Pulling the Curtain: Everything We Did, Learned, and Regretted in 2024

What Worked, What Didn’t, and What We’re Changing

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As we’re getting closer to the end of the year, I figured it’s time to pull the curtain and give a transparent review of what 2024 looked like for us at Write • Build • Scale.

I’m writing this piece for two reasons:

• I like to lead with transparency, and many of our clients and readers want to better understand the behind-the-scenes of our business so they can build their own by following our best practices. And that’s exactly what we share week after week during our coaching sessions at Write • Build • Scale.

• The second reason is more selfish: Reflecting on your wins, losses, and learnings helps you better navigate the future.

I started my first business in 2018.

Two years later, my partner

Philip Hofmacher

quit his job, and we went all-in to build our own thing.

Back then, our goal was to build a business that’d allow us to travel full-time.

Well, long story short, we quickly realized we don’t like to work while traveling.

So, we changed our goal to build a business that allows us to work less and travel more without worrying about work when we’re on the go. And that worked!

We’ve built an audience of:

• 22,000+ email subscribers on Kit

• 81,000+ followers on Medium

• 34,000+ members in our Facebook groups

• Thousands of clients

• And seven figures in revenue

As a team of two, we've always been flexible and quick to implement changes. And yet, we’ve been consistent in everything we did.

We've been running the same programs for years and have stuck with the same channels to grow and nurture our audience.

Our primary channel has been Medium, and our newsletter is on Kit.

We have a small YouTube channel and run Facebook communities.

Over the last four years, we focused on building, launching, or improving one product per year.

In 2020, we launched the Medium Writing Academy, the most effective and comprehensive course for anyone who wants to grow their audience and income through Medium.

In 2021, we launched the Freedom Business Accelerator, a six-month program to help writers turn their work into a proper digital business.

In 2023, we launched the Write • Build • Scale membership for clients who had been in our limited-time cohorts but wanted to continue to work with us.

We only made one big move at a time, which allowed us to stay focused and minimize our working hours.

Well, at least until 2024.

This year, a lot has happened and changed.

We made a lot of progress, formed new partnerships, built new offers, learned a lot, and naturally made several mistakes during this process.

I'll address the elephant in the room right away: The biggest topic we kept coming back to in 2024 was community.

Let me dive into what this means for us. 👇

A Proper Community Platform Makes All the Difference.

We started the year by moving the Write • Build • Scale membership from a basic Facebook group to Circle in January.

This was a major change: First of all, moving to Circle came with an investment of $1,000/year, which meant our efforts on the platform had to be relevant enough to justify the costs.

Until now, the membership was only open to our existing clients.

With Circle in the game, we’ve been able to onboard and serve more members.

Thanks to this shift from Facebook to Circle, our members can now interact with each other, and we’ve been able to build a truly supportive environment for growth.

Even though we still don't actively promote the membership, we have grown to almost 100 members.

This size allows members to support each other and is still easily manageable for us.

We can still promise to give individual support to each member whenever they need it, which has been a core promise of the community since day #1.

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Our Biggest Live Launch.

After completing the move to Circle for our membership, we started working on our first live launch of the year, which happened in mid-April.

We onboarded 70+ new students for the Medium Writing Academy, and looking back, the main drivers of this launch have been community elements. (surprise, surprise)

First of all, we used a brilliant tool called Bonjoro to personally welcome every single buyer inside the cohort.

Here's what this looks like: When someone purchases the course, I get a push notification via Bonjoro, which pops up as a “task” in my dashboard.

This allows me to directly message this person and send them a personalized video message, which I did for every single customer.

I usually wait 12-24 hours after the purchase to send the video to be sure they checked their confirmation emails and followed all necessary steps to join the student community.

If they haven’t joined yet, I kindly remind them to check their confirmation emails and ensure they activate their community access.

If they did join the community, I reminded them to introduce themselves so they take the first step towards being active participants.

At this point, we had used Circle for three months, and since we already loved it, we decided to run this live cohort on Circle instead of a Facebook community as well.

This was a major upgrade to the quality of our program.

Truth be told, it's been harder to get people to use the platform since many of our buyers hadn't used Circle before. Facebook is more familiar to most people, but those who stuck around have been able to get a lot more value out of the interactions and live coaching sessions.

The last major community element that helped make this launch a success were our affiliate partners.

Over the years, we’ve worked with many affiliate partners and learned that the Pareto Principle applies: Less than 20% of our partners drive more than 80% of sales.

In this launch, five of our partners generated 25% of our total sales, proving the value of having reliable, engaged affiliates.

The key takeaway? Properly onboard your partners. Give them all the information they need upfront, including swipe files that make promoting your offer simple.

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Our Biggest Partnership of the Year.

After launching the Medium Writing Academy, we began working closely with

Jari Roomer

, a business partner we’ve known since 2019.

Over the years, we’ve done smaller collaborations, but this year, we realized we share the same goal: Helping writers turn their words into successful digital businesses.

Since we’ve always worked well together, we thought, why not combine our strengths

Why not build a platform to help writers improve their craft, stand out online, and create profitable offers they can sell independently to earn more and gain freedom?

As with any partnership, the start was challenging.

We had to figure out how to collaborate, define the scope, split earnings, and ensure we’d make more together than we could individually.

We began with many ideas and wasted quite a lot of time to find out what exactly we wanted to do together.

We started by building three low-cost offers throughout the year:

#1. We created the Write • Build • Scale Database, which has proven to be a great order bump on various offers.

An order bump is a cheap additional product that your customers can add to their carts when they are already on the checkout page of a larger offer.

Since the price point is usually quite low, many buyers impulsively add the Database to their carts:

Next, we launched the Superwriter Workshop, which helps writers build the mindset, routines, and systems they need to write and publish consistently.

This was another small launch that only took a couple of emails but didn't generate much revenue simply because the price point was too low.

It is, however, an amazing addition to our product portfolio since it's another order bump that we can offer on various products:

Lastly, we built an Online Writing Challenge, which kept us busy for a long time.

This 7-day challenge included daily videos, an editable workbook, and a private community.

We delayed the launch of this offer for months because we got caught up in other projects, such as starting our Substack. By the time it went live, our excitement for the offer had already faded.

And guess what? If you’re not excited about a product by launch day, it’s hard to do your best to make it a success,

Even though the Challenge received great feedback, we spent so much time on it that it felt like a wasted effort. We haven’t even added it to our evergreen funnels yet, which was the original plan.

Looking back at all three products—the Database, the Superwriter Workshop, and the Online Writing Challenge—we’ve realized that low-cost offers were a nice experiment but didn’t deliver the ROI we’d hoped for.

Sure, they’re nice to have. And the launch of a new product is always sexy and exciting.

But they haven’t really moved the needle in terms of growing our customer base or revenue.

Many of our sales on these products were past clients who would’ve probably invested in more expensive offers as well.

Even though we built three offers in a short period and have a large audience, we made a low 5-figure income through all of them combined.

That’s nice pocket money, but it's nowhere close to what we could have made by selling a few more digital copies of the Medium Writing Academy, which is priced at $697.

Long story short, small products lead to small income.

If you want to make a significant amount of money through $50 products, you have to sell a lot of them. And even with 20,000+ email subscribers, this hasn’t been easy for us.

In 2025, we won't invest more time into those smaller, lower-priced offers anymore.

We’ll keep offering the ones we created because they are incredibly valuable and well-crafted, but we won’t create new ones.

Instead, we’ll focus on building higher-priced products because it's way easier to build leverage and significantly increase your income when you make several hundred or even thousand dollars per sale.

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Looking back, we can split our collaboration with Jari into two periods: Pre-Substack and post-Substack.

Before building the Write • Build • Scale Substack publication, we’ve been busy trying to figure out a commission model to build a mutually beneficial collaboration-

In this case, Jari was basically operating like a committed affiliate partner.

But once we discovered the opportunity to build Substack as a new channel, we realized we could simplify our collaboration and build new income streams, which was much more promising and attractive to all of us.

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From Zero to Substack Bestsellers

The most exciting part of 2024 started in July when we decided to join Substack.

We published a deep dive on how we have gone from zero to becoming Substack Bestsellers in record time, but if I had to summarize it, the key element that drove our growth was community.

The truth about building a content business and an audience is that the beginning is the hardest.

Once you’ve built momentum on one platform, you can take it with you anywhere you go.

You basically only start at point zero once.

Everything you do later on builds on what you’ve done before.

My point zero was in 2018 when I published my very first piece on Medium.

Everything I did afterward was built on the momentum that I had created earlier.

Even if I join a new platform, I’m never starting at zero again because I have my past experiences, knowledge, and credibility.

That's what helped us leverage Substack as a new channel in record time.

Even though we’ve been new to the platform, we haven’t been new to the community or the content game.

By the time we joined, we’d known dozens of writers who’d already been thriving on Substack.

I’ve hosted dozens of interviews with digital writers over the past years. Many of them had joined Substack before us and were kind enough to support our content and publication in the early days.

As we realized the importance of collaboration and connection on Substack, we launched the Substack Mastermind Community - a private space full of ambitious writers.

We have a dedicated community space (also on Circle) and meet for weekly Mastermind Meetings to help brainstorm solutions for each other’s challenges.

This has been a major driver for our growth because we've been able to learn and iterate quickly.

Another key driver for our growth on Substack has been recommendations, again driven by the core idea of community. The more people recommend your publication, the faster you will grow.

From July to August, we focused on better understanding the platform and building our community.

In September, we started to systematize our approach to Substack.

We launched a boot camp called Substack September to share what we have learned over the first two months on the platform.

This was a great opportunity to promote our paid tiers for the first time since the boot camp was exclusively for our paid subscribers.

For the next four weeks, we met with our community for a number of live trainings like:

• 🚀 Everything YOU wanted to know about getting started and growing on Substack

• 💰 This is how you get PAID on Substack

• 📈 How to Grow Your Substack Audience through Notes

• 🧡 How to Build a Writing Business You Love

• 🛠️ Prepared for Success: How to Leverage Smart Tools to Grow on Substack

• 💬 How to Promote Your Paid Substack Tiers and Leverage Social Media as an Author

This month alone has helped us build a stellar archive on Substack since our publication was now full of amazing in-depth video content.

This period helped us take the biggest steps on the platform.

After September, we knew we wanted to continue to invest our time and energy into Substack because we felt confident about the community aspects that are driving growth on the platform.

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TL; DR Building a Thriving Creator Community for 2025 and Beyond

I know this is a long post, so if you scrolled here to get the key idea, it's basically the fact that community and simplified systems are everything for creators in 2025 and beyond.

We are heavily investing in community pillars because we see the biggest leverage for ourselves and our clients.

Alongside the Mastermind Community that we have built for Substack writers, we have also been part of Teachable's exclusive Mastermind, where we have met amazing entrepreneurs who helped us improve and optimize specific parts of our own funnels.

There's a beautiful saying that goes:

"If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together."

We genuinely believe that's the way to go for creators as we move into 2025.

Creating content is no longer valuable because AI tools can do the job in seconds. Your humanity sets you apart, and this includes your quirks, flaws, and authenticity.

What matters is that you:

• Have a community of readers who are truly invested in your work.

• Have a community of peers who support you every step of the way.

• Build smart systems that allow you to save time while growing your reach, audience, and income on various platforms.

Collaborating with others, tapping into their audiences, learning from their experiences, and genuinely supporting them are the ultimate growth hacks for building your audience, leverage, and income in 2025.

The key lesson? Connection should be genuine.

It’s not about blindly following profiles or making cold outreach with no real interest in the person behind the screen.

We have always been excited to meet our online partners in “real life,” and funny enough, with collaboration and community being the core theme of our year, we have been able to connect with various clients and partners in person this year.

I’ll be honest: Making money by doing fun stuff on the internet is cool. But having happy clients who are excited to meet you for a cup of coffee is the cherry on top: