How We Built a $1m+ Creator Business

At the end of 2022, Money with Katie officially became a million-dollar business: Our revenue hit $1.1m by December 31. (We really just squeaked over the finish line, but a win is a win.)

While I shared some of the downsides of monetizing your personhood in this earlier episode, following your own curiosity and interests down different rabbit holes and packaging it all up for other people to enjoy is a pretty fun way to build a business, too.

Plus, I think you might be surprised to see how our revenue and expenses break down (hell, I was surprised). 

Moreover, my experience building a business within a business has been interesting since Money with Katie was “acqui-hired” in January 2022 by our parent company, Morning Brew. Prior to that acquisition, I was a solopreneur, and my revenue was roughly $250,000 in Year 2 (an infinite increase from Year 1, when I made $0). 

The acquisition meant that I would join the Brew to run the franchise and have access to part-time resources within a larger, more established media business, and…well, the results speak for themselves.

We don’t gatekeep in Money with Katie Land (if anything, we prefer gate-opening), so without further ado, here’s how the franchise made money last year, plus key takeaways () where applicable:

“Direct to Consumer” Revenue: $663,048

Affiliate revenue, merchandise sales, Wealth Planner sales, and educational products, like our Budget Like a Millionaire and Tax-Smart Investing master classes (though the second didn’t launch until 2023).

Affiliate revenue ($83,801): One of our revenue streams is affiliate links for credit cards that we recommend in our Travel Rewards content, but it’s really our only source of affiliate income. While affiliate revenue is a popular choice for many creators who organically plug products they believe in, it’s not part of Morning Brew’s broader sales strategy, which means it’s a smaller one for Money with Katie, too. 

I think of affiliate revenue like a double-edged sword—it can be truly passive, but I think it works best as a “quality over quantity” game. In our world, it was more beneficial to focus explicitly on a small handful (and now only one!) high-value affiliate relationship that was easy to build into content we would’ve been making anyway.

Merchandise sales ($107,318): Think our trademark RETIRED sweatshirt, Rich Girl Summer koozies, and the “Mom, I Am a Rich Man” line. We did a lot of testing and learning around product in 2022, and ultimately decided that while certain kitschy offerings are fun, we mostly want to focus our efforts on functional tools rather than branded merchandise.

Frankly, I was surprised this line of business did this well. Our best merchandise products played off something happening in real time within our community, like the My Qualifications mug, which spawned from a cold DM I received from someone who told me our feminine branding was “off-putting” and that we could reach more people if we’d drop it. The message closed with, “As a straight man, I can assure you my opinion carries weight.” I shared the DM on Instagram Stories and said I wanted to put it on a coffee mug—then we did, and it sold out overnight. On the flip side, merchandise that we developed in a vacuum sat on the shelves.

Wealth Planner sales ($407,750): This is our flagship, core product, and the apple of my eye. In the UX world, we did something called dogfooding (eating your own…dogfood? I don’t know, it’s a metaphor that leaves a lot to be desired), or using your own product in order to help make it better, and man, that’s been true for the Wealth Planner. I’ve been eating my own “dogfood” since Day 1, which means I think of new enhancements almost every month. We try to keep the price point accessible for this product, but also want to avoid making it so cheap that it inadvertently suggests it’s a low-value product. We just kicked off development for the 2024 Wealth Planner, which will launch in November, because it typically takes 5–6 months to get it right.

The Wealth Planner is by far our biggest single source of revenue, and it’s also the line of business that makes me proudest, because I know how impactful it can be in someone’s financial life. The pricing of a digital tool is always the tough part, and we’ve increased the price incrementally over the years, as we’ve had to invest more money in development and as we’ve made the functionalities more robust. Having a staple product that you know will work for most everyone in your community (because it directly addresses the reason they’re interested in your work) is nonnegotiable for a creator-led business (Thomas Frank addresses this in this week’s episode, too).

Educational products ($64,179): This is an area we’ve devoted more resources to in 2023, after assessing where we want to be investing more of our time and energy. It hadn’t historically been a major focus for us—probably because we give away the vast majority of the value we provide for free to our audience (made possible by an advertising model). Our courses focused on a deeper dive into budgeting and building a spending plan that actually works, as well as tax-smart investing philosophies that aggregate all the goodness of the tidbits you’d find strewn throughout our blog posts, podcasts, and social media into a coherent curriculum.

I struggle with courses, mostly because of the price point. It’s an area where I know we need to improve, because we get questions all the time about more advanced offerings. We tried a cohort-based course in early 2022 and ended up not moving forward with it because we didn’t have enough sign-ups to cover our expenses; this was a big surprise for me, as I figured live courses would be preferable to asynchronous learning. Turns out people don’t want to air their financial grievances to strangers—which, fair.

Advertising Revenue: $489,465

Ads sold for the newsletter, podcast, and social media (though our social media sponsorships are all part of our larger podcast sponsorship; we rarely do one-off social media campaigns that aren’t also part of a broader campaign).

It’s difficult to delineate advertising revenue by product because we don’t typically sell things à la carte (instead, a full package for a sponsor might entail coverage on all our properties), but we tend to work with fewer, large sponsors as opposed to a ton of smaller ones.

Total 2022 DTC + Advertising Revenue: ~$1.152m

Adjacent sources of revenue ($30,123)

On the side, I’ll sometimes do corporate speaking engagements or seminars for large groups, but this isn’t something I actively seek out, as running the business described above takes up most of my time. 

Expenses

Ah, yes—the non-fun part of the equation. How much does all of that cost? 

Merchandise ($31,280): When you sell physical product, you first must buy physical product. 

Delivery and production ($39,546): Software, tech products, and other production costs. 

Salaries, wages, healthcare, 401(k) matching, contractors, and payroll taxes ($502,113): The “people” costs side of the equation, and by far the largest line item.

We’ve also expanded in 2023, which means our staffing costs have increased—but in 2022, we were a one-woman show (read: me) until May, when we made our first full-time hire: Henah, my executive producer. (You know her! You love her! She’s…my Rich Girl Roundup costar and the wind beneath my wings.)

There are some other smaller costs—a few thousand dollars for travel, a couple hundred bucks in office supplies, some small licensing fees, etc.—that I’m not including here because they cumulatively don’t add up to more than $10,000 (1% of our budget, based on revenue).

And, of course, three big lessons learned

1️⃣ The importance of hiring well. Our first full-time hire, the aforementioned Henah, came directly from Rich Girl Nation—and her involvement in the business made a world of difference last year when I was drowning on my own. It’s hard to overstate how crucial proactive competence is in the early stages of a business (or how damaging it can be when you’re either understaffed or incorrectly staffed).

2️⃣ The challenges of a creator-forward business model. Sometimes your biggest strength as a creator brand (i.e., the ease of relying on your own personality and opinions) is also your biggest weakness. There are obvious issues with long-term scalability when the brand ethos is so dependent on one person, as well as the fact that—at any moment in time—everyone could decide they think my voice is annoying and my takes are bad and, well, that’s the end of that! We’re actively thinking through how to address the potential vulnerabilities this introduces.

3️⃣ Trying to do too much. It’s so easy to get distracted in an entrepreneurial landscape that’s constantly evolving, and I have to continuously remind myself that we need to focus on our core competencies and what actually matters for our bottom line and larger goals. Aka, not virality on TikTok or rapid “follower” growth on Instagram, but instead producing an incredibly high-quality show every single week and delivering enough value to our newsletter subscribers to make them feel as though the time they spend reading is well spent. I had to reevaluate where I was spending the bulk of my time at the end of 2022, and realized I was falling too often into the trap of petty metrics (How many plays did that Reel get?) and not enough time on the higher ROI activities, like researching and writing.

Looking forward

There’s a saying I like in business (and life, I suppose): “What got you here won’t get you there.” 

The pure relentlessness of my obsession and a truly serendipitous full-time hire helped us scale from $250,000 to $1m in annual revenue, but in order to reach more people with even better products (whether that be the podcast, the Wealth Planner, or something else entirely), we need to make sure we build systems that support us (vs. just brute-forcing our way through the week, every week). 

Part of this entails making sure each person in Money with Katie Land is operating in their zone of genius for the majority of their time spent working. And once we’re confident we can run our existing platform(s) excellently (and like a well-oiled machine!), we’ll be able to explore things like four-day work weeks, new lines of business, and more unique opportunities.