![]() ![]() Khe is one of the best creators I’ve seen in terms of building relationships. Since then, he’s changed his strategy and now gets a third of his traffic from search. In 2019, Khe realized that he was growing a lot slower because he completely ignored one of the biggest opportunities of getting people on his email list. He doesn’t have a massive audience, but he does have a highly valuable list of connections. Khe uses social differently than a lot of the high-growth creators you might see. And you just have to see it to understand. This is by far my favorite piece of his growth. And he uses these in newsletter swaps, which is very rare at this point in the creator space. ![]() Love ’em or hate ’em, the lead magnets are extremely effective for Khe’s audience. However, the way he’s gotten these features is interesting in itself. Khe has been fortunate to have a story interesting enough that journalists want to share it with their readers. Over the last 8-9 years, Khe has tried a lot of things to grow his newsletter and audience. So while he “only” has 50k subscribers after 9 years of writing, he would probably have a much larger list if he wasn’t so diligent about cleaning it up. So he’ll go through deleting subscribers because he doesn’t care about the vanity metric of subscriber count. Instead, he raves about having a high open rate or around 50-55% and optimizing for replies (which I love). He is not someone focused solely on a vanity metric like the number of subscribers he has. There are a lot of times when his subscriber count stayed flat, or even shrank, but the reason is that Khe is consistently cleaning up his list. Getting the numbers for this deep dive was interesting. Don’t worry, we’ll explore that in a bit. Khe’s growth has a few peaks, but mostly it’s a consistent up-and-to-the-right chart, aside from that huge jump in the middle of 2022. This is no longer something he does, but it felt important to share that this was one of his bigger revenue streams early on. It was a part-time gig but he was able to draw a salary from it. This helped him learn more about the digital media side of things and get his writing out to more people. The terms aren’t clear, but it sounds like Khe was brought on to write regularly for the publication. In 2016, Khe became the Professional in Residence for Quartz Magazine. ![]() Only 5 people can upgrade to that higher tier, and you do get 1-1 coaching as well as 12 months access to the $10k accelerator. Now he sells the self-paced version for $1,997.Īnd you can upgrade to the group coaching side of things for $7,997. He made a big pivot, which we’ll get into later and shut down the cohort side of things. However, he said it was also his highest in terms of expenses, meaning the business profited only $250k. In 2022, RadReads made $658k which was his best year ever in terms of revenue, mostly coming from the course. These were heavily inspired by Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain course. He would do 3-4 cohorts a year, charging more than $1,000 per seat. Khe has run cohort-based courses teaching productivity via Notion in the past. He isn’t a huge fan of managing sponsor relationships, negotiating, and writing ad copy, so he manages his sponsors through the ConvertKit Sponsor Network. Khe has sponsors in his newsletter, which at 50,000 subscribers should be a few thousands bucks per issue. It doesn’t take many clients paying that kind of money to have a full-time income. This post was in 2021, so maybe the format was different than it is now, but it’s a signal. Khe has pivoted a few times in his business, but now makes a good chunk of his revenue from coaching and helping others get off the hamster wheel.īased on this post, it sounds like Khe was charging around $10k for his coaching engagements. Khe definitely might not be making the 8-figures he was while being in upper management at Black Rock, but he’s also not working 100-hour weeks either. He left his job in May 2015, and ended up turning the newsletter into his full-time business, which is now called RadReads.Ĥ34 issues later, Khe has over 50,000 subscribers and has built a business that allows him to live a life he loves. In January 2015, he sent a few people in his network an email with links to interesting articles he read while he was on vacation. He was extremely successful by most measures.īut to get there, he was working 16-hour days, 7 days a week, and was so stressed that he lost a chunk of his hair right before his best friend’s wedding, which he would come to find out was from stress-related alopecia. He was making 7 figures a year working at Black Rock, and was one of the youngest managing directors in company history. In 2014, Khe Hy was seemingly living a dream life. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |