About Olly Richards

"You should raise money!"

“If you’re not working 14 hours a day, you’re not serious.”

“You’ll never be able to sell a personal brand business!“

…just a smattering of the advice I’ve cheerfully ignored over the last 10+ years.

Why?

Because I’m not building the next Uber…

I’m calmly building an ecosystem of online education businesses around my personal expertise -- language learning -- and writing about what I learn here on my personal newsletter.

I live deep in the English countryside, in an area known as Hobbitshire, 10 minutes from the beach, surrounded by beautiful rolling hills.

And while it seems like the entire internet is attempting to normalise hustle culture, berating you to "10X bro!" and shaming you with Stripe screenshots...

I'm a proponent of a different kind of goal:

• Align your business with your personal values
• Surround yourself with amazing people
• Build a business that supports your lifestyle 
• Indulge in creative projects
• Actually help people (yes, really)
• Create generational wealth for your family

Over the last 10+ years, I've followed a strategy of doubling-down on my domain of expertise and using that knowledge to create value in many different ways.

Here are some of the businesses I have (co-) founded or own a significant stake in:

• StoryLearning 
• Teacher AI 
• Langua
• OllyRichards.co 
• Creator Empires 
• Cohere
• Online Business Owner
• And many more

Each of these businesses have either 6- or 7-figures in revenue, and range from online courses to SaaS to AI to community memberships to high-ticket coaching.

(Oh, I've also sold 1.4 million books, but that's more of a side-project.)

But most importantly for me...

I have little to no operational involvement in any of these businesses (with the exception of this one, where it's all me!).

That's because I value freedom above all else.

Freedom to travel...

Freedom to indulge passions...

Freedom to collect my daughter from school at 3:30pm every day... 

Freedom to run cool events...

And freedom to work hard when the inspiration strikes.

These days, "working hard" means teaching everything I've learned about online business.

If you run an online education business, welcome home.

The best place to start is with my 118-page case study, which you can read free here, or pick up in paperback format if prefer reading that way.

Throughout my writing, you'll find a dogged focus on one thing:

Building a business in full alignment with your values & lifestyle.

This is important because 99% of business advice is intended to answer the question: "How can I make more money now?”

But “More money now” can very quickly take you out of alignment with what you truly want, leaving you with a business you don’t want to wake up to every morning.

Business decisions taken in alignment with your true self lead to a stronger, more profitable, and more valuable business over time.

All you need to be able to answer is … what do you truly want?

I’ll tell you what I want:

And if you have a business like this...

Why would you ever sell?

That's why I'm so anti-hustle culture...

Slaving away for years to build some imaginary future...

It's far too easy to make a lot of money and live an epic life right now. 

There's no need to defer happiness.

If you run an online education business, this newsletter will help you scale intentionally and live your best life.

To join the newsletter, and read a case study of how I grew my primary business, storylearning.com, enter your details below.

You can also:

• Read about my back story
• Subscribe to my YouTube channel
• Follow me on LinkedIn