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Why the only way to 2-3X your salary is to do less (and how to know what to stop doing)

increase your revenue by reverse-engineering success

Author

Ole Lehmann
December 13, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

Read time: 6 minutes | Sponsor this newsletter

Greet from the deep,

The one thing that separates solopreneuers making $5,000 a month from solopreneurs making $20,000+ a month:

Metric tracking.

You can get to $10,000 / month just by doing more, but you get to $20k, $30k, and $40k by doing less and streamlining your business.

Why?

Because if your only way to increase revenue is by doing more, you quickly hit an income ceiling - after all, time is the solopreneurs’ most limited resource.

In this edition, you’ll learn:

  • Why the only way to 2-3X your salary is to do less (and how to know what to stop doing)

  • How to transform from a freelancer into a one-person business overnight (and stop feeling out of control of your revenue)

  • How to increase your revenue by reverse-engineering your business growth into key metrics with the Revenue Rizzer prompt

I'm excited for you to instantly get clarity on which metrics you should focus your limited time and attention on.

Let's dive in!

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Why the only way to 2-3X your salary is to do less (and how to know what to stop doing)

When you're starting out as a solopreneur, you only focus on making money.

You don't really think about the hygiene of your business:

  • Keeping track of your revenue

  • Running the profit numbers through your head

  • How much money you’re APING into shitcoins without noticing

You get to $10,000 a month by doing more, but not past that.

Because time limits you.

Instead, you increase your income by replacing your lowest-income customers with your highest-income customers.

It’s pretty simple - but only if you have an overview of how much you’re making per hour for each client.

The problem is:

You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

If you don't measure something, there's no way to tell if that metric is:

  • Improving

  • Worsening

  • Plateauing

To 2-3X your income, you need to focus on efficiency and stop doing tasks that don't contribute.

Here’s how to do it:

How to transform from a freelancer into a one-person business overnight (and stop feeling out of control of your revenue)

I used to steer my solopreneur business like a drunken sailor steering his sailing boat in a hurricane:

Constantly afraid of the uncertainty around me, but still somehow making it.

But then I learned how to take control of my revenue.

The biggest mistake I used to make it treating revenue as a standalone metric that is separate from everything else.

In reality, you can always break down your businesses’ revenue into leading metrics.

Leading metric = a metric that predicts future trends

For example, a leading metric for my solopreneur business is my amount of newsletter readers. If more people read my newsletter, there’s a high likelihood more people will buy my product and increase my revenue.

To take back control of your business, you need to identify which leading metrics lead to your main goals.

I’ll show you how to do that with ChatGPT in a second…

…but first, let’s take my business as an example, and reverse-engineer my target metric into actionable metrics I can work on at a daily basis.

My target metric: Increasing revenue

What’s my main source of revenue? Digital product sales

Where do most of my digital product sales come from? My newsletter readers.

Where do most of my newsletter readers come from? My social media impressions

After doing this exercise, I can see that my revenue is the result of this process:

In other words, if I can just increase any of the following:

  • Social media impressions

  • Conversion rate from social media to newsletter

  • Newsletter readers

  • Conversion rate from newsletter to product sales

…my revenue will increase.

By mapping out the metrics that affect my revenue, I suddenly feel in charge of the outcome.

Once you have an overview like this, building your business becomes just a numbers game - you look for the lowest conversion point and then improve it.

Here’s how to reverse-engineer your revenue into metrics with ChatGPT:

How to increase your revenue by reverse-engineering your business growth into key metrics with the Revenue Rizzer prompt

This prompt helps you increase your revenue by identifying your leading metrics:

I want you to act as "Revenue Rizzer", a revenue advisor and business analysis expert. Your mission is to help me gain more control over my revenue growth by identifying the key leading metrics that drive it through reverse-engineering.

For context, [INSERT CONTEXT ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS]

The metric I want to optimize for is revenue.

Currently, most of my revenue comes from [PRODUCT]

Most of my product sales come from [TRAFFIC SOURCE]

Most of my new customers/followers come from [FOLLOWER SOURCE]

Now, do the following:

1) Trace Revenue Source to Leading Metrics

Based on the business I laid out for you, trace my revenue stream back until you find the 3-4 underlying metrics that drive this main revenue source. Those are the "leading metrics."

2) Brainstorm low-hanging ways to optimize my Leading Metrics
For each leading metric, brainstorm 5 simple ideas for improving them that take me less than 1 hour to implement but that have a lasting effect. When doing this, also consider the conversion rate between the leading metrics. Focus on optimizing each leading metric, especially the one with the lowest conversion rate, can systematically increase revenue. Improving leading metrics turns revenue growth into a numbers game.

For example, if the main revenue is product sales from newsletter subscribers, the leading metrics would be:

Social media impressions
Newsletter subscription rate
Newsletter subscribers
Product purchase rate

Increasing any of those metrics would likely increase overall revenue.
HOW TO USE THE REVENUE RIZZER PROMPT:

  1. Fill in the [INSERT CONTEXT ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS] placeholder with context about yourself and who you are. (If you’ve done the AI Audience Accelerator, write /context to use your pre-written context)

    Example: (what I used)

    I am a solopreneur and I write a publication called "The AI Solopreneur". I post content on Twitter, have a community full of AI-driven solopreneurs, and publish a newsletter twice a week. All my content is made specifically about how Solopreneurs can use AI to streamline their business, work faster, and make more money. Most commonly, I talk about different ways to use ChatGPT, but I also introduce solopreneurs to other helpful AI tools and workflows in them. The goal of my content is to attract as many AI-interested solopreneurs (or aspiring solopreneurs) as possible. I want to be the world's best resource for them. I don't know how to code, but I'm fairly skilled at marketing, writing, and investing. In my past, I was a music ghost producer, cryptocurrency investor, and I also took many educational resources to learn about skills related to solopreneurship. I am a big proponent of psychedelics and have positive experiences with them. I don't take myself too seriously.

  2. Fill in the [PRODUCT] placeholder with your main product or service is that generates most of your revenue.

    For example:

    "My digital AI Audience Accelerator course"

  3. Fill in the [TRAFFIC SOURCE] placeholder with where most of your current customers are coming from

  4. Example:

    "Most of my product sales come from my email list of 2,500 subscribers."

  5. Fill in the [FOLLOWER SOURCE] placeholder with where most of your current followers are coming from (that lead to the product sales)

    Example:

    "Most of subscribers come from cross promotions with other newsletters"

Here’s an example of it’s output:

Shit, I actually should start measuring the social-to-newsletter conversion rate. That’s a good one.

WRAP UP

WHAT YOU LEARNED TODAY

  • Why the only way to 2-3X your salary is to do less (and how to know what to stop doing)

  • How to transform from a freelancer into a one-person business overnight (and stop feeling out of control of your revenue)

  • How to increase your revenue by reverse-engineering your business growth into key metrics with the Revenue Rizzer prompt

As a tradition, this Nnewsletter ends with a random food pic.

Today’s art piece:

Me before I fell into a bavarian food coma (2023, coloured)

My days of sauna, ice bath and weisswurst are coming to an end.

I’ll stay here for another 5 days before I leave for Berlin.

Keep diving,

Ole

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P.S.

I made over $260,000 in 112 days selling my online course. I’m now creating a course on how to use AI to build and sell a digital product in record time (without being an expert or paying 10k to consultants)

Don’t have an audience yet to sell to?

No problem, my last course will help you create 1 week’s worth of content

in 1 hour using AI and grow your audience.