🔒 My Q2 Biz Recap — Highs, Lows & How Much $$ I Made

Amelia HrubyWelcome to the Off the Grid Clubhouse. Thank you for being a paid supporter of the show. Let's get off the grid and into this super secret episode. Hello, and welcome to the Off the Grid Clubhouse. I'm your host, Amelia Frooby.

Amelia HrubyAnd this episode is for paid supporters of the Off the Grid Leaving Social Media podcast. So thank you to everyone who supports the show, supports my work in this way. I love having the clubhouse to share bonus and behind the scenes episodes with you like this one that I am sharing here today. So you might be hearing this on the main podcast feed, and if you are, I love that for you. Thanks for being a fan of the show, but you're just gonna get a quick preview.

Amelia HrubyAnd it's our paid subscribers and supporters who are going to get to hear the full thing. So what is the full thing? Well, this is my q two or spring twenty twenty six biz recap. I'm gonna walk you through the highlights from spring at Softer Sounds and Off the Grid, which are my two businesses. Then I will talk about some of the challenges of those seasons.

Amelia HrubyI will tell you what is coming up in my world over the next few months. And then the creme de la creme of these recaps is that I will walk you through my business finances from the first six months of this year. And I have gone pretty granular this time, so I'm gonna do a recap of q two, then I'm gonna compare q two and q one. I'm gonna break down the first six months of the year by offering and tell you how much money I've made from each of the different things I sell. So it's gonna be a really fun and kind of big financial recap, and I'm excited to share that with paid supporters of the show.

Amelia HrubyBefore I get into any of that, I do want to let you know that the clubhouse is moving off of Substack this summer. I first announced that I was gonna do this back, I think in February. I had a podcast on the main feed about it called something like the problem with platforms or the platform paradox or something. And in that, I said I was gonna leave Substack. I was gonna move the clubhouse to another platform, and I have decided that that platform will definitely be Ghost.

Amelia HrubyWe are moving the off the grid clubhouse from Substack to Ghost in July. So this month, as you're hearing this, I don't have exact dates yet. I have to figure out those details. But if you are a paid supporter of the show, rest assured that I will be very clear about how this transition will happen. I am endeavoring for it to be seamless for you.

Amelia HrubyMy hope, if all goes well, is that you won't notice that anything changed except the emails will look a little bit different and you will have to subscribe to a new private feed. So our private podcast feed will move. I will explain to you how to update your details, get the new feed once we've made the shift. And if you are just thinking about becoming a paid supporter of the show, if you're like, oh, Amelia, I wanna hear your recap, but should I join now if you're making a big change? The answer is yes, you can join now.

Amelia HrubyEverything will be taken care of. Go ahead and come into the clubhouse. Here, this episode, here, our entire back catalog of episodes and make the move to ghost with us. So I wanted to let everyone know that's happening at the very beginning of this episode. I'm super excited about this move.

Amelia HrubyI think it's gonna be really good for the show overall, and I will update you more when it's actually done. So thank you so much again for being a friend and fan of Off the Grid. Thanks for being a paid supporter of the show, and let's get into my recap, shall we? Here are the highlights, challenges, and finances of spring at softer sounds and off the grid. Alright.

Amelia HrubySo if you're just listening to the audio, please know that there is a video component to this wrap up. So I record a video of me walking you through my Notion dashboard, where I do collect these highlights, challenges, and finances. So you can see all of that on the Substack page or soon to be in Ghost, but you can also just listen and I'll talk you through it as well. So let's talk about the highlights from spring twenty twenty six. The first highlight of spring, which happened in the middle of April, was our twenty twenty six astrology and biz planning summit.

Amelia HrubyWe had such a good time at this summit where we had sessions from Maz George, Miana Melendez, Ray Sarafina Barker, Ray Amber, and others. We had a great panel on intuitive integrity. We had somatic practices to start each day, and this summit was sponsored by nine to kind who make anti perfectionist planners. It was all so, so good. And Clubhouse members, you have some of the recordings here in the clubhouse for you.

Amelia HrubySo I know Miana's workshop on how to get seen and get paid through your money and visibility houses and astrology that's here in the clubhouse. And my spring biz planning or gentle biz planning workshop is also here in the clubhouse. So the Astro Summit was great. And I love sharing those recordings with folks in the clubhouse and in the interweb. Another highlight of spring for me, it was not a public event, but was super exciting is that earlier in the year, I heard from off the grid listener, Sadie Gustafsson Zuk.

Amelia HrubyShe's a musician and she was coming through Nebraska and wondered if I knew anyone who hosted house shows or did sort of, like, music venues. And I was like, well, actually, one of my friends here has a backyard, and they host musicians sometimes. So we had a beautiful backyard concert right after my birthday with Sadie, and I invited friends and family, and it was such a good time. So I am so thrilled and grateful for opportunities to say yes to things like this. I love that it came through the off the grid community.

Amelia HrubyI really appreciate Sadie and her music. So I hope that you will listen to it and particularly check out her song kitchen, which is a really fun one. Some more fun things that happened in April or just in the spring in general, We had two very special programming updates in the interweb. We had our week of websites where Alex McGinnis hosted a one page website class, and then I had office hours and coworking so we could all work on our websites. And we had a Slack channel for feedback on website updates, so that was super fun inside the interweb.

Amelia HrubyAnd then more recently, we had a week of zines where we had a zines one zero one workshop with Maz George and then an about page zine workshop with Carolyn Yu. They're both amazing zine makers, and it was so fun to learn about zines and get inspired with Maz and then put all of that into practice with Carolyn. And so I loved our week of zines in the interweb. So fun. I wanna bring it back every year.

Amelia HrubyHopefully, we can. Another program that I led this spring was come to class, which was the intensive that I did all about how to teach and sell online with confidence and care. We had such a good time. It was honestly way more successful than I expected, which you will see shortly in a moment. But my favorite part was just meeting everyone and getting to learn and hear about all of the things that they're excited about, all the ways that they're thinking about teaching, and it was just honestly such a good time.

Amelia HrubySo I really loved hosting come to class, and I hope to do it again in the future. And then two more fun things to happen in the spring. Let me tell you, spring was packed full of highlights. So two other things that happened more recently were I got to go to TAFCon, which was the audio fiction convention. They had their very first gathering in Boulder in June, and I got to go out there and meet some of my favorite audio fiction creators.

Amelia HrubyI don't currently work in audio fiction. Obviously I do, you know, nonfiction interview podcasts, but it was a real pleasure to meet people in the same industry, but doing pretty different work than me. They had panels on creativity and voice acting and marketing and all sorts of things. So I really love Tapcon. Shout out to the creators of that.

Amelia HrubyIt was such a great time. And then also, on a more behind the scenes personal level, I did an office renovation in May and June. So I totally, like, knocked out a window and put in an extra door in my office so I can go straight to the backyard from my desk now. I repainted. I hung, you know, amazing quilts behind me.

Amelia HrubySo my office has a totally different feel, which I am really appreciating, especially because one of the challenges of my spring was that I had to say goodbye to my beautiful dog, Zoe, who is honestly just the creature that I have been the closest with in my entire life. I loved her so much. There's a plaque in my office where Zoe is employee of the month that my spouse, JJ, had made because she would work the longest hours in here. Like, every morning after JJ would take her for a walk, she would come get me out of bed and take me to the office to go to work because she wanted to be in her office bed. And she did that for the five years that I got to live in love with her.

Amelia HrubyAnd it was really, really hard to say goodbye to her in May. And I redid my office to try to get a different sense of the space. I just needed to clear some of that sadness and keep moving forward. You know, I took about two weeks off after Zoe passed. I just needed that, like, immediate break.

Amelia HrubyI was really grieving. It was really hard for me. And that actually led into another challenge of sort of spring. Overall, spring was just very, very busy. And when I had to pause for the grief of Zoe's passing, you know, I do like to say, like, grief is a sacred interruption.

Amelia HrubyIt interrupted a lot of things, and I'm glad I had space for that. But it also meant that a lot of those things got pushed into June, and so June has also been a really overwhelming month. I was hoping this would be a pretty chill month for me, but I've had a lot going on. So lots of highlights this spring, some challenges with grief and overwhelm. But the other reality of that busyness and of having so much going on this spring is that I actually brought in quite a bit of money for softer sounds and off the grid.

Amelia HrubySo I'm gonna share my finances next. This part will go fully behind the paywall. So when I talk about money, I like to ask that anyone who stays tuned in here remembers that the money I make is about me and not about you. And you may be involved in the money I make because you may pay me money for things. And I am so, so grateful for that.

Amelia HrubyI really appreciate the support that people offer me in this business. And I do my best to pay it forward tenfold by offering so many free podcast episodes, so many resources, so many behind the scenes, peeks into my business, etcetera. So some of you will listen to this and think, wow, Amelia makes so much money. Maybe it makes me feel bad about myself, but I ask, don't take that next step. Don't say maybe it makes me feel bad about myself.

Amelia HrubyJust let it be like, wow, that's a lot of money. Others of you will listen to this and be like, wow, Amelia makes so much less money than me. Why do I listen to her? And that is okay too. Ask yourself, why do you listen to me?

Amelia HrubyI don't know. Maybe you value my perspective in other ways. I make an amount of money that works for me and my life and the context that I live in, and that includes the many privileges I have. So before I talk about money, I also like to share some of those privileges in context. Right?

Amelia HrubySo I am a white cis woman living in the Midwest. I have a lot of higher education, including a PhD. I have a supportive family. My parents are still married. They're solidly middle, perhaps now upper middle class.

Amelia HrubyI now own the home that I live in. I have a spouse who has a job that provides us with health insurance. So there are a lot of ways that I am resourced from outside of my business that mean I don't need to make as much money in my business. That may not be your circumstance. You know?

Amelia HrubyAlso, I am generally in good health. I don't suffer from any chronic illnesses with the exception of occasional migraines that I have medication for. All of these are like the, you know, seemingly super personal details of my life, which they are pretty personal, but they play into how much money I need or how little money I need depending on how you're looking at it. So I share all of that to say once again, please listen to this next part of the episode with energetic sovereignty. Please remember that I offer a lot of radical generosity in the other parts of my business.

Amelia HrubyAnd I do talk about money publicly sometimes, but these breakdowns, I like to keep behind the paywall because they're very specific and they're very in process. Typically, I will try to do a money update in public at least once a year once I have a big picture view of what's happening with my finances. These quarterly updates are behind the scenes and paid subscriber only because they are kinda messy. They are very in it. And I am gonna draw some temporary conclusions, but I don't know what story this is gonna tell yet.

Amelia HrubySo if you wanna be a part of that story in the making, you can join the clubhouse as a paid subscriber or thank you for being here if you already have done that. And all of that shared, all of my disclaimers offered. Let's dive in to q two finances. That was your free preview of this off the grid Clubhouse episode. To hear the whole thing, just go to offthegrid.fun/clubhouse.

Amelia HrubyThat's where you can learn more about the clubhouse, which is our private podcast and newsletter that's exclusively for paid supporters of the show. It only costs $5 per month or $50 per year to become a paid subscriber, at least at the time I'm recording this. So if you would like to hear this whole episode and many, many more, just head to that link again, it's offthegrid.fun/clubhouse to learn more and sign up. Thanks again for tuning into the show, and I'd appreciate it so much if you upgrade to paid today. Until then, I'll see you off the grid and hopefully in the clubhouse.