Substack emailed me yesterday morning.
My publication, Designed, Aligned & Primed™ is now on track for over $10,000 a year in subscription revenue. They made me a little graphic and everything. I stared at it for a while.
And it was not the only thing that showed up. On September 1, the day I closed the charter window, the orange check mark appeared next to my name. That is Substack’s bestseller badge. The same day, this publication hit #3 on the Rising in Business list, worldwide, one spot under Robert Glazer and two under Steve Eisman. It has been on that Top 100 Rising list basically since I started posting.
I am not putting that here to show off. I am putting it here because I want you to see the shape of it: I did not start with an audience here. (I still have not imported a single email address) I started with a door.
On July 24, I opened The Green Room. Twelve people had already gone paid before it had a name or a single thing inside it. I had switched the paid option on and a few friends walked through a door I had not even announced yet. That was 47 days ago. Today there are 133 people in the room.
I want to tell you how that happened, because it is not the story I expected to be telling, and it is not the way I was taught to do it.
What was in the room on opening day?
Nothing.
I mean that. Not one frame of the eight-part video series was filmed. I had started mapping it out, and that was the extent of it. The Zoom hosting tech intensive was an idea but no titleSubstack emailed me yesterday morning.
On July 24, I opened The Green Room. Twelve people had already gone paid before it had a name or a single thing inside it. I had switched the paid option on and a few friends walked through a door I had not even announced yet. That was 47 days ago. Today there are 133 people in the room.
I want to tell you how that happened, because it is not the story I expected to be telling, and it is not the way I was taught to do it.
What was in the room on opening day?
Nothing.
I mean that. Not one frame of the eight-part video series was filmed. I had started mapping it out, and that was the extent of it. The Zoom hosting tech intensive was an idea with no title, no date and no plan . There was no sales page. There was a rough-and-ready info page that I called “the door” because that is what it was. There were no gear guides. No vault. No content.
What was in the room was this:
A vision. An invitation. One date on the calendar for the first Live On-Camera Presence Setup Clinic. And the On-Camera Presence Audit, which I moved inside because it had already sold out my entire August calendar on its own and I figured anything people want that badly belongs in the paid room.
That was it. A date, a price, and a promise.
The day before I opened it, one of my clients said “sign me up” before I finished describing it, and I had nowhere to send her. I was selling a room with no door. So that night I built the door, wrote a Note, and opened it anyway the next morning.
The month I spent in the void
If you asked me what I would do differently, I would not say “wait until it was finished.” I would say the opposite.
The only thing I would do differently is the better part of a month I spent chewing on it before July 24.
I knew I needed a paid space. I had my free audit calls on one side and my full custom GlamCam Studio™ offer on the other, and nothing in between for the people right in the middle of the becoming. I could feel the gap. And I spent about a month overthinking it.
I was waiting for the perfect name. I was trying to invent something new, some format nobody had seen. I kept thinking a paid tier had to be a different kind of thing than what I already do.
Then the name dropped in. The Green Room. The place where you get ready before you go on. And the second I had it, the whole thing was obvious. I didn’t need to invent anything. I decided to just start doing what I already do with clients, but inside a room, with multiple humans present instead of just 1:1. That is all a paid tier is.
Once I saw that, I was ready to fly. And I flew. The month of overthinking got me exactly nothing. The 47 days of building in public got me 133 people.
Why people came into an empty room
Jen Rogers had never heard of me, and I had never heard of her. She runs the 🎤︎︎ Substack Podcast Studio, she knows this platform cold, and she saw my announcement Note in her feed. When she told me later why she joined, it was basically this:
“I read that you were opening the doors to something that piqued my interest and when you said it was under construction and were inviting people to come build it with you, I was immediately in.”
That line has stuck with me for seven weeks.
She did not join for a library. There was no library. She joined to be inside something while it became something. And she was not the only one. In that first announcement I wrote “still under construction on purpose” and “pardon the dust,” and people read that as a reason to come in, not a reason to wait.
This is the part I was taught wrong. The rule I absorbed over the years was finish it first, polish it, then reveal it. Build the whole studio in the dark and open the curtain on a finished set. That is how we did television, and it makes sense on television.
It does not make sense here. Here, people want to watch the set get built. The construction is part of the value. The charter members who came in during that first window are the reason the 8-part training series exists in the shape it exists, because I was making it with them watching, and answering their questions as I went, and their questions changed what I filmed.
The screen should tell the truth. It turns out the same rule applies to a paid room. If it is under construction, say so. The right people will bring a hard hat.
Why I think it is working
I have a few theories, and I will tell you where I could be wrong.
The first one is the niche/soapbox. Almost nobody is teaching on-camera presence for coaches and experts. There is no crowd in this lane. When Substack looks for who is rising in Business, there is not much competition for the person doing this one specific thing well.
The second is where the paid members are coming from. They are not coming from cold traffic. They are coming off my On-Camera Presence Audit calls, out of the comments, out of Notes, from people who were already warm. Roughly one in four of my free subscribers has gone paid. I did not run an ad to get there. I ran audits and answered people.
The third is other people’s audiences. I am fortunate to be inside some fabulous rooms that are not mine, like my dear friend Julie Ciardi-50 Not Finished📕’s IGNITE University. I show up there and I serve. I answer questions, I help out however I can, whenever I can,, I do the work in front of people. In return, they learn who I am and what I do, and when they do, they tend to hit subscribe. If your growth feels slower than you want, that is the lesson: go find a great room and do some service work in it, because the people you want in your world are already in someone else’s.
The fourth is the one that surprised me. I have not locked into a cadence. I have not posted every day. There have been stretches where I did not feel it and did nothing for a few days, and the room kept growing anyway. That is why I like this platform. It does not fall apart when you rest. I built in public, showed the room while it was still framing and drywall, and let the thing breathe when it needed to.
Where I could be wrong: rankings shift daily and I do not control the formula. But the pattern underneath all of it is the same one I started this piece with. I opened the door, told the truth about what was behind it, and kept showing up when it counted. That part I do control.
What I would say to you over coffee
You have a version of this.
There is a thing you have been circling. A paid workshop, a membership, a program, a room of your own. You know roughly what goes in it. You have been waiting on the perfect name, or the finished curriculum, or the feeling of being ready.
I spent a month on that feeling. I would like you to spend less.
The thing you already do, in a room, with people. That is the whole product.
Open. The. Door.🚪
The room is still somewhat under construction, and here is what is being built right now
I said “still under construction on purpose” in July, and it is still true in September. That is the whole point of this piece. So let me show you the biggest thing on the site right now, because you can get in the same way the charter members did: before it exists.
On Friday, October 23 at 1 p.m. Eastern, I am teaching Run the Room: The Zoom Hosting Tech Intensive.
It is the full SOP for hosting workshops and events on Zoom like a professional. Not meetings. Events. Registration flows, co-hosts, breakout rooms that do what you expect, the full professional recording and replay workflow, music and graphics and video, and what to do when it all goes sideways with a room full of people watching. Pre-session, mid-session, and post-session checklists. Run-of-show templates. Everything you need to run a workshop you charge good money for, and everything you have my full permission to skip.
I have hosted somewhere around 3,000 of these since 2020, including Bob Proctor’s programs with thousands of people live. This is that experience, organized into a 4+ hour workshop with a full replay.
The public price for this will be $397. Green Room members get a seat free.
And that brings the whole thing back around. Because the honest reason I am pointing you at October 23 is not the intensive itself. It is what the intensive lets you do.
On my on-camera audit calls, the thing holding people back from opening their own door is almost never the idea. It is the Zoom tech. They are ready to host. They have the content. They have the room in their head. They just do not trust themselves to run it. That is the exact gap this fixes.
So if this piece landed anywhere in you, if you have a room of your own you have been circling, the next honest step is to come learn how to run it.
The Green Room is $222 a year. Inside it right now: the first six parts of the Be Seen as the Authority You Actually Are video training series, with the last two coming this month, a live On-Camera Setup Clinic every four weeks with hot seats, a growing training vault, access to book a private On-Camera Presence Audit with me, and a free seat plus my director’s commentary any time I run one of my own paid workshops so that after I hand you all of my signature moves, you can come watch how I use them in front of a real live audience.
The intensive alone is worth more than the year. You are welcome to do that math yourself.
Pardon the dust. It is on purpose.
Now you've caused me to wonder, what would this look like for me? What's my equivalent "Green Room"? Hmmm...
Tommy I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. You absolutely blow me away with your knowledge, creativity, and business savvy, not to mention your brilliance in everything you touch! I love you so much.