Early Exit Club

Writing about how I built a $30k/month solopreneur business and creating a community of people who want to work for themselves. I transparently share my income every month to demystify what it's like to quit your job and start a business.

Founder

Hustle Fund

Angel Squad Member

Growth Marketing Consultant

AngelList

Teleport

Glean

Vimcal

NickLafferty.com

My personal blog is a major part of my Early Exit strategy and it's something I've been focused on for the past 4 years. 

It helps me practice SEO and affiliate marketing on a surface I fully own and control.

VP of Marketing

Contractor Appointments

Magical

Briefly led growth marketing at Magical where I started a programmatic SEO hub, built a paid media testing framework, and started an email marketing migration project. Magical is an incredible company with world-class founders but I decided to step away and build my own business.

Growth Marketing Lead

I quit my job in May 2023 to work for myself and six months later I was earning $30k/month.

Here's how I did it 👇

I leveraged my 10+ year career as a growth marketing operator and leader to find consulting clients in B2B SaaS where I could use my best skills to help companies grow faster.

I was honest with myself about what I was good at and what gave me energy and focused my efforts on those things while saying no to opportunities that didn't give me joy or energy. 

What that means is:

👉 I help companies grow with Google Ads. I can fix any Google Ads account issue and turn around stagnant accounts with declining traffic and performance into money printing machines.

👉 I have strong opinions on the right and wrong ways to grow on LinkedIn, both organically and with paid ads. I help companies modernize their demand generation strategy, throw away outdated playbooks, and leverage authority-driven campaigns to produce pipeline over a long time horizon. 

👉 I'm a scrappy, roll up my sleeves and get shit done, technical marketer. If you bring me a problem I will figure out how to solve it, actually solve it, and then come back to you and ask for more. 

👉 I'm very good at networking and meeting new people on the internet. I try to generously lend my time to people because my life and career is the result of many people doing the same for me. This is both a superpower and a curse because on any given week I'll have zoom calls with 2-3 new people.

👉 I genuinely enjoy sharing my knowledge. That's why I started my newsletter, The Early Exit Club, where I unpack everything I've learned so far and share it 100% for free. I share my revenue numbers every month to show other people what's possible. Talking about money is not taboo and we're all better off for being open about it. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter here: https://newsletter.earlyexit.club

If you want to chat try sending me a Loom first because you're more likely to get one back.

Thank you for reading this far :)

Introducing the Profound Index: a public dataset of the most visible brands in AI search. Refreshed weekly and grounded by our Prompt Volumes data. 

The initial idea for the Profound Index was simple: let's track a bunch of prompts per industry and make the results public.

While the idea may have seemed simple, executing it at scale with a defensible methodology all while making it public facing was not easy.

The key challenge in building an AI visibility index is knowing which prompts to track. That's where Profound's dataset of real user prompts becomes critical.

The Index starts with real conversations from Prompt Volumes, collected from millions of users engaging with answer engines like ChatGPT every day, not hypothetical queries or search data. From there, we map the question landscape for each industry, track brand mentions, and calculate visibility scores that update continuously.

For each industry, we identify relevant user questions through a two-step process combining keyword and semantic filtering. Once we've mapped the question landscape, we collect responses daily from ChatGPT and apply Profound's proprietary entity extraction models to identify which brands appear in each response.

We calculate a visibility score based on the percentage of responses where each brand was mentioned. The rankings update continuously as new data flows in each week.

The Index also includes estimated prompt volumes for each cluster, showing not just where you rank, but how much the conversation matters.

This was truly a labor of love and a massive team effort. Major thanks to Sartaj R., Siddharth Chandrappa, Ali Vaghar, Joshua Prunty, Dimas T., Josh Blyskal, and Layla Baradaran who all played significant roles in getting this project over the finish line.

The Profound Index is now live on our website, check it out and drop a comment with what industry we should add next!

Nick Lafferty

Growth Marketing @ Profound | Helping You Win AI Search

Insanely proud and humbled at the turnout at our Zero Click London event today!

Hundreds of marketers turned out from all over the world to further their knowledge and meet other people in the industry. 

These events require a massive team effort to pull off and seeing the turnout and energy makes it all worth it.

On stage now is Jonny Bentwood from Golin, the very first Profound customer.

Right before we walked out, I said "Hey Mike, do your thing when you get on stage". 

We wrapped up Zero Click by Profound, London Edition, on Wednesday, an event that was bigger, more ambitious, and higher production value than Zero Click NYC only 5 weeks ago. 

A huge thank you to Aleyda Solís and Michael King for sharing their thoughts on the state of our industry. Here are some takeaways from my panel:

👉 AI Search is more of a brand channel than a performance channel, and the metrics you use to measure it should reflect that. Clicks are great, but impressions and brand mentions are also very impactful and can help ensure your brand is in the consideration set.  

👉 There has never been a bigger opportunity for SEOs to stand up and own this moment. Embrace the future and you can unlock more budget, more resources, and more attention from leadership inside your company. 

👉 In 18 months, the brands that stand out in AI search will have invested early and shifted resources (content, PR, engineering) towards supporting the SEOs doing the work to make sure their brands are highly visible in Answer Engines.

Thank you to everyone who came out, including my friends from Women in Tech SEO, Areej AbuAli and Erin Simmons (they/them). It is the privilege of a lifetime to put on these events and everyone at Profound could not be more grateful that over 400 of you showed up to our event this week (so many that we ran out of lanyards and chairs!). Thank you, thank you, thank you, and see you at our next one 🙏

So excited to moderate a panel at Zero Click by Profound London next week with two of the great minds in AI Search right now: Aleyda Solís & Michael King

This won't be your average panel, we had a prep call last week and both Mike and Aleyda disagree on more than a few things about the state of our industry right now. Things will get spicy. 

Disagreements are what make panels interesting, no one just wants to hear people agree with each other for 20-30 minutes straight. 

Over the last 7 months I've been at Profound it's been a true honor to get to know Mike, Aleyda, and other prominent voices in our industry like Kevin and Lily. 

I still feel a bit like an imposter here. I come from the world of paid ads and now I spend my days talking to and working with folks from the organic side. I've spent my whole career watching as the SEOs in my company look at my monthly budgets with envy (sorry, y'all). But folks, now is your time. 

There has never been more attention on search teams. Execs, board members, investors are all paying attention to you now. Seize the moment. Do not fumble this bag. 

Excited to welcome hundreds of you to our London event next week! Learn more about this event here: https://lnkd.in/gwMAXi2K

The recap video of Zero Click London last week honestly gives me chills.

I never fully appreciated how much work goes into an event like this until we started hosting them ourselves. The answer is an insane amount of work, stress, planning, and last-minute pivots that somehow all come together. I gave a shoutout to the team on stage at the event, but this event would not have happened without Layla Baradaran putting in absolute WORK. 

We landed not one but two massive events in the back half of this year and that's on top of our standard warp-speed pace of product releases, partnerships, research, and other marketing activities we have going on at all times. 

I have a lot to be thankful for this week, but working at a place that puts on events of this caliber is definitely one of them. 

Watch the recap below and I'll see you at the next one in 2026 :)

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