My business results from August

Last night we closed the doors for the Publish30 cohort.

In a little over a month, Kevin and I went from idea to launch.

Our final stats:
- 55 founding members
- $25,060 in gross revenue

And my favorite part?

Members are already winning :)

Let’s freakin goo!!

If you’re new to this newsletter, you may not be familiar with my story - but for the past 5 years, I’ve “apprenticed” under the top online entrepreneurs in the space.

And now I’m implementing the lessons I’ve learned from them.

Here’s how we validated the idea of Publish30:

Step 1: Ask your audience

I started taking LinkedIn seriously back in February. I joined a group chat of 4 other people also taking it seriously - and the accountability helped me get a lot better results.

I had a lot of people ask me if they could join that group, so I thought, “Why not open this up and productize this?”

Key: Validate your idea before you invest in building it.

Step 2: Collect contacts

For the people that were interested in joining, I created an email waiting list they could join to get updates if I ended up launching it.

Key: you want to be able to contact the people who raised their hand saying they were interested.

Step 3: Ask pain points

For everyone that joined the waiting list, I emailed them asking what they’d want to see in a challenge like this.

I then collected all their responses and used it to help build the curriculum.

Step 4: Sell before you build

The biggest lesson I learned working with Noah Kagan was to “sell before you build”.

You don’t want to waste time building something no one wants.

Kevin and I created the landing page and our hard rule was, if we didn’t get at least 20 students to sign up within the first 14 days, we wouldn’t build it and we’d refund people’s money.

Key: we used Claude Code to create this landing page. Basically that means we didn’t have to code at all. Pretty cool!

Step 5: Obsess over customer results

I’ve been a part of a few cohorts myself, and wanted to implement my favorite parts of each.

A few things we did (and are doing) to ensure our customers’ get the best results:

• Tactical curriculum. The self-paced curriculum is no more than 2 hours to watch. Most people don’t finish courses, so we wanted to make sure there was no fluff.

• Weekly live sessions. The majority of the value I’ve gotten out of cohorts are from asking questions to the coaches LIVE. We have 5 scheduled live sessions and I’m hosting a few impromptu ones at different times (for my EU, asia, and aussie friends).

• Subgroups within the group. When you have a friend, the likelihood you stay consistent goes up. We created subgroups of 5-6 and a shared spreadsheet where they could hold each other accountable. We did this for my first group and it was my favorite part (no one wants to get a red box!)

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What could’ve been better:

Kevin and I could’ve done a better job teasing and telling people about the cohort. We had a little under 30 days to promote it, and for most of it, we were out of town.

Kevin is in Asia right now, and I’m writing this email from Greece.

Was it a bit stressful? Admittedly, yes.

But it was also a lot of fun.

We worked out of a shared Google doc and had a loooong checklist to make sure every base was covered.

Anyway, I’m rambling now.

In summary:

-August was fun. I started a YouTube channel, went to a friend’s wedding in Greece, launched pre-orders for my 2nd book, and much much more. I’ll share a more comprehensive life update soon.

-I’m excited for the Publish30 cohort. If you want to join the next one, you can sign up for the waitlist here.

-Hit reply and let me know how your August was! I love hearing from you 🙂 

Rooting for you,
Jay ✊🏻