Early Exit #17: Two Big Announcements

And did I hit my $20k goal yet??

You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business by Nick Lafferty.

In this newsletter

• I’m launching my first digital product

• I’m building a marketplace for solopreneur products

• Did I hit my $20k/month goal yet???

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I missed y’all last week!

For the first time since starting my newsletter I purposely didn’t press publish.

And Substack made me pay for it with this guilt trip of an email.

not that guilt trippy but I wanted to be dramatic

But it’s all worth it because I spent that time finishing the exciting updates you’re about to read.

(psst, the best update is at the end)

Update #1: The Early Exit Club is Changing

But not like how you’re thinking.

Unless maybe you’re thinking “Nick you should start a marketplace for Solopreneur products and feature them on your website and in your newsletter”.

In which case you’d be exactly right.

Let’s rewind the clock a bit.

Communities, so hot right now

My first big goal for the Early Exit Club was to turn it into a true community.

One where you beautiful people could talk to each other to learn and improve grow your business.

But communities are really, really hard. And the honest truth is y’all all want different things.

Some of you are just here for the vibes and I love it.

Some of you have been working for yourself for years.

And some of you are thinking about quitting your job to work for yourself but you’re not quite there yet (I learned this after many of you graciously agreed to meet with me).

So I’m pushing pause on the official community for now in favorable of something more scalable.

So what am I doing instead?

I stumbled upon this tweet from Sahil Bloom that perfectly sums it up.

Ok well maybe not perfectly because some of that investing lingo goes over my head.

My version is this:

• Build a high value consulting practice ✅

• Turn that experience into digital products ❌

• Build a distribution channel to market them ✅

I skipped the middle step, until now.

My first premium product

honestly stoked with how this image turned out

I built a 4-step growth marketing playbook for B2B SaaS companies to grow their business called the Competitive Conquesting Playbook.

It’s built on my 10+ years of experience running marketing at high-growth startups like Loom and from scaling my consulting practice to $XX/month (I don’t want to spoil the surprise at the end 😉).

My consulting business has grown faster than I ever imagined -- so much that I'm having to turn down clients (or refer them elsewhere).

I'm helping companies from Seed to Series C start and scale their growth marketing efforts and it's given me a ton of experience.

It's like a laboratory where I get to test different ideas to see how they work across different industries and company sizes.

And today I'm packaging up one of my best playbooks, one that works across every company size I work with, into a super easy to follow framework.

It’s great for:

• Anyone who wants a copy/paste marketing framework

• Indie hackers who built their own SaaS product

• Marketers who want to expand their skillset

If this piques your interest I’m running a 50% discount code for an undetermined amount of time.

And if you want to help promote my products I’ll give you a 30% cut.

The Early Exit Club Marketplace

Y’all are all seriously so brilliant and talented with tons of experience behind you.

I want to help put a little wind in your sails by:

• Teaching you how to translate your knowledge into digital products

• Helping you sell those products to build a new revenue stream

So that’s what The Early Exit Club will do.

We’ll feature the best products from Solopreneurs on the website and every week I’ll highlight one of them in my newsletter.

But I have one favor to ask.

If you’re building digital products now I’d love to feature them on my website.

Hit the button below and fill out my quick form.

And hit reply if you’re interested in learning how I turned my consulting experience into a product — I want to help you do the same thing!

Update #2: I f*cking did it

I’ll let the image do the talking.

Last month I broke $20k in revenue which was the very ambitious goal I set for myself way back in May.

Why $20k? It’s more than any previous annual salary I made and it honestly just sounds nice.

I quit my job in May with nothing but a dream and a few small consulting clients and look how far I’ve come.

Next week I’m going to send a more detailed finance update because this week I spent all our time on the other announcements.

And I plan to break down how many clients I have now and how much revenue I make from each one.

Because it really doesn’t take that many clients to hit $20k if you price yourself right.

Last chance to check out my shiny new toys:

• My first digital product

• A marketplace for solopreneur products

As always, see you all next week (I now realize I lied to you all two weeks ago when I said that and didn’t deliver, I’m so sorry).

Nick