Sahil Bloom had no experience as a writer, but he built a newsletter that drives upwards of $70,000 in revenue per month — and he pours it all back into growing the newsletter.
Why? Because that newsletter, called Curiosity Chronicle, helped him build a business that scales faster — and drove $10 million in revenue in 2023.
Bloom’s philosophy is this: Instead of just being a creator, he wants to use his experience to understand creators — and then launch businesses to serve their needs. “My view was, ‘What’s a more durable way to earn as a quote-unquote creator?'” he says.
We discussed his approach on the Entrepreneur podcast Problem Solvers, which you can listen to here. Below, I summarize his main lessons — and how anyone in the creator space can start thinking bigger about their business.
Bloom’s three main lessons:
1. The creator business model is too hard
Bloom didn’t set out to be a creator. He spent the first seven years of his career as an investor at a private equity fund.
“I learned a ton, but I didn’t get a lot of energy out of the work,” he says. “And I’m a big believer that you do your best work when you are deriving the most energy from what you’re doing on a daily basis.”
In 2020, the pandemic gave him some time to find that answer. Instead of constantly traveling for work, he was at home — and started posting regularly on Twitter. He noticed that long, informative threads drew significant audiences, so he would spend four to eight hours writing each one.
Soon he gained a following. It got him thinking about the creator marketplace, and what it took to make a living as a writer.
That’s when he saw the problem.
“Most creators monetize in a core set of ways,” he says — either by selling ads, courses, or other products. “The challenge is that you’re constantly having to sell, right? Like, you’re constantly having to create a new piece of content and then sell to your audience. It’s really hard to make a true, long-term career in that.”
He wondered: What’s a more stable, scalable business model for a creator?
That’s when he started to look at his costs.
2. Your needs are other people’s needs.
“I looked at what I was spending money on, on a monthly basis, while trying to grow my platform,” Bloom says. “And it was things like design services, video-editing services, back-end operations for my newsletter. And my perspective was: How can I flip those cost centers into profit centers?“
This is a tried-and-true business approach. Bloom uses Amazon as an example: The company was spending a ton of money on cloud computing services, so decided to get into the cloud computing business — and now its Amazon Web Services division drives more than $80 billion in annual revenue.
Bloom figured he could do the same thing — helping to launch companies that offer design services, video-editing services, back-end newsletter operations, and more.
“Because they’re high-ticket service businesses, they don’t require a whole ton of upfront cash or investment,” he says. “And I don’t have to talk about them on a daily basis, because the lead generation comes in naturally from existing clients and from whenever I’m putting out pieces of content that are created by my company.”
The companies are housed under what he calls SRB Holdings. There is, for example, a newsletter growth agency called Paperboy, a YouTube growth agency called HeyFriends!, a short-form video editing company called Viralcuts, and more.
Bloom isn’t the day-to-day operator of these businesses. With each, he partners with other entrepreneurs to launch them and then supports them as a high-profile client.
This led to what Bloom calls “the really big unlock,” and the way he’s grown so steadily as a creator:
3. You grow more when you sell less.
As Bloom said before, most creators must be in constant sales mode. They’re always introducing new products, trying to upsell their followers, or seeking new advertising deals.
Bloom doesn’t have to do any of that, because his newsletter and social channels aren’t his main revenue drivers — and he doesn’t need his audience to buy anything.
“I can grow my newsletter and my social platforms much faster if I’m not constantly having to sell some new product or course to people,” he says. “I can just focus on creating incredible content that people naturally want to share, and I can make money elsewhere in a way that’s sort of on autopilot.”
For entrepreneurs that want to follow his model, Bloom’s experience offers a useful model: Instead of treating your work as the product, treat it like a laboratory. Examine your pain points, and consider how you could solve them — not just for yourself, but for others.
“If I was encountering any of these needs,” Bloom says, “a lot of other people were too.”
This article is from Entrepreneur.com
