You want a sustainable business, not a high-revenue one

OR, why you should make less money sometimes

Amie and I never worry about growth. In fact, we have no plans to grow. If it does happen, it will be a happy accident. We have low costs, a high profit margin, and good enough topline revenue to make that all worthwhile. We don’t make millions of dollars a year in revenue and don’t plan to. We live a good, comfortable middle class life.

But the internet is seemingly full with 7 figure businesses. They post screenshots of their Stripe or Kajabi sales dashboards and use them to sell you coaching programs. Don’t I want to be more like them?

It’s almost all bullshit.

One of our friends has a wonderful, thoughtful social presence that offers real value to their audience. They also sell courses and do live teaching. It’s a side project at the moment and they don’t want to it take up too much of their time. They keep it sustainable.

But a few months ago, they found that someone had stolen their content and packaged it into a course. Worse, they said, the course had made the thief over 50,000 dollars according to a screenshot they posted.

There’s a lot to be said about how shit it is when someone plagiarises you, but I want to focus on the second part here. That this person supposedly made $50,000 selling a course.

The number is irrelevant to me. I don’t care about it.

Why? It’s their revenue. It gives you no clue what their costs are.

And there are often a lot of costs.

Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads on Meta.

Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in a paid sales team.

AI funnels, paid sponsorships, massive giveaways. The list goes on.

For all we know, the thief took nothing away for themselves, and just used their stolen content to make a zombie course so they could boast about it.

When I see someone brag about sales online I want to yell: Show me a photo of your tax return! Show me a profit and loss statement! Don’t show me some bullshit about sales numbers (which could even be doctored or altered).

Why does it matter?

I have no problem with spending money in business or running ads. But if someone isn’t honest about their profits, and then try to sell you a course based on how great their sales numbers are, they’re tricking you.

How much better does it sound to say you made $500,000 than to say you made $5000 in profit?

How much better does it sound to say you have a million dollars in turnover than even $100,000 that you actually take home?

When people use their sales to brag, it’s usually an empty boast. That matters for consumers, but it also matters for other entrepreneurs who then think they’re doing something wrong.

They aren’t.

Smash and grab

I often wonder about the sustainability of these businesses. They have to extract so much money from people, and often charge very high prices for their items. It’s a smash and grab. That means they aren’t building relationships and aren’t building loyalty. They’re trying to make as much money as possible in a year then leave.

It’s the classic neo-liberal capitalist model of arriving, extracting, depleting, and leaving.

Even the ones that are profitable are usually gone in a year or two.

How many of these people will you still see doing what they’re doing in 5 years time?

So what should you do?

Maximise relationships and sustainability. The vast majority of our income comes from repeat customers. We want the same people buying our products again and again because they like us, and they find value in what we offer. There’s a respect, a give and take.

We don’t try to fleece them for the maximum possible amount on every product, and they, in turn, stick around.

Keep costs low. You don’t need the fancy ads. You don’t need the $10,000 mastermind. You don’t need to have a fancy A/B testing AI quantum funnel service.

Try stuff, sure.

We have expenses. We pay for Squarespace and Demio. We have an assistant two days per week. We buy Amie’s canvases and paints and some decent mics for our podcast. We pay for editors on the books we self-publish. But we try and focus on the things that will actually help us do good work. Not things that will simply help number go up.

We could put our life savings into ads, break even, and post the sales screenshot as proof you should do our money making course, but we don’t and we won’t.

For me, it’s not worth high revenue if you’re going to be putting everything on a credit card. I don’t want mountains of obligations keeping me up at night, worried about how I’ll pay it all down one day.

That might be normal in a traditional, brick-and-mortar style business, but it’s not why I got into selling stuff online.

Don’t worry about your sales dashboard screenshot. Don’t try to maximise revenue. And don’t worry about that random on the internet’s Stripe dashboard. You can’t know the context behind it.

You should have one goal: make enough profit to sustain yourself. If you can just get there, other stuff had a way of happening as if by magic.

Use what you’ve got

If you’re an artist, you probably have a natural aversion to being gimmicky or “sales-y” anyway. Use that. Try to foster genuine connect. Be sustainable. Worry about money to an extent, but don’t be obsessed with growth. You are here for the long haul, not the smash and grab!

Coda: Of course, you may not have any interest in making money from your art or hobby, and that’s fine too! All the more reason not to worry about the people fudging their sales numbers trying to impress you.