The Email Strategy Behind Her Template Business
Sometimes the thing people want from you isn't what you're trying to sell.
That's exactly what happened to Sam Vander Wielen. After spending 4 years as a corporate lawyer, she decided to become a health coach in 2016. But when she showed up at a creator conference called "The Good Fest" to find clients for her health coaching business, something unexpected happened.
A lot of people wanted to meet with Sam, so much so that there was a line to meet her, but it wasn’t about her health coaching business. They wanted to meet her to talk about how to protect their online business legally.
Mind you - Sam barely had an audience at the time. She had around 600 Instagram followers and that was it.
Fast forward to today, and she's built a business that has made over $8 million in the last 8 years with the same core products she started with.
Let's dive into how Sam Vander Wielen built her online legal templates business from scratch to $250k in annual revenue (and beyond).
Sam just wrote her first book! You can check it out here.
The Story of Sam Vander Wielen
Before the legal templates business
Sam spent the first 4 years of her career as a corporate lawyer following the typical path – but she was ready for something different. In 2016, she found herself cooking a lot in her free time and decided to pivot into health coaching. It seemed like a good mix of her passion for health and what looked like a solid business opportunity.
That led her to "The Good Fest," a health creator conference where she hoped to find clients for her new health coaching business.
Except something entirely different happened.
At the conference, people kept approaching Sam about legal protection for their online businesses instead of health coaching.
A week after the conference, Sam had an acupuncture appointment and ends up having this vision of doors whooshing opening. She felt like it was time to experiment and see if there was a business for online legal templates given the conference experience and this odd vision.
The start of her legal templates business
In March 2017, Sam created 10 different legal templates for online business owners. She built a new website with 10 blog posts to support these templates (because as Sam put it, this was obviously "SEOable" 😂).
Within just three hours of launching her website, Sam made her first sale – $347 from a complete stranger. And that was just the beginning.
Over the next couple of years, Sam continued to expand her template offerings. She eventually created what she still calls today "The Ultimate Bundle" – a comprehensive package of legal templates, access to a community, and more direct access to Sam for legal questions.
What's remarkable about Sam's business is how simple it is. She basically has had only two different product offerings since starting in 2017, and they haven't fundamentally changed – they've just been updated over time.
With just these two product offerings, Sam has generated over $8 million in total revenue since 2017. It's proof that you don't need a complex product suite to build a multi-million dollar business.
Getting to $250k in annual revenue wasn't overnight though – it took Sam about 2 years. But once she hit that milestone, growth accelerated dramatically. She reached $1 million in annual revenue in 2020 and has continued to grow into a multi-million dollar business each year since.
Everything Goes Back to Her Email List
From the beginning of Sam's business, she's been focused on growing her email list with Kit, but there's actually a lot of unconventional wisdom from Sam when it comes to her email strategy. She does a lot of what people tell you don't do and it actually works incredibly well.
Bait and Keep 'Em Strategy
As you can imagine, legal emails are only so much fun to read.
Sam's strategy to grow and keep people on her email list is simple, but it's not advice you would hear from many.
Sam will attract online business owners by essentially offering help via free content with legal help. If you go to Sam's website, you'll notice there's a free legal training.
The pitch of how Sam can help you as an online business owner is specific and clear. It's simple. Sam is going to help you protect your online business legally.
Sam will "bait" you will that clear offering, but just talking about legal topics probably won't keep you around.
Instead, Sam talks more broadly in her newsletter. She'll talk about legal updates as that's always evolving, but she talks about online business generally and about her own online business journey.
The common advice of "sTaY iN yOuR lAnE" is proven a bit wrong here.
This adds a ton of personality to her newsletter and people then feel like they know and trust Sam way more.
As one of Sam's friends put it to her, Sam is the "broccoli in your mac and cheese". The stories she'll tell in her newsletter are the mac and cheese. The fun part that everyone enjoys.
The legal advice and help is the broccoli. You don't necessarily want to hear it, but you know it's good for you.
As Sam says internally to her team, it's an "easy email" strategy.
Even with it being easy and simple, it's actually really clever. Let's dive more into that.
The Email Funnel Sam Has Built with Kit
Sam's entire business is incredibly simple and the email funnel she has built with her newsletter in Kit is no different.
First, this is her incentive email.
The copywriting in this email is incredible. Honestly, might be the best written incentive or welcome email I’ve received in a long time.
It builds credibility, but also these tiny hooks to keep me reading were amazing. Things like “I’m giving you a free gift in just a second” and “Under no circumstances should you accept $1 (more) online before having the 5 things I’m about to walk you through solidly in place.”
Well done, Sam.
The ending of this welcome email though is the cherry on top.
At the end of her welcome email, subscribers are automatically added to a 7-day email sequence – but they can opt out of it if they want. This accomplishes two things:
- It lets people manage how many emails they receive (preventing unsubscribes due to email overwhelm)
- It helps Sam segment her list in a brilliant way
If someone opts out of the sequence, it essentially tells Sam, "hey, I'm in a decent spot with legal stuff and know the basics. I want the advanced stuff".
If they stay in the sequence, they're either didn't read until the end or are at the very beginning of their journey with protecting their online business.
I don't have Sam's data to prove this, but I would guess that the people that opt out of the sequence are the ones that end up buying from Sam more quickly than the ones that don't opt out.
They're probably more advanced and if they clicked on it, they're definitely engaged readers.
Want to build a newsletter just like Sam’s? Try out Kit for free here (this is an affiliate link, so I do get some credit if you sign up with it!)
Growth Strategies That Led Sam to $250k
Looking at The Bootstrapped Report, there are 10 main ways founders grow their businesses to $250k in annual revenue. Sam primarily used three of these strategies to reach this milestone and beyond:
1. Media (Creator Partners)
Sam did something I found incredibly clever that falls under the "Media" category in The Bootstrapped Report - specifically through creator partnerships.
She would reach out to larger creators or people with larger audiences and offer them a free legal template if they would share out her legal templates or her newsletter to their audience.
This worked incredibly well.
In her first 18 months or so, Sam made over $125,000 just from selling her legal templates, primarily from this strategy of building relationships with creator partners who could amplify her message.
By providing value to larger creators first (free legal templates), she built relationships that led to natural promotion of her products.
These relationships grew over time too - not only would Sam be included in posts by these creators, but eventually she found herself on those creators' podcasts and partnering with them more deeply.
2. Social Media
Sam continued to post on Instagram except instead of health coaching content, she was posting about her legal templates. This has driven a good amount of revenue just by posting content there.
But Sam's social media approach has changed with time. Instead of just posting on Instagram where posts might last a week or so, she's focused more on evergreen content like on YouTube.
She doesn't have a huge following on YouTube by any means, but when your content there is highly specific like Sam's, every view is probably a high-quality one from someone who has a good chance of buying from her.
As Sam's resources have grown dramatically since 2020, she's also invested more into social media ads. It's a lot easier for Sam to do this now than before she reached $250k in annual revenue since she can calculate the lifetime value of an email subscriber much more accurately these days.
3. SEO
Sam wasn't entirely wrong about her legal templates business being "SEOable". When I researched the SEO of Sam's website, SEO wasn't the top growth strategy for her out of the gate.
It's been a massive growth engine for her since about 2020 according to Semrush.
I'm not sure what to make of organic traffic going down while organic keywords have stayed relatively flat in the last 6 months or so. I don't think it's ChatGPT taking her traffic. Maybe it's just more seasonal?
It's clear SEO has been a key part of Sam's growth but not necessarily a huge part of her journey to $250K in annual revenue. It was a post-$250K in annual revenue strategy.