The $9/month membership earning more than $500k/year AND buying Smart Passive Income — Pt. 2 featuring Liz Wilcox

Liz Wilcox (0:00)

I think that you're looking at the math wrong. There's 8 billion people in the planet. How easy would it be to sell 4,000 of them?

Jay Clouse (0:21)

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. This is week two in our two-episode series about the sale of Smart Passive Income. Last week, we heard from Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland about how they sold the company. This week, you'll be hearing the other side of that story from the buyer, the other side of the table. My guest today is Liz Wilcox, the person who bought Smart Passive Income. If you don't know Liz yet, she's built a name for herself selling a $9 per month email marketing membership called EMM. It has been $9 since she launched it in February of 2021 She is somewhere around 4,400 paying members and it does roughly half a million dollars in sales per year.

No high ticket upsell, no next step, just this $9 product. Before we get into the purchase of Smart Passive Income, we spend quite a bit of time talking about Liz's business. Because if you know me, you may know that I have given people the opposite advice of her business model for years. In fact, I've said over and over again that if you're going to charge less than $10 or something, just don't charge for it at all. So I came to this conversation kind of a skeptic and I left it genuinely altered. I completely have a new lens on how I think about these membership offers and it's really interesting. We really get into her numbers and here's why I think this matters right now.

Most of us build for the upper end of the market. Higher ticket requires fewer customers, more revenue per person. It works when it works.

One of the biggest drivers of turn in my own paid membership this year has been that our members are feeling a little bit of a crunch sometimes. Their customers have less money to spend. And when your customers' customers have less money to spend, you have fewer customers. But Liz has built something that just about anyone can afford, an expense that's so low that you don't even really think about it when it hits your credit card statement. And it's one of the most durable businesses that I've looked at in a long time. So in this episode, we get into how the $9 model actually works, the math she ran before she started, the two year runway she gave herself to make it happen, how she's grown it with almost no social media, why AI hasn't touched her business, and the strange way it's actually sending her new members.

Then of course, we get into the purchase of SPI. What needed to be true before she'd buy an 18 year old brand with someone else's face on it, what she licensed from Pat and what she's planning to change. We end this conversation with an exchange that I really wasn't expecting. Toward the end, Liz admits she does not know how her $9 membership and the SPI community fit together. We talk about it live on the mic and neither one of us fully lands the plane. It's the most honest business conversation I've had on the show in a long time. I really love this. I hope you do too. We'll get to that full conversation with Liz right after this.

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SPEAKER_3 (4:17)

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