In 2024, Matt Lakajev made $1.56 million selling on LinkedIn.
He did it while telling his audience that the standard LinkedIn playbook is wrong.
Followers were a stupid vanity metric, he said, and most small businesses didn’t need content at all.
This is a strange thing to say on a platform built entirely around posting, and a stranger thing to build a million-dollar business on.
Rewind two years, though, and the picture looked very different.
Fifteen months into his business, he’d earned nothing, burned $180,000 of his own money, and found himself crying on a Wednesday morning.
But somewhere between those tears and the $1.56 million sits the thing he understands about LinkedIn that almost nobody else does.
It starts a long way from LinkedIn, behind an espresso machine on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.
A Latte Artist, 5,000 Cold Calls, and an Office Pod
Matt Lakajev dropped out of school in 2007, at only sixteen years of age.
What followed was a decade of drift.
Twenty-five jobs in four years, a rough crowd that sent two of his friends to jail, and eventually a steadier stretch behind a café espresso machine, where he got good enough at latte art to win competitions.
By 26 he’d opened a café with his brother, and by 27 they’d sold it for $125,000.
Ownership, he learned, meant long hours and slim margins rather than freedom.
So he tried the sensible path instead.
An accounting job, university at night, a version of his life he could explain at dinner parties.
The career pivot didn’t agree with him though, and at 28 he was left with panic attacks,chest pain, a constant sense of dread, and ultimately a breakdown.
The answer to it all came in his own words: “F*ck it. I’m gonna stop listening to others. I’ll follow my own path.”
The path turned out to be sales.
He landed a job at Zoom just as COVID sent the world onto video calls, and something clicked.
He ended up booking 750 meetings in a single year simply by asking himself how many emails he was capable of sending.
Three promotions followed.
Then he stepped away to find out whether his results really came from his own mettle, or he was riding on the back of Zoom’s name and the post-COVID wave.
He joined TeleSense, a small firm with no brand, locked himself in an office pod, and made 5,000 cold calls.
He closed around $1 million in that year.
Now he knew. He had the skills, and it was time to do something for himself.
Office Overheads And $180,000 Gone Before He Earned A Dollar
\In November 2022, Lakajev walked away from a $280,000-a-year sales package to start his own business.
It was the same month ChatGPT launched, and he’d seen what it could do straight away.
Here was a machine that could write the outreach he’d spent years grinding out by hand, and the posts and templates to go with it.
He called the business UnlockAI and set it up for LinkedIn, where the business owners he’d been selling to spent their time, and got to work packaging his sales skills into the new tools.
He built it the way he thought a professional company should be built, with enterprise software at $15,000 a year, plus an office and staff.
All of it set up before the business had made a dollar.
Eight months in, the spending had piled up into a $180,000 hole, and one morning in June 2023 it caught up with him.
“I’ve cried a handful of times in my adult life,” he wrote later. “And June 2023 was one of them.”
What pulled him out wasn’t a new tactic. It was noticing what he’d actually been doing for those eight months, which was talking to business owners. Around 150 of them, meeting after meeting, hearing the same problems on repeat.
Many had been burned already, paying agencies $30,000 for leads that never came.
He’d nearly become one of those agencies himself.
At its launch, he had taken on seven clients for done-for-you LinkedIn work, running their accounts himself, but within three weeks he’d refunded every one of them.
The model hadn’t worked, and he knew it fast enough to hand their money back.
So he scrapped the done-for-you model and flipped it.
He would coach them to run the outreach themselves on LinkedIn, using the same lead gen playbook he’d run at Zoom and TeleSense.
A coaching business needed almost nothing to operate, so there’d be no repeat of the overhead trap that buried him the first time.
By late 2023 he’d formed Seven Figure Creators with a co-founder, Steve Butler, and the machine that would make the $1.56 million started taking shape.
15,000 Leads and $196 of Marketing
The business they created ran on a simple rule: every post existed to start a conversation.
Lakajev published to LinkedIn daily, all of it designed to make his ideal buyer raise their hand.
Comment a keyword, and you got a free playbook. Download the playbook, and you were in his database.
By early 2025 that database held more than 15,000 leads, and every one of them arrived through a free resource rather than an ad.
His total marketing spend for the first twelve months was $196.
The selling happened in the DMs, through a process he calls Sell By Chat.
Anyone who commented, connected, viewed his profile, or grabbed a resource got a message.
Value first, then a question, then a few qualifying checks.
For the first two years, the person on the end of every one of those chats was Matt himself.
His co-founder Steve Butler was the proof you didn’t need a following to make it work.
Butler closed $100,000 in his first three months without posting once, and without so much as a profile picture.
Only genuine client fits got offered a call, and before it happened they received a document outlining the whole offer, price included.
By the time a prospect showed up, the decision was mostly made.
He’s claimed 472 deals closed from 1,426 calls, one in three, from conversations that started as a comment on a post.
The ladder those calls fed started free, with a five-day course that pulled thousands of opt-ins.
Above it sat a $3,000 program called Six Figure Creators, which by February 2025 held 660 members.
Above that, an invite-only coaching tier at $14,000 a year capped at twelve clients, and a $20,000 software package at the top.
His first 150 meetings produced 25 paying clients.
By October 2023, a single month brought in $80,000. Twelve months after the pivot, he announced the business had passed $1 million.
Cash collected reached $2 million by early 2025, with some months hitting the $300,000 mark.
In April 2025 he handed operations to Butler and turned his own attention to improving the product.
That September, he hired three more salespeople to handle DM’s.
The posts still go out every day and the DMs still do the selling, but it’s no longer just his hands doing the typing.
The program he built now charges as a monthly subscription rather than thousands upfront, and the newest tools in the stack are AI agents that scan LinkedIn and filter for buyers worth messaging.
The machine he’d once been involved in every part of now runs mostly without him.
One Process, Cheaper Hands
Step back from the timeline and Lakajev’s success rests on a single process he’s mastered.
Reach out to a qualified buyer. Start a conversation. Qualify hard, then sell.
He ran the same process on email at Zoom, on the phone at TeleSense, and in the DMs on LinkedIn.
Ten thousand conversations deep, it became the product itself.
The LinkedIn posts exist so buyers can self-select.
The database then captures them, the DM conversations work them, and the calls close them.
Every piece of the operation feeds the sales pipeline, and a working pipeline is the thing his customers are actually paying for.
Those customers are small business owners, many still bleeding from a $30,000 agency retainer that delivered nothing.
They arrive with an empty calendar and a real cost attached to it, as every month without clients drains the business.
So when Lakajev quotes his prices, the buyer doesn’t look at it as an expense, they’re looking at the potential revenue that could be added to the bottom line.
And against that number, $3,000 for a program or $14,000 for coaching is easier to justify.
The pricing also explains something else about the business: how it reached $1.56 million with so few customers.
In February 2025, the whole operation rested on 660 paid members and twelve coaching clients.
All revenue was born from a few thousand real conversations a year, worked through a dependable sales process.
Since then, Lakajev has been applying the lesson he learned back on the phones: once a process is proven, hand it to cheaper hands.
He built the method himself, one DM at a time.
Butler and the sales team now run those conversations.
The $20,000 package ships his whole system pre-built, and the newest AI agents run the prospecting on their own.
Every handoff moves Lakajev further from the day-to-day, but the process itself never changes.
Underneath it all sits the real asset: a database of 15,000 buyers who raised a hand, and a process to turn a raised hand into revenue.
Three Moves That Work Without the Cold Calls
Lakajev’s numbers come from thousands of conversations and a decade of sales work, but the thinking behind his business transfers to yours without any of that history.
Tie your price to the money your buyer will make.
When your offer helps a buyer earn more, the price can climb as high as the results justify.
Charging $15,000 for something that generates $100,000 is an easy yes. Charging $15,000 to trim $7,000 in costs never will be.
Cost savings run out, because expenses can only fall so far. New revenue keeps going.
Lakajev’s buyers pay thousands because a full calendar of sales calls earns them far more than the program costs. If your work genuinely makes clients money, anchor your price to that number, and walk them through the math in your sales conversation.
Work the audience you already have.
Content builds an audience, and the likes, comments, and views feel like progress.
They only become revenue if you do something with them.
Every person who comments, follows, or downloads your free resource has shown interest. Reach out to them. Start real conversations, ask what they’re working on, and move the right ones toward your offer.
If you’re posting but never messaging, you’re doing the expensive half of the job and skipping the half that pays.
Save the sales call for last.
A call with you, or with a salesperson, is the most expensive moment in your whole sales process. It costs real time, and there are only so many hours available.
So build the path to that call in order of cost. Social content does the first work for free. Automated emails and qualifying questions do the next part cheaply, and filter out the people who were never going to buy.
By the time someone books the call, they should already know your offer and your price, and be close to a yes.
That’s how one in three of Lakajev’s calls became deals. Everything cheaper came first, and the call only had to finish the job.
Sit with the numbers behind Lakajev’s career for a moment.
Seven hundred and fifty meetings booked in a year. Five thousand cold calls from an office pod. A quarter of a million DMs.
That is a staggering amount of rejection to absorb, and he kept showing up to it for a decade, on every platform his work moved to.
The process he sells today came out of those hours, tested and reshaped one conversation at a time.
And that process is exactly what his customers are paying for.
The fear of reaching out to strangers is real, and it keeps thousands of capable business owners posting content and hoping the clients come to them.
Lakajev hands them a path through it. Every step is laid out, the early ones are automated, and by the time a call happens, there’s a qualified buyer on the other end who already knows the offer and the price.
A proven process removes the guesswork, and with it, most of the fear. His clients follow the steps he spent ten years absorbing rejection to build.
Your next client is probably already sitting in your comments or your follower list.
The message is yours to send.