Earning $300K+ Per Year Without Social Media | Jessica Lackey's Relationship-First Approach

Jessica Lackey (0:00)

I'll never have a million-dollar launch. I won't cross six, seven figures. That keeps me out of rooms.

Jay Clouse (0:19)

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Today, I'm talking with Jessica Lackey, founder of Deeper Foundations and author of Leaving the Casino, Stop Betting on Tactics and Start Building a Business That Works. Jessica's work is rooted in helping you build strong business foundations that make running your business more profitable and easier over time. Jessica is a long-time member of the lab and she walks that talk. She has 200 paying members in her Deeper Foundations membership with a 2,000-person email list. That means that 10% of her email list is customers and in many cases, repeat customers. And for the last 3 years, Jessica's business has earned over $300,000.

The typical Creator Math is that you grow a big audience and convert 1-3% of them into customers. And yet, Jessica is here converting 10%.

A lot of creators, myself included, get pulled into playing the top-of-funnel audience growth game. Jessica has resisted that siren song and has found ways around it. Almost nothing she sells is one and done. Her business is built on renewals and retention, not growth and virality.

That decision changes your math significantly. If you sell a one-time program, you have to keep refilling the top-of-funnel forever, and that's when discovery platforms can really help. If people stay for four years, 2,000 people on an email list might be enough for you. In this episode, Jessica walks through exactly where those 200 members came from. She explains the webinar she runs over and over again. She tells me why she does a 30-minute welcome call with every new member at $50 per month. And she's honest about the trade-offs this strategy has come with and why she's okay with making them.

By the way, this is the one-year anniversary of the release of Jessica's book, Leaving the Casino, and it's also Jessica's birthday today. So if this conversation has you interested in her book, there's a link in the show notes. It's a nice happy birthday gift to her as well. We'll get that full conversation with Jessica right after this.

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Jay Clouse (4:00)

Maybe to give us a starting point, did you play the social media game? Were you trying that? And how did you come to this place where you're like, you know what, email is what I'm doing, and I'm actually just gonna get really good at the percentage of folks on my email list being clients or customers.

Jessica Lackey (4:15)

So I started my business actually in 2021 as a high-touch services business. So I was a fractional chief operating officer for seven-figure organizations. So I was doing the services as my primary source of income. I tried the viral threads. Actually, that's how I found you was the tweet 100 challenge. So I tried the viral ship 30 for 30 challenge to grow on Twitter.

I tried Instagram. I hired a social media team for roughly two years to help get the word out. I never cracked 1,700 Instagram followers. I'm on LinkedIn as a user, but not as someone who's creating content forward on LinkedIn. I'm more of a, let's hang out with my friends on LinkedIn. So I didn't need an audience to grow my revenue when I started the business, at least for the first few years. So my audience has always been relatively small.