Hey {{first_name | there}},

“Create a membership,” say the people selling a membership course.

“Host a free workshop,” say business influencers with 20k followers.

”Just raise your prices,” says someone who’s never had to fill their pipeline.

All of this conflicting advice is frustrating and just goes to show: there’s no one way to run your business. It’s just the way that works for you.

But figuring out what works for you, without seeing what’s working for everyone else, feels a little like Tim Gunn giving Project Runway contestants $10 and a can of tuna fish and asking them to make a Haute Couture gown in 6 hours.

So I asked Lex Roman, the primary writer, publisher, and community convener behind Revenue Rulebreaker, to share what’s working for them in 2026 (after seven years and several iterations of their business).

You’re in for a treat!

Hopeful

First, RIP Pollen is right. I loved that community and meeting people like you. It was a real loss to the indie service provider world when it went away.

The thing I love most about my current business is that I don’t face a lot of pressure from any one person. When you take big checks, there’s a cost. You’re responsible for something. My first solo consulting gig was a $100k+ contract. As a person with a variety of mental afflictions and anxieties, I find that immensely stressful even when there’s no actual outside pressure from a client.

I do still take higher sums of money from sponsors, but I’m hoping to wean off that eventually and go back to smaller ad buys. I love being a business that serves many (not that many, but certainly many more than my consultancy or my membership did) and largely operates as self-serve.

That said, I’m currently feeling some customer service pain from the recent growth we had, and that’s something I’m mindful of too: how many people can I serve well in this model? My guess is somewhere around 500-750, but I really need 900 to make it viable without sponsorships, so we’ll see if we can get there or if we need to adjust the model.

This business could not have existed without my membership, Growthtrackers.

I really loved building and running that, and the relationships I formed with those members continue to this day. Many of them are involved in my current business as Legends.

This year, I’ve been experimenting with bringing more “Growthtrackers style” events back. We ran an event series in Q1 that was in that style, and we’ll probably do another in the fall. I do enjoy going deeper on people’s businesses and hearing what they’re actually executing, which is harder to do in my current publisher-community model.

I learned I hate working with clients!

And I know that other service providers will say, “You just didn’t know how to work with clients,” but I tried for a decade.

Before I went out on my own, I did business development inside the agencies I worked for. I worked in client services as a designer and growth lead for several years. I freelanced, and then I formalized a growth consultancy that served growth-stage (Series B and C) tech companies.

By the time I went out on my own, I was itching to find another model that wasn’t client services. I was speaking for a bit of money, selling a class that did fairly well, and I was asked by a tech publisher to write a book, which I ultimately declined. But I knew there were other ways to make money, and I desperately wanted to make one of them work.

Revenue Rulebreaker came out of this now 7-year-long journey I’ve been on to find a model that works for me and to create a space for others to experiment with and discuss what works for them.

The most recent example of a failed experiment was our Legendagram invitations in February, where I asked Legends to invite a friend to our mixer anonymously, kind of like candygrams in high school.

It flopped pretty hard because there’s too much spam on the internet, and when I sent the invites, the recipients were like, Who’s this? Must be spam! And [the invitations] mostly went ignored until some Legends just invited their people directly.

I was bummed that so many people couldn’t Google me or the brand or check the guest list for names they recognize, but I misjudged how people use the internet now. Even though I wanted it to work, it didn’t. I know I can’t change people’s behavior, so I just have to let it go.

For small things like that, it’s easy because if people don’t take the invites, it’s kind of a dead end. For bigger things like a story series, it can be harder because sometimes it feels like it’s worth doing something even if people don’t get it.

We’re about to do a small series for Pride month, and I don’t know how it’s going to land, but we’re going to do it anyway.

The Lifetime Legends keep me going! Thank you for this high praise. That means a lot to me.

The vast majority of the Legends come from other parts of my life. They’re past colleagues from my time in tech, I met them through other communities (like you and me inside Pollen), they were clients or members of mine before, or we’ve known each other for years in professional circles. So part of it at least is that, if they’ve hung around me that long, it’s likely that we still have something in common, which means you’re likely to have things in common with each other.

The other thing that has been surprising is that Legends is a confusing and unknown format to a lot of small business owners. People are constantly asking me what it is. I don’t think it’s that hard to understand — it’s the premium tier of a small business publication that comes with loads of networking benefits — but it’s too hard for many to grasp, and the $99/year price point turns them away from even trying it. If you’re a person willing to toss $99 in and just come find out, you’re a risk-taker, a believer, a doer, and a community builder, and you’re gonna make the most of what you just joined.

It’s crazy to me that 356 people are now part of this project. I am grateful for every single one of them.

Because I have so many interests and pivots under my belt, the diversity inside Legends is wild. I find filtering the inbound feedback I get to be one of the hardest parts of this one-to-many, many-to-many model.

We’ve got fertility experts, cake designers, journalists, web designers, conservationists, historians, and podcasters. A Legend just joined us who runs a foraging school in the UK. I always say it’s creative entrepreneurs because that fits most, but that label also flattens how vast the expertise and operating styles are in this group. Everyone needs something different.

I love getting feedback on individual stories. That’s the easiest to parse, and it helps me gauge that a story landed and was useful (or not). What’s hard to synthesize is the wide range of feedback I get on our activities inside the network and our editorial strategy as a whole.

I do need this feedback, but it’s just tough to find patterns in it. Some people want a Slack, other people hate Slack, and even more people like that there’s no live community at all. Some people want more digital product stories, other people feel those don’t apply to them at all. It’s tough to reconcile. Some people like that our mixers have music, others feel it cramps their style.¹ Who is right?! Everyone! No one!

What I’m going to end up doing is formalizing more channels for feedback, like a reader survey I’ll launch in June and our Quarterly Earnings Calls. Otherwise, I’m going to choose some directions and see what the reaction is. I certainly care what the Legends think and want to hear from them, but I also can’t be paralyzed by the millions of ideas we all have for what we should do next.

My hope is that people stay with me even when one particular thing doesn’t resonate with them, knowing that I will come back around and serve them in other ways.

I made a video on this on my YouTube channel, but I couldn’t run any of my previous businesses and live this way. I realized I had an opening to live on the road because of the model of Revenue Rulebreaker, where I was mostly working solo without any mandatory meetings.

For all of October last year, I was on this island off the coast of Honduras called Roatán, and the internet was real touch and go; there was only one coworking space, and there were basically no coffee shops you could work at. Amazing that there was even a coworking space, but it burned down the week before I got there, so they were in a temporary spot that wasn’t very conducive to calls. Suffice it to say, there was not an ideal setup for me to teach classes or lead workshops.

Luckily, I could plan around that and basically take no meetings that whole month. I ended up renting a second Airbnb at one point just to film a YouTube video because the one I was staying in was too dark to shoot in.

I spent 6 weeks in Oaxaca, Mexico, too, and there are several very rad coworking spaces there, but my apartment basically had no wifi (which was my fault; there’s plenty of wifi in Oaxaca). I had to upgrade my phone hotspot, and at one point, it was so bad I considered getting my own Starlink. Now that I’m in Bogotá, it’s better. It’s a business city, and there are plenty of places to work and film and record podcasts, so I’ve been able to take on more virtual speaking and classes this year.

I always forget this about you and wish I had taken one of your classes. I love spin!

Magic by B.o.B

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