as well as my own marketing experience to be able to monetize the AXE THE TRASH newsletter with additional bonus content for paid subscribers to substitute for the loss of the chunk that I am missing from client work. I am once again looking forward to having more fun at work and not counting each hour I work for billing the next invoice. And maybe even more importantly, I am able to ditch chasing time and again after each single new corporate client for good!
Being creative about what you can offer as a bonus to paid subscribers might help you grow your newsletter that much faster.
In my case, AXE THE TRASH is about bootstrapping startups and brutally honest tool reviews. I came up with the name because I have tested so many tools with the majority of them being useless or over-expensive junk, that I just couldn´t help myself. I soon started building a clean tech stack of essential tools that are super-efficient, easy to use, and affordable on top. And I am going to share each and every tool on that list with you here in this very newsletter.
So stay tuned for all of that reviews and subscribe for free! That is going to be the main free content. But as a special bonus, I am able to throw in some fully fleshed out eLearning course material in the mix. As well as Live Workshops and as an exclusive gimmick that I am really looking forward to:
I will give every paid subscriber access to an exclusive private WhatsApp Mastermind group.
To mingle with like-minded people and talk bootstrapping all day long is gonna be so much fun. It´s totally worth getting to know you guys and directly helping each other out, building something great and meaningful that can have an impact on this world.
So basically, that´s it. My reason for killing my marketing agency and going all-in with a paid newsletter as my favorite side dish.
One word of caution though:
If you are feeling light-headed now and are thinking about replicating my move, please be aware that this is not going to be my only source of income! I am not flying blind into this! After all, I have a family with two kids to raise! I am fully aware that it might take me more than six months to earn any substantial part of my income from this. For the time being, I am still keeping that last one same old agency client that I am working with for about six years now. Hint: It´s one of the biggest eCommerce companies in Europe! That alone will cover my rent and most of my expenses. I would be dumb to blow that in the wind! But I will not take on any new clients from now on.
Also, I am still working on two startups. FakeScouts.com is ambitious. O.K. VERY ambitious. Basically, we are creating a browser extension and want to enable anyone to never buy a fake product again. But it also sucks money and takes a lot of time. And ViSPR.net is the complimentary marketing SaaS tool for this newsletter. It´s a do-follow backlinks exchange network for startup partner pages. Building backlinks is one of the most effective ways to boost your organic Google Search rankings in no time, but it is usually hard to do and keeps you from working on your startup. ViSPR solves SEO for people that don´t like SEO in a heartbeat. So make sure to check it out ;)