I Built a Solopreneur Business School Curriculum for $99. Here Is Everything Inside.
Three courses. 45 lessons. 43 tools. 100+ operators. Weekly Lesson Review & Q&A w/ Me + Limited Time Offer Three hours of 1:1 time with me.
I studied the economics of companies at Harvard and the University of Chicago for ten years. Then I operated, optimized, sold and advised companies for 20 more.
I spent the last two turning everything I learned into a system while building my personal brand online (Zero to 70,000+ followers. 6,000+ Substack subscribers. Bestseller. 100-person cohort sold out in 12 days. No paid ads. No launch strategist. One system.)
This week, I’m opening the doors to my first course and digital product.
The Operating Founders Curriculum
This is NOT a standard newsletter upsell or lead magnet.
This is NOT a PDF bundle with a Calendly link.
I am going to walk you through every piece.
If you’ve been following along, you already know the frameworks.
You have watched the Operating Habits install one system per week with a downloadable asset behind each one.
You have learned how some of the most iconic firms in business history have optimized their operations via our Operating Stories pieces.
You have learned how to Scale Down the Big Ideas.
The articles are the thinking.
What I built is the doing.
The Operating Founders Curriculum gets you into action.
What Is Inside
Three structured courses, 100+ operators, and a live lesson walk through and Q&Q with me every Friday for 52 weeks.
Course 1: The Operating Foundation
Five modules. Fifteen lessons. The operating system I used to scale a family-owned B2B distribution company, repackaged for one-person and small-team businesses. (The principles did not get smaller when the company did.)
You build a business model canvas.
Calculate your effective hourly rate by activity.
Find the Denominator Problem buried in your calendar.
Define your moat.
Install the Friday Forensic, the Decision Journal, and a time-blocking system.
Build an Operating Dashboard tracking seven numbers.
Design a 90-day Priority Map reducing 47 competing priorities to three.
Run a Quarterly Business Review using the same structure I use with 6A East advisory clients paying five figures a month.
Nine Excel trackers. Six Word templates. Actionable steps and business deifning infrastructure as oppossed to surface level theory.
Course 2: The Brand Operating System
The course between operating and content. Most founders skip to posting before defining what their brand is. The output is competent and forgettable. Like a well-organized filing cabinet with nothing interesting inside.
You build a Brand Association Map (what you want associated with you, and the equally important list of what you refuse).
Map your competitive field and find the positioning gap nobody occupies.
Construct your three-part brand story.
Design the 80/20 content mix (80% authority, 20% the stuff making you human and not a content-producing automaton).
Document your brand voice and test it against real audience perception.
Fourteen assets including a Brand Voice Reference Document (the documentation your AI systems will use to write content sounding like you instead of sounding like ChatGPT wearing your name).
Course 3: The Content Engine
The system behind Operating by John Brewton. Zero to 70,000+ followers. 6,000+ Substack subscribers. Bestseller. 100-person cohort sold out in 12 days. No paid ads. No launch strategist. One system.
You define your editorial thesis and content pillars.
Build the Engine-and-Exhaust model turning one flagship piece into eight to ten derivatives.
Learn the Counterintuitive Reframe.
Master the paywall architecture.
Install a Content Dashboard.
Run a Content Audit at four weeks.
Design a 90-Day Content Operating Plan.
Fifteen tools, including a Repetition Rate Tracker (the target is 60% reinforcement, and I have never met a founder hitting it without measuring).
45 lessons. 43 assets.
And this is just the start…
The Courses Change. Your Access Does Not.
Most online courses are time capsules.
Someone records the videos, uploads the PDFs, moves on.
A year later, the whole thing feels like business advice from a previous administration.
AI is rewriting how work gets done at a pace I have not seen over the span of my career.. The tools I teach today will be different in six months.
A static course in 2026 is a decorative item.
New lessons get added. Stale lessons get removed. Assets get rebuilt when the tools underneath them change. The course six months from now will be better than the course today.
Your access is permanent. New lessons land in your Classroom.
Updated assets replace old ones.
You do not pay again. You do not re-enroll.
I am inside this community building every week because it is the foundation of my business, not a side project I stopped thinking about on day 31.
The Community
The courses are the curriculum.
The community delivers the game-changing, compounding value.
Seven feeds:
Wins and Milestones (with numbers attached),
Ask the Room (advice from operators with the scar tissue to back it up),
Collab Corner (cross-promotion, newsletter swaps, referrals),
From the Desk (my updates and asset drops),
Resource Vault (every tool, organized),
AI Operators (workflows, prompts, tech stacks)
Introductions
200+ operators have already been given access. Consultants, newsletter operators, coaches, founders, investors, academics, creators, artists. A room full of people doing the same thing produces groupthink. A room full of people applying the same principles to different businesses produces signal above the noice and learning community that will remain evergreen.
When someone hits 100 subscribers or publishes a post with 3X their normal views, the room is their to celebrate with them. When someone lands a client from the quality of the content they’ve been producing, the room studies the mechanics. When someone asks a question, the answers come from an experienced, global community of friends and colleagues.
Members recommend each other’s Substacks. Swap newsletter features. Co-host Lives. The reciprocal engagement alone is worth $99. Everything else is gravy baby.
The Friday Sessions
Every Friday. One hour lesson walk through and Q&Q (for all 52 weeks of the year)
My real data. Not curated screenshots from a good week. Open Q&A where nothing is off-limits. If you want to know my revenue, my conversion rate, my worst-performing content, ask.
There is a second layer most people do not notice until they are inside. You are watching an operator build a product. Every decision, every course I add, every framework I test and discard, every mistake (and they are instructive), shared openly. The team operations. The tech stack. The launch sequence. What worked. What I will never do again.
If you plan to build your own course or community, this is the 52-week build log. The live version, including the weeks where the data said something I did not want to hear. Nobody was offering this when I was building Operating from scratch or when I started my personal brand building journey two years ago. I wish someone had. I would have paid well above $99 for it.
The 1:1 Sessions
Three sessions. Sixty minutes each. Your pace.
Not coaching calls. Coaching calls are someone asking how you feel about your progress. These are working sessions.
We apply the course materials to your business.
Your canvas.
Your positioning.
Your content strategy.
Your dashboard.
Your priorities.
You are getting three hours for $99. The cohort gives me a front-row seat to 100+ businesses, and the relationships inside this room will produce engagements and collaborations worth far more than the per-seat revenue on the table.
$99
Permanent access to all three courses.
45 lessons, 43 assets, and every future update. You pay once.
52 weekly live sessions. Real data, real Q&A. Plus the full build log so you have the perspective to build your own.
Three 1:1 sessions applied to your business. Scheduled when you are ready.
Less than $2 per week.
Scalability is overrated. Helping people is the business model.
Who This Is For
You are building a business, a newsletter, a coaching practice, a consulting firm, or a creator company, and you want a system underneath the work. Not more content. The foundations on which you will build a profitable business.
You have been reading this newsletter and thinking “I agree with all of this and I have done none of it.” This program was built for that sentence.
You want a room to really refine your offers and moat.
You want to build your own productized offering and want to watch one get built live to learn best practices over 52 weeks.
Do not join for passive consumption. Every lesson produces a deliverable. Every lesson can be conusmed in under 10 minutes and completed in under an hour. If you are collecting courses the way some people collect books they display but never open, this is the course that was built for you to be able to proudly finish.
Enrollment Is Open. It Will Not Stay Open.
Limited window.
The offer remains for only as long as my calendar can manage the 1:1 sessions.
Quality matters more than size. When enrollment closes, the Operating Founder tier with the 1:1 sessions goes away.
Free subscribers: becoming an Operating Founder includes full paid access. Every article, every asset, every tool.
Paid subscribers: upgrading adds the Skool community, the courses, the sessions, and the 1:1 time.
$99. One click.
Let’s go build your business, friends!
- john -
Companies are becoming tech stacks.
We are all becoming companies.
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Become a paid subscriber to access all the content ($7.99 / month)
John Brewton documents the history and future of operating companies at Operating by John Brewton. He is a graduate of Harvard University and began his career as a Phd. student in economics at the University of Chicago. After selling his family’s B2B industrial distribution company in 2021, he has been helping business owners, founders and investors optimize their operations ever since. He is the founder of 6A East Partners, a research and advisory firm asking the question: What is the future of companies? He still cringes at his early LinkedIn posts and loves making content each and everyday, despite the protestations of his beloved wife, Fabiola, at times.
Love this, John.
There’s already enough advice out there.
The harder bit is getting people to actually do something with it.
This $99 solopreneur course packs decades of experience into actionable lessons and tools.