Hello, and welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. And on this show, I talk about the internet and how we navigate the internet in our personal lives, our professional lives, and our social lives in ways that hopefully don't just hand everything over to big tech surveillance. And today, we are kicking off season nine of the show. Now, I would normally be arriving here with a lot of excitement, with metaphorical air horns, with a cheering sound effect to really celebrate the launch of a new season, and everything that's ahead.

And there's definitely a part of me that feels that, that's excited to be back with you, that's excited to share the amazing conversations I've recorded and prepared. But there's also a big part of me that is struggling to come to the mic today because in The US, especially in the Midwest US where I live, we have been experiencing for some of us or like me just witnessing the murders of US citizens by ICE officials, particularly in Minneapolis. And every time I sit down to record, it's hard to really believe that this matters right now in the face of these losses. You know, I arrive at the mic and I think of Renee Good and I think of Alex Pretti, and I think of Liam Ramos and everyone who's been forcefully removed from their homes or their preschools and taken into ICE custody, many of whom have been or are being deported. I can't stop thinking about them, and I don't think I have to.

I think it's good to keep them in the front of my mind to be reflecting on the horrible things that are happening right now, to be resisting them. I have been calling my senators, particularly this week where there is a bill to defund DHS and ICE that's moving through the committees. I have also been donating to organizations and mutual aid funds in Minnesota to support their active and resilient resistance of ICE and Customs and Border Patrol in their city. And beyond that, I think I've just been watching and waiting, trying to regulate my nervous system, trying to make space to support the people I know who are on the ground in cities that are currently occupied by ICE, and also to get ready for if or when ICE comes to where I live. If you, like me, have been struggling with meaning or purpose or just some like general existential dread around going to work in your own business amidst the state of the world, then I do wanna let you know that I recorded a free class for us.

It's called Crystal Clear, How Our Businesses Create Change. And I first taught this class right after Trump was reelected in 2024. I did a live version and I didn't record it back then. But with everything going on, it just felt like the right time to revisit my notes and rerecord the class. And I shared that recording in the clubhouse last week when this is coming out.

So I will link to that in the show notes. It really shares my way of centering in the liberatory power of self employment. So if you are listening to this and you are feeling like why is Amelia recording a podcast right now? Why am I listening to a show about business right now? Why am I going to my desk every day when so many people are in the streets or actively resisting or being persecuted.

Why? Why? Why? If you're stuck in those whys, I just wanna invite you to take a deep breath with me. And then if it feels helpful, you can head to the show notes and grab that class for free.

There's no email or paywall or anything. You can just watch it. And I hope that you find it supportive. Okay, with all of that still very much on my heart, I do want to welcome you to season nine of Off The Grid. This season, we are going to continue what we've been doing for years now, which is talking about to and with creative small business owners, self employed folks who are finding ways to make money online without relying on extractive algorithms or surveillance platforms.

Now, of course, this is a challenging endeavor, and so we do it together with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty. And I'm so excited this season to be joined by so many people I admire. In the upcoming weeks, I will welcome back Nick Antoinette. I will speak with Harry Duel of Keep Candles. I'm talking to Morgan Evans and Saray Jarelle Johnson.

I will also be doing a whole series on AI with Mel Mitchell Jackson and Casey Zabala. I'm talking to Natalie Bright of Do Good Biz, as well as Hannah Cole of Sunlight Tax. We have so many great conversations coming up this season. And in addition to those weekly conversations, I am going to be adding in bonus Friday episodes. I think most weeks of the winter at least, maybe through the spring, because I wanna share just some practical tools around quitting social media, navigating platforms online, how to put together a privacy focused tech stack so that you can, you know, maybe rely a little less on Google or like me, try to fully extricate yourself from their services.

And so this season, you can expect Wednesday conversations and Friday minisodes. Some of those mini episodes on Fridays will also be previews of things that are happening inside the clubhouse. So I tend to show up in the clubhouse on Mondays and share bonus episodes, written content, link roundups, and other great things there. And so you can also find that linked in the show notes. Some of the things I send out are free.

Most are for our paid supporters and subscribers. So if you want to be all in on off the grid this year, if you're ready to change your relationship to tech, if you're ready to deepen your business foundations among people who get it, people like me who are here to say abolish ICE and fuck Trump and also your art matters and you can still do good business among all of this. If you want more of that in 2026, I'm here to say there's gonna be a lot of it on this feed and even more of it in the clubhouse. So make sure you're subscribed in both places so you can hang out with us from now through the summer when we take our annual break. I do hope that you will pull out your phone or navigate to your browser tab with the show notes and check out those links for more information on how to call your senator and get ISD funded, on how to stand with Minnesota and send your direct support.

I've also linked the clubhouse there so you can take the free class that I mentioned. And I've included our free leaving social media toolkit, which you can find in the show notes for every single episode to help you step back or away from the platforms. Thank you so much for tuning into Off The Grid and for being here for our season nine opening episode. So let's dive in, shall we? This week, I'm gonna talk to you about me, my biz, and I, what the first five years of Softer Sounds have looked like, and what's next for me and my business.

In 2026, Softer Sounds is going to turn five. And as I approach that anniversary, I wanted to reflect on what has happened in my first five years of full time self employment. And I realized that this year was gonna be a year of a lot of change, that the way I've been running my business isn't really working for me anymore, and I wanted to make some pretty major shifts to the model, to the offerings, to my role. And so in this episode, I want to walk you through how all of that has happened. We're gonna look back at my first five years in business and actually at the five years before that as well.

And then we'll take that up to the present moments. I'll talk a little bit about where you're finding me in business at the 2026 and what is ahead for me and my work. Along the way, I will tell those stories and also ground into some of the things I would definitely do again and some of the things I would absolutely do differently at different stages in business. So this episode is for you. If you really like How I Built This with Guy Raz meets E True Hollywood Story for a little bit of the drama.

I don't actually think there's any drama, but it's also not quite as dry as how I built this episode. So here we go. How I built softer sounds. Let's roll it back, shall we, to the very beginning. I registered Softer Sounds, my podcast production studio as a business in 2021.

That means that this iteration of my work officially began five years ago, but I would say that my self employment journey, my entrepreneurial mindset started many years before that. I published my first ever podcast episode, the first public one at least, in 2015, which means that I have been podcasting for over ten years. Back then, I was volunteering with a community radio station in Chicago, and they asked if I'd be interested in interviewing local bands for their features department. I said yes, and then afterwards, I learned that that meant I had to create a podcast. At the time, I had no clue how to do that, but the beauty of this community organization is that they taught me.

And within a few months, I was interviewing in our studio and at venues. I was editing the episodes together, and I was learning how to make podcast episodes. I did that for the next year or so, and then I got my first podcast editing client in 2017. So it took about two years between publishing my first episode and landing my first client. And when I look back at that time, I mean, your girl was skill building.

I had no clue what I was doing. And I feel very lucky that like my first client was a friend. It was actually my college roommate who had started a very successful business and had a podcast for it and just needed someone to edit the audio. And at that point, I could do that much. So she hired me and I started doing her episodes.

Over the next few years, I built up freelance work as a side hustle. I added in more clients. They would recommend me to other people. It all happened through typically word-of-mouth. I also hopped on a few listservs to see when people needed editing support and chime in.

And that sort of kept growing until in 2020, I made about $10,000 from freelance audio editing for those clients that I had met along the way. So before Softer Sounds ever existed, I had been podcasting for over five years, and I had already had a year where I made $10,000 from freelance editing. And I wanna really underscore that because I think it can be easy to hear me talk about having been in business for five years and be like, wow, that happened so fast. But it only happened fast because there was a whole other five years before that where I was building skills and practicing and sort of proving to myself that I could do this. I built a lot of self trust in those first five years of practicing my craft.

And I don't think that my business would have had the success it has had since then if I hadn't done that work first. So when I did start Softer Sounds in 2021, I wasn't starting from scratch. I had made money doing freelance podcast editing. And not only that, I also had a whole other creative practice going on that I'm gonna talk about a little more later. But essentially what happened five years ago is that I had a personal brand and a hobby business, and I decided that I wanted to make that my full time job.

I wanted to stop piecing together some personal brand stuff, some freelance editing stuff, and then some part time jobs, and I wanted my own full time business. So if you're listening to this, trying to reverse engineer for yourself, how might I start a business? I think it begins with finding a craft that you enjoy. For me, was podcast editing, and practicing and building that up alongside other steady stable work that can support you financially. I am not out here to tell people like leap and the net will appear.

I think that is true for some people, but it has not been my personal experience. And so I built slowly over time until I felt like, okay, this is substantial enough. And at that point, I had some other life things going on where I was like, I can't work for these other people anymore. I have to try this out. I have to try going all in on me.

So what happened when I decided to go all in on me, as I just said? Well, first thing I did was actually take a break. Going all in on me started with a few months of not working. It started with a summer sabbatical. And then from that place of rest, I was able to find the energy, the time and the commitment to register my business and start working again.

So when I went back to work, when I started Softer Sounds, the first thing I did was email 50 personal contacts to share my new studio with them. At that point in time, literally all I had was a PDF and a dream. Like, I sent emails in the 2021 that were basically like, hi. Hello. We met at this place this many years ago, and I have really admired what you've been doing with your career.

And I wanted to share the news that I just started my own business. It's called Softer Sounds. It's a podcast studio. If you've ever thought about making a podcast, I'd love to support you. Or if you know anyone through your work who needs audio editing support or podcast production support, I would be really grateful if you would share my work.

I attached a PDF of my services to that email and sent it out. And I booked my first six months of client work from those emails. So again, this goes back to I had been doing this freelance audio editing work for almost five years before I started my business. And so when I did start my business, I had contacts. I had people I could speak to.

Now those people weren't really in the podcast industry. A few of them were, but most of them were people that I had met through other work. I reached out to people I had known in high school, in college, through my first job, through grad school. Like, I reached out to family members. I reached out to friends of friends.

And anytime somebody would reply to my email and say, hey, think you should talk to so and so, I would ask like, could you make an intro or share their contact information and I'll reach out? And I did that over and over again until I booked those first six months of client work. As I did that work, I built my website and I developed my offerings and I created systems to help everything go more smoothly. So in 2021, I started that process of sending the emails in the summer. And by the end of that year, I had made approximately $20,000 in my first six months of being in business.

Now this is the place in the episode where I want to add my financial disclaimer, which is to say that if you keep listening, if you will hear me talk about money in this episode, I ask that you remember that the things I say about money are not about you. They're about me and my very specific circumstances in my very specific context in my life. And so you may hear me say, I made $20,000 in my first six months of business. And you may think, wow, that's a lot of money. Or you may think, wow, that's nothing.

And if you have those thoughts arise, that's great. We all have thoughts like that. But I ask that you take a deep breath and then let them go. What $20,000 means to me will not be what $20,000 means to you. And there are listeners of this podcast who make no money or lose money on their business, and there are listeners of this podcast who make over $1,000,000 a year in their business.

And again, we all have different experiences of money. We all have different backgrounds and different privileges that create those experiences of money. And so I share those numbers to be transparent because I do think it's important to talk about money when I'm telling you about my business and you're trusting me for educational purposes. Like, for that reason, I want to be transparent, but I am in no way saying that like what I have done is what you should do or is even replicable by other people. So that's the disclaimer about money.

Now let's get back to the stories. So we had just reached the end of my first six months in business. If we recap, I registered the business in the 2021. I sent a bunch of personal emails, warm and cold, to share a PDF of my services and book my first six months of work. And at the end of those six months, I had made $20,000 from podcast editing.

At that point in time, Softer Sounds only offered podcast editing and podcast launch support. Those were my two services when I started out. I would edit your episodes or I would help you launch a show. That was the thing. And that's what I did for the first six months.

The next year, I expanded a little bit. I offered more advising services, and I experimented with different marketing methods. I taught free classes. I taught in other people's programs. I put some ads in the industry newsletters, and I asked for referrals over and over and over again.

Through that, I slowly built up my clientele. And at the end of my first full year in business, at the 2022, I had made over $94,000 in revenue from Softer Sounds and our podcast editing services. The next year that kept growing, and the studio kind of peaked in 2024 when we made over $151,000 in revenue. Now inside the clubhouse, I will be sharing an episode where I actually really walk through those numbers because I can tell you that when I made $94,000 in 2022, I had a lot more profit than when I made a $151,000 in 2024. So the revenue in the business kept growing.

But because of decisions I made to hire contractors, to set myself up in some different programs, like those were expensive things. And so just because my revenue grew didn't mean my profit grew. In fact, it declined over those years. So I was making more money, but I was spending more money in the process. And again, inside the Clubhouse, I really break all that down.

I've recorded a video that sort of walks through the first five years of finances in my business. So if you're somebody who's like, I want to know the money details, you have to go to the clubhouse for that. I don't put that here on the public feed. I just need a little more opt in and privacy when I'm having those conversations. But for now, what I want you to know is I started pretty small in my first six months.

I grew it to an almost 6 figure business in my first year, and then that grew by another 50% by 2024. That's sort of the money arc for now. So looking back over those years, I wanna offer a few key takeaways. When I revisited years one through five of Softer Sounds, I had a pretty clear question and goal for each year. In year one, which is really I'm thinking of as like the first six months of the business.

My question was, will this work? My only goal was survival. Can I run a business that will financially support me? That was my only question. Because as I said, I had come out of a sort of side hustle freelance practice that was always supported by part time jobs.

And so when I transitioned into full time self employment, my only question was if it would work, can I survive this way? And I stayed really close to that question for the first year. In years two through three, my question expanded a bit from not just will this work because I proved to myself it could work in year one. But in years two through three, the question was, how does this work? And my goal was to make money because that $20,000 in six months, that was not enough to actually support me.

Once you take out taxes and expenses, it was not that much money. So I knew I could make money in this business now from year one. But in years two and three, it was like, how do I make more money? How does this actually work and become sustainable? And so that's why I share those revenue numbers because I did make it work.

I figured out how to make money by adding in some other offerings, by focusing on exactly the clients I wanted to support, by listening to what they really needed. Those are the ways that I built my offering ecosystem and figured out how it worked. Now at the end of year three, when I was hitting that 6 figures of revenue, I was paying myself what I wanted, I had some profit at least in the business. Then my question really shifted in years four through five from not just can I do this and how do I do this? But to what do I really want from this?

If I know that I can make enough money through this business, what is my goal here? What am I continuing to work toward? And for me, that goal became very personal and it became to buy the house that I currently live in. And so in years four through five, I was really pushing toward how do I have more profit in the business? How do I pay myself more such that I can take home some more money and set up secure housing as like a foundation for financial stability for me going forward?

Again, I talk a lot more about that in the clubhouse episode about money that will be coming out soon. So if you wanna hear all about the money, head over to the clubhouse, become a paid supporter, and I'll walk through the finances and how I bought my house and all those things there. But again, back to my money disclaimer, I don't actually think that's all that important. I think what we can root into here is these questions. I think year one for any business, the question is survival.

Will this work? I think the next two to three years is really like, how does it work? How do I keep making money and sustain this? And then beyond that, once you figure out how to sustain your business, once it is sustainable, then you have to figure out what you really want from it. This is why a lot of businesses totally pivot or like burn it down and rebuild when they get to year four or five.

Because maybe the way that you figured out how to make money isn't actually that satisfying to you. And so that is also gonna come up in a minute in some of the shifts that I'm making. So with those questions and goals in mind, I want to offer a few lessons that I learned from my early years in business. So I'm going to tell you three things I would do again and three things I would not do again. We'll start with the things I would do again.

The first thing I would always do if I were starting a service based business is work my network. I would always start with those emails 100% of the time. I think that when you are starting a brand new business, that is a really great time to reach out to people that you have known through different stages of your life and let them know that this new exciting thing is happening for you, and here are ways that they can help. Now, I don't think you should do this for like every single thing you do in your business. Right?

Like, I didn't send those emails every time I launched a new offering. But at this watershed moment of I am starting a business, this is a big deal, I felt comfortable with that outreach and it worked because I did book work from those emails. So I would always start with the emails. That's the first thing I do again. The second thing I would do again is I would join all the communities and show up for all the things.

So when I started my business, I joined Holisticism's North Node community. I joined my friend Grace's community, Ken. I joined my friend Patty's community, The Fiery Well. I was in a lot of online communities for creative people and small business owners, and I met so many people that way. Now I was starting my business in 2021, so everything was online.

If you're listening to this now, you might go to in person meetups or join local communities. You also might join the North Node. It still exists. You might join the interweb and come hang out with me and all of the creative business owners that we've gathered. I think that there are so many opportunities, but in my early years in business, knowing those people made all the difference.

One, because I felt supported by my peers, and two, because I booked work in those communities. When people learned I was a podcast editor and they liked how I showed up in the space that we shared, they wanted to hire me. And so that's the second thing I would do again. I would keep joining the communities and showing up for things. And I will say this can also apply to like taking people's classes, going to their events.

Maybe it's not like a membership community you're joining, but just being an active part of online business life in the right spaces really benefited me and my business. And then the third thing I would definitely do again is I would absolutely build the systems I created in Notion again. My Notion systems really made running my business so streamlined, simple, and easeful for me and my clients. And I might even build some things a little earlier than I did. When I first started software sounds, I didn't really know much about Notion.

So those first six months, I was kinda piecing things together through PDFs and Google sheets. I was really just trying to make it work. And then by my first full year in business, I was more set up in Notion. I was building different dashboards and that helped so much. So I would definitely do that again.

The bonus thing I would do again that I'll talk about more in a moment is I would also definitely start off the grid again. That was not like a strategic plan in the business. Often people think that I started off the grid because I ran a podcast studio and I was trying to sell podcast stuff and I knew the podcast would sell stuff. That was not it at all. I started off the grid because people asked me a lot of questions about how my business was working without social media, and I wanted to just answer them one time and send that link to people.

And then it became so much bigger than I ever could have imagined. And so if I was going back, I would follow that creative seed or spark again. I'm so glad I said yes to it, even though I didn't really have a vision for it, or I didn't know how it fit in strategically. Now there are plenty of other things that I would not say yes to again. Plenty of other creative sparks that I did not need to follow through on.

So let's move into the three things that I would not do again. Number one is that I would not hire a VA from a VA company again. I did this in, I think, the first full year of my business, maybe it was year two, and the person I worked with was lovely. But I just found that when I was working with an agency, their systems were too big for what I needed, and it was too expensive for what I could afford at that time. Now I did need support, so I definitely would hire support again.

But I think that I kind of drank the online business Kool Aid and was like, well, if I need support, need to hire a VA. And I don't think that was exactly right for me. I think that I would have actually tried to find people who I could work with on a sort of project basis instead of like an ongoing retainer, and I would have experimented more with that before bringing on support. So again, I'm not saying don't work with VA agencies. Some of them are great.

I'm not saying I wouldn't hire again. I'm just saying that I don't think that was the right first move for me. It ended up being pretty expensive, and I couldn't quite figure out how to utilize the support well. So I would not do that again. The second thing that I would not do again is I would not teach so many just like random free workshops to random industry people.

So early on in my business, I taught quite a few, like how to start your podcast in twenty twenty two workshops. And I would advertise them through podcast industry newsletters, and I would get a lot of people who would come in from that. But I don't think I booked any client work from doing those things. I think that the topics were too general and the audiences were too industry focused. And the real value that I brought as a podcast editor had a lot to do with my values and my personality.

And people in those spaces didn't care so much about that. If I were going back, I would be teaching those workshops in creative communities and small business communities. It's not that I wouldn't teach them, but I would teach them in different places. I don't think just like hosting them on my own and inviting people who are generally interested in podcasts was the best idea. I think I just spent a lot of, like, wheel spinning time doing free teaching for relatively little outcome in my business.

And then the third thing that I wouldn't do again is that I would not try to scale my business again. When I started Softer Sounds, it was just me. Then I brought on my friend Jesse as a contract editor, and that was great. And then I was like, I should have more contract editors so I can have other people doing editing. I can have more clients.

And at one point, I had like six contract editors on the team, and then that sort of condensed down to two editors, and then I added an assistant producer. And I just wanna say that every single person I worked with was lovely, And I don't regret doing any of this because I really needed to learn that I don't wanna run a business like that again. I don't want to scale for the sake of scaling. I don't want to hire for the sake of being able to say me and my team. I again, I think I got really swept up in the sort of like online business culture and felt like the path to success was more people on the team, like more people, more clients, and growing that way.

And as I did it, it just never felt quite right. So I would not try to scale in that way again. But I would bring on a good friend who had these has these skills to work with me. I still work with Jesse. I love working with her.

And so it's not that I would never bring on support or that I wouldn't grow in like specific ways, But I definitely would step back from that advice around scaling. It just it wasn't right for me and I didn't enjoy it. And I spent a lot of time stressing over running a team and a business that I didn't really like that much. So those are my three things I wouldn't do again. Just for a quick recap at this stage, the things I would do again is I would always send those 50 emails.

I would always join communities, show up and be with my peers and potential clients. I would always get my Notion system set up and start off the grid even though it didn't make sense. But I would not hire a VA agency so early. I would not teach those random free workshops without a clear sense of who might be in the room. And I would not focus on scaling.

And that, my friends, is a recap of my first five years in business. I'm happy to report that I did achieve my three primary goals for my first five years of business, right? Year one, survive. Years two and three, make money. Years four and five, buy my house.

I did all of those things, including signing the closing papers on my home on January 8. So now I have met my big goal for softer sounds. And I'm asking myself, what comes next? What is my question and goal as I move into year five and beyond? And I have some fun answers to that.

So we're gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, I'm gonna tell you about how I built off the grid alongside all of that and what I think is ahead for me in 2026. Hey there, lovely Off the Grid listener. We're taking a quick break from this episode because I want to make sure that you know that you can become an Off the Grid sponsor and share your work here on the podcast during a mid roll ad like this or in a pre roll ad that airs before every single episode on our feed. In past seasons of the show, I have shared some of my favorite affiliate partners.

If you've heard the Flodesk ad, you know what that's all about. But since season three, I've also been partnering with listeners like you to showcase your work and the amazing, inspiring things that you're creating and sharing with the world. I know I don't have to tell you this, but off the grid listeners are smart, fun, values centered business owners who create and share impactful things on and offline. We are writers, artists, designers, wellness practitioners, service providers, shop owners, and product makers who know a lot about our craft but need more support, making the business side of things thrive. If that sounds like the kind of crew that you wanna get your work, your products, your services, your books, your free lead magnets in front of, I hope that you will head to the show notes and learn more about placing an ad on the podcast today.

One of our very happy sponsors from last year wrote to me and said this, placing an ad on off the grid was hands down the best investment I made last year. My cost per lead ended up being around $6, which is 70% less than Meta's average, and nearly all of those leads are still highly engaged a year later. On top of that, many have become customers, bringing in over 13 times the return on my investment. If you would like to hear your work shared by me and featured in a spot like this, you can head to the show notes to learn more about our ad opportunities. And whether or not you decide to sponsor an episode, I am so grateful that you listen to the show, and I hope that you will check out some of our partners this season.

They have amazing free and paid offerings for you, so please make sure you click through when you hear them. Okay. Enough about our sponsorship opportunities. Let's go ahead and dive back in to this episode. Okay.

So when I left off three minutes ago, I had just told you that in my first five ish years of running softer sounds, I had reached all of the goals that I had set myself. And I was asking, what's next? Now what? What do I do from this point on? Well, in 2025, I honestly thought that like the universe was answering for me because business was slow.

I had had a really big year in 2024. I'd worked with so many great clients. I felt like I had met all of my revenue goals for the studio. And then when 2025 started, honestly, we felt like Trump was inaugurated and business just plummeted as his nonsense and violence began. And so through that, I held steady for a few months, and then I decided to scale back because I just wasn't sure what was going to happen with the business.

And as I did that, I kinda thought that, like, maybe there just wasn't a market for softer sounds anymore. Maybe this business had just sort of, like, come to an end or wasn't gonna be able to be as successful as it had. And I really believed that, and I told my team that. And I scaled back on our work, and I actually ended up wrapping my contract with my assistant producer because I was like, I just don't think the work is coming back and I can't afford this anymore. And then, of course, in fall, business came back in full force.

I went from, I think, having like three to five clients over the summer to all of a sudden, like five of my clients who had kind of paused or ghosted me for the whole year were suddenly in my inbox in August and September being like, I need to do a season this fall. I wanna put out episodes before I sell this thing. It truly felt like people had just been holding their breath all year. And then as the year was coming to a close, we're a little bit like, oh, shit. Now I to sell something.

Now gotta do something. And hence, they ended up back in my inbox. So in the fall, I ended up editing a ton of episodes for clients with less support than I had had before because after eight months of paying people and trying to help support them financially when I just didn't have the work for it, I had said, okay, we can't do this anymore. And then of course, the work came back right after those people were on to their next gig or thing. So what do you do at that point?

Well, it seemed pretty clear to me that there were kind of two paths. One was that I could look at all this work coming back and take it as a sign that softer sounds could be stable and grow again. I could recommit to the business and just keep going. But as I was doing the editing, it just felt very clear to me that I did not wanna take the growth path. In fact, I wanted to keep scaling back.

I wanted to really ask myself if I wanted to run a podcast production studio at all. And that wasn't just a mental thing. It wasn't just like a train of thought I had. It was also very clear that my body was telling me no to doing so much more editing work. My migraines returned, my carpal tunnel was really hurting, and I was having nerve pain in my hand, and no amount of ergonomic adjustments has really helped fix it.

And so with the help of my friend Nick, who you'll hear on the podcast next week, I was talking to Nick about this and they kind of honestly just like BizFriend coached me into deciding to take a six month sabbatical from the business. I needed a break. My body was telling me I needed a break. My heart was telling me I needed a break. And Nick helped me come to this language of I'm taking a sabbatical to give myself permission to take that break because I'm not closing Softer Sounds.

That felt way too scary. It still doesn't feel true to what I want to be the case, but I needed to stop editing. I needed to cut back on my workload. And so I told my clients that I was taking time off, and I helped them find new studios. I think in the fall, I was working with around 10 clients, and I told six or seven of them that I could not support them when we got to 2026.

And I made recommendations. I helped off board them and transition them to other places. And I put myself on sabbatical for the first half of this year. Now, what does that mean? Well, to me, it means that I'm not actively doing audio editing, and I am not taking on new clients.

I am still offering podcast advising sessions through the studio. I am still selling our self guided courses, and I have kept two active clients who are people I've worked with for a long time and wanted to support, and honestly just wanted to know that I had kind of that steady income in case nothing else was panning out. But that's it. Softer sounds has now gone from, you know, at its peak in, I think, 2023 going to 2024. I had 24 active podcast clients in a team of three people who are helping me manage all that work.

And now I have two. And I still have two very extremely part time contractors who help out a bit with editing and with transcripts, but I've really scaled back and I've pressed pause on Softer Sounds podcast studio. So what else am I doing? Well, this is where off the grid comes in. Because even though I'm on sabbatical from my one business, I also have a whole second business.

And to explain that, we need to go back to go forward again. So I already shared that I launched Softer Sounds in the 2021. And I decided to start off the grid the following year, and I launched our first season in the 2022. As I said before, I started the show because people kept asking me how I had launched and started this business without social media. And instead of having a coffee chat with, like, all 15 people who emailed me about it, I decided to start a podcast.

So the podcast launched in the 2022. But just like with my audio editing career, the path to off the grid becoming a business probably began much, much earlier. You see, I have been sharing creative work in public for a very long time. I was the editor in chief of my literary magazine in high school and of my newspaper in college. I was very used to putting things together, putting them out in the world, managing people, managing timelines.

And even after school, when I moved to Chicago, I tabled Chicago Zine Fest my very first year I lived there. So I was tabling there in 2014. I did public readings of the poetry zines that I had, and I shared all of that on social media. I think I started my first sort of content campaign on my Instagram profile in early twenty sixteen, and I published my first newsletter in late twenty sixteen. And that means that I have been publishing newsletters and content on the Internet for at least a decade now.

Beyond that, I was hosting feminist creative consciousness raising groups in Chicago in 2018. I self published my first book in 2018. I got a book deal for that book and republished it with a traditional publisher in 2020. During that time, I also had another podcast called 50 Feminist Dates that I did two crowdfunding campaigns for and raised over 13,000 to bring that show to life. So there were seven years of active content creation, event hosting, sharing, and selling in public before I ever launched off the grid.

I had so much practice. And I think it's really important to say that, like, when I was doing all of that, the stakes were low. I was not relying on any of those things to make the money I needed to pay my bills and get my basic needs met in Chicago. Those things were always sort of like bonus money or additional income, or they directly funded the things I was doing, like with the podcast. But it was all me practicing and preparing to have a creative business.

Like, I don't I don't really think of all of that as a business, although technically with some of the earnings, I think the IRS would think of it as a business. But to me, that was all practice for what eventually became my business. And it was practice and experimentation, again, when the stakes were low. Because it's much easier to experiment in that place when everything feels like a bonus and failure doesn't feel so intense. That's much easier than what I'm trying to experiment now and it feels like my car insurance depends on it.

My grocery bill depends on it. My other expenses depend on it. Right? And so I don't think that off the grid or Softer Sounds would have had the success they did in the first few years if I had not been practicing for so long before that. So with all that background, let's get back to the launch of Off The Grid.

I launched Off The Grid in 2022. I started publishing in March, and I ran my first season through August. And then at the August, I hosted my first event. So I wrapped up the first season of Off The Grid by selling The Refresh, which was a three day workshop series where I helped people map their creative marketing ecosystems. I love teaching that workshop, and it was such a fun way to wrap the first season.

But at the same time, if I'm being perfectly honest, after season one, I wasn't sure I was gonna keep going. Because my first few episodes, they were getting less than a 100 downloads in their first week of being published. I felt like I really had something to say, and the show was really great, but it just didn't feel like people were actually tuning in. And at that time, I was in the business of selling podcast editing. I wasn't trying to sell anything through this podcast.

So why keep doing it if I didn't really see it having an impact? Now, luckily for me, I told my friend Taylor about this, and Taylor said, Amelia, you have to keep going. I think you're a little bit ahead of the curve, and if you do this another year, people will get it and they will be excited. And Taylor was right. She was so, so, so right.

Because when I came back for the second season in the 2023, I saw an immediate jump from episodes getting less than a 100 downloads in the first week to episodes getting more than 300 downloads, more than 400, almost 500 downloads in the first week. I think that was for a few reasons, largely because I got to be a guest on Holisticism's twelfth house podcast, and that brought a bunch of listeners to the show. I think that also introduced me to Cody Cook Parrott, who shared my work in their newsletter many times that year, and that helped the show grow so much. So I think that the initial growth of the show really was because one, I was practiced in what I was doing. The show was good.

I had put in my, you know, ten thousand hours elsewhere before I launched off the grid, and then I had built relationships. The reason I was on the twelfth house podcast is because I was a member of their community. I had been hired to edit their show, and then they were like, oh, you have this great other podcast. We'd love to have you on. The reason Cody was excited to share my work is because even though we didn't know each other then, I had taken Cody's classes.

I wasn't a total, like, stranger to them. We had shared Zoom rooms before. And so that relationship building I'd been doing, mostly for Softer Sounds and also because I loved these people's work, then sort of I don't wanna say paid off because that feels transactional, but, like, it was just all amplified when I was really in my lane creating great work too. And that way of working where I'm just like building relationships, being with people, sharing good work, and sharing other people's work in the process, it just kept paying off. A year later, I hired my friend Lauren of Tink Media, which is a podcast marketing company, to do some speed pitching for me, which is where we had a one hour meeting talking about my show and the goals.

And then she opened up her podcast Rolodex and pitched me as a guest for, like, 10 or 15 shows that she thought I'd be a good fit for, and I booked on a lot of them. And that was the beginning of more audience growth. Now other podcast listeners knew about the show, and they came to Off the Grid. Lauren from Tank also pitched me to another Lauren who was the producer of We Can Do Hard Things. And I was on Lauren's own podcast around that time, and then a year later, I got to be a guest on We Can Do Hard Things because Lauren remembered our great conversation and told Glennon and Abby that they just had to talk to me.

And so I wanna acknowledge that, like, some of this is just luck and magic, and I'm just feel so grateful it turned out that way. But also, it was very intentional relationship building, showing up for other people, putting in the time to hone my craft, and then keeping going. So that by the time people heard about the show, it was still around. I had to stick it out. If Taylor had not been there to tell me to keep making the show, when all these other people found it, it would have been over.

And so again, it's just those relationships, it's that craft, and it's that staying in the game. If I had to pick three keys to success for off the grid, that's kind of what I would pick. Now that's the journey of off the grid's podcast growth. But alongside that, I have also developed these offerings so that off the grid could really be a business because I didn't just want to run a podcast, and my audience isn't big enough to make a full time living or even really that much money from just podcasting. So I already mentioned that at the end of the first season, I taught the three day workshop series, the refresh.

I did that again at the end of the second season. And after I sold it the second time, I really wanted to do something that was more ongoing. I loved gathering with off the grid listeners, and it just felt like this three day series, like, like, wasn't enough. Like, I wanted more. So once again, I was talking to Taylor about it, and we brainstormed.

Like, how could I create some type of ongoing community or membership that off the grid listeners would love? And also, that was relatively low lift for me because at that point in time, I was running Softer Sounds and it was very busy. And so I couldn't just spin up a whole second business because I didn't wanna work sixty hours a week. And so Taylor helped me create the initial idea for the interweb, which back then was a membership that had four calls a year and a resource library alongside it. And founding members joined for $99 a year.

I still have some of those founding members inside the interweb, they are now getting like three to four calls a month for that same price. Right? They were getting four calls a year back then. But I really appreciate that, like, they were with me when the show was just getting started. They were willing to buy in at that early stage.

And I think that's another thing that's been really nice about the way that I've been able to grow off the grid is it's been slow, it's been steady, it has evolved as I have had more space for it. And I feel like the people who have been there from the beginning, like, they also get to benefit from that. And that lifetime pricing is part of how I sort of pay it back to pay it forward, if you will. After the interweb was up and running for, I think, like, six to nine months, I launched the clubhouse, which was something I came up with in conversation with my friend Nick because I wanted to make more episodes of the show, but it just felt like I didn't really wanna put more than one a week on the public podcast feed back then. And I also knew that I had a lot of really active listeners who wanted to support the show, but they just didn't really need the interweb.

Either their business wasn't in a stage where they needed a membership community, or they just didn't wanna join any more membership communities, or sometimes they weren't even business owners. And they just liked off the grid, and they love to support the show, but they didn't need to join this other space that I had. And so I launched the clubhouse so I'd have space to make more episodes and so people could support the podcast if they really enjoyed it. So just to pause and recap there, I launched off the grid in 2022 while I was running Softer Sounds as a full time business. That meant that I had to grow it slowly.

So a year and a half later, I launched the interweb. A half year after that, I launched the clubhouse. Throughout that time, I was experimenting with some paid ads on the podcast feed. And then in 2025, I launched my book. And that became a really big, I think, like watershed moment I'm realizing for the business.

I think that launching the book, even though it honestly wasn't like quite the success I had hoped or dreamed it would be, it did help my ideas spread to people who maybe weren't gonna listen to a podcast every week. And so now at the start of 2026, the interweb has more than 200 active members. The clubhouse has over a 130 paid subscribers, and my book has sold over 350 copies. Those things together with a small boost of revenue from selling paid sponsorships on the podcast, make up the business ecosystem of off the grid. And those are things that, again, were launched one at a time as the show grew, as the excitement grew, and as my capacity to work on off the grid grew.

The interweb could not be as big as it is now if I was still running at the scale that I was in 2024. It just wouldn't work. I couldn't do them both because I'm not willing to sacrifice my well-being to be working that much. I felt like I did that already for too long in certain ways, and I wouldn't do it again. And so that's where you find me today, my friends.

I am on sabbatical from Softer Sounds. I am paused on taking new editing clients, and I am focusing on all things off the grid. I like to think of it as making this podcast my full time job, but I think it's really important to remember that I don't make that much money from just making this podcast. Again, the exact financial details will be inside the clubhouse episode if that's your thing. But overall, I will say here that paid ads on the show and clubhouse memberships, those are the things that I consider like, these are the things I would do if I was just making money from my podcast itself.

And those things combined only bring in about $10,000 a year right now. I just don't think my audience is big enough at this point. You know, most off the grid episodes get about a thousand downloads within the first week, and I love that. It's such a good size for me, and I love having the sense of, like, people are tuning in, and I get to know a lot of you. But it's also not quite big enough to create a sustainable income for me, at least not just from the podcast.

Right? Like, I can't actually live off of $10,000 a year revenue. I do need more money than that. And so that's why I created the Interweb. And within the Interweb, I also sell a small group program that's been quite successful.

And those two offerings then make up about 40,000 a year in revenue right now, and that is something I can work with. That is like a sort of year one income for what I consider a new business, but isn't really a new business. It's just now my full time business. I can work with that and grow from there. So reflecting on all of this here, I think what's really standing out to me is that it takes about ten years for something to really work.

And I've noticed that in my process, I seem to have about five years of doing something on the side and then it can become the full time thing. So I was doing audio editing on the side of grad school and after five years, it became my full time thing. I was doing off the grid on the side of audio editing, and after five years, it's becoming my full time thing. And I think it's really important to share that and say that and be explicit about it and even insistent on it. Because in the era of online business ruled by social media and paid ads and virality, it can seem like your business should be making 6 or even 7 figures within six months.

Right? There are so many people out there selling a quick 10 step plan to ten k months. And I just don't think that's how it works. Even when that does work for people, I think it's very fleeting. And I don't think that those tend to be very resilient businesses.

Right? Because if you build your business on social media and paid ads, as soon as Meta or Google tweak their algorithm or change a little thing, you can lose all of your traffic and all of your visibility. I feel very confident that my business is built on relationships, and no one can take those relationships away from me. And yes, it took me five years to do that rather than perhaps the, like, five months that virality promised, but I'm okay with that. Maybe it's just because I'm a Capricorn rising and I know how to goat it out for the long term.

But I really do feel like this way of being in business allows me to grow at a pace where my body and my nervous system can stay with me, And it allows me to just get so much more out of my work because I know the people that I'm working with. Like, obviously, don't know every one of the thousand people who tune in every week, but I know a lot of you. And I know over 200 people who are in the interweb who are listening. I know over a 130 people in the clubhouse who are listening, and that feels really good to me. And I don't need social media for that.

Right? I have created these other spaces. And so what comes next for off the grid? Well, that is something I'm not quite ready to announce yet. In some ways, because I I can feel the, like, striver in me trying to reach for the next big goal.

I can feel that voice inside me or the part of me that's like, you're gonna write another book. You're gonna launch a huge program. You're gonna do this. You're gonna do that. And, like, that voice is coming up with a lot of big ideas.

But honestly, I think that this year is not about the big ideas and the next big thing yet. I think that this is really gonna be a sort of in between year for me. I need to sit with being on sabbatical and see how I really feel about that. I need to stabilize the offerings I already have in the off the grid ecosystem and really hone those so they feel good before I create anything new. And then I am gonna be making some changes.

I do plan to move the clubhouse off of Substack this year. More on that coming soon. And I am working on not a book, but a new zine based on my are you a business owner or an artist or a secret third thing episode. I also have some fun pet project ideas, some things I wanna do just for the joy of them again. And so I'm holding myself back from any big goals.

Honestly, I want to enjoy this place where I've landed. I want to appreciate the fact that I have hit my ten year mark of audio editing and maybe I'm ready to retire from that. I want to appreciate the fact that I've hit five years of off the grid and now it is its own full time job. I wanna be in this space before I push toward anything else. And honestly, that felt really good at the start of the year when I decided it, and it feels really necessary now that we are almost at the January and we're seeing all of the awful things happening in The US.

I just feel like my energy is needed elsewhere. I wanna be out in the world supporting people. I wanna be resisting. I wanna be calling my senators. I wanna be donating my time and energy to local mutual aid networks.

Like, I think that this is a really good time for me to pause parts of my business, maintain in other places, and then allow my life beyond my business to become more of a focus. I've definitely spent the last five years really focused on those goals of survival and financial stability. And I think it's really important now to recognize that I've arrived at that, and I don't have to keep pushing. I don't have to keep striving. I actually have enough.

Alright, friends. That felt like a lot. Did that feel like a lot to you? I'm gonna take a deep breath for all of us. And I'm gonna let you know that next week on the podcast, I will be joined by my friend Nick Antoinette to talk about exactly this thing I just landed on.

How to arrive at enoughness, how to decide what is enough for you, and then how to radically change your business as a result. Nick has made some very big changes with their business over the past two years, and we're gonna hear all about them and talk more about business degrowth as a strategy for really rooting into enoughness and exactly what that means for you and your specific circumstances. That's coming up on the podcast next week. Before then, I will have a little mini bonus episode here for you on the feed as promised. And inside the clubhouse, paid subscribers will be getting my behind the scenes financial update recapping the first five years in my biz finances.

So head over there if you want all of the numbers, the dollars and cents of it all. Make sure you stay tuned to this feed if you just wanna hear more from me and from Nick next week. And for now, I just wanna say thank you one more time, and I wanna send you to the show notes to get that link to my free class on how your business can create change, to get the link to support and stand with Minnesota, to get the link to call your senators and demand that they defund DHS and abolish ICE. And as you do all of that, I just send you a huge hug. So much love, so much care.

And until next time, I will see you off the grid. Okay. That was an abridged version of social media by Surfer Boy and Wreck Tangle. To hear the entire song, find Surfer Boy on Spotify or head to the link in the show notes. Thanks so much to them for sharing the song with us, as well as to Melissa Kaitlyn Carter, who sings our theme song that you hear at the start of every show.

I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. And if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you will download the free leading social media toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit. Until next time, I will

see

you off the grid.