I want to introduce you to my friend Jay…
Back in the day, he showed up to his first-ever client pitch in his dad’s suit, carrying his mom’s iPad, sixteen years old, heart fully leaving his body.
He’d gone viral on Facebook by accident, created a fake event as a joke, accidentally saved a local restaurant from closing, and then thought, logically, “I should probably pitch them my services”. So he borrowed the suit. Walked in. Got the client.
So, that’s who we’re talking to in this one!
Jay Topp is Australian, lives part-time in Buenos Aires (his version of “slowing down,” which we got into later on in our chat), has visited 66 countries, built multiple seven-figure businesses, and has been fully off Instagram since his accounts got deleted in March. Not by choice at first. And then very much by choice, once April came around and turned out to be his biggest business month ever!
We talked for almost an hour and covered a genuinely wild amount of ground, including Nietzsche, his Christian upbringing, pure joy at a festival in Holland at nineteen, and what it actually means to build a business that doesn’t depend on an algorithm to survive.
The business stuff alone is worth the listen. But honestly? The other stuff is we talked about it pretty kickass, too!
The Hard Truth
I asked Jay near the end of our conversation what he’d say to someone who’s been doing the same thing for years, grinding organic social, following the rules, quietly living a life that doesn’t feel like theirs. And he paused and said:
“It sounds like it hasn’t got painful enough for them yet.”
No softening. No pivot to encouragement. Just, yeaaahhh, that’s probably what’s happening.
I laughed, and then I felt it, because he’s right, and it’s one of those things that sounds harsh until you realize it’s actually just kind, in the way that honest things are kind.
He’s not someone who grew up in the box and then had to fight his way out of it. He was getting kicked out of schools in his teens, starting a marketing agency from the back of a classroom, and leaving before they could expel him one last time. Courage wasn’t something he had to find. It was just how his family worked. His dad was an Australian boxing champion, and the thing he modelled for him, over and over, was how to walk toward the hard thing without flinching.
“Show me the mountain. Show me where to jump. I’ll do it.”
Jay knows that’s not everyone’s story. And he said that too, generously. But he also said he thinks most people don’t lack intelligence, and rather, they lack the courage to bet against consensus. To let go of a belief that’s kept them comfortable, to walk a path that looks lonely from the outside.
“To let go of what you think you know, that’s terrifying. You see why people hold onto beliefs that don’t serve them for so long. Because to let go of those beliefs would be to stand naked in the world and be all alone.”
Jay’s also been in two genuinely dark places in his life, deep nihilism, once when he left Christianity and lost the whole framework he’d been using to make meaning, and once after he’d hit the milestones and found out they didn’t do what he thought they would. His newest book, Art Is The Only Way Out, came out of the second one. It’s a meditation on Camus and Nietzsche, and the question of how humans make meaning when the old structures don’t hold anymore, and his answer is, essentially…you make art. You create. And that’s how you do it.
I hadn’t heard of it before the morning we recorded, and I was immediately annoyed that I hadn’t, haha! (I may have quietly ordered the book while we were recording.)
The Business Model
Jay doesn’t post organically. He runs paid ads to a book. The book, priced at $20, covers the cost of the ad on day one, so he can scale without bleeding money while he waits for clients to convert. He’s currently selling around 100 books a day. A book he helped write for another business in 2021 sold 2,600 copies last month. His email list is his, nobody can take it, and it gets a 40% open rate versus the 10% reach you’re probably getting on Instagram if you’re lucky.
He calls it the shift from creator economy to author economy. The content game is a volume game, post more, stay relevant, chase the format that’s working this week, build on land that doesn’t belong to you. The author game is different. Quality over volume, assets that compound, and distribution you own, baby!
“The book funnel frees you to be more free in your expression without needing to bastardize your message to get it in front of people.”
I’m not saying drop everything and write a book tomorrow (or maybe I am?!), but I am saying this conversation will have you think differently about what “building an audience” actually means, and what we’ve all just accepted as the only way to do it.
The question I want you to ask yourself is, “What would I do differently if playing it safe stopped feeling like the safer option?” Because, isn’t that interesting…
Show Notes & Links
Guest: Jay | Website + YouTube + Substack
Book mentioned by Jay: Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously by Osho
Jay’s books: Real Growth + Art Is The Only Way Out
Curious About Me?
I’m a former marketing agency founder and CEO, current Silly Rebel, and someone who has built four businesses in the last 12 years that looked great on the outside and quietly ate me alive on the inside. So yeah, I’ve been there.
This year I opted out. No social media, no hustle-for-visibility games, no building a life around platforms that don’t love you back. Instead, I’m writing honestly about money, business, and what it actually takes to build a sustainable life… not just a scalable one.
This Substack is where the thinking lives. The questions, the experiments, the unpolished truths. Honest thoughts for women who are tired of performing and ready to just actually live.
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