Creator Science with Jay Clouse

My guest is Liz Wilcox, the creator behind Email Marketing Membership — a $9/month newsletter template subscription she’s kept at the same price for six years, that now generates close to half a million dollars a year.

Liz built the whole thing as a single parent with no support system and no reliable internet, working from library parking lots and Lowe’s lots during nap times. She launched in February 2021, kept the price at $9, maintained a 5% churn rate, and grew to over 4,400 paying members. She and her sister run the operation — no upsells, no masterminds, no group coaching. Just the membership. Then in April 2026, she quietly closed a deal to buy Smart Passive Income — the 18-year-old creator education brand Pat Flynn built from scratch. She spent five months operating as SPI’s director of community before anyone outside the deal knew it had happened.

This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation. Last week, Pat and Matt told the seller’s story. This week, Liz tells the buyer’s.

In this episode, we talk about:

Why the $9 price point has worked for six years — and why she’ll never raise it

How she grew a half-million-dollar membership without social media, using podcasts and a 50% affiliate program

What had to be true before she’d pull the trigger on buying SPI

How she’s thinking about merging EMM with the SPI community — and why she doesn’t have the answer yet

By the end of this episode, you will understand how a $9 offer can compound into a half-million-dollar business — and what it actually looks like when someone buys a legacy brand and tries to honor it.

Liz Wilcox

Email Marketing Membership

Smart Passive Income

Episode 317: Pat Flynn & Matt Gartland — Part 1

Superfans by Pat Flynn

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Introduction

(01:14) The $9 membership

(03:48) The retention rate

(07:54) Low stakes for both sides

(11:06) The four thousand member math

(12:39) AI and the membership

(14:55) Who this model isn’t for

(16:38) Growing without social media

(20:23) Single parent, no backup plan

(31:41) Buying Smart Passive Income

(34:51) What made the deal happen

(43:49) Why she hasn’t cross-promoted yet

(48:34) Merging the two memberships

***

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE

#317: Selling Smart Passive Income (And What We Can Learn From It) — Pt. 1 featuring Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland

***

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This week I’m joined by two longtime friends — Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland.

Pat is the founder of Smart Passive Income, the creator education brand he started in 2008 and ran for 18 years. Matt came on around 2018 — first as an advisor, then as CEO — and spent years making SPI operationally strong enough to stand without Pat at the center. They spun SPI out into a separate entity called SPI Media, pivoted from courses to community with recurring revenue, and quietly prepared the business for a sale they weren’t sure would ever happen. In September 2026, they announced that SPI had sold. The deal had closed five months earlier.

The buyer is Liz Wilcox, an email marketing expert who spent those five months operating publicly as SPI’s “director of community” before anyone knew the deal had closed. The community doubled in size during that window. Part 2 is next week, with Liz.

In this episode, we talk about:

How Pat and Matt deliberately structured SPI over 8 years so it could be sold — including spinning out a new company, removing Pat’s face from the website, and making the community the hero

Why Pat turned down multiple VC and PE offers worth more than the final sale price

The deal mechanics: seller financing, no broker, 160 documents of due diligence, and how it closed in 6 months when deals like this typically fall apart

What creators who operate entirely under their own name are missing when they eventually want to exit

By the end of this episode, you will understand what it actually takes to build a creator business that could outlive you — and what the groundwork for an exit looks like years before anyone is thinking about it.

Smart Passive Income

Liz Wilcox — the buyer (she’s on next week’s episode)

Deep Pocket Monster — Pat’s Pokémon YouTube channel (2.4M subscribers)

Built to Sell by John Warrillow — the book that shaped their thinking on making a business sellable

Superfans by Pat Flynn — his self-published book, part of the deal’s licensing terms

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) The news

(01:44) The first seeds of the idea

(03:10) The VC and PE offers

(05:52) Building for optionality

(13:20) Running two companies at once

(18:11) Why real partnership is the unlock

(21:17) Who to hire first

(38:16) Why the negotiation wasn’t about money

(40:38) What seller financing actually means

(41:24) The due diligence process

(45:26) The transition strategy

(47:37) Part 2 preview: Liz Wilcox next week

***

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE

#122: Pat Flynn and Matt Gartland – Courses, community, and the future of education

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WHEN YOU’RE READY

📬 Creator Science Newsletter

🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)

🧪 Join The Lab (private membership community)

🧞‍♂️ Get a Personalized Offer

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Meet Kallaway, the creator behind the Kallaway Marketing channel and the founder of Sandcastles — an AI research tool that helps creators find and validate viral video topics before they ever hit record.

Kallaway started 4 businesses. All 4 failed for the same reason: no one knew who he was. No audience meant no customers, no leverage, no second chances. So he made it his mission to understand how audience growth actually works.

He cracked short-form content at scale after years of building online businesses, and he built the research system he wished he’d had from the start. Now he has over a billion views, a 50% viral hit rate, and he built a tool to help other creators do the same. This episode is the full system.

In this episode, we talk about:

Content minutes — the framework for mapping how much trust your audience needs before they’ll buy at each price point on your offer ladder

The modern content stack: why short-form and long-form both need to funnel into email, and why that’s the golden goose

The 3 metrics that actually matter for content creators — ranked in order of importance, with views coming in third

A live walkthrough of Sandcastles: channel watchlists, outlier score, deep video analysis, and how to use the MCP to run research through Claude

By the end of this episode, you will have a clear research system for finding validated, high-trust video topics — and a framework for staying creative while using data to de-risk almost everything else.

Book a free discovery call with 1of10 StrategyTry Sandcastles for free

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Intro to Kallaway

(01:03) Introducing “content minutes”

(02:12) The modern content stack

(03:45) Why you want a narrow ICP

(05:40) The 3 metrics that matter

(14:38) Sandcastles demo: building a channel watchlist from scratch

(16:14) Why you study mid-size creators, not mega-famous ones

(22:18) Deep video analysis: hook formula, storytelling structure, contrarian angle

(24:59) Kallaway’s research flow

(30:47) Solving structure and scripting problems using your own channel’s data

(36:34) Data-enabled creativity: the thesis behind the whole system

***

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE

#303: Riley Brown — The AI Content Creator Who Doesn’t Write With AI

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📬 Creator Science Newsletter

🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)

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🧞‍♂️ Get a Personalized Offer

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Caleb Ralston is a strategist and brand builder for some of the biggest names in business. His breakthrough was back in 2018 when he grew GaryVee’s TikTok from 300k to 3.5 million followers in just 3 months. In 2022 he joined Alex and Leila Hormozi’s team as content employee #1, where he grew their audience from 1.2 million to 11.5 million. Caleb just doesn’t miss – and now that he’s out on his own, he’s here to help YOU.

In this episode, you'll learn the content strategy he used, how to improve your content, and where to start if you're feeling overwhelmed.

⁠⁠⁠Full transcript and show notes⁠⁠⁠

Caleb's ⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠ / ⁠Instagram⁠

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) The Secret Man Behind GaryVee and the Hormozi’s
(01:11) How Often Do the Top 1% Post?
(03:31) The Brand Journey Framework
(05:18) Being Intentional With Your Content
(08:51) Is It Possible to NOT Niche Down?
(13:55) Say the Same Things in Different Ways
(18:07) Tracking and Analyzing Data
(22:36) Maintaining Quality While Increasing Quantity
(24:27) What it Actually Takes to Perform like the 1%
(27:21) Where to Start
(30:22) Building a Personalized Team
(34:54) Agency vs Full Time vs Contractor
(41:58) Developing a Content Strategy
(45:15) Width Content vs Depth Content
(46:55) Scaling Trust Using Educational Content
(50:02) Best Call to Action Strategy
(52:10) Email and Web Traffic Strategy
(55:27) How Caleb is Going About Hiring His Own Team
(58:53) The Correct Way to Give Feedback to Your Team
(1:03:17) How to Take Inspiration from Others
(1:04:55) Which Platform Has the Biggest Opportunity
(1:06:57) Audio Content Strategy
(1:08:47) Why You Need to Collaborate with Others

***

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE

→ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠#175: Angus Parker – Ali Abdaal’s right-hand man shares a YouTuber’s guide to hiring.⁠

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📬 ⁠⁠⁠Creator Science Newsletter⁠⁠⁠

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Our first-ever 6-figure launch started with a cold email I didn’t respond to. Twice. The third time, I wrote back. A few months later, we ran a 3-day free virtual summit that drove $101,666 in revenue — with a $78,400 margin. This is the full breakdown of how it happened, what we’d do the same way again, and what we’d change.

Joining me for this behind-the-scenes recap is Anna Reich, the integrator here on the Creator Science team. This was Anna’s first launch — 3 and a half months into the job — and she was right in the middle of all of it. We ran this summit in partnership with a third-party team called After Harvest, who pitched us on the whole concept via cold email and worked on a 15% performance-based fee.

In this episode, we talk about:

The full mechanics: $101,666 in revenue, $23,300 in costs, and the exact offer stack that got us there

What we’d absolutely do the same — the VIP ticket, aggressive email volume, and the live pitch with a day-2 bonus

What we’d do differently — a simpler structure, a new webinar platform, and building the presentations before everything else

The 80/20 version: what a stripped-down, repeatable launch playbook actually looks like

By the end of this episode, you will have a clear-eyed view of how a virtual summit launch actually works from the inside — with all the numbers, the chaos, and the lessons on the table.

Work with Sean and the After Harvest team

Build a Beloved Membership — 50% off the self-paced version

Full transcript and show notes

***

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Introduction: the first-ever 6-figure launch and what this episode covers

(03:44) Registration and attendance numbers: 3,145 registered, 1,000+ live on day 1

(04:34) Revenue breakdown: $63K cohort, $9K upsell, $17K downsell, $11K VIP tickets

(08:29) Cost breakdown: After Harvest’s 15% deal, $1,800 in affiliates, $7,800 domain

(10:01) Timeline: cold email in February to contract in April to summit in June

(13:56) Things we’d do the same: VIP ticket, compelling web work, full offer stack

(16:12) Why the $47 VIP ticket was the biggest surprise of the whole launch

(20:54) The live day-2 pitch — 30 minutes, almost no drop-off, and why the bonus mattered

(24:30) Things we’d do differently: simpler structure, drop WebinarJam, build launch capability in-house

(36:24) The core mistake: building all the assets before locking the presentation content

(42:10) The 80/20 version: what to lock in before you open registration

(52:28) Skipping affiliates for high-ticket offers, and why one-click opt-ins backfired

***

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODE

#144: Bari Baumgardner – How to create the perfect 3-day event (IRL or virtually)#191: Breaking down my $60,723 product launch

***

ASK CREATOR SCIENCE

Submit your question here

***

WHEN YOU’RE READY

📬 Creator Science Newsletter

🚀 Get CreatorHQ (creator operating system)

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🧞‍♂️ Get a Personalized Offer

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CONNECT

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