What four solo course creators run instead of ads

1. All four creators built a six-to-eight-figure course business without spending on paid traffic. Three are explicit about it in their own words; the fourth (Forte) doesn't mention ads anywhere in his 2025 review.
2. The structural funnel is identical: one organic discovery channel feeds one owned email list, and the product sells from inside email. Nothing else.
3. The discovery channel varies. LinkedIn for Welsh, YouTube for Clouse and Forte, Substack for Giaro. None of them try to run multiple channels at once — each one picked a single platform and went deep.
4. The smallest of the four (Matt Giaro) clears more than $10,000 a month from roughly 8,000 Substack subscribers, working 30–45 minutes a day. The largest (Justin Welsh) has crossed $10M lifetime revenue at ~89% margin from 185,000 newsletter subscribers.
5. Email is the conversion engine in every case. Time from newsletter signup to first purchase is days, not weeks — Forte's published median is three days.

Strip away the platforms and the funnel is the same in all four cases:

• One organic discovery channel. Free content published on a platform with built-in distribution (LinkedIn feed, YouTube algorithm, Substack Notes). The content does the work of finding new readers.
• One owned email list. Everyone on the discovery channel is funneled toward newsletter signup as the next step. The platform is the doorway; email is the room.
• One primary digital product. A course, a cohort, or a membership sold to the email list. Often with a single secondary product layered on top (templates, community, coaching).

What's notably absent from every breakdown: no waitlist tactics, no launch sequences with countdown timers, no urgency emails on the last day of a cart, no affiliate-driven traffic spikes (Welsh's affiliate program is the closest, but it's structured as long-tail referrals, not launch spikes). The funnel is dull on purpose. The interesting part is the consistency of the input — daily organic content — and the patience to compound it.

Two of the four (Clouse and Forte) name YouTube specifically as the channel doing the heaviest lifting in 2025. Welsh's anchor is still LinkedIn. Giaro is the outlier — Substack Notes is his primary discovery surface, not the long-form publication itself.

Welsh published a full retrospective covering five years and nine months of solo revenue. The numbers are itemized by product line, and at the top of the post he's explicit about how the audience was built.

This was achieved through 100% organic social posting on LinkedIn, X/Twitter, and Instagram, writing my newsletter, and with SEO. I never ran any paid ads. — Justin Welsh, June 2025

The structure of his stack is worth noting because it shows how the funnel layers on itself. LinkedIn is the discovery surface — over 750,000 followers, daily posting. The Saturday Solopreneur newsletter is the conversion engine. Once a buyer is in the email list, they enter a product ladder that starts with a low-ticket digital course (The LinkedIn Operating System at $150) and moves up to The Creator MBA, Monthly Templates subscription, and an affiliate-driven referral system.

Welsh also describes the moment the newsletter became central. It wasn't planned — it was a reaction to having an email list he wasn't using.

With 10,000+ students and Monthly Templates subscribers, I had a bunch of email addresses I wasn't really sending anything to. So, in January of 2022, I launched this newsletter, The Saturday Solopreneur. — Justin Welsh, June 2025

The affiliate program (3,247 members generating $600K) is the only piece that looks like leverage rather than direct organic. But the affiliates themselves are people who came in through the LinkedIn-to-newsletter funnel — paid acquisition wasn't used to recruit them either.

Clouse broke down the previous twelve months of revenue on his podcast — July 2024 through June 2025. Membership is the bulk of it; sponsorships and one-off products fill out the rest. He hasn't run paid acquisition at meaningful scale.

I haven't done nearly enough paid experimentation. It falls in this bucket of this is a great idea and I know it could work. — Jay Clouse, July 2025

The funnel sequence is YouTube → Creator Science newsletter → 3-tier membership (Basic / Standard / VIP). YouTube is the front door because it has built-in distribution and search intent. Once viewers are in the newsletter, the lowest membership tier acts as the on-ramp; ~62% of revenue comes from people who stay long enough to renew at least once.

What Clouse names as the deliberate design choice is moving people off the discovery platform as fast as possible.

My goal is to get people to discover the Creator Science newsletter as soon as possible and get into the world of email. — Jay Clouse, July 2025

Worth flagging: Clouse explicitly does not run a waitlist on The Lab. New members can join at any time. The conversion mechanism is consistent newsletter content and word-of-mouth from existing members, not artificial scarcity.

Forte's 2025 review is the most numerate document of the four — full revenue, profit, channel attribution, email funnel conversion rates. He called 2025 his "Year of Profitability" and attributed the gains to consolidating around a single high-ticket flagship rather than running many products at once.

The channel attribution numbers are unusual to see published openly. YouTube drives over half of the new audience and over a third of paying customers. The rest comes from word-of-mouth, podcast appearances, and the existing Circle community (13,000+ members).

The funnel sequence is YouTube → Forte Labs newsletter → high-ticket cohort. The email open rate is 48.6%, click rate 3.8% — well above the typical newsletter benchmarks. What stands out in the conversion data is the speed: people who sign up to the newsletter tend to buy within days, not months. That suggests the discovery content is doing the pre-selling work before anyone hits the email list.

The Notion template (2,350 copies sold in 2025) is the secondary product that sits below the cohort. It's not a meaningful revenue driver — but it functions as a low-friction first purchase that warms up the relationship before the high-ticket sale.

Giaro is the smallest of the four cases by revenue and the most reachable as a model. He's not a long-tenured creator with a back catalog — he started the current Substack in early 2024, hit 6,123 subscribers in the first 365 days, and grew past 8,000 by August 2025. The mechanic is daily writing, mostly on Substack Notes (Substack's short-form social feature), then directing readers to longer pieces and the email list.

Yet I make way more than $10,000 a month from my tiny email list. — Matt Giaro, December 2025

His best single month was April 2025 — over 1,000 new subscribers added without paid promotion. The acquisition came almost entirely from Substack Notes (his own posts, plus reposts and cross-promotions from other Substack creators) and the cumulative effect of daily output.

Giaro is unusually direct about the difference between an audience-building channel and a monetization channel.

Substack is an audience-building channel, not a monetization engine. — Matt Giaro, December 2025

He doesn't sell paid Substack subscriptions — he abandoned that model after testing it. The Substack itself is free; the money comes from a course (around $200–$400) and 1:1 mentoring at $1,500 a month, both sold to the same email list. The setup is the closest version of the shared funnel — single channel, single list, layered products.

Worth noting that he tested paid ads earlier in his career and walked away.

I burned $7K on Facebook ads in 2020. Walked away from paid traffic entirely. — Matt Giaro, paraphrased from his 2025 posts

Each creator chose a different platform to find new readers on — but all four converge on the same step in between discovery and purchase: an owned email list. The discovery channel is whatever has built-in distribution for that creator's format. Email is where the actual selling happens.

The pattern reads as: the platform is rented, the email list is owned, and the money lives where the audience is owned. None of these creators rely on a single algorithm to keep their business alive — if LinkedIn or YouTube changes its rules tomorrow, their existing email list still buys.

The other thing worth noticing: none of the four use the email list for "promotional blasts" at launch time. The email is the product surface — readers expect to receive something useful from it weekly. Sales happen as a natural extension of that ongoing relationship, not as a separate campaign.

Start with the original primary source for each case. All four creators publish regularly.

• Justin Welsh — The Saturday Solopreneur (weekly newsletter). The full revenue retrospective: "My complete $10M journey (all 23 steps)", June 7, 2025.
• Jay Clouse — Creator Science (newsletter + podcast + YouTube). The 12-month breakdown: "Ask CS Pt. 1", July 29, 2025.
• Tiago Forte — Forte Labs blog. The full 2025 annual review: "Tiago Forte's 2025 Annual Review", January 12, 2026.
• Matt Giaro — Matt Giaro on Substack (daily Notes, weekly longer pieces). Recommended posts: "4 Strategies That Helped Me Grow to 5,000 Email Subscribers", March 19, 2025; "I Abandoned Substack's Paid Newsletter Model", December 12, 2025.