Learn about SPI and the team here to help you

About Smart Passive Income

Pat Flynn started Smart Passive Income in 2008 to share what he had learned in the process of building a popular blog for an architecture industry exam. Ethical advice on how to monetize a blog was hard to come by, and Pat wanted to share the lessons he learned.

Transparency has always been at the heart of the SPI brand, with Pat becoming “the crash-test dummy of online business,” running experiments and sharing the results, whether they were positive or negative. Pat also began a monthly practice of publishing income reports, sharing totals for the income earned from each revenue stream, along with the expenses incurred to achieve that revenue. In an industry overrun with get-rich-quick schemes, Pat’s was a mission of radical transparency. Readers hoping to start an online business gained a realistic understanding of the work involved, as well as the time and investment required to get started. The income reports were one of the Smart Passive Income site’s most popular features and ran until 2017 when we determined that Pat’s business was no longer representative of our average reader’s business.

The Smart Passive Income Podcast with Pat Flynn launched in 2010 and has consistently been one of the most popular business podcasts, with over 80 million downloads since. The podcast has been instrumental in helping us serve a worldwide audience with the most powerful online business strategies.

Our north star at SPI has always been providing actionable, ethical business advice, whether through free content, books, courses, or now membership communities.

About Winning Edits

Matt Gartland started Winning Edits in 2011 as a creative agency for author entrepreneurs, specializing in all aspects of book production, including editing, design, and self-publishing support. Over time, the agency’s services grew to support a wide variety of content production, including blogs, podcasts, and online courses. Winning Edits long served as Smart Passive Income’s creative agency. Winning Edits has been the secret behind-the-scenes partner to many bestselling books and other transformational content in the entrepreneurial space.

One of Matt’s true gifts is finding and developing talent, and Winning Edits grew to have a deep bench of creative, skilled staff. It was clear as time went on that for everyone on the Winning Edits team, Smart Passive Income was the favorite customer — a combination of enjoying Pat as a person, the commitment to ethical advice, and the wonderful Smart Passive Income audience. As Smart Passive Income grew, so too did the volume of its creative needs, setting the stage for the merger of these two organizations into a single brand: SPI Media.