Early Exit #24: November Finances

Welcome back to another episode of "how much money did Nick make this month"

Dec 05, 2023

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

Last week: How to take time off as a freelancer

Next week: How I’m planning for 2024

Today’s sponsor: Superhuman

Quick Summary

November was yet another good month! Some highlights:

I finally incorporated a LLC to run all my consulting income through. Not only will this save me a ton on taxes it also means the Early Exit Club is an official business 🎉
- Let me know if you want a future newsletter dedicated to why and how I formed my LLC.
My affiliate income went up despite my website traffic continuing to decrease. How’d that happen? 😏
I started working with a consultant to punch-up my LinkedIn content and there was an immediate impact in my metrics (both impressions and subscriber growth) 📈

But as always it’s not all good news, I’m expecting a decline in revenue next month for the first time ever.

Let’s get into it.

Email Should Be Easy

A messy email inbox is no way to run a growing solopreneur business.

I’ve been a paying subscriber of Superhuman for over three years it’s critical to organizing my email workflow.

Here’s the thing no one tells you about consulting: all the email inboxes you have to juggle.

I have 5 different email accounts all my clients and the standard Gmail UI isn’t built for managing that effectively.

Enter Superhuman: it’s the fastest email experience ever made where you can easily organize your inbox into tabs for each client.

Their optional white-glove onboarding also pairs you with an email expert who will sit down and declutter your inbox, while showing you all the best Superhuman features.

The team at Superhuman is offering Early Exit Club readers one month for free which you can redeem by clicking the link below.

Get A Month Of Free Superhuman

November Revenue Breakdown

a monthly revenue growth rate that would make any VC jealous :)

Website Visitors + Affiliate Income

Website Visitors: 🔴 Down 6% (17.6k → 14k)
Affiliate Income: 🟢 Up 160% ($2k → $5.2k)

Numbers and affiliate income are from my personal website nicklafferty.com

You’d expect fewer website visitors to turn into a smaller amount of affiliate revenue.

This was the case until I added a new affiliate partner last month.

Most, but not all, of my website traffic centers around Notion templates.

I write blog posts about Notion template topics, put affiliate links in them, and earn money.

But I have other highly ranked pages for other topics like software reviews. Some of these reviews have affiliate links, but some of them didn’t.

I recently added a new affiliate partner to an existing page that was getting a ton of traffic.

And it spiked my income.

Affiliate income doesn’t show up like this overnight unless you have the perfect audience that you can get an offer in front of.

And in this case I have the perfect offer for people and I’m finally getting paid for it.

Consulting

🟢 Up 22% ($23.9k → $29.3k)

I advise Seed to Series C b2b SaaS startups on growth marketing strategy and run their demand generation campaigns.

I added two surprise clients in late September and in October I worked a full month for them, which means I billed them on November 1st.

I run billing in arrears (aka I bill my clients after the month is over) so November represents all the work I did the month prior.

I don’t want to spoil next week’s newsletter but I’m hoping to make some changes to my consulting business next year:

Decrease the total amount of clients I have
Increase my prices across the board (to practice what I preach and raise my rates)
Shift some operational clients down to advisory (and thus decrease my hourly commitments with them)

I also haven’t written much about my day to day client work but I have that slotted into my content calendar for next year to talk more about how I balance my client work on a monthly basis and how I juggle both advisory and operational clients (it’s kind of messy).

Expect this sometime in January.

Banner Ads

🔴 Down 13% ($1.1k → $948.74)

Last month I announced that I ripped all of the banner ads off my website.

I’ll continue to get paid out for ads I ran months ago (thanks to unfriendly net 65 payment terms) for another two months.

I’m also noticing an increase in affiliate revenue too, leading me to believe the ads were affecting my affiliate performance (this intuitively makes sense, all those ads were distracting AF).

Long-term I’m hoping my newsletter sponsorship can reclaim the lost revenue here.

Newsletter Sponsorships

🟢 First month! ($0 → $600)

As I approached 1,000 subscribers I started reaching out to brands that I thought would be a good fit for this newsletter.

One of them, Superhuman, agreed to be my first sponsor!

I’ll only accept sponsorships from brands whose product I personally use and love.

👉🏻 Want to sponsor this newsletter and get in front of 1,100+ solopreneurs?

Wait, before you go

There are nearly 200 more of you this month than last month, and I’m truly grateful for every single one of you.

Next year the mission of the Early Exit Club is slightly changing and I’m excited to bring you all along for the ride

No spoilers yet but as this newsletter has grown I’ve found that I need to make some adjustments to make sure I’m providing you with as much value as possible.

I’ll be narrowing my content to focus on a core audience that I can provide tons of value for.

Because I still don’t intend to charge for any of this content. My newsletter will continue to be free.

See you all next week!

Cheers,

Nick