How a “science experiment” turned a paid acquisition test into a $475K profit, solo business.
Welcome to Day 13 of the 30 Days of Growth.
This is a pop-up newsletter put together by the team at Growth In Reverse. We’ve pulled 30 creators together to help give one short, actionable way you can either grow or improve your email list.
You can view past issues here.
How do you know if the people on your email list are actually buyers?
It’s easy to find cheap leads, it’s much harder to find cheap buyers. And if you don’t know the difference, you can build a 10,000-person list and still wonder why nothing sells.
Olly Richards didn’t want that to happen to him. So he treated his first year of list-building like a science experiment.
He spent $19,000, tested a few channels, ran low-priced workshops to separate buyers from lurkers, then cut everything that wasn’t working.
By the end of year one, he had 12,637 engaged subscribers. In year 2, that list became a business on pace for around $475K in profit – with no team.
How Olly Did It
1. He niched down 2 layers. Plenty of people teach “how to build an online business,” but few are actively running one at $10M scale. So Olly niched past “online business” to owners of online education businesses scaling from 6 to 7 figures.
2. He built a lead magnet that signaled seriousness. Instead of a 5-page checklist, he wrote a 118-page Google doc called “Anatomy of a $10 Million Online Education Business.” The doc being 118 pages long also acts as a filter for his target audience.
3. He spent money to speed up learning. Olly put $19,000 into paid newsletter sponsorships, ads, a new YouTube channel, and new social accounts on X and LinkedIn. His thinking was simple: testing 4 channels in 6 months beats testing 1 per year.
4. He ran a $200 workshop as a buyer test. About 6 months in, Olly ran a 5-day live workshop called 7-Figure Marketing Stack. About 150 people purchased it.
5. He got rid of the channels that weren’t working. He tracked every buyer back to the channel that brought them in. Some sources produced cheap leads and zero buyers, others produced buyers consistently. With the data on which channels drove purchases, Olly cut the ones that weren’t driving buyers and doubled down on the winners.
Why It Works
A big email list is only an asset if the people on it actually buy. Olly’s whole framework is built around answering that question as early as possible, so he’s never making bets on subscribers who’ll never convert.
The 118-page lead magnet does 2 jobs. It filters for the exact kind of person Olly wanted to attract, and was long enough that if someone got through it, they were clearly interested.
Results
- 12,637 engaged subscribers from $19,000 in spend, which works out to about $1.50 per engaged subscriber
- An insanely valuable lead magnet that doubles as a brand-building asset he still gives away today
- Year 2 turned the list into a one-person business on pace for around $475k in profit, with no team.
How You Can Implement It
Step 1: Niche down 2 layers. Pick an audience you can describe in 1 sentence, narrower than the obvious category. (Not “online business owners” but instead “online education businesses scaling from 6 to 7 figures.”)
Step 2: Build a lead magnet that signals seriousness. Give away something that feels like it belongs in a paid course instead of a throw-away PDF.
Step 3: Pick 3 or 4 acquisition channels to test. You can spend money or time – and either works as long as you commit to running experiments.
Step 4: Run a low-priced offer in the first 90 days. Something under $200 that delivers real value (like Olly’s 7-Figure Marketing Stack). You’re trying to find buyers in your email list.
Step 5: Track every buyer back to their original source. You need to see which channels bring buyers and which bring lurkers.
Step 6: Cut what’s not working and double down on what is. Drop channels that produce leads without purchases, even if they feel productive.
Tools
- Carrd, Kit, or Beehiiv for the landing page and list capture
- A simple spreadsheet to map every buyer back to their source
- Zoom combined with any checkout tool to run a low-priced workshop
This works at any budget. Olly used $19,000 to compress learning, but he says time works just as well. The real move is running the buyer test early so you know within 6 months which subscribers actually pay.
See you tomorrow,
Chenell
P.S. Olly’s free 118-page Anatomy of a $10 Million Online Education Business is still up at ollyrichards.co. If you run a course, community, or info product, it’s a great example of Insanely Valuable Content done right.
