Revealing what I earned in the last 12 months 💸

okay friends it's income report time I've been writing an income report for six years now sharing the different revenue streams that make up my business as well as the growth that I've had in my career as a designer I love making these and showing you which revenue streams have grown which have shrunk what categories my income falls into I will absolutely be sharing real numbers in this video and I want you to know that I'm doing this not to brag or to make you feel like you should be owning this too we are all in our own paths and I'm just showing you what's been possible for me on my career Journey this is not going to be a tutorial on how you could earn this too we're just going to look at some numbers together and nerd out over them so let's get into it foreign

foreign into four different categories design income content income products and services and memberships so let's walk through them and we'll start with the smallest one which is membership income so this is a category that has been

shrinking for several years and I'm kind of okay with that because I'm not really focusing my business on like a community membership style of Revenue this income stream dropped 72 percent and only earned me 462 pounds total and that was made up of income from the design life patreon which is something that we have for listeners to be able to support our show and help us pay for our editing costs our like hosting fees my share of that was 213 pounds and every pound of that definitely went back into like paying for our podcast expenses I did quite a few co-working Club live streams in the second half of 2022 and so that led to a bunch of people becoming members for a few months so YouTube channel membership earned me 179 pounds I've not really streamed a lot so far in 2023 just given the nature of my work and the projects I've been working on and so yeah I don't think this is an income category that is going to grow much past this in the coming years side note by the way because I didn't explain this at the top my reporting happens on my like Financial year so it doesn't align to the calendar year but it's okay it's a four years worth of data we'll just go with it oh yeah that's right this category also includes twitch subscriptions which I haven't done for quite a while but I received a 70 pound payout from twitch due to reaching like the threshold of Subs on Twitch so that is also included in this very small

income category the next category is probably the one I'm most excited about and that is products and services this is the one that I wanted to actively focus on growing it looks like overall the category grew 15. 6 percent so that's not huge growth but I'm still really happy with how that turned out the largest stream within this category is my mentoring sessions which is something that I started a little over a year ago this is where designers can book a call with me we'll spend like 30 minutes together workshopping a problem I can give them some advice give them some things that I would recommend they work on next to help achieve their goals I love doing mentoring sessions I only open up six spaces a month because I gotta like save my energy for a lot of the mentoring that I do as part of my day job as well but I've been really pleased with the rate at which those sessions that I make available have been booked out and the feedback that I've been getting from them as well as the number of people who like book multiple sessions so overall I earned 2 111 pounds through sales of my font grayscale were down a little this year down by 13 but I still earned 633 pounds from it and this was something that felt like passive income even though I know that I put a lot of work into making the font and making it like a good quality product but that work happened several years ago so it was really cool to be able to make these sales without doing a ton of promotion and without spending a lot of time on sales what I did spend time on in the past year though is my new product scribbles my figma Vector pack I made this as part of the beta for paid community files with the figma team and it was really fun to work on this and like set up a system with all these components to like switch out the direction of the arrows and the colors and the style I intentionally priced it very cheap because I wanted it to be like a no-brainer kind of thing you should add to your resource kit and as such I have only made 236 pounds from scribble so far was it worth it for the amount of time I put in not yet but maybe in the future it'll get there then the last little one percent of this products and services category is sales of design life pins my share of this was 31 pounds and that's just like merch that we had up available in our store that people could buy to support the show so in Tok to all these streams together I earned three thousand and eleven pounds from selling products and services and once again I am setting it as my goal to grow this income stream over the next year as well I really want my business to be much more products and services than it is content which is making up the majority of my like side

income at the moment speaking of which let's get into content because it did make up 94. 6 of my side hustle income the majority of my content income 53. 7 comes from content sponsorships this is where a brand will sponsor either a video podcast social media content sometimes and then my newsletter too this was kind of a new one in the past year at convertkit we've set up a program and as a team member I got to be a part of the beta of that and so there was like ad slots sold in my newsletter and it looks like I ended up earning a little over nine thousand pounds from that like addition to content sponsorship so that was really cool I think newsletters in general are underrated as content sponsor and Brands tend to want to go for like Instagram stories and reels or like YouTube videos because they're like more public facing but actually more people read my newsletter than watch my YouTube videos on a regular basis you just don't really see that happening because it's all happening like privately in someone's inbox if you're not subscribed to my newsletter you should check it out I'm really proud of it it's called the marketing design dispatch but anyway in total having Brands sponsor my content led to 32 936 pounds in revenue and that income stream is up 109 from last year which is massive growth not growth I really intended honestly I tend to just like take on sponsorship opportunities when they come my way there was one that I actively reached out for and that was for webflow to sponsor the season three of inside marketing design so thank you workflow for doing that show was quite expensive to run but yes very happy with this number and I know that sponsorships are something I could probably push on more but it's just not what I would find enjoyable as a way to spend my time so products and services it is another income stream within content that grew a 61 this time was my channel sponsorship this is the wonderful figma who sponsor my channel every month you see the logo on my intro they Link in my description box on my channel Banner as well through this channel sponsorship I earned 20 970 pounds in the last year and that is an increase only because I was more consistent with my content in the year before I had not uploaded some months and so I obviously didn't charge figment in the months where there was no videos going up and there's probably a little bit to do with exchange rates leading to again there too anyway my AdSense income also grew in the past year just by 30 and that earned me five thousand four hundred and thirty pounds affiliate commissions though were down three percent I only earned 1738 pounds through that the makeup of my affiliate income sources changed a lot as well previously it was like a little bit from a bunch of different tools in the past year the majority of it 62 actually came from webflow being a webflow affiliate so people signing up for their webflow account like paying for a site plan on my recommendation my Amazon affiliate income was way down and that's okay I don't really try to make that a big part of my business I'm not so sure that I want to encourage a lot of Amazon purchases but a new addition to my affiliate income is being an affiliate for some fellow creators courses which I think is really fun this only made up 18 of the total affiliate income but it's definitely something that I want to do more of and then lastly in this content category is just uh 243 pounds that I earned from writing this was actually work that I did in the previous year but the invoice got paid this year usually in this category we also see speaking and content hosting as income streams and I didn't do either of those things in the past year and I hope maybe we'll see those income streams come back in the future so content income in total came to 61 317 pounds I know that there's like inflation at play here and everything but I just think it is wild and also very cool that I can earn that amount from like something that I created from scratch you know like nobody asked me to start this YouTube channel this is my thing I make content that I think would be useful and the fact that Brands agree with me and like want to sponsor it to get the word out about their products and that can lead to me earning more than I did for my like last salary that I had when I worked in London was earning in pounds that's it's wild I was so surprised to see this number it's a 56 increase on last year when I already felt like okay this is like Peak content income like I said though I am not focused on earning more in this category I really want products and services to make up more on my business it feels like a little bit unstable or like I've got too many eggs in one basket having like 95 of my side hustle income focused on this content category so yeah I do want to work on maybe not decreasing content but raising up products so that it can be a little bit more even in the future lastly

though we get to the biggest category which is design income I didn't do any freelancing work in the past year and not even any like design Consulting even though that is an income stream I would like to add in so all of the income in this category is made up of the work that I do as creative director at convertkit and in total that came to 173 158 pounds I think if I look at like what I earned last year that is almost the same as my like total income for the previous year so this design income category grew a lot it grew by 31 to be exact there was two reasons for this one I got a promotion in the second half of 2022 I'm doing the same role I'm still creative director I'm just like moved up a level on our management scale and that also meant that I got a raise and then profit sharing which is something that happens twice a year at convertkit where we take the six months of profits from the company and divide a portion of it up amongst the team members we just simply had a more profitable year as a company I guess and so profit sharing was up almost 63 and I earned 20 854 pounds as a profit sharing bonus so

these four categories with the like I think it's 13 different revenue streams within them all together combined earned me 237 948 pounds in the past year this is the first time that I've ever seen a two in front of my like total income number but you do have to keep in mind and I'm saying this because I also have to keep it in mind that is not like profit that I earned I also spent a lot in running my business and I won't break down the expenses in this video but you can go check out the blog post if you want to see more about them totaled up to a little over 30 000 pounds that I spent on running the business there's also of course taxes to pay and like accounting bills and things like that but still the fact that I can say that I had a multiple six figure income over the past year is very cool and I do feel very proud of myself for this growth I have no idea what goal to set for next year especially in this economic climate where like I don't know things are all over the place I'm just like grateful to have had a good year and if it's down the year after that's okay we'll deal I'm also very proud of the fact that my side hustle's made up the largest chunk of My overall income that they ever have made up 27 in the past year and that is something that I definitely want to keep pushing further through products and services like I talked about I hope you enjoy going through this report with me remember you can check out the written version and see all the graphs and things in detail as well as like more information about my expenses in the report on my blog and if you are newer to my channel and you're wondering how I ended up here with this income you can go watch this video here about my career Journey so far foreign