Justin Welsh: Turning Knowledge Into a $5 Million Business

Learn how solopreneur Justin Welsh scaled his knowledge and expertise to build a $5M online business helping over 30,000 creators launch their businesses.

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Justin Welsh: Turning Knowledge Into a $5 Million Business
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Justin Welsh has truly mastered the art of turning ideas into income. A prior startup executive, Justin has played a pivotal role in rocketing two startups to billion-dollar valuations, carving out a legacy in managing robust teams, and raising 300+ million dollars in venture capital. His entrepreneurial journey, however, didn't stop there — it took a turn toward an exciting solo venture. Armed with his vast experiences and drive to make a unique impact, Justin embarked on a mission to build a one-person knowledge business that has generated a profit of more than $3 million and helped over 25,000 people start their own businesses. Some quick stats:

  • Earned over $5 million in revenue
  • Helped more than 30,000 people achieve their entrepreneurial goals
  • Turned a single upsell into a $22K MRR product

Justin's mission reaches far beyond his own success. His true goal, in his own words, is to “empower 100,000 people to leave their corporate jobs and build an online business that lets them spend more time doing what they want, when they want, with whom they want."

"I help people take the skills that they have, identify those, and turn them into income," Justin shares. As part of our vibrant creator community, Justin's story serves as proof and inspiration that taking that big leap of faith, combined with Kajabi's robust resources, can be the prelude to unmatched success.

Justin currently offers two courses. In Content OS, he provides a 9-step system you can use to create one high-quality newsletter and 6–12 pieces of social content every single week. With LinkedIn OS, Justin leverages knowledge gleaned from his own LinkedIn success to help others create, grow, and monetize their own personal brand on the platform.

The Challenge: Speaking the Language of Your Customers

Justin understands something fundamental about building successful online businesses — you need to get into the hearts and minds of your audience. His biggest challenge? Unveiling the deepest fears, aspirations, and desires of his audience, and aligning his offerings to address those precise needs.

"Where are you in your journey? What are your two or three biggest challenges? What are you afraid of?... These questions are crucial," according to Justin, as the answers to these questions form the building blocks of a successful online offer. However, he realized querying every single potential customer wasn’t an efficient way to gather this data. At the same time, jumping straight into creating an offer before extracting this crucial information was risky, often leading to products that miss the mark.

"Many creators mess up this step by talking to their audience and going ahead and building an offer right away," Justin observes. So instead of choosing this common, often futile route, he decided to take a different path and restore the balance.

Cognizant of these challenges, Justin pledged to create a method of truly hearing his audience and using their language to refine his Unique Value Proposition (UVP). His goal? To offer a solution that resonates deeply with potential customers, and not just another course full of generic advice.

Of course, winning the hearts and minds of your potential customers means nothing if you’re not able to deliver your content or run your business effectively.

As Justin's knowledge business started expanding, he envisioned adding more facets to augment user experience and boost customer average revenue. Goals like blogging, setting up newsletters, configuring advanced email automation, and incorporating one-click upsells were on his radar. However, he found himself juggling various tools and solutions, trying to cobble them together. A ballet of integrations with an unpredictable partner, Zapier, proved to be time-consuming and occasionally unreliable.

"There were so many different things that I was trying to cobble together using various solutions, with Zapier...which fails every once in a while. I moved over to Kajabi and had all that stuff under one roof, which was a blessing for my business," says Justin.

The Solution: Streamlining Business Operations with Kajabi

With Kajabi, Justin found all the tools he needed unified under a single platform, simplifying his operations while boosting his efficiency. He ended up replacing seven separate tools that he was previously using and finally finding the capacity to focus on areas indirectly linked, but crucial, to revenue, such as user engagement, customer experience, and retention. Kajabi helped him intertwine the different threads of his business into a seamless pattern, which was in harmony with his vision and the expectations of his audience.

Justin’s transition to Kajabi beautifully illustrates a journey, from seeking a solution to achieving a harmonious blend of business needs with a single, robust platform and reinforces Kajabi's ability to be the magic bullet that entrepreneurial ventures need to streamline their operations, and most importantly, focus on their true passion: creating.

The Results: Unlocking Entrepreneurial Potential

The newfound streamlining of his business operations resulted in far more than just revenue generation, it gifted him the valuable commodity of time. Time he could now invest back into creating and refining his offers, engaging with his audience, and pursuing his ambitious mission.

"When my business started growing, I wanted... a blog, a newsletter, email automation, email triggers, one-click upsells... I moved to Kajabi and had all that stuff under one roof," Justin says.

One of the most visible results of integrating Kajabi into his business was seen in his revenue streams. The one-click upsell, a feature he was excited to incorporate, swiftly transformed into a $22K Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) product, a bonus revelation of the power held within Kajabi's extensive toolkit.

However, the results weren't limited to tangible metrics alone. With Kajabi, Justin experienced a smoother and more seamless operation of his business. His products were now hosted under one roof, free from the risks of technical failures and fragmentation, allowing him to focus solely on growing his business and advancing his mission.

Justin's journey with Kajabi proves that chasms in business can be bridged by the right platform and a dedication to one’s vision. His story stands as a testament to the idea that adversity should be seen not as a setback but an opportunity to innovate, grow, and succeed. With the right tools and mindset, every creator has the power to transform their dreams into reality.

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Looking Ahead: The Entrepreneur's Roadmap to a Bright Future

As the sun rises on Justin's bright future, he continues to use Kajabi as a driving force behind the success of his business, embracing the platform's ever-evolving capabilities to amplify his message, expand his reach, and strengthen the connection with his audience.

A big part of that is the Creator MBA Justin’s launching in January 2024. “Rather than being a short course on how to do one thing in particular, the Creator MBA will be everything I've learned over five years of building internet businesses,” Justin says. “I call it a living breathing course because I expect that over the next decade, as I learn more about building businesses, this is the place where that information gets stored, gets updated. I want it to be the number one repository in the world for internet entrepreneurs who want to get started building something meaningful.”

For fellow creators and visionaries, Justin's inspirational journey provides valuable insights. He outlines several key steps aspiring entrepreneurs can take to start and grow their own online businesses:

  • Identify a skill you already have that you can monetize.
  • Tidy up your online profiles to make sure they’re clean, crisp, and professional — and all about the skill you want to share.
  • Create at least 90 days of educational content around your skill.
  • Set up a website.
  • Network.
  • Talk to your audience and find out what they truly need.
  • Build a lead magnet that leads to a survey where you get even more information about your audience.
  • Use everything you’ve collected to create and refine your offer.
  • Optimize.
“My advice is very simple: realize that it’s not all going to happen tomorrow. You're not going to get it perfect. Business is a game. Business is a formula. It's expertise multiplied by time. The better you get at something and the longer you do it, generally the more successful you are. That's a pretty simplified formula. But you can't start that formula if you don't start,” Justin advises.

Another crucial piece of advice he imparts is to listen to your audience, letting their stories, challenges, and aspirations inform and shape your offerings. By staying true to this principle and leveraging Kajabi's powerhouse features, the seemingly impossible becomes achievable.