Before Sponsr.ru, I sold financial, economic, and political analytics to order for companies, investment funds, and research centers. I wrote articles for the Russian federal media and ran my own personal channels on LiveJournal, YouTube and Telegram.

The transition to Sponsr was in some ways reminiscent of any business shifting from serving large wholesale customers to retail. But otherwise this kind of business does not present any unique difficulties: there is the same need to be self-starter (who does not need additional motivation and a boss over his head), the same need for proper branding, differentiation of their product, uncompromising quality control, rational marketing.

I promoted the project through my personal Telegram channel, and then the project was promoted by "word of mouth" by the readers themselves, for which I thank them very much, because this for me is an indicator of its usefulness for them. It took me about 48 hours to reach a stable income.

Before we started earning on Sponsr, Crimson and I ran some pretty popular blogs where we wrote about finance and politics. We had some filming experience, so there was no problem launching Klub Zelenoj Svin'i. Our video director developed a convenient recording scheme that allowed us to produce our hour-long videos basically on the fly, and with good sound quality.

The project began to generate income from the very first month. We announced in our blogs that we were launching a new project, and, if my memory serves me correctly, we posted a video snippet so that potential subscribers would not buy a pig in a poke. Within the first month, we had built up quite a sufficient follower base to consider the project a success.

We earn 180,000 rubles a month on the project, which, after paying commissions, taxes, and the video director's salary, leaves us with a fairly acceptable sum. We expect that our audience will continue to grow, also because our existing subscribers will bring us new subscribers by word of mouth.

On August 1, 2019, my project on Sponsr went live. Initially I planned, like all sane people, that it should be some kind of exclusive, meaning that no one else would see it, only the guys and gals who put in the money. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way, because of the workload I can't make any exclusives. But as part of the project, I'm posting videos that are watched a week earlier by those who have subscribed. 

The only reason I can put out all these videos is because people have subscribed, because they are interested, and I thank them very much for that. This creates a financial cushion, within which I can give up on anything else, and do what is interesting to me personally, and what is interesting to people. I can say for myself that without this, I wouldn't have been able to accomplish a lot of things.

I had been running my channel for about four years before starting to work with paid subscriptions. I had been running my channel for about four years before starting to work with paid subscriptions. The biggest challenge was to dare to find out if people were willing to pay for what you have to offer. The fear of "I'm going to run a paid project, but actually no one is interested in my work" was definitely there. After the paid project was launched, I had to rethink the quality of my master classes: video, voiceover, workplace comfort. Yes, that too had to be changed, as the amount of work increased. Consistency is also important. As long as you're running a free project, you may or may not put out videos. With a paid project, I set a certain bar and made certain promises to subscribers, which I try to keep. So far, the only month I haven't been able to keep my promises is the one where my whole family got Covid.
A sincere thank you to my subscribers - everyone wished me well and patiently waited for the workshops to come out the following month. Nobody unsubscribed. I promote the project using my YouTube channel, where I publish short overview videos and my VK group. It seems to me that the stability of income strongly depends on the starting numbers. By the time I started the subscription based project, I had already been running a YouTube channel for a few years. Probably, if they both had started at the same time, the situation would have developed differently. In general, taking into account the changes in the quality of the videos and other things, a consistent income came in the third or fourth month of work.

Prior to working on Sponsr, we already had experience working with sponsors on other platforms. But Sponsr won us over by the fact that it is a Russian company, which is especially important for our audience. Therefore, many of our subscribers moved to Sponsr from YouTube, which has been profitable for us, as the American service has a much higher commission. We managed to achieve a stable income from Sponsr and it helps us to develop the project, to upgrade the hardware and to cover people's salaries. In the new year we are ready to storm new heights!