Olly Richards had spent ten years building a language education business called StoryLearning. By 2023, it had crossed ten million dollars in sales and was running on about four days of his time per month.
Then he wrote a 118-page Google document unpacking how the business worked. Plain formatting, page after page of operational detail, like something out of a company wiki.
He linked to it once and stepped away.
Two years later, 19,000 people had joined his newsletter. A mentorship program he hadn’t planned to run had filled with applications, and the second business he’d quietly started had generated $1.2 million.
A decade earlier he’d been back in London and the closest thing he had to a plan was how he would juggle a newborn and a language blog.
Ten Years From the First Blog Post to the
Bookstore Shelf
Before any of this, Richards had been a jazz musician, playing London clubs through his twenties and living on almost nothing.
The music was the driver for him.
But that stopped being sustainable in his late twenties, so he moved to Japan to teach English, then took an academic role in the Middle East.
By 2015 he was 34, back in London with his wife and a newborn baby, “no job, no home.”
What he did have was a language blog he’d been writing on the side called StoryLearning, so he made a decision to build from there.
With the drive of a newly made father, Richards dug in, creating blog articles, books, podcasts, and digital products, all under the StoryLearning name.
By the early 2020s, he had started to reap the rewards of the hustle and could walk into almost any bookstore and find his own name on the shelves.
Twenty-five books. A million and a half copies sold. Ten million dollars in cumulative revenue.
The problem was, it had nearly broken him.
The anxiety, the 2am wake-ups, the weight of a business that had gotten bigger than the life he’d built it to support.
So he redesigned it. He cut the parts of the operation that demanded his constant presence, rebuilt the team around the parts that didn’t, and pulled himself back until StoryLearning was running on roughly four days of his time per month.
What was left was something genuinely rare. A real business, at real scale, running on almost none of its founder’s time.
Over a decade at StoryLearning, one lesson had stayed with him more than any other. Whoever owned the audience got to decide what happened next.
And he’d become curious about a new audience, founders like him, running online education businesses, trying to avoid the mistakes he’d made.
People he could compare notes with, and maybe build something useful for along the way.
The Audience-First Bet That Paid Eighteen Months Later
Richards started building the audience first.
His plan was simple. If he could get the right operators onto an email list, a business would emerge from it eventually.
He wasn’t sure what the offer would look like, but he was willing to give it three to five years to figure out.
The asset that would pull the audience in was a case study of his own business, so he decided to write the one he’d wished he’d been able to read years earlier.
Every system, every number, every decision at StoryLearning, documented for anyone who wanted to see how a real online education business worked.
He spent three months writing it and called it “Case Study: Anatomy of a $10M Online Education Business.”
The final document was 118 pages long, published as a free Google Doc.
To get the Doc in front of the right people, he ran newsletter sponsorships.
The biggest was on Justin Welsh’s Saturday Solopreneur list, which reached 175,000+ founders and solopreneurs.
Organic sharing kicked in alongside the sponsorships, and the document started to travel.
Readers rolled from the Doc into Richards’ newsletter, which was where the business started to take shape.
He wrote the newsletter three to five times a week, sometimes daily. Short operator notes, written quickly, sent often, on the belief that more emails meant more revenue.
The first paid offer he made was a marketing workshop Richards mentioned casually in newsletters as the natural step up from the case study.
He pushed every dollar the workshop earned back into ads, which drove more people to download the Doc.
The coaching hadn’t been part of the plan. People who’d sat on his list for a while began emailing to ask if he’d work with them directly.
He said yes.
The filter was simple. He only worked with operators already past $300,000 a year in revenue.
“I didn’t advertise coaching at all. It was just people emailing me.”
By the end of 2024, the second business had generated $1.2 million.
Sixty percent from one-on-one mentorship, twenty percent from masterminds and events, twenty percent from digital products and workshops.
Buyers Show Up When You Stop Trying To
Look Impressive
The 118-page document looked like nothing.
Plain text on a white page, formatted like an internal company memo, given away as a free Google Doc.
Most operators in his position would have built it differently.
They would have hired a designer and built a landing page with social proof and conversion copy.
They would have held back the most useful sections for a paid product.
Richards made a different call, and he had a reason.
“The kind of people I’m aiming at, which are established business owners, they’ve seen it all before. They know when they’re being marketed to. They just want the information.”
The plainness was a filter.
A serious operator reading the document would recognize the substance and stay. A casual browser would lose interest within ten pages and leave.
Richards wanted the first kind and was happy to lose the second.
The same thinking ran through every other piece of the business.
The mentorship was priced for founders already past $300,000 a year. He stated that filter plainly, in the application copy, with no softening.
Anyone below the line was told directly that his mentorship was not for them.
He was equally direct about how big he wanted his own business to get.
Richards said in public that he was capping his own business at one to three million dollars in high-margin revenue, and that he had no interest in growing it bigger than that.
Most consultants in his market would let buyers assume the business could grow into anything.
Richards said the opposite, out loud, and stood by it.
The newsletter ran on the same logic.
Three to five emails a week, written quickly, sent often.
Each one was an operator thinking out loud, in real time, in front of the people on his list.
And the coaching was the same again.
Richards never advertised it. People who wanted to work with him emailed him, and Richards replied to the ones who fit.
Every one of these decisions came from the same place.
Richards had built StoryLearning. He had the books on the shelves, the ten million in revenue, and the four-day-a-month operation to show for it.
He did not need to dress any of it up because the work was the work.
That is what confidence looks like at this level. It is the quiet of a person who has done the thing and trusts the people in front of them to recognize quality when they see it.
Most experienced operators have spent years being marketed to by people who have not built what they claim to teach. They’re skeptical.
So when they encounter plain work backed by real substance, they pay attention.
By the middle of 2025, Richards’ newsletter was earning around $63 per subscriber per year.
Most of that revenue came from a small number of mentorship clients paying him tens of thousands of dollars each, and he had not chased any of them.
They had read the case study, sat on his newsletter for months, and decided on their own that they wanted to work with him.
When they finally emailed, the buying decision was already made.
There was nothing left for Richards to sell.
What You’re Hiding Is Probably What You Should
Be Selling
Olly’s principle is that plainness can beat polish when it comes to building trust with experienced buyers.
If your work is genuinely good, the move is often to strip the polish back so the work itself comes through.
Here are two ways to put that into practice.
1. Audit one customer-facing asset for unnecessary polish.
Pick one piece of your back end that is not converting the way you expected.
Here are some likely candidates:
- Your highest-priced offer page
- Your lead magnet
- Your application form
- Your about page
- Your most recent launch sequence
Open it and read it the way a serious buyer in your market would read it.
Ask one question. Where am I dressing this up in a way that hides the actual substance?
Common places polish gets in the way:
- Stock photography or generic hero images that scream “marketing asset” instead of “real thing”
- Hype language that makes specific results sound vaguer than they are
- Bonuses, fast-action discounts, or urgency timers stacked on top of an offer that doesn’t need them
- Pricing softened by payment plans and risk reversal language that crowds out the actual value
- Testimonials cherry-picked for emotion rather than chosen for relevance to the buyer’s situation
- Bios that list adjectives instead of facts
Strip what is not earning its place. Replace it with the plain version of what is actually true.
2. Show one piece of real work this week that you would normally hide.
The case study Olly published was operating detail he could have kept private. He gave it away because the people he wanted as buyers responded to that kind of access more than to any sales asset he could have built.
Find your version.
It might be:
- The actual numbers behind a result you have been describing in vague terms
- The full sequence of a launch you have only summarized
- The unedited workflow you use behind a service you sell
- The honest cost of a project you have been pricing without breaking down
Pick one and publish it plainly, this week, on whatever channel you already have.
You are not doing it to teach. You are doing it to let serious buyers see what is actually there.
The ones who are looking for substance will recognize it, and they’re the ones worth having.