Well, the headline pretty much sums it up. In just 10 hours, I made more money selling a brand new service than in one entire year of trying to build an online business, selling courses, and growing a community.
And yes, I spent literally months to grow it and make it work.
Not to mention the thousands I blew on ads...
Well, fuck me, am I right?
Buckle up, I'ma tell you the whole story...
How it all started
My 2025 plan was to give myself time to experiment, pursue my passions, and follow my curiosities - outside of my agency. And I set myself a budget of about 1.000 EUR/month to grow whatever comes out of this.
On my birthday (that's March 27, for all of you who want to send me a present) I published The Introverted Entrepreneur's Guide to Thrive.
Stefan Zangerle
Ran ads to it and got amazing feedback. Many leads. Lots of love in comments and DMS. I think it was around 1,200 sign-ups if I remember correctly... honestly, feels like a lifetime ago.
I then decided to quickly build a mini online course to monetize the attention.
Wasn't a huge success. I promoted primarily using the guide and ran cold ads directly to the sales page. Barely made a profit.
A couple of weeks later I stopped promoting it. Wasn't worth it. Also I had a huge burnout from my agency and was super pissed off and basically did nothing for an entire month or so.
Newsletter & membership era
Ok, first off, the term "era" is hugely exaggerated. It was like 2 or 3 months.
After taking a vacation, I felt motivation again and wanted to give the whole "build an online business besides your agency" another try.
I realized that my best skill is writing. Most of the success of the guide came from my unconventional writing style. The very one, you're also reading right now. Straight from my mind. Without giving a shit what anybody thinks. My own personal essay to share with the world.
So obviously. a paid newsletter is the way to go, right?
I spent weeks setting up my blog and preparing it for monetization. SO MUCH FUCKING. It was basically my entire summer. Thinking of different categories, call to actions, paywalls, the membership plans, pricing, VAT issues, hosting, GDPR yada, yada, yada.
Then I launched it.
Not gonna lie, I expected 20-30 sign ups in the first week and a monthly recurring revenue of about 1k EUR / month. The same amount I'd spend on ads. So I could grow this forever without making a loss. Until to the point where I make enough monthly recurring revenue to actually make a living off my blog/membership.
Turned out, a whopping 3 people signed up. Like 100 EUR/ months.
If I were a beginner, I would have probably been happy about that. But mind you, I run an agency with multiple 6 figures in profit, so yeah, not a huge impact in my income...
And I still ran the 1k / month in ads. So,actually, I was making a loss of like 900 EUR per month. Also, these ads directly to my blog did absolutely horrible. Worst conversion rates ever.
So at that point, I was spending at least 10 hours per week writing content for my blog. Making a loss of 900 EUR per month. And couldn't get any more people to sign up for my membership.
I originally come from Finance, so pretty huge red flag.
Fast forward a month and I shut it all down again. What huge waste of time... the only thing left from this "era" is this very blog. But with monetization turned off and all posts available for free.
Skool community
But, quitting is for losers, right? So I tried to analyze what all went wrong, and spent two weeks researching. What works? Where's momentum? What are other creators doing differently.
I came to the conclusion: Simplify everything. The offer is the most important thing. Build a Skool community, learn what your audience wants and give it to them.
The start was pretty promising. 100 members in 7 days. Heavy promotion with ads... you remember my 1k/month comittment, right? Learned from the leading community builders on Skool. Spent a lot of money and time to really focus on the one thing now and make it work.
Interacting with the members felt really good. The vibe was great. Everybody excited. I offered an awesome founding member deal, and about 45 people took it. I had weekly calls. Shared what I was building, my plans, my data, my metrics. Everything was looking like an awesome start.
I built the one course, most people told my to build. I used the brand-new "freemium" monetization feature from Skool. The one that every admin on Skool was awaiting so much. The huge gamechanger.
Turned on my ads to the maximum again... aaaand: losses left and right. AGAIN.
At this time I really thought, I was too stupid, to make it work. Some weird setting in my brain, that always lets me do the wrong moves. Totally able to make multiple 6 figures in profit in my agency, but too dumb to not make a loss when trying to sell a course or community.
I heavily discussed this issue with my community members (most of them having also online businesses and communities) and turned out, we all made pretty much the same experience: doesn't matter how idealistic you are, in online business you have to be aggressive.
Lure people in with cheap courses, immediately give them upsells and don't go for a monthly pricing, but rather go for a yearly or lifetime pricing. Also offer high-ticket coaching/consulting/freelancing in addition to your community.
So I changed my pricings, did all the online guru moves I absolutely hate and started my ads again. And the irony in all that... That fucking worked.
For the first time, my ads were actually profitable. Not to immediately scale to the moon, but to make a nice extra income. The Skool community as a total became profitable.
High ticket service > community/passive income
We're now in early December of 2025. Pre-christmas. Super busy time. I decide to pause my ads again and prepare a gameplan for 2026. And start again in January with promotion.
In the meantime, I really was sucked into Skool and was very active in other communities. Especially in the Skool community of my favorite funnel building software in my agency.
I would comment on posts, answer questions, analyze funnels and just "give value" because I'm genuinely interested in funnels and marketing. In this group, DMs are not allowed. So a couple of days in, people start entering my own community from there and send me a DMs like "hey saw your answers and expertise there, could you build a funnel for me". They'd add me on LinkedIn and reach out for help.
I never actually planned on doing this, but since the demand was there, I quickly built a funnel for "funnel building service" where I'd build funnels for other agencies and businesses and offered a free discovery call for my new service.
I linked this funnel in my Skool profile and a couple of days in, I had around two calls each day. People showed up and were interested in buying from me. So I set up a checkout, sent them the link and without me actually ever really selling anything, they bought.
To be honest, I didn't take more than 10 hours to build this all. And the funny thing, I sold a couple of funnels for 1k EUR each.
Now with math being math, and all the fails and losses from my previous online business endeavours, I realized during my Christmas vacation (while doing the taxes and P&L for 2025) that I actually made more money with this, than after one entire year of trying all kinds of online business models.
FUCKING CRAZY.
Months of work, detailed plans, super strategies, upsell strategies, value ladders bla bla bla vs. a couple of hours of building something people actually want and not giving much of a shit about it.
(I do care when it comes to my work of course. At that point I just didn't care to actually make money with this new income stream... I was just about to focus on further growing my community, after all...)
Profit vs. "actual" profit
My Christmas vacation went on. With everybody taking a break, the community's engagement also completely died down. The fact, that I spent so much time trying to make my "passive income" online business work vs. how much easier it was to just sell a high ticket service (very much like my agency also does) really kept me thinking...
Me, being a finance nerd, I also calculated my hourly rate with the two income steams. On the one hand, funnel build, 1k per funnel. About 4 hours of work max. So 250 EUR / hour. No further costs, no ads, sold this just organically.
On the other hand my Skool community, a couple hundred of bucks profit per month, 1 weekly live call, about 10-20 hours per week of creating content, keeping people happy, answering comments and posts, responding to DMs.
Not gonna lie, that was about 2.50 EUR / hour. (Please take a look at that period there. 2.50 EUR... the amount one glass of Coke zero costs in a restaurant ... well, only if you're lucky).
So 250 EUR / hour, a reasonable hourly rate for a business owner vs. 2.50 EUR / hour, where I’d make more money cleaning public bathrooms on a legal minimum wage.
And then I also took another look at my agency...
While I was gone playing online entrepreneur, we had the most profitable year ever. 70% profit margins. Long contracts with big clients. Already closed 100k or so for 2026, before the year even started.
Now I couldn't help myself and also calculated my hourly rate for my agency.
Depending on the month, that was like 500 to 1,500 EUR / hour, as I barely did anything and was basically avoiding and delegating all work to our employees.
Yikes, pretty fucking good, for something I really hated on a couple of months ago. Something I didn't believe in anymore. Something that just wasn't interesting anymore.
The moral of this story
So yeah, guess what I then decided? I'd immediately shut down my "profitable" Skool community. I'd stop all my useless time wasting in seek for "meaning" and building "passive" income and immediately grow my attention back on my agency.
I still take on funnel building projects on the side, if I want to. Cause why the fuck not. A couple of Ks extra per month are always nice, I have the time now anyways without spending most of my weeks trying to unsuccessfully grow a community and/or online business.
Not sure what I'll be doing with this blog in the future. There might be an occasional update. Or not. I might change it back to German and use it for other purposes.
Honestly, I don't know it yet.
Not using a list with a couple thousand of subscribers feels a bit like a waste of potential. But then again... what is the time of writing this blog even worth? Do people even care about my thoughts? Or is this just to organize my own thoughts and public therapy? Not sure....
If you've read this far, send me a thumbs up, or reply to this email and share your thoughts.
If some people do, I might keep the blog for now.
If not, I'll also shut it down or change it to a German content hub for me...
My key learnings for you
Last but not least, some food for thought for you. My personal key learnings from one year of building an online "business" (or more like an online loss center lol):
- Figure out what works, do and do more of what works
- Never offer something for free. Freemium doesn't work. The higher you charge, the easier everything gets.
- The grass is always greener on the other side. I thought an info products/creator business was a golden goose and easy money. Couldn't be further from the truth. For me, it was harder to sell than my agency services (priced 10x - 100x more) ever were.
- Always take action. Through action comes clarity. If I had never devoted the time to experiment, I would have fantasized about an info product business forever, and it would have haunted me.
- Spending the time was absolutely worth it. I don't regret it. Even if I never found success, the experience made me a better entrepreneur. Humbled. Grateful for what I have and what I've built so far with my agency. More focused. With a clear goal in mind. Hungrier than ever.
Thanks, everyone, for being a part of this amazing journey - it was a hell of a ride!
Through this experience, I made connections to strangers who eventually became friends & business partners.
All the best to each and every one of you!
Over (and out?),
- Stefan
PS: I really don't give a shit about grammar, tenses and typos. I just wanted to give a super quick update (like 15 minutes) that turned into an 2,5 hour blog post at 1 am in the morning again. So suck it 🤣
