8-Minute Proposals Built a $250K Email Business

If I told you someone could create a $12,000 proposal in 8 minutes and get it signed that same day, would you believe me?

That's exactly what Allea Grummert, founder of Duett, does regularly as part of her email marketing and copywriting agency for bloggers.

But having the ability to close five-figure deals this quickly didn't happen overnight.

It took a $5,000 investment in an incubator program, creating one perfect productized service, and valuing long-term relationships over short-term gains.

Let's dive into how Allea built Duett into a $250,000+ annual revenue business:

The Story of Duett

Before Allea started Duett

Allea started out studying advertising and public relations at the University of Nebraska. She also picked up a history degree 'because she liked storytime' as she puts it. I personally think it's because storytelling and advertising are a perfect match - and because Allea tends to go above and beyond on everything lol.

After college, she worked full time at a small video production company as their production coordinator. Beyond just organizing video shoots and coordinating all the moving pieces, she got her first real taste of marketing by managing their online portfolio and bi-monthly newsletter.

On the side of her full time job, Allea started her own personal finance blog called AskAllea.com

Allea's friends were constantly coming to her with personal finance questions - one even cornered her in the cereal aisle at the grocery store for budgeting advice. I guess cereal really can break your budget?

AskAllea.com never became this huge side project as it was only followed by about 100 people, but it taught Allea a ton.

Through this side project, Allea taught herself everything from blog writing and webinars to website building and SEO. She also discovered something that would change her career path: email marketing.

As she dove deeper into marketing, Allea noticed that email marketing came naturally to her in a way it didn't for others. More importantly, she actually enjoyed it.

As she told me in our conversation, 'email marketing is the least sexy form of marketing, but it's also the most stable and robust'.

And she's right - I mean, I've had the same personal email address since high school, which is over a decade ago. When you have a consistent way to reach someone, it's just easier to stay connected. Which is exactly why email marketing is stable and robust.

With her growing passion for email marketing, she learned an important insight from a conference speaker that would shape her future: 'the things that come easily to you and not other people, that ends up being where the money is'.

Originally, she planned to start the business with her best friend. But when her friend became pregnant with twins, Allea found herself reconsidering the partnership.

The more she thought about it, the more she realized the risk to their friendship wasn't worth it. As Allea puts it with a laugh, 'I was bullied as a kid. So my adult friends, you think I'm risking anything?'

If you haven't noticed yet, Allea values her relationships quite a bit and puts a lot of effort into them. Kudos for realizing the risk of potentially starting a business with a best friend.

The path forward became clear: she'd build a business around what she loved, what came naturally to her, and what others found challenging: email marketing.

The start of Duett

To start Duett, Allea didn't just quit her full time job and take the leap.

Instead, she negotiated with her employer to go part-time in summer 2018, giving herself space to start building Duett while keeping some stability.

She still had AskAllea.com running, but she knew she needed more than just a personal finance blog under her belt - she needed real business knowledge.

Then came a perfectly timed email from Val Geisler, one of the first employees at Kit. Val was launching the Email Marketing Mastery Incubator - a $5,000 program designed to turn people into confident email marketers.

It was a big investment for Allea, but she knew Val's work from Kit and, as she put it, she wanted 'the whole thanksgiving meal'. No half measures - she wanted a complete blueprint for running an email marketing business, not just bits and pieces.

That $5,000 investment in Val's incubator program turned out to be a game-changer.

The returns are still paying off today, way beyond just the business knowledge. Allea learned how to carry herself with clients, present her ideas with confidence, and even communicate more effectively. Instead of hesitantly saying 'I think you should do this', she learned to confidently state 'we can accomplish this'.

The incubator also helped Allea develop what would become Duett's signature offering: the email strategy playbook.

By turning this into a productized service, Allea didn't just make her work easier to sell - she eliminated those hours spent writing custom proposals for every potential client.

Remember that 8-minute, $12,000 proposal I mentioned at the start? That's the power of having a clear, packaged service.

This email strategy playbook has become the backbone of Duett, driving it to over $250,000 in annual revenue in 2024.

Getting there took 6 years, but since starting in 2018, Duett's revenue has consistently grown year after year. Steady growth for the win 🙂

The Growth Channels of Duett

To reach $250,000 in annual revenue, Allea's growth strategy has been refreshingly simple. Let me show you the three main ways she's built Duett:

1. Events

Fun fact: this is actually how I met Allea - through events and conferences.

I knew of Allea through Kit's conference, Craft & Commerce, where Allea wasn't a speaker in 2024, but she led a walking meetup before the events of the day started.

Events have been core to Allea's strategy since day one - even before Duett existed. Back when she was running AskAllea.com, she attended FinCon in 2016.

In 2019, she went back to FinCon with the training from Val and some help with a business coach on her pitch, and was able to get a lot of clients for Duett by attending.

This is a textbook example of if you know your target market (in this case bloggers) and know their pain points (in this case email marketing), all you need to do is get in front of them and tell them what you do.

For Allea, this meant showing up at conferences where bloggers hang out and basically saying, 'you know that task that you know is really valuable and you should be doing (cough email marketing cough)? Yeah, I can build your foundation for it and get you on your way.'

This has sometimes looked like Allea being a speaker at these events (she taught a workshop at FinCon in 2024) or is attendee networking during the events.

These events haven't just been about finding clients - they've helped Allea grow as a founder too.

Prior to the start of Craft & Commerce in 2023, Allea was invited to help lead the mastermind with six-figure and seven-figure business owners. There, one of the business owners in the room, told Allea she was providing a ton of value and effectively that her limitation at that time was that she was playing small. This is where Allea realized she wasn't giving her work enough credit.

It's a perfect example of how customer feedback, even when it's tough to hear, can transform your business.

2. Relationships

If you've read this entire deep dive, you've noticed that Allea deeply values her relationships with people.

I got to see this firsthand when we were at FinCon. One of the attendees had a bunch of questions about email marketing and specific tactics, and Allea just started sharing all these tips and helpful resources without hesitation.

This wasn't just a one-off thing - Allea invests in people, whether they're strangers, team members, or clients.

One quote from Allea really drives this home: 'if I'm asking people to invest $12,000 with me, I can invest $10,000 in a business coach for six months'.

Now, she's not saying you need to hire a $10,000 business coach for one $12,000 client. But it shows how seriously she takes her responsibility to deliver value. She's constantly investing in herself to better serve her clients and her team.

You can see this in her client testimonials too: 'Every time Allea writes for me, she delights me with her knowledge of online business. She doesn't just write what I tell her to but goes above and beyond to suggest additions that make my offers better.'

The result? Not just happy clients, but clients who actively refer others to Duett.

When you invest in relationships like Allea does, there's always a return - both in revenue and in the impact you get to make.

3. Media

There's a chance Allea reads the heading of this growth channel and is surprised I put it on here.

Let me be super clear though - I'm not talking about viral social media posts or features in major publications.

While that kind of exposure would be cool, it's not how Allea has built Duett. Instead, she's used media in a much smarter way: niche podcasts.

Take the Food Blogger Pro podcast, for example. In Fall 2019, Allea landed a guest spot through Val Geisler (mentioned above). That single podcast appearance brought in leads from food bloggers for the next 8 months.

If you search for Allea online, you'll find her as a guest on all sorts of these niche podcasts.

They might not be the biggest names in podcasting, but that's not the point. Like we saw with events - when you know exactly what you offer and can get in front of the right people, magic happens.

Now Allea's taking it a step further with her own podcast, Happy Subscribers.

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It's a clever move - she gets to build trust with new people while also highlighting all the relationships she's built over the last 6 years.

Her podcast feels like the perfect way to bring all her growth strategies together in one place: relationships, events, and media all working together.

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You can learn more about Duett on their website and get a free Airtable content calendar template by Allea here.

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