I Built My Own Printing Press
With a Circulation of More Than 134,000...
Dear Permission to be Powerful reader,
I’m at the end of my rope.
Money has dried up.
The situation is dire.
I don’t know how I’m going to pay for my next tank of gas.
I’m at eye level with the homeless.
I live at a Zen center.
In a single bedroom.
There are mice…
and bed bugs…
I moonlight as a janitor
Cleaning more toilets than I ever care to do again…
A cook…
Scrubbing more pots than you could imagine…
And a groundskeeper…
Doing all sorts of crazy shit under all sorts of conditions
Zen folks are all about their work.
If you’d told me five years ago that I’d give up nearly everything I owned and end up living like a monk while trying to save my business…
I would’ve laughed.
I had a house.
I had a wife.
I had a steady job.
I was a brand new immigrant with a new green card…
Yet here we are.
I have to keep reminding myself that I have 134,000 person army behind me…
I didn’t liquidate my life for nothing.
I bought myself more leverage than I ever had in all 15 years as a freelancer.
There’s nothing like owning the whole damn building.
And frankly…
What else was I going to do if I quit freelancing?
I’ve been writing emails for 15 years…
This is merely the next level…
Going from writer…
To publisher
But, as I said before…
I need money like it’s oxygen…
I’m out of runway.
This is either sink or swim.
There is no more time to rehearse.
No more time to prepare.
Either I start generating meaningful revenue…
…or I’m not much better off than the homeless woman down the hall.
How did things get this bad?
You don’t know the half of it.
The truth is, I built a six figure audience while unemployed, broke, living off my savings.
I locked myself in a room for 18 months…
And I bet my whole life on THIS.
Why?
Long story.
I talk about my old career all over this blog.
But there is some good news.
After months of work…
I finally finished building the machine.
It’s robust…
It’s secure…
And it’s mine.
Outright.
The whole machine runs for about 20 bucks per month.
It’s highly efficient.
One of the key issues I’ve seen in business goes like this:
Your spending is out of control…
Revenue can never keep up…
Profits suffer…
Never-ending boom-and-bust cycles…
I wanted an extremely stable foundation from which to build this publication and media empire.
When you’re always worried about costs you’re stuck in reactivity.
You’re not thinking strategically…
You’re trying to survive…
Not grow…
You make impulsive decisions…
In the same way a surgeon needs a sterile environment to do their work…
Or the scientist needs a controlled environment to do research…
I needed my own platform.
Something that could carry the weight of more than 100,000 people.
For the past several months, I haven’t just been writing.
I’ve been rebuilding my business from the ground up.
Not the website.
Not the logo.
The plumbing.
The invisible machinery that makes an online business possible.
For fifteen years, I made my living as a copywriter.
I wrote millions of words.
I helped companies make millions of dollars.
Yet I barely understood how email actually worked.
That’s because I never had to.
Someone else always handled it.
Then I built my own business.
From scratch.
One blog post at a time….
That’s when I discovered an uncomfortable truth.
Most creators don’t really own their businesses.
They rent...
Their email platform.
Their checkout.
Their distribution.
And whenever a company changes its rules…
Raises its prices…
Or decides it doesn’t like you…
Your business can disappear overnight.
I’ve lived through enough of that.
Today, I own four private email servers.
The software.
The infrastructure.
No giant monthly bill that keeps growing like Godzilla.
No middleman deciding whether I can contact the people who asked to hear from me.
No company holding the keys to my livelihood.
Building it wasn’t glamorous.
It was months of debugging.
Configuration.
Testing.
Breaking things.
Fixing them.
Learning why emails disappear.
Learning why servers get blocked.
Learning how reputation works.
Learning how to protect a business before disaster strikes instead of after.
The funny part?
Almost none of it will ever be visible.
That’s the point.
The best infrastructure is boring.
It quietly does its job while everyone else forgets it exists.
There’s one catch.
Even the best email system in the world can’t go from zero to sending 134,000 emails overnight.
Email providers don’t trust strangers.
Trust has to be earned.
So I’m warming everything up slowly.
A few hundred emails.
Then more.
Then more.
Patiently building a reputation until the entire system is ready.
It’s frustrating.
I want to hit the button today.
I can’t.
Not if I want this thing to last.
Ironically, I think getting kicked off Patreon did me a favor.
At the time, it felt like a disaster.
Now I see it differently.
It exposed a weakness in my business before it became fatal.
It forced me to stop depending on someone else’s platform and start building my own.
I built the list.
Then I built a machine worthy of the list.
Now comes the part I can’t automate.
The writing.
The offers.
The ideas.
The machine can deliver the message.
It can’t make people care.
That’s my job.
Which brings me back to where I started.
Yes, I’m scared…
I’m closer to the edge financially than I’ve ever been.
But hope is not lost.
I’m sane and sober…
And I press on with full conviction…
Because for the first time in a long time…
I’m standing on ground that I own.
The infrastructure is built.
Every part of the machine is working…
It’s more stable than ever…
Now it’s time to find out what this business is really capable of.
Tony V.
Editor-in-Chief
Permission to be Powerful
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