[Case Study] How Lex Roman Makes a Living as a Creator with Less Than 10K Followers
You don’t need a big following to make money, have an impact, or reach your goals.
Hello, introduce yourself and briefly share what you do and your work
I’m Lex Roman and I managed to be a mostly full-time creator with less than 10k followers.
All thanks to my newsletters which have been the backbone of my business the last two years. I write three newsletters: Low Energy Leads, Journalists Pay Themselves, and Revenue Rulebreaker and I operate two subscriptions: Legends and the Paid Sub Playbook.
My specialty is helping people find their buyers. I do that for creatives with Low Energy Leads and Legends. And I do that for journalists with Journalists Pay Themselves and the Paid Sub Playbook. I had a 10+ year career in tech and I’ve been working for myself since 2019.
I make most of my money from memberships and subscriptions, some money from speaking, and a bit of money from sponsors and ads. Next year, I’m targeting a split of 50% subscriptions, 25% speaking, and 25% sponsors for a revenue goal of $108k, the majority of which is income but some of which would allow more delegation and expansion of my projects.
Let’s start with a round of rapid-fire questions…
What’s your most controversial social media hot take?
That you don’t need it. At all.
What’s your screen time and most used app?
I have screen time off on my phone so I don’t have any data but I’d guess I’m on screens 10 hours a day. Most used app is probably my password manager which was accidentally totally erased over the weekend, ruining my life for 12 hours but luckily the passwords are back and the screens are still in use.
Have you ever gone viral for something completely unexpected? Tell us about it.
I went sort of LinkedIn viral for the passwords being deleted. 80k impressions, 184 comments, 14 reposts. Really tapped into everyone’s fear of having their digital life locked out. Also had lots of people telling me I was dumb for trusting *any tech company.* Learned about a lot of new password managers!
What’s your go-to strategy for dealing with internet trolls? Are you a muter or a blocker?
Depends on how fun the troll is! I’m an avid blocker of people across the internet, troll or not, but sometimes I love a good banter with someone who takes the internet too seriously or someone who has a super backwards opinion on something. I block people if they appear too much and they’re not relevant to what I’m doing or if they waste my time and it’s not personal. It’s just feeds!
What’s a social media myth you’d like to debunk once and for all?
That you need a big following to make money, have an impact, or reach your goals. I don’t even have 1,000 followers on X but even at 100 followers there, I was able to chat with key people in the journalism and newsletter space. I was able to get interviews, get sponsors, and get subscribers using my small social accounts. Some of us are not good at the social media game, but we’re speaking well enough to our audience and they get it and come along for the ride anyway.
There’s something about the dopamine that comes through from celebrating wins online or even just from receiving an unexpected opportunity in a DM. It’s absolutely addictive.
What was your relationship with social media before becoming a content creator?
I’ve been on social media since 2004 when Facebook came to my school because I’m old that way. I never found Facebook that valuable though, especially after school was over, and was thrilled to abandon it for Twitter as soon as I learned about it. I was a huge fan of Twitter and advocated for pretty much every startup I ever worked for to get an account and use it to develop a userbase. I even did a hackathon at Twitter HQ back when Dick Costolo was the CEO and I started interviewing to work there as a designer but bailed on it because big tech interview processes take too long.
Twitter helped me get many job interviews, speaking opportunities, find local friends, gain internet friends, and raise money for causes. I even did a live radio show that raised $10k for a friend running for office on Twitter during 2020 back when they had better live audio functionality. By the time I deleted my Twitter account in 2022, I had about 10k followers. (And yes, before you ask, I do regret deleting it even though Twitter as a numbers game is mostly gone now 🙂
Given today’s landscape, I’m lucky I set up my LinkedIn years ago and have been collecting colleagues there throughout my tech career because now it’s a lot more valuable (and stable) and I’ve been able to pivot that content quite fast in service of my current projects.
What inspired you to become a creator?
Witnessing the power of Twitter—even in something as simple as launching a course pre-order there—made me excited about posting online in general and that evolved into the work I do now. There’s something about the dopamine that comes through from celebrating wins online or even just from receiving an unexpected opportunity in a DM. It’s absolutely addictive.
I was raised before the internet existed. I’m old enough to have owned music on cassette tapes unironically. I came to this content creation idea as an adult and it would never have occurred to me as a kid that I could make content without engaging in a bigger studio system. I wanted to be a movie director when I was little, and at that time, you had to get in and pay your dues at the major studios. Lucky for me, the decades of editing and production experience I put into that have really come in handy on YouTube and in sponsored content. Now, I’m trying to get all my movie and TV-producing friends to come over to the world of creators.
My goal is to get everyone from social media onto one of my newsletters and then into my subscriptions.
As a creator, what role does social media play in your projects? There’s always this debate of owned channels versus social media, it seems like you can’t have one without the other; what’s your take?
I use Twitter and Bluesky to drive traffic to my newsletter Journalists Pay Themselves and LinkedIn to drive traffic to my projects for creatives like Low Energy Leads and Legends. My goal is to get everyone from social media onto one of my newsletters and then into my subscriptions.
I love using social media so much, but it does not love me back. I’ve never been a viral creator. I find it hard to play numbers games so I don’t bother anymore and instead, I cater to my captivated audience and try to convert as many of them into long-term fans as I can.
LinkedIn is all vetted professionals so even though my posts don’t get much engagement, they get a high response rate in terms of people DMing, subscribing, or paying.
Which social media channels have you had the most success with?
The app formerly known as Twitter was my fastest growing by a longshot (10k followers before deletion) and most valuable in terms of how much money it helped me drive, but now it’s LinkedIn (5k followers).
Twitter was fun because it was so topic driven so if you tweeted about something, other people would find you and follow you and the algorithm was smart about how it served that stuff. It was also the easiest content to create. Just a sentence or two would take off. What made Twitter work for me is now mostly gone now in the X realm so I’ve hopped over to Bluesky to try that out.
On LinkedIn, it’s more about the quality of the network. LinkedIn is all vetted professionals so even though my posts don’t get much engagement, they get a high response rate in terms of people DMing, subscribing, or paying. Often those folks don’t even like the post, they just take the action. It’s a much higher value audience than other channels for us B2B content creators.
I tried Instagram and Reels for way too long and made a YouTube video about why I deleted that app too. I think Instagram is a solid waste of time unless you’re a lifestyle influencer or an ecommerce brand.
It definitely seems like we’re living in a time where independent creators are thriving, and the number is only growing. What would you recommend to someone who wants to become a creator?
It took me years of stumbling around to even embrace that I could make content intentionally as a job. I wish I had understood the power of the platforms I had built and how much value those audiences had to the tech companies I was partnering with years ago.
I wrote about this on LinkedIn recently but I had a long-term partnership with Amplitude that I sort of squandered and didn’t get paid sufficiently for. They hadn’t worked with creators before me and I had never worked with a brand in that way. This was back in 2017-2018 so it has taken a lot of years and a lot of conversations with other creators to realize how much money I could be generating for brands and for myself.
There are a lot of misconceptions about small audience creators too and I’ve now learned that us micro creators really hold the cards in the B2B space because we can convert super high-value accounts. Trust me when I say I’m charging a lot more for that value next year.
What are some creators/brands you love and feel like are nailing having a unique, interesting voice online?
Chris Nguyen is my daily inspiration. He’s on all channels but I follow him mostly on LinkedIn.
I also love design recruiter Hang Xu’s absolutely unhinged but deeply accurate takes also on LinkedIn.
My YouTube model comes from LaShonda Brown. I also have learned so much about partnerships from how she works with brands.
On the newsletter front, I am a huge fan of Kaitlyn Arford, Tarzan Kay, and Sparsh Saxena. Kaitlyn is a helper and stays on top of market trends to assist her audience with freelance work. Tarzan’s emails are hilariously personal but they manage to sell within them and I truly admire that skill. Sparsh has a strong take that’s also rarely heard and I love how he lays out and presents it in each edition.
