Josh Spector Chats with Ellen: All things content-led growth

A raw, open chat between Josh and Ellen about business models, growth and pivots inside their content-led businesses.

Jul 23, 2025

Welcome back to Chats with Ellen. Unedited conversations with peers in the online business, coaching and future of work space. Expect: trade secrets, advice we’re giving clients, and inspo to guide your business building.

Josh Spector Chats with Ellen

Josh Spector is a content strategist and the creator of For the Interested, one of the most valuable newsletters in the online business space and an early mentor in my own business journey.

Josh has been writing his newsletter for nine years, growing it to over 32,000 subscribers. He runs the Clients from Content membership and podcast, helping entrepreneurs turn their content into a client-generating machine.

In this intimate conversation, we dived straight into one of our shared obsessions: how small business owners can build sustainable, aligned businesses without getting caught up in the shiny metrics that don't actually matter.

Josh generously revealed the realities behind the scenes of his own business and a recent mistake he made with his business model and the subsequent aftermath of what’s happened since turning this ‘mistake’ around.

You can find my highlights from the conversation below, or hit play for the whole conversation to hear us discuss:

Why strategic content starts with knowing your actual goal (hint: it's not followers)
How to align your business model with your content strategy and why so many people get this backwards
Josh's experience hiring a business coach, raising his prices 10x, then completely reversing course and sunsetting a £1k membership
Why he chose to embrace "generosity" as his core business strategy… and how it's ACTUALLY working
The difference between building for scale vs. building for fulfilment (and why you need to choose)
How to price strategically when everyone's telling you to "charge more"

Enjoy!

Connect with Josh on LinkedIn, join Clients From Content, subscribe to his newsletter and check out his podcast.

The Ellen Edit

I’ve pulled out some of the insights that stuck with me from the chat with Josh…

From Josh

Content is not a goal in itself. Growing an audience is not a goal in itself. You need to understand what you actually want to accomplish separate from these platforms.
I felt like I had sort of screwed up my whole business. I'd spent years building this thing, and then just screwed it all up by trying to be someone I wasn't.
If you have a newsletter with 10,000 subscribers that gets you 2 clients, that's not as valuable as a newsletter with 100 subscribers that gets you 20 clients—if your goal is clients.
I don't think you need to produce more content, more time, more effort, more money. You just need to get better and more strategic at how you're doing it.
I believe you should choose based on what you're most excited to do, not what you think is most likely to succeed.
When everyone's telling you you're generous, it might mean you're charging too little. Or... it might mean generosity is your competitive advantage.

From Ellen

We can decide in this pure way: I am building this type of business model. Then everything else flows from that decision.
The mental load of solo business is so high. Every new tool or hire adds weight, so it has to be worth it.
I've found a lot of value and fulfilment from one-to-one work. For me to explore moving to a completely scalable, high-volume model, I think I'd lose a lot of that fulfilment along the way.
It's not about keeping up with everything you could be doing. It's about doubling down on who you are and what you're about.
When you hire a coach, you're choosing to change. You don't necessarily know what the result will be, but you know something needs to shift.

The Hard Truth About Business Model Alignment

Most people are building content strategies that don't match their business models and it's killing their results.

Josh's story is the perfect example: his scalable membership model worked beautifully…. create content once, serve many people, minimal ongoing time commitment. But when he tried to "go premium," he accidentally broke his own model by adding high-touch elements that destroyed the scalability he'd built.

The lesson isn't that low prices are good or high prices are bad.

It's that your pricing, your content strategy, your audience size goals, and your business model need to work together. If you can only work with 20 people a year, you don't need 100,000 newsletter subscribers. If you have a completely scalable product, you might.

The questions this raises for your business:

What business model actually excites you? (Not what seems "easiest" or most likely to succeed - because anything can!)
Does your content strategy support that model, or are you chasing metrics that don't matter for your goals?
Are you trying to win someone else's game instead of playing your own?