The new LinkedIn Hiring Pro can't undo your last hire, the empty seat. Who was actually just that, an empty chair in your office, because you couldn't find someone to fill it. So it just sat there costing you money with all its fancy ergonomic features. But LinkedIn Hiring Pro can make it easy to fill that seat with the right candidate, with nearly 60% of businesses finding someone to interview in the first week alone. Hire right the first time with LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Post your first job today and get £100 off at linkedin.com.ai hire. Terms and conditions apply. This is Justin. He built his online business to $1.7 million a year, working only five hours a day. And the crazy part is, he runs it all by himself. I don't have any employees. What's even more insane is the story of why he decided to quit his job to do this. Screaming, crying, hallucinating, didn't know what was happening. In this episode we met up in downtown New York City, and he showed me exactly how he makes millions of dollars with zero employees. Last year my business did about $1.7 million, and this year I anticipate that it'll do around $2.5 million. He also told me the secrets to getting hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter and LinkedIn. It's not as complex, I think, as a lot of folks might assume that it is. And how he runs his entire business on less than $700. The total cost of my business is about $620 a month. This interview is a masterclass on how to build a multi-million dollar one person business from scratch. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Justin, can you explain to the audience exactly what you do and how you make money? So the easiest way to describe it is I have sort of a portfolio of products that I sell. My main portfolio is what you would just call online courses or information products. I sell two of those, one on how to use LinkedIn effectively to build a business, and the other one on how to build your own content system. A secondary way that I make money is I have a newsletter that's approaching 100,000 subscribers. So I sell sponsorships to companies who want to get in front of, you know, their ideal customer, if that person or group of people happen to be my readership. And then a third way that I make money is I have a subscription email that I send out where every month they'll get an email from me that shows them copywriting techniques for writing better copy on social media. So all in all, everything that I do is based on knowledge, and I most commonly refer to myself as a knowledge entrepreneur when people, you know, don't know exactly what I do. Based on all these products, how much money do you make total? Last year, my business did about 1.7 million, and this year I anticipate that it'll do around two and a half. So I think it's hard for some people to comprehend that one person, you're just one person, no team can make 1.7 million dollars a year. How is that even possible? I think the most important thing to think about, if you can commit to getting on social media, choosing a topic you're passionate about, really educating yourself about it, and then going out and writing consistently about it, every single day on multiple platforms, sometimes two to three times per day, then you can build up this audience, and then it really becomes a numbers game. If you have a million followers and 1% or 2% of your 1 million followers by a product that you offer at a few hundred dollars, well, suddenly you see that this becomes relatively possible. When you add to the mix tools, systems, and processes, it becomes significantly easier. So you can't just wake up every day as a one person business and say, well, what do I do on Monday? What do I do on Tuesday? What do I do on Wednesday? When I wake up every morning during the week, I know exactly what I'm doing. And then it's a lot of tools, right? It's like publishing tools, which allow you to schedule your social media publishing. Tools like Notion, which allows you to stay organized and have all your ideas in one place. Tools like Trello, which allows you to move projects forward. And these are things that I leverage on a regular basis for my business. I know you have a pretty unique background. Can you tell me about what you're doing before this and the journey that led you to where you're at today? Yeah, prior to going online and building a business, I was in technology and ended up at a really small tech firm in New York called ZocDoc. And I was successful out of the gate and spent five years at that company eventually reporting to the CEO. And I parlayed that into my very first executive role at 33. I was the VP of sales. I was hired on, but I was the VP of sales of one person in a company that had no revenue. And I thought I would do maybe one or three million in ARR. And they would go get like an inexperienced person to come kind of take over that role. Hired some good people. A lot of things just went my way. And the company grew to about 50 million and recurring in four and a half years. The problem is that when you work at a company like ZocDoc, which was really, really well known for like very cutthroat, very, very deep and intense work ethic, and then transition into becoming an executive, you go 10 consecutive years of high anxiety, high stress, board meetings, targets. And after 10 years, I burned out really badly. And that all culminated in this massive panic attack that I had on December, would have been December 16th of 2018, where I just thought I was dying. For people who've had panic attacks, your fingers go numb is the first thing. Then you get very confused. And like I was on all fours screaming, crying, hallucinating, didn't know what was happening. So my wife called 911 and EMTs came out and told me that I was not dying. And things subsided over the next few hours. And that was the end of my career in tech, basically. That was how I ended up trying to build my own thing on social media. I know you run a one person business, so you can't spend too much money. What do you spend money on and what do you spend money on? Yeah, I spend mostly on software. So I try and keep my software stack as lean as possible. I use a piece of software called Kajabi, which is sort of like an all in one marketing solution and website solution for solopreneurs, creators, coaches, things like that. So that is the primary meat of my cost, 399 bucks a month. The total cost of my business is about 620 bucks a month. So I have things like testimonial.to, I've got Taplio, I have HyperiSync publishing tools. Almost everything that I invest into my business is tools. I do not spend any money on paid ads, so I've never run a paid ad before. I don't have any employees. I very, very rarely work with freelancers and contractors, but I really spend most of my money on software and things that make creating content easier for me because my business is really content driven. All right, let's get tactical. I want to talk about marketing. You've reached millions, potentially billions of impressions on social media, and you've sold millions of courses. What's your marketing strategy? It's not as complex, I think, as a lot of folks might assume that it is. Really, it's content driven. Most of my strategy is to show up on two platforms every single day, two to three times a day. And those platforms right now are LinkedIn and Twitter. And the way that I do that is sort of a few different things. The first one is what I call discovery, and that is just getting discovered by new people at the top of funnels. On Twitter, on LinkedIn, people who have never discovered me, who have no idea who I am, who have never seen my name in the face before, I want them to find me on those social media platforms. The second thing that I want to do once people have discovered me, and this is sort of the second part of my, I guess you could call it funnel, but I don't really like to think of it as a funnel, is trust. And trust to me comes from really showing people how your brain works. And the easiest way to show someone how your brain works is through longer form content. So what that is for me is my weekly newsletter and the guides and articles that I produce on my website. So every day what I'm trying to do is move people from Twitter and LinkedIn onto my website. Once I do that, it's pretty simple. Discovery, trust, expertise and authority, and then it's a presentation of an offer. And my offers aren't aggressive, it's not like, hey, you need to buy my course right now. Idle money lies in your current account, picking crumbs out of its belly button wondering, should I eat them? But when you start investing with Monzo, your money's always busy. It turns on regular investments, invests your spare change, and tops up your stocks and shares, Issa. It even helps you make sense of risk and return. Monzo, the bank that gets your money moving. You could get back less than you invest. Monzo current account required UK residents 18 plus T's and C's apply. Urgency, it's just like, if you enjoyed this piece of long form content, if you believe I'm the person that can help you solve the problems that you have in your social media content or your online business, then here are some affordable options that I have right now. That's my funnel. Social media for discovery, longer form newsletter for trust, authority and expertise, and then asking people to buy something. Pretty simple. All right, so Justin, you post a ton of content on social media. How do you come up with so many new ideas for great content? Yeah, I have a bunch of different ways that I think of ideas. Some really common ones for me is I subscribe to a lot of aggregator newsletters. So every morning in my inbox, I get some of the biggest stories. I get some of my favorite creators bringing some of their things into my inbox. I look at a lot of YouTube channels that are relevant to what I do and I look at their most popular videos because if it's a popular video on YouTube, then it's probably going to resonate with my audience. I'm always looking for things that I can put my spin on. You don't want to write the same thing that somebody else in your industry wrote. You want to take popular topics. You want to take things that are challenging to my ideal customer and I want to put my spin on those things. I take ideas from everywhere, podcasts I listen to. When I go on a walk, things pop into my head. So I use my phone to capture things. I'm always trying to be cognizant that ideation is around you at all times. And if you let it slip by without noting it down, I can never remember them. So I just try and keep track of them as they're happening. What's a typical day in the life look like for you? My days are relatively regimented. I wake up 5.30, 6.00, sometimes 6.30. I have a standing date with social media every morning. So my content comes out at the exact same time every single morning, 8.15 Eastern time on both platforms, LinkedIn and Twitter. And I make it a point to engage with my audience almost every single morning for at least 45 minutes to an hour. Once I'm done with that, my wife and I, we got to go to the gym. And so we drive about 20 minutes down to the nearest town called Stone Ridge and we go to a gym there. So we might spend 9.30 to 11 at the gym and driving. And then we eat lunch around 11.30, 12. And I don't really start doing creative work till normally around noon or 1 PM each day. And I'll try and do a really intense three or four hours. In a typical day for that might be Monday, I'll spend that time writing my newsletter. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I'll spend that time creating content. And Friday, I'll work towards more strategic projects. So building a new product, standing up a new service, working to meet interesting and unique people like you or like other folks who I admire on Twitter and LinkedIn. That's usually how I spend my Fridays, but that's a pretty typical and average week. It's really impressed me how fat you've built this business. How do you level up and how have you been able to grow so quickly? Back in 2018, when I first started giving this a swing, Russell Brunson was really popular. So I bought a lot of his books and that kind of gave me the fundamentals of the foundation for understanding why people change, why people buy things, how to tell stories. The way that I have leveled up is I'm a hypothesis driven creator. Same thing I was when I was a sales leader in my previous career, which meant making a hypothesis, testing it, seeing if it worked, if it did, doing it twice as much or three times as much or five times as much, and if it didn't, completely eliminating it. So what I always encourage people to do is try a bunch of stuff, try things, throw everything you can against the wall. That's the easiest path to getting better at this very specific business. What advice would you have for someone that wants to do something similar or wants to get started building a brand online and selling products? The first thing I would do is really think kind of deep and hard about what it is that you love doing that you're also very competent at. So figure out what that thing is, talk to your friends, talk to your family, and go start talking about it online. The number one piece of advice I have for people is start. Everyone wants to learn everything. Everyone wants to read every book or listen to every podcast or do whatever. Starting will teach you 100 times more than reading my story or listening to what I have to say because your journey and everyone else's journey is going to be very different than mine. All advice is contextual, mine included. Start, learn, try. Yeah, that's great. Thank you.
