You're listening to Cubicle to CEO, Episode 231. Hey, friends, it's your host, Ellen Yin, just like that another 90 days has sped past in our business. So we're back for another quarterly income reports, I have been publicly sharing my income reports for my business since 2019. So this is our fifth year now of reporting exactly what our business makes spends and profits every 90 days. And if you're new here, you can catch up on all of our past income reports at Ellenyin.com/incomereport. But if you're not new here, then you know, we've been doing this practice for so many years because we really believe that financial transparency is the future and that we all benefit when we collectively share our insights and our data. And we don't gate keep this really important information. So this is part of our advocacy work as a media platform that creates content through a financially transparent lens. And I hope it inspires you to be more transparent in whatever way makes sense for you, in terms of money conversations. So here are our q4 2023 numbers.
Welcome to Cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful founders and CEOs the business questions you can't google. I'm your host, Ellen Yin, every Monday go behind the business and a case study style interview with the leading entrepreneur who shares one specific growth strategy they've tested in their own business, exactly how they implemented it, and what the results and revenue were. You'll also hear financially transparent insights from my own journey bootstrapping our media company from a $300 freelance project into millions in revenue.
All right, so this income report covers the months of October, November and December 2023. Our income for these 90 days totaled just over $149,000. And of the three months, the highest revenue month was December, our expenses over these 90 days totaled $98,000. And our profit was just over $51,000. So that leaves us with a profit margin of 34%. Now, if you've been following our income reports for a long time, then you know, as a company, based on our unique business model, we aim for a 30% pre tax profit margin throughout the year, and some months that may fluctuate up and down. But in general, that's kind of our success metric that we're shooting for.
I do also want to clarify that when I say pre tax profit margin, that is our net income as a business that we keep after all expenses are paid. So that includes payroll, our W-2 wages, that we pay our employees as well as myself as an owner of the business, and then also anything we pay to our contractors. So I know when some people share income reports, if they're a solopreneur, especially, they may treat profit or take home pay as the same as owners pay. But within our business payroll is, you know, labor I should say as a whole is counted as part of our expenses. So profit is actually accounting for what our business keeps after we have paid our payroll costs and any other wages that we're paying for labor on our team.
Speaking of, labor and variable overheads were our two largest expense categories in November and December. And advertising and marketing and labor were the two largest expense categories for October. The reason advertising and marketing was a larger expense category in October and then was not in November in December is because in October, we had our pay to create challenge, which is a live challenge that we typically invest in running ads for. So we did have a launch also in December, which I'll talk about in just a moment. But that was a purely organic launch, we only sold to our existing audience. Whereas with Paid to create, we usually, I would say close to 50% of our enrollments usually come from cold audiences.
So people who previous to the challenge, were not part of our community, we're not on our email list or following us on social media. So we really rely on cold traffic, and particularly running ads on meta, aka, Instagram and Facebook to drive sales for that particular challenge. And we'll talk a little bit more about the 10th cohort of paid to create in just a moment because it was unique in the way that we structured the pricing model for this challenge compared to the nine previous cohorts of running this challenge.
Also, if you're curious, I will be covering our full year stats at the end of this episode. So what we generated in red Vanunu for all of 2023 as well as our overall profit margin for the year, so make sure you stay tuned until the end of the episode if you want to catch those stats.
Now let's get into some of the highlights of this past quarter. I'll start with October because a lot of really cool things happened in October. So first off, are photoshoot with WorkPlay Branding, if you've never heard of WorkPlay, there are really innovative branding company that flies to you wherever you are. And once a quarter, we'll shoot video and photo content for you. So 90 days, honestly, it's a lot more than 90 days, like I'm talking 1000s of images that you can use for much longer than a 90 day window. But anyways, they come to you, they shoot that content, everything is custom to your brand. From the shot list to the editing aesthetic, it's a really awesome innovative business. So if you are looking for a company to partner with for your content needs, I highly, highly recommend WorkPlay, I will drop actually, there's a email that we had sent to our community sharing a little bit more about their service, I'll drop that link for you below in the show notes. Or if you're watching this on YouTube in the description box in case you want to check them out.
But what was cool about this photo shoot in particular was usually when we're doing a brand photo shoot, it's just you know, photos of myself or sometimes my team so we keep it internal. But this time, because we knew we were going to be publicly launching the C-Suite, which is our flagship annual membership for small business CEOs. We wanted to create some original assets that actually showcased real life members of our community.
So we actually put a call out inside our membership, like hey, if you are local to Oregon, or if you're willing to travel to us for a day we'd love to include you in this photoshoot. And we had about a dozen or so of our members come join us for this photoshoot, which again, was just such a blast to get to know some of these people who I had been talking to for years potentially online. Isabel, for example, shout out Isabel Sarley, I think she traveled the furthest distance came all the way down from Seattle to be with us for this shoot. But we also had, you know, local members come and join us. And it was just really awesome to be able to create imagery that really represented the full richness and diversity of our community.
So anyways, those images you'll probably see rolled out in some of our content over the next few months over this next year as we really focus on presenting the C-Suite and all that our amazing community has to offer. But that was a really cool highlight for me in 2023. Also in October, we found out that our podcast this very podcast, you're listening to Cubicle to CEO was one of five shows selected by OSSA, which is an ad network that our podcast works with, they decided to feature five shows who are part of their podcasts are in residence program on a billboard in Times Square.
Now, this is a lifelong dream of mine bucket list item for sure I never imagined it would happen so early. And I mean, it was such a pinch me moment, Dustin, my husband and I decided to fly out to New York to see in person. I felt like I could not leave it to the street cams or whatever I wanted to see it in person. And I'm so glad we took that trip because it truly was such a surreal moment just standing in crowded Times Square feeling the energy around you and seeing our podcast and my face up on a huge billboard on the side of a building. I mean, just unreal. If you didn't get a chance to see and follow that adventure in real time, I'll make sure to post the real link below where I kind of captured the billboard experience. So if you want to give that a peek, it'll be below for you. But definitely one of the top moments of last year.
Also in October again, I told you a lot happened this month, right? Also in October was our 10th cohort of paid to create. So paid to create if you're new here is our live three day challenge. It's a fan favorite in our community, we help people turn their existing knowledge or an idea in their brain into an online course that they can actually pre sell and enroll their first paying students for before they create any of the lesson content upfront. So this really protects people because instead of wasting a bunch of time and money creating a course you're not sure will sell you actually get to validate your idea first by enrolling ping students. And then you get a cash injection that you can use to essentially bootstrap your entire course creation process. There's also a lot of built in accountability. And we've been able to take more than 2000 students through this process successfully.
So October was our 10th cohort and we really wanted to celebrate by doing something a little bit different than what we have done in the past. So for the first time ever as a company but also for this offer, we decided to take is a pay what you want price model. So what this means essentially is so we we host everything on Kajabi. That's also where we host our checkout cart system, and Kajabi in 2023 released Kajabi payments, which has been such a godsend because now we have so many more flexible payment options, we've been able to incorporate Apple Pay, Google Pay, Afterpay for people who want to use like a buy now pay later option, but also they rolled out 'pay what you want' which essentially just allows the customer to set the price of what they want to pay for a product. And you are able to set a minimum. So we did set the minimum at $10.
Usually our challenge is priced at $55 a ticket for the general admission, we reduce that to $10 as a minimum buy in, but then it was up to the customer if they wanted to pay anything more than $10. And I will say the stats were really interesting. So I went ahead and pulled our sales data. And we found that 89% of our challenge participants purchased at the minimum cost of $10. Which is unsurprising, right? I mean, if you give people that minimum threshold, I expected, I actually expected even more than 89% to just choose the the minimum that we had set. What surprised me was actually the 11% of people who chose to pay more than the minimum.
So we kind of had a whole range of different prices that people set for themselves, if they chose to pay above the minimum threshold, the highest contribution, the highest ticket price someone set for themselves was $151. So that's almost three times the price of what we normally charge for the challenge $55. So that was a really interesting experiment, just to see, if you give people the option, will they actually pay more if they perceive that the challenge is, is worth more than the price, you set it up.
And I will say historically, in our feedback forms for this challenge, we usually get such great feedback from people saying, Oh, I would have you know, having done this experience. Now, I would have easily paid $200, $300, $400, $500 for this challenge. So I would say pretty consistently exceed people's expectations in terms of, you know, what they paid versus the value they got. So I'm glad that we were able to keep up that you know, that same cycle with this cohort. But it was again, just a really interesting experiment to play with the pay what you want model.
And I think having done it now once. One thing we did change this cohort, in addition to the pricing structure is because the pricing structure was so low, it really put a little bit more emphasis from a revenue perspective on us needing to sell the VIP upgrade to kind of make up the difference, right revenue wise. Otherwise, if we didn't really focus on that VIP upgrade, then we're taking a huge loss on the front end by only charging $10 instead of the normal $55. So to incentivize and encourage VIP upgrades in the past with our other cohorts when we charge at the normal full price.
If you join with general admission, then you basically when we do our daily live trainings, you have access to all of those trainings for the week that our pop up, community is open. So we have a pop up group that is live for seven days, you have access for the whole week. And if you miss, you know one of the live trainings, you're able to really catch up anytime within those seven days before we close the group. With the 10th cohort, we decided to test something new. And we made each day's live training only available for 24 hours. So you had 24 hours to catch the replay before that day's training or the previous day's training, I should say, got removed, and then the new training that new days training would replace it.
So we still got a really high, what is the word, participation rate, like I would say if I had to estimate live each day, we had probably a 40 to 50% show up rate, which was great, especially for the time of year that it was and I feel like I don't know that that time of year in October. There's a lot of events going on in general in the online business world. So we were very happy with the live participation rate. But it seems that people had an easy enough time also, you know, catching up on a replay if they weren't able to make it live within that 24 hour window. So we didn't see any huge hurdles in terms of customer feedback from being able to meet that new expectation.
However, that said, because there was such a shorter replay window, that meant that people who wanted to refer back to the material for longer who wanted lifetime access to all the replays, there was a greater incentive for them to purchase the VIP upgrade, which we kept at the same price that it always is which is $195 for the VIP upgrade. And that includes lifetime access to all of the replays from the challenge, as well as a additional bonuses that, you know, total are like $1,500 More in value. So really, it's a no brainer for the price that we positioned it up.
So some interesting stats there. Historically, from the other nine cohorts, we've seen about a 30 to 33% conversion rate from participant to someone who purchases the VIP for this particular cohort. So normally, our cohorts, I would say range anywhere from 100 to 200 people per challenge, this challenge, we had over 440 people. So I mean, more than double our largest previous cohorts. So we had a huge influx of new challenge participants, which I think is obviously widely attributed to the fact that we did offer that pay what you want model. So this was a really great experiment for us to really widen the amount of people who entered our ecosystem through this challenge. But because of that lower buy in the conversion rate from general admission to VIP upgrade did not hold up to as high as in previous rounds. So I think we ended right around 13% actually upgraded to VIP. So again, very interesting experiment.
Also, one thing we experimented with on the back end is we offered a behind the scenes, all access pass, where we took a handful of individuals through the actual process of facilitating and hosting a live challenge. So we took a few people through like, what does it look like on our end to market? A challenge like this? How do we structure the schedule? What are all of our SOPs and processes behind the scenes to like, make sure this challenge runs really smoothly to keep our members engaged to get the best student results? How do we price the upsells? And what are some of the, I guess, more silent ways that we monetize from this challenge things that aren't necessarily as front facing, but actually really add to our revenue on the back end beyond just the VIP upgrade. So that was really cool, because we've never tested something like that before.
And what I would say coming out of this is that if we could find a way, perhaps when we eventually retire paid to create, because I don't know when that will be I definitely plan to keep it going for 2024. But someday, I'm sure we won't, you know, be hosting this live challenge forever and ever. So when we put it to bed, I think it would be cool to do a bigger kind of group, taking people behind the scenes of how we structure and sell and facilitate this pay challenge. And maybe placing that into some sort of evergreen product that people could learn our process and replicate a similar format, in their own unique industry or niche teaching their own unique thing using a paid challenge format. So definitely open to teaching that again, just probably not in the exact same live format that we did this past round.
And also on the pay what you want side of things, I definitely want to continue using that pricing model. But probably I wouldn't do that, again for paid to create. I think that was a special one time offer just for the 10th cohort because we wanted to celebrate that big milestone. But I think we would probably go back to a flat rate pricing for future cohorts. That said, I do think pay what you want has a lot of merit for utilizing in any sort of setting where the primary goal is to generate as many new customers as possible in our ecosystem, right.
So I think about a lot of low ticket products as more of a way to essentially break even on customer acquisition. So even if you're not really making money on the front end, if you can acquire a customer for essentially free, then you have the opportunity on the back end to upsell them and to really extend their lifetime value as a customer, right. So I think for other low ticket products or low ticket experiences, maybe even things that I normally would have offered for free. I think having some sort of paywall is helpful to increase the actual participation rate, which I think is so essential for success on both sides.
So I mean, that old adage, people who pay pay attention, I really think that's true. People need some skin in the game to actually show up and be accountable and use what they have invested in. So I think that's kind of how we're going to approach the pay what you want model moving forward is maybe for hosting, let's say a virtual event that no Normally, we might have offered for free, we might just do a pay what you want model so that, again, people can choose what they want to invest, but at least it gives them a little bit of buy in to ensure that they have a higher likelihood of actually showing up and making use of what they opted in for. So that's kind of the takeaway that we had from that experiment.
Now, some other things that happened in q4 of last year, I finalized multiple angel investments. So this has been a new part of my journey as a founder as as an entrepreneur, if you're brand new to Angel investing, I talked about this a little bit in a bonus episode where I was deciding between two different investments. So if you haven't listened to that one yet, I go into a little bit more detail about what inspired me to get into angel investing and how I came about my first angel deal. Again, that will be linked below in the show notes or the description box, if you're watching on YouTube, if you want to check out that bonus episode. But I had, I think, three total deals that the details were finalized in in q4 of last year.
And one of them actually, that I haven't talked about too much I'm really excited about because it has directly to do with Angel Investing is my my investment in Cherub. So Cherub is a financial tech or FinTech for short platform that matches founders with funders. So think of it as the same practical use of a dating app. So if you think something like Bumble, that, you know, you get matched with potential dates, right, Cherub is similar in that it's matching entrepreneurs who have startups that are seeking funding, and don't necessarily want to go to a bank and get a loan or don't necessarily have maybe the right product or the desire to go raise money from VC firms venture capital, and they instead want to take money from individual investors.
So angel investors, then they can get on the platform and be able to, you know, reach a community of funders, angel investors and share more about their startup. And on the opposite end, funders, aka angel investors, people who have capital, they want to deploy and invest in other small businesses, they're able to get a direct connection to deal flow. So instead of them having to go out and find these founders and do their own research on seeing, you know, what startups are up and coming and who seeking funding chair makes it really convenient, because it just plays matchmaker between these two parties.
I'm really passionate about this, because this is a world that on both sides, women are historically less involved in, you know, we've all heard the dismal stats, less than 2% of VC funding goes to women owned startups, that's really dismal. And then on the other end, I think a lot of women who didn't grow up around this may not have the connections are the know how to get involved in Angel investing. And maybe this is something like a path that you want to explore more. For me the draw is that I get to see behind the scenes, and be part of the journey of another company's growth without actually running the day to day operations. So it's really cool.
All three of my angel investments are in industries that I don't normally play in. So my own company Cubicle to CEO, right, we are a media business, my three angel investments, one of them is a supplement company. So that's Soursop Nutrition, one of them Lotza is a beverage company. So both Soursop and Lotza are both in the wellness space. And they're both CPG or consumer packaged goods. So again, the type of business that I probably wouldn't on my own seek to, you know, start or to operate. But I love getting to contribute strategically as an advisor and also to support in whatever way I'm able both from a funding perspective, but again, from strategy and connection networking side. So it's really fun to again, get to learn behind the scenes of these companies without being in the day to day at these companies.
And then Cherub of course, is a tech company. It's a FinTech platform, again, something that I'm very interested in but probably would not normally start a business like that on my own. So anyways, finalize multiple of those deals. And I'm just so excited about what 2024 will bring for all three of these brands. I'll link all three of them below in the show notes if you want to go check them out, give them some love on social, go look at their websites.
For Cherub's specifically if you are interested in Angel Investing if you want to learn more about that, or if you're on the founder side and you know you might be looking for funding you might be looking to raise money for your company in the next year or two. Then I highly recommend getting on the waitlist for Cherub. It's actually going to a officially launch at South by Southwest in March. So you guys don't really have to wait that much longer by the time you're hearing this episode. But just in case you know, you're hearing this right when it drops, it may not be available yet. So either way, I'll link that website below if you want to add yourself to the deal flow newsletter that's totally free. It sends out all the best deals, and kind of highlights, you know, different different companies that are on the cheer platform, you also get to learn more about angel investing in general. So highly recommend at least signing up for the newsletter and if that's an area of interest that you want to learn and grow in. I think that'll be a really great free resource for you all.
All right, I'm looking at my notes what else happened in quarter four that I want to celebrate with you I'll Oh, so Cubicle to CEO we attended our first ever university career fair. So shout out to Corbin University. Here in Salem, Oregon. This was really fun, because we want to get more involved in higher education, and supporting students who have an interest in media marketing, social whatnot, to help them come into their professional careers. Sabrina, our Podcast Producer actually started out in our company as an intern while she was in college. So I 100% believe in the power of mentoring, the next generation of professionals that are going to go into work in these spaces, and then also the untapped talents really in college students.
So we were really excited to get to attend a career fair have a booth, we got awarded, unofficially, but from feedback from attendees like best booth design, so that was a lovely compliment. And shout out also to my team member Andi, who is really talented with creating these beautiful balloon displays and helped us create just the most aesthetic photo backdrop for people to take pictures in front of which was so much fun. So highly recommend. We're definitely planning to do more of those in this upcoming year, our alma mater, all three of us actually on the team all full time staff, we all graduated from Oregon State University. So I know that's been on our list of career fairs that we want to have a presence at. So fingers crossed, we can make it happen in 2024.
The final notable thing that happened in Q4 2023 was our 12 Days of Christmas campaign. So this was in December. And actually, by the time this episode drops, the teaser episode for our 12 Days of Christmas launch debrief will have aired on our show. So if you have not listened and yet, it's like a five minute teaser after you finish this income report, go cue that up in your playlist. Listen to that. Next, it's a five minute teaser of my launch debrief of that campaign. The full launch debrief is published on our private podcast, which is a members only podcast that our C-Suite members have access to.
So again, the C-Suite is our annual membership for small business CEOs. We provide exclusive cash savings and deals with your favorite brands whose products and services help you grow your business. So think your favorite software brands, maybe health and wellness and lifestyle and travel brands that help you better yourself as a CEO or make your life more convenient in some way. We also offer exclusive content, like our private podcast for our members, and then an off social community where we host different events and gatherings and programming for our members. So again, if you want to check out the C-Suite, it will be linked below in the show notes. And you can see everything that we have there. But the teaser kind of gives you a little bit of a preview of what we cover in that launch debrief. So if you're curious, go go give that a listen.
But 12 Days of Christmas was a brand new campaign, we've never run it before. It was, as the name would imply ran over 12 days technically 13 Because our last deal was available for 48 hours instead of 24 hours. But it was December fourth through December 16. I think was the date. Don't quote me on that. And wait, that's not right. Four plus 12. Well, yeah, no, that's that is correct. Around the 16th. Yep.
Anyways, so this campaign was really fun, because we got to test a lot of new offers that we normally don't sell, just to kind of gauge, you know, what the reception was, what the demand was, some of the things that I had not imagined would be so popular. We're I mean, we're wildly successful. And it kind of gave us perspective on Oh, okay, like, here's a type of product we never would have even thought to create or continue to sell on an evergreen basis. But now because of the data from this campaign we're going to so again, it was just really great because each day was a different offer. It would expire in 24 hours. So it was very low risk way to bring back some popular products from the vault that maybe we hadn't sold in a while, but also again to test new offers and it was a great end of year cash injection for a relatively low lift launch.
We only marketed this to our email list. In fact, you had to be on our email list to even receive the daily offer and to have the opportunity to buy. So that was another cool aspect of this sale. But we didn't really promote it on social, we didn't run any ads to it, there was no pre launch window, which definitely is one of the things that looking back if I could have done things differently. And if we were to repeat this campaign again next year, we would definitely implement a pre launch window to really widen the, I guess the prospective buying audience right to get more people on our email list ahead of this launch. But it was a really, really awesome experiment.
And again, if you want to hear the full debrief, it is on our private podcast. So you can join the C-Suite and get instant access to listen or to read that episode, because we do provide full transcripts of all of our episodes as well.
Now, as promised, I wanted to real quick high level share our end of year stats for 2023. So for the full year, we made $556,000 give or take, we're kind of rounding to the nearest whole 1000, just for a little bit of context there. So $556,000, which is higher than 2022. But more or less, that half a million mark, you know, is kind of been consistent in our business for a couple years. There's many reasons for that, I think one of the largest reasons being that we have significantly shifted our business model in the last two years, and especially in the last year.
So again, if you're new here, then I just want to give you a quick, you know, quick layer of perspective. But if you've been in our community a long time, you already know this. For the years between 2019 to most of 2022, our primary revenue source was our coaching program, a 12 month coaching program, teaching freelancers, service providers, coaches, how to sign consistent four to five figure clients for their one on one service. So a very specific program. We retired that in August of 2022. And we also previously had a lot of evergreen products that we sold through, you know, various funnels. That was a really successful business model for us. You know, we've had more than 11,000 students come through our various programs and products over the last few years. But ultimately, we wanted to shift into a media business model where content like this podcast essentially becomes our product, even though this podcast is free for you all to consume.
So because of that we ended our largest revenue generator, which was that coaching program, we put all of our evergreen funnels on pause. So keep in mind when we started 2023, we were essentially starting over from almost zero, like no new recurring revenue was coming in, we had retired all of our big offers. So it was like starting from ground floor, I honestly had no idea what to expect for 2023, I was quite frankly shocked not only that we made more than we did in 2022 in such a year of transition, but also our profit was approximately $200,000. And again, this is after payroll this is after paying everyone on my team, including myself. And that also is about a year end profit margin of 36%, which exceeds our target of 30%.
So in a year of transition, where we had essentially no recurring revenue from any sort of evergreen products or funnels, we were able to have our highest profit margin year yet. And again, this is just astounding to me, but also affirming that even though our revenue has not significantly increased in the last number of years, due to all these transitions, we are still making significant progress on the profit side on on the piece that matters, right.
And so honestly, for even a further I guess, layer of context, this profit this year in profit of 200,000, would have actually been even a little bit higher, had we not front loaded. And I didn't do the exact math. But if I had to guesstimate it was probably at least $10,000 in expenses that we could have paid out in 2024. But we decided to front load and pay it in full at the end of last year. So in the latter half of December, we prepaid a lot of our expenses, because that effectively reduced our taxable income, right, because we had higher expenses, which then lowered our tax liability, aka what we owe in federal and state taxes at the end of the year.
So again, we could have shifted those expenses to this year instead, but instead, we prepaid them last year so that we could reduce our tax bill by bit by I should say more than a bit, definitely a couple $1,000. So it was a smart decision from you know, just a pure like tax and accounting perspective. But you know, That's what makes profit margins, even though they're very important, and I would say a more important metric than purely measuring revenue, profit margins at the end of the day, and I've said this before, are still not telling the full picture because they are still able to be manipulated, right, you can choose to have a higher profit margin by just paying your bills at a different time.
Like, if you're following the fiscal year, you could pay them in January versus December, and that will make your previous years total profit higher. But you know, at the cost of potentially paying more in taxes for that particular year. Also, you can choose to be less risky, and maybe hire less support or invest less into your business. And you can artificially inflate essentially your profit margin by making those decisions. But again, at what opportunity cost, right. So I say this because profit margin is an important metric. And I think it is an important measure of financial health in your business. And for the long term stability, you do want to hit certain profit margins. But there's always that caveat of understanding that profit doesn't tell the whole story. And you have to really understand like why someone made the decisions that they do that impacted what the final profit margin or profit total was. So I always like to give that reminder because I think it's important for us to keep top of mind.
Also, along those same lines, there were some contracts that we had signed for at the end of 2023, that we did not collect payment for in December 2023. So because of that, you know, there was potentially, I think if I am doing rough math right now, like potentially $15,000, maybe even up to $20,000. of business that we are not going to get paid for until January 2024. So again, that piece that revenue and or profit also did not get factored into last year's revenue numbers or profit numbers because we do cash basis accounting, so we don't count anything in our revenue report until the money has actually landed and like deposited in our bank. So that's a little bit different.
Some people do accrual based accounting. And again, I'm not a financial professional. So on my limited understanding accrual based accounting, I think is like based on invoicing rather than like when you're actually paid. I just like to keep things cleaned with cash cash basis. I mean, it's how I run my business, right how we run our business bootstrapped, we don't count money until it's actually landed. So that's just another, you know, thing that impacted our total revenue and total profits for last year.
Now, out of that $556,000 in revenue, our largest revenue category was brand partnerships. So surprisingly, actually ended at exactly 50% of our total revenue last year. And I will be sharing the full breakdown of last year's nine revenue streams and the percentage each revenue stream contributed to our year total on our private podcasts for our C-Suite members. So I'll share that the percentage split of all of our revenue streams, all nine as well as the percentage split of all of our different expense categories. So where did we spend the most amount of money? And what did that percentage split look like across all of our different expense categories. So if you are curious to know the more detailed dissection of 2023, in terms of our financial picture for the year as a whole, then you'll definitely want to access part two of this income reports on our private podcast.
And again, this podcast is only accessible to our C-Suite members. So if you're curious about the C-Suite, if you want to preview all of the member perks that come with joining the C-Suite, because it's not just the private podcast that you'll get access to when you join us, make sure you check out the first link in the show notes below. Or again, if you're watching this on YouTube, in the description box below. And you'll be able to see everything that comes with your C-Suite membership.
We'd love to have you we really want to build this together as a premier destination for small business CEOs across all industries, sectors and stages of business. So I really believe that variety and the types of entrepreneurs you get to interface with and that you're exposed to, will really strengthen your leadership position as not only a CEO but as a thinker because I don't know about you when you're stuck in a silo. And if you're surrounded only by others in your niche or your industry, it's really easy to get in that echo chamber where everybody just kind of feels like they're doing what everyone else is like we're all just copycats of each other.
I find that my most creative ideas and inspiration come from learning and being with founders and CEOs who exist outside of our space. So the media industry, but also outside of online business engine enroll. I love learning from people who offer in person services or people who own retail shops, Mom and Pop brick and mortars, people who run really successful ecommerce businesses and who sell physical products. I mean, there's so many types of businesses out there. And I think the more that we can cross share our knowledge and our experiences, the more we all grow together. So that's my vision for the C-Suite. I really want it to be home for all small business CEOs. So I'd love to welcome you there. We would love to see you inside.
If you have any questions at all. You can always reach me on Instagram @MissEllenYin or reach my team @CubicletoCEO. We're happy to answer any questions to make sure it's a good fit for you. But again, check out the first link in the show notes for more info on the C-Suite and we'll catch you in part two over on the private podcast if you choose to join us. Thanks for tuning in everyone.
If you love today's episode, send it to a friend tag us on Instagram @CubicletoCEO or give us a five star rating at ratethispodcast.com/cubicletoCEO. You can also access bonus episodes on our private podcast by joining the C-Suite, our flagship annual membership providing exclusive cash savings, content and an offline community for small business CEOs. Check out the link in the show notes to join us.
