Justin Welsh left the corporate world after a major wake-up call and built a successful creator business leveraging over one million social media followers and a multi-six-figure email list.
This is how he used Kit to launch his latest course, The Creator MBA, and earn $1.5 million in six days.
It was 2019, and Justin could hardly breathe. His wife called 911. He thought he was dying.
The EMTs came and told him that he’d had a panic attack. And that’s when he realized what was really happening: he was working himself to death.
He quit his job as a Chief Revenue Officer in healthcare to focus on his health.
I wanted to build a life first and then a business that supports that life; I think the easiest way to do that today is by being a creator.
Justin started his own business in August 2019 as a consultant to help early-stage healthcare technology businesses scale. But it soon turned into a business where he helped other creators grow and scale.
All of my DMs went from asking about healthcare tech to asking how I was getting attention on LinkedIn. So I leaned into that and started creating content around what I was doing on LinkedIn.
He created a course about what he was doing to leverage LinkedIn and another on content creation, but soon ran into a problem, especially when it came time to launch his newest course, The Creator MBA.
The challenge: Selling to everyone means selling to no one
Justin built The Creator MBA for creators at various levels: some beginners, some with businesses on the side, and some with full-time businesses.
But he knew if he tried to speak to all those groups at once, nothing he said would resonate with their unique problems and goals.
He was afraid of casting the net too wide and not catching the attention of the right people.
At the same time, he’d hit a wall with his email software. He wanted more personalization and customization regarding automations to help him sell more products.
While Justin is an expert at growing a social media audience, most of his course sales happen off of social media via his email list.
Each email needed to be custom and tailored to the person so that I told the right story. Most email providers don’t have that.
The solution: Switch to Kit
Justin decided to switch to Kit in 2023.
Kit gets complex automations and understands personalization and customization, allowing me to tell the right story to the right person so they’re more likely to buy.
He also switched in hope of joining the Creator Network and using Recommendations to further grow his email list.
Part of the reason I moved was the Kit Creator Network. I saw that as an opportunity to grow my newsletter at a much faster pace than I was growing it previously.
He hoped leveraging Recommendations to grow his list and using automations to sell to that list would help The Creator MBA launch be more successful than his previous course launches.
The strategies: Prioritize your newsletter and ask your audience the right questions
Justin used these core strategies to grow his list and launch The Creator MBA using Kit.
1. Switch to software that supports your goals
Once Justin knew his goal was more customization and personalization to grow his course revenue, he made the move to switch to Kit as soon as possible.
As someone with a list of over 5K, Justin qualified for our free migrations service. But he was nervous at first, especially because he had such a large list.
The people on my email list are the most important people to my business. Giving that to somebody on the Kit team felt scary. But they held my hand. They made sure that the phased approach we chose worked really well. And nobody at Kit dropped the ball.
When it came to his role in the transition, he says most of that work was done upfront.
I think the biggest lift was going through my old platform, making sure I had notated every single automation, and then getting that over to the Kit team.
It was maybe a couple of hours’ work, but after that, the Kit team did most of the lifting.
Once the process was done, creating in Kit was much more seamless for me than creating in my previous platform.
2. Study newsletters you don’t like
One of the things Justin creates in Kit is his popular Saturday Solopreneurs newsletter.
To craft his newsletter strategy, he studied the newsletters he didn’t like.
Most newsletters were dedicated to selling a product and not helping the audience. So my first note to myself was, this isn’t gonna be about selling; this is going to be about helping. And I’m going to hope that if I help enough times, people will come back and buy my product.
He also noticed that most newsletters, at least in his opinion, were too long.
I don’t have 15 minutes to read a newsletter. I want newsletters to be short, compelling, and impactful. So, I make sure each of my newsletters is less than a four-minute read.
He also noticed that after reading some newsletters, he found himself asking, “What now?”
I wanted to make sure that each of my newsletters were actionable.
At the end of each newsletter he shares one thing they could do right now to make their business better.
By doing all of that, the natural outcome was more subscribers, more people talking about it online, more people sharing it with their friends, and more people naming it in their top five newsletters.
3. Share your newsletter on social media to turn more followers into subscribers
When Justin started his newsletter he already had half a million social media followers so when he started an email list it grew to six figures quickly.
It took him years to build that following, and while there are many ways to build a social following, Justin says what worked best for him and his personality was being “regimented” and consistent.
If you wanna read my LinkedIn content, it comes out every single day at 8:15am and 11:15pm, without fail. The people who have been following me for five years know that it’s coming out at that time.
On X/Twitter he posts every day at 8am and 9:36am.
I’m currently on a 1,978-day streak on LinkedIn and an 843-day streak on Twitter.
I very rarely miss. It’s a lot about just showing up.
He turned those social media followers into newsletter subscribers by posting about his newsletter on his socials weekly, especially “teasers.”
I come from a marketing and sales background, so I’m relatively decent at writing teaser copy. Oftentimes I’ll tease out my Saturday newsletter every Friday. Fridays are my biggest subscriber days.
4. Ask your audience questions to inform your course content and sales sequences
When it came time to launch The Creator MBA, Justin used Kit alongside Right Message to survey his audience.
Every time someone subscribes to his newsletter, they are directed to a thank you page that asks them a few questions.
Based on their answers, they are tagged in Kit as either beginners, working on a side project, or full-time creators.
The Creator MBA was built to help everyone in these groups, but Justin knew the problems that brought them to the course would be very different.
People who are at the beginning often have challenges like choosing the right idea or creating their unique value proposition, whereas folks who are scaling up are dealing with things like outsourcing or running paid ads.
He takes everything he learns in the surveys and uses that content to write his course content and sales emails.
It’s about listening.
They think, wow, this guy’s reading my mind. But they told me.
Result: $1.5 million course launch and 91,271 new subscribers
Justin launched The Creator MBA using Kit in January 2024, and the six-day launch made $1.5 million.
He also has a few other courses, a $9 subscription that brings in $23K per month, and two sponsorship slots in each newsletter, which go for $3,500 each, bringing him $7K for every newsletter he sends.
To date his business has earned $7.5 million, and Justin says switching to Kit has been a huge help in growing and scaling his business.
The transition, while scary, was seamless.
And once we brought all of my subscribers over to Kit, deliverability improved. I was also able to see deeper analytics with Kit, and I could fix errors in my emails.
He’s also grateful he joined the Creator Network and set up Recommendations.
My list is growing faster than ever. I just broke down the Creator Network subscribers for my business, and each subscriber who comes through Recommendations is worth $2 to my business.
I get about 5,000 from Recommendations monthly, so the Creator Network alone adds $10,000 of business every month. Recommendations have been one of the easiest ways to grow my business and my subscriber base with relevant subscribers.
Business used to feel like it required Justin to sacrifice what mattered most for work, but he’s most grateful that now he has a business that supports his life instead of drains it.
If you found this case study helpful, please show Justin support by enrolling in The Creator MBA. You can also subscribe to his Saturday Solopreneurs newsletter here or learn more at justinwelsh.me.
