Where a manager starts: a plan for the first 30 days

From the outside the job looks simple: there is a model, an account and a chat with subscribers. In practice a manager is closer to the producer of a small media outlet — they are responsible for making the audience arrive, stay and pay regularly. Here is how the work is arranged from the inside and what to do in the first thirty days if you have only just entered the industry.

What a manager is and what they are responsible for

Formally a manager runs the model’s account. In practice they cover four areas, and a failure in any one of them shows up in the revenue within a couple of weeks.

• Content. A shooting plan a month ahead, not “we will shoot when we feel like it”. The manager decides which formats go to the feed and which to paid messages, and makes sure the material does not run out mid-week.
• Traffic. Subscribers do not appear on their own. Social media, collabs, paid placement — every channel has its own cost per subscriber, and you need to know it, not guess it.
• Sales. A conversation with a subscriber is a funnel: introduction, interest, offer. A canned “buy this for $20” blast breaks it at the very first step.
• Retention. Winning back a subscriber who has left costs more than keeping a current one. That is why in a mature account half the work is about people who are already subscribed.

In a small team all four areas sit with one person. In an agency they are split: the chatter handles the conversations, the traffic manager brings subscribers, the producer takes care of the shoots. The manager here is the one who brings the parts together and answers for the result.

A manager does not sell content. They build a relationship in which buying looks like the natural next step. The rule our team’s training starts with

What the income is made of

The first thing to accept: the subscription is not the main source of income. For accounts that have reached steady revenue the picture looks roughly like this.

The conclusion is simple and counter-intuitive for a beginner: lowering the subscription price is almost always more profitable than raising it. A cheap subscription is the entry to the funnel, and the funnel earns further down, in one-to-one work with the list.

A plan for the first 30 days

The urge to start selling on day one is understandable, but the month is built differently: first data, then a system, and only then experiments. Otherwise there is nothing to compare the result against.

Week 1. Work out what is already there

1. Export the statistics for the last three months: subscribers, revenue by source, unsubscribes by week.
2. Read the last twenty conversations in full — that shows at which step the conversation breaks off.
3. Collect all the finished content into one table: what has been shot, what has already been published, what can be reused.
4. Write the starting numbers down. In a month your memory will tell you things “got better”, while the table will show by how much.

Week 2. Put together a content plan

1. Separate the formats: what goes to the open feed as a shop window, what goes to paid messages, what stays for custom requests.
2. Set two shooting days a month. Regular shoots are cheaper and more predictable than daily catch-up ones.
3. Write out the scenarios for the first three messages to a new subscriber. Not a template to send, but a frame inside which the chatter speaks in their own words.
4. Split the list into at least three segments: new, active, dormant. From there the conversation goes differently with each segment.

Weeks 3—4. Test the hypotheses

1. Change one thing at a time: the subscription price, the sending time or the first message — but not everything at once, or the result becomes unreadable.
2. Keep a hypothesis running for at least five days. The audience’s weekly cycle is noticeably uneven; two days will not give you conclusions.
3. Once a week put together a report on the metrics from the table below and note exactly what you changed.
4. By the end of the month keep only what produced growth and write it down as a procedure. From the next month on it is the baseline, not an experiment.

Five mistakes that cost a lot

1. Chasing subscribers instead of revenue. A thousand random subscribers who never pay cost more than a hundred active ones: they clog the list and spoil the messaging statistics.
2. Selling in the first message. An offer made before the person has said anything about themselves closes the conversation almost every time. The first messages are about interest in the other person, not about the price list.
3. Working without a content plan. When the material runs out mid-week, repeats go out, and the subscriber stops seeing the point of paying any further.
4. Copying someone else’s setup wholesale. A scheme that works for a blogger-style profile may give a niche one nothing at all. Borrow the logic, not the literal texts.
5. Not measuring the cost per subscriber. Without that number any paid traffic is a lottery: there is no way to tell whether the channel paid off or merely produced a nice-looking bump in the profile.

The metrics to look at every week

The report takes fifteen minutes and saves weeks of working blind. Five indicators are enough — the rest are derived from them.

What to do next

After the first month the work stops being a set of separate tasks and becomes a cycle: plan — shoot — send — report — adjust the plan. From there it is not the number of actions that grows but their precision.

• Write down what worked as a procedure — otherwise the result will not survive a holiday or a change of chatter.
• Count the workload: one person can handle only so many conversations well; beyond that both the revenue and the tone of the conversation drop.
• Plan content a quarter ahead in large blocks, and refine the details month by month.

If you would rather not figure it all out alone, this is a fair moment to join a team where part of these processes is already in place. We cover questions like these on the answers page and in the rest of the blog.