Latest / Solopreneur Sessions with Fexingo: One-Person Businesses, Freelancing, and Independent Work / How a Solopreneur Booked 25 Speaking Gigs in One Year
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this consultant I've been following — her name's Elena, she runs a solo practice helping SaaS companies with customer onboarding copy. Last year she made sixty-two thousand five hundred dollars from speaking alone. Twenty-five paid gigs in twelve months. Luna: Twenty-five? That's basically every two weeks. Did she have an agent? Lucas: No agent, no PR firm. She did it all through cold outreach. And what's interesting is she didn't start with big conferences. Her first paid talk was at a local meetup — forty people in a co-working space, she got paid five hundred bucks. Luna: But she turned that into a national pipeline. How? Lucas: Reverse-engineering speaker lists. She'd find conferences that matched her niche — SaaS onboarding, customer retention, content strategy — then she'd look up the previous year's speaker roster. She built a spreadsheet of about two hundred contacts. Then she researched each one: what they talked about, what the audience liked, who the organiser was. Luna: So she wasn't just blasting a generic 'I want to speak at your event' email. Lucas: Not at all. She wrote a three-email sequence. First email: compliment something specific from the previous year's conference. 'I loved the panel on churn reduction — the data around onboarding emails was eye-opening.' Second email, three days later: a one-paragraph pitch for her talk, with a clear title and three bullet points of takeaways. Third email, five days after that: a short testimonial from the local meetup organiser. Luna: And the reply rate? Lucas: Forty percent. Out of two hundred, eighty replied. Twenty-five turned into bookings. Luna: That's a fifteen percent conversion rate from reply to booking. For cold outreach, that's exceptional. Lucas: It is. And her average fee was two thousand five hundred per keynote. Some were higher — one national conference paid five thousand plus travel. A few were lower, like the five-hundred-dollar meetup she kept doing for the practice. Luna: Did she ever speak for free? Lucas: Only once. A non-profit event that aligned with her values. But she was disciplined: she had a minimum fee of a thousand dollars for for-profit events. And she stuck to it. Luna: That discipline matters because speaking can be a pipeline for higher-value work, right? She wasn't just chasing the fee. Lucas: Exactly. Out of those twenty-five gigs, six turned into retainer clients. Companies that hired her for ongoing onboarding copy work. One client alone was a thirty-thousand-dollar annual contract. So the speaking revenue was great, but the real ROI was the leads. Luna: So the stage was effectively her top of funnel. How did she capture those leads? I imagine after a talk, people swarm you — but how do you turn a handshake into a contract? Lucas: She had a system. After every talk, she'd send a follow-up email to the organiser within twenty-four hours, thanking them. And she'd ask for the attendee list — most conferences share it. Then she'd send a personalised note to anyone who asked a question during Q and A or came up to her afterwards. No pitch in the first email. Just a link to a relevant resource — a blog post or a template she mentioned on stage. Luna: And then a gentle pivot? Lucas: On the third email, she'd mention her consulting work. 'By the way, I help teams with onboarding copy — if that's ever relevant, happy to chat.' That's how she landed the retainers. Luna: I love that she didn't sell from the stage. So many speakers turn their talk into a ninety-minute infomercial. She kept it educational, and then followed up separately. Lucas: Right. And the hidden cost of all this — she tracked her time. Each talk required about fifteen hours of prep, plus travel. She had six overnight trips last year. So the hourly rate on the speaking fee alone was about one sixty-six per hour. Not bad. But when you factor in the retainer clients, the effective hourly rate jumps to over four hundred. Luna: That's the math that makes it worth it. But I imagine the first few gigs were nerve-wracking. How did she get good on stage? Lucas: She practiced at Toastmasters for six months before her first paid talk. She also recorded every talk on her phone and watched it back — brutally honest self-critique. She told me she deleted the first three recordings because she couldn't stand her own pacing. Luna: That's the kind of behind the scenes work that doesn't show up in the success story. Most people see 'twenty-five gigs' and think it happened overnight. Lucas: It was a twelve-month grind. But she built an asset. Now she's getting inbound requests — conference organisers find her through previous event websites. Her speaker page ranks on the first page of Google for 'SaaS onboarding speaker.' Luna: So the cold outreach was a bridge to a self-sustaining pipeline. That's the goal for any solopreneur looking at speaking. Lucas: Speaking of things that build on themselves — if these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, Elena's story is a good reminder that small steps compound. And listener support is what keeps this show ad-free. If today was worth a coffee to you, that's the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it genuinely helps us keep digging up these concrete case studies. And we don't run sponsors, so it's just you and us. Lucas: Okay — back to Elena's system. One more detail I thought was clever: she always asked for a testimonial immediately after the talk, while the organiser was still grateful. She'd send a one-question form: 'What's one thing the audience gained from my talk?' She collected twenty-three testimonials last year. Luna: Which she then used in her pitch for the next conference. That's a flywheel. Lucas: Exactly. And she published them on her speaker page with the event logos. Social proof is everything. Luna: So if a solopreneur listening wants to start today, what's the one action they should take? Lucas: Pick a local event — a meetup, a chamber of commerce, a small industry gathering — and offer to speak for free or a small fee. Record it. Use that to build your first pitch. That's how Elena started. One forty-person room. Luna: And then reverse-engineer three conferences you'd love to speak at. Build that spreadsheet. Lucas: Right. Because the difference between wanting to speak and actually speaking is just a sequence of small, repeatable actions. And if you do it right, the stage becomes your best salesperson. Luna: Let's hope it works as well for our listeners as it did for Elena. Lucas: I'll link to her speaker page and her email template in the show notes. That's it for this episode — see you next time.