How my $450 Chat with LinkedIn Millionaire Justin Welsh Changed My Perspective
After Justin closed Audience + Income, I'd moved on from Sales Sherpa (lawsuit over the trademark), and rebranded Revenue Climber to Solopreneur, Inc. The new branding impressed him on the call. This quote below was from Justin Welsh, who makes $10M a year in passive income from LinkedIn and Substack. He posted this eternal immutable wisdom on Substack today: “Stop wishing for outcomes that require you to do work you aren’t interested in and improve your life the easy way.” I responded right away with a version of my thoughts below. Let’s see how it goes. I’ve already built companies, have over a million, and enjoy a great lifestyle. But what I wanted was $10M annual passive income stream from doing nothing—the real Golden Promise. He accepted me back in 2021 into his first private invite-only audience + income community. We started on Discord, but he caved to the corporate crowd that likes Slack better. Then he closed the entire thing. Now, he gave up on LinkedIn, focuses less on Twitter (x), and got popular on Substack late to the game. See my email to my partner Dave when I got the acceptance email from Justin, as I'd been on the waiting list. Baited breath folks. This is about royalty, popularity, and big time celebrity acceptance. Dave was open to the conversation. We split up our partnership in early 2023. He wanted passive income only, while I wanted to focus on creating something new for me and other entrepreneurs. The Justin meeting cost me $450. What I learned was to "let people get to know you, rather than market to them." Who will eat the power of those simple but quite expensive words, and waiting 3 months to talk. Between late 2020 to early 2023 the investment in total was modest. I spent $150K to get popular. Jeff Lopes is a Canadian serial entrepreneur with over 26 years of experience, having grown multiple seven- and eight-figure businesses including a boxing equipment brand that sold over 250,000 pairs of gloves and a growing vacation rental portfolio in Northern Ontario. He's an example from Revenue Climber days. That was after Audience + Income closed, and I founded Solopreneur, Inc. with Dave.