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This is my seventh year of writing an annual income report, but it’s the first time that I’m reporting an overall decrease in income from the previous year.
In fact, when it comes to my side business this year I’m reporting the lowest level of revenue since I first started writing these reports. Yikes.
What you’ll see in these numbers, my friends, is the financial cost of burnout. The cost of me taking a break from creating regular content, offering mentoring services, or creating new products for the better part of a year. Honestly, at this point my business is running on fumes.
It’s vulnerable to share real numbers around income, but when things are going well there’s also been an element of pride for me in the knowledge that sharing which choices have paid off for my business could help others pick some new income streams to explore for themselves.
Writing a report this year — when things haven’t been going so well — has been a real test of my commitment to transparency. It feels extra vulnerable to share all the ways in which my business was not sustainable, but I hope that in doing so I can help others avoid some of my mistakes.
Let’s get into it. You can watch the video below, or read on.
As a reminder, these reports follow the “accounting year” my business runs on — June to May — and during that 12 month period I earned £194,700.84. That’s £43,246.48, or 18% less than I earned the previous year.
My overall side hustle business income coming in at just £11,200.54 is a whopping 82.7% decrease on last year’s earnings, and it’s even 27% less than what I earned way back in 2017.
This decrease in side business income means my work at Kit (formerly ConvertKit – we just rebranded!) made up 94% of my total income for the year.
Here’s how my income broke down into categories:
And here’s how those individual categories have grown or shrunk over the past 7 years.
Check out that steep dive on the content category. Let’s talk about it.
Making up 54.8% of my side business income, I earned £6,157.80 from my content this year. That’s 90% less than the year before. Oof.
What happened?
Burnout happened. In October 2023 I finally accepted that I was burnt out and I made the choice to stop creating content for the remainder of the year. January came around, and I realised it was going to take much longer to recover than I thought. I made a video talking about this burnout that you can watch here.
I’ve been saying for years in these reports that I don’t want to be so reliant on content income streams, and this is why. When you stop producing content, it stops being a major income driver. If only I had listened to myself sooner!
The majority of my content income came from sponsorships on the content I did produce before I took my burnout break.
I’m accepting that sadly my wonderful YouTube channel sponsorship with Figma (where they paid a monthly fee to appear in my title screen, end card and description box) has come to an end, and it’s my fault. We forged the partnership back in 2020 but the person who first made this decision has long since left the company. I’ve been handed off to several other folks since then as people have transitioned in and out of the role, but I honestly didn’t put enough work in to form relationships with them to help them see the value of our partnership.
Of course, when I took a break from creating content I also stopped sending in monthly invoices. Once I’m confident I can recommit to a regular content schedule I would love to search for another channel sponsor (or ideally work with Figma again if I can find the right person to speak to on the team!). I much prefer it to working with individual video sponsors – even though its less lucrative – as it delivers great value for the brand through a long-term brand alignment partnership where they benefit from the reputation I’ve built up in the design industry, but overall its less work on my side (because there’s no need to film specific ad sections or send videos for approval).
Aside from the channel sponsorship, I also had one issue of my newsletter sponsored via the Kit Ads network for £283.35.
Adsense is “passive income” earned from people viewing my YouTube videos, but as we can see in the chart above; if you stop uploading, you stop getting as many views (not just on new videos, but YouTube is less likely to recommend older videos in peoples feeds either) so you make less from ads. Still, the £2,343.82 I earned from this income stream helped to offset some of the costs from the videos I did produce.
Less content means less talking about the tools I use in my process and less opportunities to share affiliate links, so it’s no wonder this stream is down 75%. I earned £292.61 in Webflow affiliate commissions and £145.42 from Amazon. (And yes, those are affiliate links! Thank you in advance if you use them.)
Speaking fees is a category that was missing in my last income report too. With well-paid, well-timed speaking opportunities non-existent in my inbox over the past few years I decided to take matters into my own hands and host my own workshop. But that I turned into a product, so let’s move on to the products & services category.
Here’s where things actually look positive! This category is one I’ve been working on building up over the years, so I’m very proud of the 61% increase this category saw over the last 12 months.
I earned £4,844.84 from sales of my products and services, which makes up 43.3% of my side business income.
Each year I try to add a new product to my list of offerings and this year, having no invitations for paid speaking gigs at conferences, I decided to put on my own live event online.
With competition for design jobs heating up due to mass layoffs, I knew that my framework for personal branding could be hugely beneficial in helping folks to stand out. So, I created the Crafting a Personal Brand workshop.
I was absolutely thrilled by the response!
Tickets were $39 (though I offered an early bird discount of $10 off), and more than 120 people purchased a ticket for the live event. I also decided to offer up access to the replay and workbook as an on-demand workshop for people who didn’t hear about the live workshop in time. I priced this at $39 too because I really want to incentivise people showing up to the next live event I may run, and not set the precedent that if you only want the replay you can get the same value for less. To ensure the value is still high for the on-demand customers, I’ve included a free ticket to the next live version of the workshop (which will likely happen in early 2025, if you’re curious).
In total — across live ticket sales and on-demand purchases — 139 people bought access to my training, bringing in £3,545.65 in revenue.
To put this in perspective, the most I’ve ever been paid to speak at a conference is around $1,500. So while running my own event was more work (as I had to do the marketing and tech setup too), it was absolutely a great use of my time and more than replaced the missing speaking income.
Mentoring income is down 71%, bringing in just £621.62, because for 8 months of the year I didn’t open up any slots for people to book. I truly love helping designers through their career challenges and decisions on mentoring calls, but right now (due to burnout and general work-busyness) I can’t fathom adding any more meetings to my calendar so this is a stream that will likely stay dormant for the next little while.
Since I launched it in March 2023, 184 people have purchased my pack of hand-drawn vectors! I was pleased to see that even though the initial launch happened in the previous year, I earned 54% more from Scribbles sales this year with a few steady sales happening each month, bringing in £362.97 in total. That may not be much, but I’m proud of this product and since the work to create it (and it was a lot of work 😅) feels like a distant memory, this now feels like passive income.
Check out Scribbles for yourself if you haven’t already!
Purchase the Figma component library
Sales of Grayscale, my handwritten font, have been in decline the past few years but it still makes me happy every time someone picks up a copy! I may have only earned £314.60 in font sales this year, but in total since its launch in May 2020 I’ve earned £4,136 from this product.
Pick up a copy of Grayscale for yourself here
Coming in at only £197.91 (a 57% decrease on last year) my membership income category continues its decline.
Running a paid membership continues to not be a focus for me, but I’m grateful for the folks who chose to support my YouTube channel and the Design Life podcast this year. As running costs increase and we eat through our ‘savings’ from the income the show has brought in over the years, Femke and I are actively looking for sponsors to bring in revenue for Design Life so that we can continue to cover the costs. Interested? Get in touch.
As per usual, income in this category is solely made up of my work as Creative Director at Kit.
I got a promotion in November 2022, so the 5.8% increase for design work comes from being paid at that rate for the full 12 month period of this report.
Twice a year the team at Kit gets to share in our profits from the previous 6 months, and my share came to £22,309.85 (a 7% increase on last year). I’m proud of the way our company has weathered the economic slowdown, and that we’ve continued to grow and remain profitable thanks to the work of our team and the value we offer to our customers.
It cost me £17,489.43 to run my business this year. That’s 45% less than last year and 9% of my total income. But it’s also over £6,000 more than what my side business actually earned me, so I’m definitely in the red this year.
Here’s how those expenses broke down:
And here’s a further breakdown of the contractors and services category:
Overall I spent 56% less in this category this year. I ended the contract with my lovely VA when I hit pause on my content, and I haven’t outsourced any video or Inside Marketing Design podcast editing since then either.
I know that having outside help will be an important part of getting back to my business and running is more sustainably, but with hindsight now I can see that I wasn’t outsourcing effectively. That’s something I’ll need to work on in future.
The training category covers my membership to two online communities and the equipment expense covered studio rental space for a photo shoot and a new tripod. And these expense categories were down 7% and 12% respectively.
The software and subscriptions category was the only one to increase my expenses this year – by 28%. I can’t believe how quickly they all add up!
Here’s some of the tools I pay for (with affiliate links added where I have them):
Despite the struggles I’ve been through with burnout, I know that I do want to continue to run a creator business. But I also know that the way I was running it previously no longer works for me.
Right now I’m leaning into what I call ‘intuitive creating’ – I work on my business as and when I feel like it.
Is this a recipe for success? Who knows. But I’m a motivated person and I have no shortage of ideas; I just burned myself out by trying to tackle too many of them on too short a timeline alongside working a very demanding full time job.
To actually have an impact on helping creative professionals to level-up in their careers (still something I’m very passionate about), I need to get my ideas out into the world. And to get them into the world I need the energy to create. So I’m in a phase of learning how to run my business in a way that gives me energy, rather than taking it away.
This approach to creating has led to a heavily reduced output in the short term, but I hope it’ll mean I can keep showing up and sharing things I’m learning as I navigate my own career as a creative professional for many years to come.
I don’t know for sure what next years income report will bring, but I hope you’ll follow along the journey as I figure things out.
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