How An Ordinary Dude Makes Over $40K A Month From His Link In Bio
Kyle Smith Had Never Sold Anything Online Before Finding Koji
In this post, I share the story of Kyle Smith, who uses his Koji Link in Bio to take home over $40,000 a month. If you want to keep up with my thoughts on the creator economy, entrepreneurship, and other dispatches from my life, please subscribe!
If I asked you to imagine a successful creator on Koji, you might take a glance at our home page and pick from one of the big names that appear in the "Featured Creators" section. After all, some of those people have followings the size of countries (and, in some cases, arguably even more power).
You'd likely be wrong, though. One of the most successful Koji creators—at the time of my writing this—is Kyle Smith, who has around 600k combined followers on TikTok and Instagram. Kyle is 35 years old, and, until last year, was working as a Sheriff's deputy in Idaho.
A few months ago, Kyle quit that job. Monetization via Koji is now his full-time source of income.
Kyle isn’t who we think of when we imagine a successful creator. He's never been to VidCon, for example. He doesn't have a profile on Famous Birthdays; he doesn't have an agent or live in a house in LA with a bunch of other creators. He's not grinding and hustling hundred-hour weeks. He's not burned out.
To be honest, I’m not even sure that he’d describe himself as a creator. Kyle is basically—and I say this in a positive way—just an ordinary dude.
But he's an ordinary dude who is making over $40,000 a month via his Link in Bio.
How?
It’s actually surprisingly straightforward.
He uses his iPhone to film the healthy meals he cooks for himself and his family, edits them, and posts them as recipes to TikTok and Instagram. At the end of each video, he tells his viewers to check out the cookbook that's available in his Link in Bio. It’s a PDF he made using Canva, and he updates it each month with new recipes. It costs $20.
That's it.
No ads, no growth hacking, no tricks. Just consistent content paired with dead-simple monetization.
He had been posting recipe videos for a while when people started commenting that he should make a cookbook—they said they’d pay for it. Kyle had never sold anything online before, so he searched YouTube for "How to sell ebooks on Instagram" and he found Koji. He watched a video, signed up, and within minutes had created a storefront.
At first, the sales were a trickle. He made $1,100 in his first month. But that trickle motivated him to keep going.
So Kyle kept experimenting. He tried different offers and placements, different calls to action at the end of his videos. One stuck, and now he ends every video with a direct call to action: “Recipe e-book in my Link in Bio.”
His earnings started to climb. $5,000 one month, $7,000 the next. Then upward—$12,000, $16,000, $25,000. Fast forward a year later: he took home $43,000 last month. More than he made in an entire year working as a deputy.
The app that Kyle uses to sell his cookbook was built in less than a week by one developer and one UX person, thanks to the power of the Koji Platform. When we launched it about a year ago, it didn’t make any waves; it didn’t get any press. But that app changed Kyle’s life.
This is the magic of Koji. When you expand people’s agency—when you give them new tools to help them interact with the world in new ways—you can meaningfully, radically change their lives.
To hear more about Kyle’s story, as well as his tips and insights, check out my co-founder Dmitry Shapiro’s recent interview with him on YouTube.