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Welcome to March 2026’s Monthly Memo.

If you’re new here, each month I share my income, expenses and what I’m working on now.

In today’s memo: why I made a loss this month (and why I’m cool with it).

Grab a cup of tea, let's dive in.

The Freedom Metre

When I was a dentist, I hated how my income was tied to my time. As a writer, I began tracking leveraged income (scalable assets) because what you measure, you improve. I started the Freedom Metre in January 2023. I’d made $89,360.77, and 35.82% was low leverage.

Today, I have made 1,497,647.80, here’s the leverage breakdown:

But this month, I made my first loss in a year. Let's look at the numbers.

March 2026’s income:

Gross: $3,132.88

Expenses: $5,285.46

Net: -$2,152.58

It’s cool to see I’m about to break the $1,500,000 total revenue mark. I’ve been slowly chipping away at writing and building for almost 6 years now—with most of the revenue in the second half of the journey.

Although the past few months have been pretty slow, for good reason.

Income breakdown

• Products: $2,194.70
  • Digital Products: $833.40
  • Welcome Sequence: $1361.30
• Affiliate sales: $938.18

The revenue is primarily from my automated welcome sequence with a front-end e-book. This has been great for running ads to grow my newsletter instead of relying on social media.

Expenses: $5,285.46

• Monthly running cost: $4,777.36
  • VA: $2000
  • Ads: $1,644.97
  • Software: $1,132.39

The running costs are mainly focused on buying back time and building more relationships.

Now, you might be thinking that this month is a terrible result. But before I explain why I'm not freaking out, and I'm optimistic for the business, let's run through the audience stats first.

A quick note: ​​ I’ve been uploading two videos per week to YouTube. It’s been a fun way to share new ideas. If you want to write to grow your business, you’ll love the material. Come join 1000+ subscribers here.

Audience:

Total New Followers: 917

• ​X: 494
• ​Youtube: 150
• ​Linkedin: 137
• ​IG: 65
• ​Substack: 41
• ​Threads: 30

​X has got a little better over the past few months. I haven’t changed much except trying to enjoy myself as much as possible.

I'll be honest, on YouTube it's been a little more tough this month. I missed my first week of posting after 36 videos because I was running on a motivation slump (I wrote about being overwhelmed here). Like any platform, it takes serious time and effort to build momentum. My mistake was forgetting to have fun and starting to over-analyze stuff like algorithms. I've dropped back to just recording ideas I believe in and speaking to my one true fan, and that will do for now. Perhaps I will invest more time and energy in YouTube once I've completed my top priority, which is the Magnetic Writing book.

Newsletter:

Total readers: 26,102

New subscribers: 1,115

Unsubscribes: 838

Net growth: 277

Last month, I explained why I regretted deleting my list and losing over 10,000 subscribers (you can watch that breakdown on YouTube if you'd like). It's nice to see the list is slowly growing again. We get subscribers from three areas:

• Social media
• Cross-promotions
• Paid ads

Obviously, I'd always love to have a bigger list. But I'm happy with slow growth, particularly for a newsletter. It's not like social media; one quality subscriber is worth 1,000 lukewarm readers. It’s better to treat your newsletter more like an exclusive nightclub as opposed to an everyone-welcome party.

So let’s chat about the dip in the revenue.

The truth about making money online

When you are building online, there are two parts of your world: the live and the leveraged. Live is the work you are doing right now: content, clients, building relationships. Leveraged is building the work that works for you. Many entrepreneurs I know are stuck in the live world. They are committed to a certain monthly revenue and feel like a failure when they dip below it, which I understand—it’s hard to unravel your self-worth with your income.

But if you want to make your biggest impact, you have to be comfortable with making money in bursts.

The point is to build things that work for you.

I've spent the past four months spending most of my time on my book, Magnetic Writing. If you missed my essay, I lost 1000 hours of writing when my phone was stolen and mac wiped. So I decided to go HAM to get back to a good point.

I've now finished the third draft, so it's almost presentable, and I'm taking a little break from the book to create space for my next editing round. This means I get to build a cohort that I've been passionate about building. That's going to launch next month, and then I can get back to the book.

This is one reason I love business.

It's the biggest test of your discipline, your patience, and your ability to think long term. If you're having a slump too—but you're working hard and building things that last—just remind yourself you're playing a game that most people won't.

Leverage is the long game,

Kieran

Some stuff you might've missed:

• ​😱 I Asked Her to Be My Girlfriend​​
• ​I Lost 10K Email Subscribers Last Month​
• ​How To Become a Top 1% Writer in 2026 (With Zero Expertise)​
• ​Why I Deleted 10,000 Email Subscribers​​
• ​How to Become a Powerful Writer (Steal This Framework)​​

P.S.

The cohort is a 12-week sprint where I'll work closely with you to help you build a business around your ideas. It's for entrepreneurs, founders, and deep thinkers who aren't happy just writing with AI and creating shitty offers, but want to do something meaningful. You leave with systems and strategies to attract a high-quality audience and serve the people you can serve best.

The launch is on at the start of May.

Spaces are limited, so I can work closely with you. Click here to join 60+ on the waitlist and hear about it first.​