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This is a new format for my membership business. So, for the first post in this category, there will be a brief introduction dedicated to "business breakdowns."
What are business breakdowns?
Business breakdowns are unfiltered, raw behind-the-scenes metrics and insights, where I share all my data, KPIs, revenue, profit, and loss with you.
I do this not only for the sake of transparency and authenticity. Some buyers of the Anti Guru Lead Gen System said that the update log (aka "The Bet") was the most interesting and valuable thing inside the course. And I personally love the idea of sharing an honest log book with every up and down, every win and every fuck up with my audience.
If in 10 years someone asks me "How did you do it?", I just need them to refer to this category, and they can read and track everything I ever did to build a successful business and/or audience. They essentially have my entire blueprint, my entire digital journey. I mean, how fucking valuable do you think this will be down the road?
However, I have never seen a creator genuinely doing these things. They either share their "track record" with shady screenshots of a Stripe dashboard or just claim they are millionaires without any proof. Or they simply use it to brag instead of genuinely helping their audience.
So, with that in mind, I will publish one business breakdown each month. It will be organized into three sections.
- A summary of what occurred over the past month. How much content was produced, and how much time did it take? What went well? What didn't turn out as planned?
- A data section with all relevant metrics and KPIs. How much did the business grow? How many members signed up? What's the conversion rate from free to paid members? How much revenue am I generating? What were my expenses, and how much profit did I make? I will also track the month-to-month changes and include profits from my agency.
- A strategy section with detailed theory, my beliefs on what will work, and my plans for the next month, along with my goals and milestones I aim to reach.
All clear? Then let's get started with the first edition.
July 2025 summary
The first week of July, I was on vacation. Not much happened in terms of business.
During the second and third week of July, I built the Ghost test project, which gave me the idea to potentially use Ghost as a content hub for my English website. You can re-read my thoughts on Ghost here, in case you missed it:
Stefan Zangerle
In the last week of July, I had the epiphany to go all-in on a membership model for my digital products.
This involved the challenge of moving my entire website and all my courses to Ghost. Fortunately, Ghost has a direct import feature for WordPress for the blog posts. As a result, it was surprisingly easy to transfer the content. Once I had everything imported (which took me no longer than an hour), I reviewed each post, categorized them into free, free for members, and added preview links.
Then I realized the "old" featured images from WordPress weren't ideal for the design of my Ghost theme, so I quickly searched Canva for a YouTube video thumbnail and customized it for my blog post feature image. While doing that, I also came up with different colors to make it easier to understand for users.
It took me about 24 hours of work to migrate and customize everything to Ghost. I was a bit nervous about the online courses because ThriveCart doesn't have a real export option, but since I already hosted my videos outside on Kapwing, I just had to copy each lesson and publish it in Ghost. It took me another two hours to move everything onto the new website.
The last challenging part was setting up the Stripe integration. Ghost has an amazing integration... in theory. However, the way they use Stripe is simply not "good enough" for European business owners. Customers can buy using only their email address; they don't give a shit about VAT or sales tax, and don't care about invoicing requirements (e.g., a customer billing address) at all. I had to customize my Sign-Up and Membership page and adjust some Stripe settings to ensure it complies legally.
July 2025 - Metrics & Data
Now, let's dive into the juicy part of the business breakdowns: all my secret metrics I have never shared before.
