How I built an online course business that makes $16,000/day

Ironically, as much as I have talked about money mindset, I still get uncomfortable talking about money. But the reason I wanted to share this video and take you deep behind the scenes and show you the actual financial reality on a day-to-day of my business, I’m going to show you that, taking you into my computer in just a second is because for me ever since I was a kid, financial independence has been very, very important to me. As soon as I could get a job, I got a job. I started as a busser when I was 15 in a restaurant, hostess, server, works into gelato shop, almost became a mascot. I’ve kind of done it all.

So, to be in this position today, it has certainly not been overnight success. I’m never going to claim that. I’ve been an entrepreneur for over a decade now. And particularly in this business, I have been doing this for coming up on five years in December. So we have an online course business. And this started from zero. It started from an idea and it started with basically $100 being invested into the business to get it going. And I talked about that in this video. And what it’s become is so far beyond what I ever could have dreamed or manifested like I talked about in last week’s video.

And so I’m not doing this and sharing this to say, hey, look what I’ve done. I’m doing this. And sharing this to say, look at what’s possible because I never would have thought this was possible. So I’m hoping that this journey gives you some tactical advice, but also just allows you to think outside of your reality. So I’m going to share my five key takeaways of how I’ve built an online course business that’s generating 16K consistently a day. And I’m also going to share the journey of what it’s taken to get here.

So this is the backend and business dashboard for our business. We have two. So I’m going to show you both, where the revenue from our digital products or online courses comes through. So you can see on this screen that you’re going to see today’s revenue in sales and yesterday’s. And then you can see from October 1st to today’s, we’re just entering the final quarter of our fiscal year. We go October 1st to the end of September, 4.2 million. And then in addition to that, we have a PayPal option as well. And so that is just under 600K in there.

So that evens out once you add everything together. They’re in both in different currencies, but once you add them together, it’s 4.6 million around that. When you divide that, it’s about $16,000 a day. Now there are days that are bigger than others. As you can see here, there are days that are very slow and maybe there’s no sales. But month over month, we’re very consistent. And that’s how I wanted to build my business. I wanted to know what to expect and to build a business that I could create projections for. So I wasn’t just banking on one big month and then no sales. So our entire business is evergreen.

So you can see a couple of months I’ll show you here. So 450,000 in March, we’ll do April 1st, April 30th, and that will show you around the same. A little bit improved. And then we’ll show you the next month, which is May, just so you can have an idea of like consistency wise what it looks like and how I’ve been able to build this business as I’m going to get into, to a place where it is consistent and it’s growing. So half a million in May. So I think it’s important in this space because there is a lot of inflating to show the behind the scenes. I’ve never done this before. It does make me uncomfortable to share this, but I think it’s important in honor of just being totally transparent. So let’s get into the nitty-gritty.

Today I have an online course business and I help people to package their experience and their expertise into highly scalable online courses, everyone from doctorates to dancers, to artists, to DJs, to accountants, to everything in between. That is really my why. I am here to help people create success ripples and create an impact far beyond what they could have imagined through online courses and through online marketing. So this started with very humble beginnings and very confused beginnings, and it all started back in 2015. 

Back in 2015, I started on YouTube. And I had had a few videos on my channel prior to that. They really were purposeless. And there were like random demo reels because I was a journalist at first and kind of ran the gamut, some random blogs all over the place. No strategy, no idea what I was doing. And in 2015, I had been working with clients. I had a social media consultancy. I was also… It was kind of a hybrid of everything. I was consulting, I was doing management for clients, I was running an agency. I did basically everything by myself for four or five years for tons of different clients, all different industries, all different niches, and learned so much about the online space.

And so in 2015, I was basically at a ceiling. I had no capacity to take on any more clients, but by word of mouth, I was getting a lot of referrals, which was great. I just was too tired to take anybody on and I didn’t have the time. So I kind of very randomly sat down and decided I’m going to try filming a video about how to use live streaming and I’m going to send it to my clients because it was a question they were all asking me at the time and I really didn’t want to have to get on the phone or go to a meeting because they just didn’t have the time. I had to be working on their accounts. I didn’t want to be going and speaking to each person individually because we wasted so much time. So I figured this was a good way to clone myself.

And at the time I didn’t really want to have to hire a team at all. I didn’t really want any support. And so that’s really where this all started. It started when I kind of fell backwards into YouTube. I made that video. I wasn’t expecting anything from it. And I think it’s the big key as part of my journey. Everything kind of has been an experiment. And my motto, as you know, is test, fail, learn, grow, repeat. So put out this YouTube video and it starts to get a lot of views and a lot of comments and I start getting people emailing me when I didn’t even put an email address on it. I didn’t even have a call to action on the video, I don’t think. People all over the world saying, “Hey, you’re really good at explaining this. You seem like an expert in social media. Can we hire you?”

And all of these opportunities came up and it started to just sort of compound and I just was overwhelmed and didn’t even know how I was able to tackle all of these things because I didn’t have any time. So my plan kind of backfired a little bit, but in the best possible way. So that’s when I attempted to make my very first course. It was the hardest thing I had ever done because I had no guidance. I was winging it. I chose the most difficult way to build it. I tried to build my own website. At this point I just had an intern working with me and we kind of tackled the whole thing together. And my biggest mistake was I made the entire course without actually doing any research or talking to any people about if this was something that anyone would actually want to buy. I also priced it ridiculously low. And I think in total, that entire course made about $15,000. And in full transparency, it was packed with information, but it wasn’t really a great course and it wasn’t really a transformative course.

Then 2016 rolls around and I decide to create another course. Now, this course was packed, again, packed with information. It was really long. It took me about five months to build it and yet again, didn’t learn my lesson the first time. I basically built the course without doing a ton of market research, which is a huge mistake. I also built it very dependent on platforms. It was kind of about all different platforms on social media because I was an expert at all of them and I had been doing it for so long. Instead of, again, focusing on a transformation, I focused on information.

And so built this course and the biggest mistake with this course is that it constantly would have required updates like all the time because the algorithms were changing and the platforms were changing and it was just… I kept updating it and it was never ending and it was not an enjoyable process. And I didn’t feel like I was able to deliver the best possible product or even evolve it in the best way because it was broken from the beginning in how I built it. So it was great and transformative when we sort of put it out into the world and then it sort of aged out.

So I decided to basically shut down both of those programs, then I launched a new course in December of 2016. This is when I found the winner. This is when this particular business launched. It’s a program called YouTube for Bosses. It’s still around. When I first launched it, my biggest focus was on efficiency because I had made those mistakes with the previous courses of just ramming them full of information. I wanted to make this course as efficient as possible in getting people the transformation that they were looking for. And it was for anyone who was looking to build a targeted, hot audience with tons of leads on autopilot every single day from YouTube.

So built out the course and immediately saw a huge reaction, huge influx of enrollments, which was really exciting, and I loved the course. I was so proud of it. And then my main focus was on client results and testimonials because I noticed with the other two, it took a really long time to get results because there was too much information and it was a really confusing course. Both of them were kind of confusing. And so there were still results, but they weren’t phenomenal results. So with YouTube for Bosses, I was seeing phenomenal results with my clients. And that’s what I really focused on. I focused on social proof and I focused on client results and I focused on ensuring that the program was efficiently getting people the results and the outcome that they rafter. And that course is still around to this day.

So between 2016 and 2019, a lot happened. Too much to go over in one video and probably kind of boring to be honest, but I tested a lot of different things and I still was in this headspace of more and more and more. I should be doing more businesses, I should be trying more things and not just focusing on the fact that this one course, YouTube for Bosses, was bringing in a ton of revenue, majority of the revenue, and it was very, very manageable to scale it. I talked about this in this video of all the different business models I had and then had to shut down and now we just have the two courses, which really they’re both kind of two different businesses. And I always say, if you have more than one course, each course really is its own individual business because it requires marketing, fulfillment, customer service, all of the things to make it actually successful. And in that time as well, our team grew quite a bit.

So now I’m certainly not saying I’m a one woman show anymore. I now have an incredible team who works with me and is so dedicated to transforming our clients and making sure that they’re getting the best possible experience in our programs. And we’re really proud of that. As of 2019 is when we actually launched the Authority Accelerator officially. We had done like kind of a beta launch, what we call a pop launch prior to that. I think we’d actually done several pop launches before that, which are basically test launches of that program. And I have evolved it. I think we’re on the third or fourth iteration of that program now.

Over the last two years, we have attracted over 1,700 clients to that program. And you’ve seen a lot of the transformations and the results through my YouTube channel, I’ve shared a lot of them on here, and then just also through my day-to-day social media. And what I share and the stories that I share and truly the transformations in there blow my mind. They’re incredible. We have clients who have gone all the way up to $250,000 a month in revenue completely organically with their online courses consistently on a monthly basis using our strategy. It’s really phenomenal to see and I’m so proud of that program as well. And again, it’s stood the test of time because I spent a lot of time figuring out who was I trying to serve and what was I trying to support them in creating a transformation around? What was the impact I was trying to have? Which again, I wouldn’t have learned that if I hadn’t gone through kind of the flops early on in this process.

So today we just have YouTube for Bosses and we have the Authority Accelerator. So YouTube for Bosses still stays true to the original mission that I have with it, which was basically to enable anybody who’s looking to build a targeted audience for their business and bring in leads in their sleep using YouTube. Then the Authority Accelerator is what we call a business in a box. It’s basically giving you everything you need to know in order to go from concept to actual, scalable, profitable, online course and continue to generate consistent revenue with it month over month and to scale it. They are different programs and they’re both phenomenal programs. And I’m proud of both of those programs because of the results that we get for our clients.

Of course, at this point you know we’ve done well over $14 million in sales with our online courses and we’re now absolutely not an organic business. We definitely spend money on ads and we spend about $3,000 a day. It fluctuates a little bit, but it’s pretty steady at around $3,000 a day. We don’t do launches. As I mentioned earlier, everything is really just evergreen and consistent. And like I said, we also have expenses outside of that now with just software and platforms we need and our team as well, which is vitally important. I could not do this completely on my own at this point. There is a tipping point when you’re building any business where you have to. It’s really important. You have to have support. You have to have the right people in the right seats and people that are a lot smarter than you in the right seats as well in order for things to be manageable and also scalable.

So yes, we started organic and I’m a big believer in that. I do believe if you spend money on ads too early, you’re basically just throwing money into a fire because without a strong strategy and without knowing clearly what your messaging is and who you’re trying to target, it’s just a waste. It’s a waste of your time, effort, and your money. And it’s amazing to start organic because then that allows you to build up cashflow and confidence in your offer and your messaging and get client results in the doors. So then you can absolutely easily reinvest that back into ads to add fuel to the fire and to scale faster.

And listen, does this mean that it’s always perfect and that everything flows so easily all the time? No, there are days that are really challenging. There are months that are really challenging, but the biggest thing for me, and I talked about this in this video about money blocks is knowing your numbers is an act of self care. And if I can share that with you, that’s really one thing that every entrepreneur needs to know. I study my numbers every morning. It’s the first thing I do so I know exactly how much traffic we’re getting, how many leads are being generated, what’s our cost per acquisition. I know every single stat when it comes to the numbers in my business because that’s what drives consistency. If you turn a blind eye to what’s working, when things stop working, you have no idea how to fix them.

And the true engine that runs the entire business and the fundamentals of our business at this point, that creates consistency is this. I’ve mentioned this in past videos. It is called our flywheel. And basically it starts with having the best program on the markets, getting people to enroll in the program, getting them a transformation, and then they become your happy customers and clients and your greatest ambassadors and truly kind of your own little Salesforce organically because they love the program so much that they send more people to your online courses. And that gets you more enrollments. And all of a sudden, it starts to just work on autopilot. So this really is a big key to how we’ve created consistency in my business.

And honestly, the true measure of success for me when it comes to any business is if people recommend you and refer you. If you’re getting referrals and you’re getting people saying you have to work with them or you have to take this course, that is the true sign that you’re on the right track. If you’re not getting those, something might be wrong.

So my five key takeaways from my journey when I look back on it to where I am today, number one is focusing on transformation, not information. This goes for really any service-based business. Your clients are investing in the outcome. They’re investing in the desired result that they’re looking for. They don’t care how much information you provide them with. And they’ll actually get kind of irritated if you give them too much. But I always use the analogy of if you think about somebody climbing up a mountain and going from the bottom to the top, they don’t want to be on that mountain forever. They don’t be sweating and dying on the mountain. They want to get to the top as quickly as possible. Your clients are the exact same. So transformation over information and efficiency in getting results. So your job is to subtract anything that isn’t 100% necessary to getting results.

Number two is knowing who you want to work with is really important, but more importantly, you need to know who you don’t want to work with. One bad client can spoil the whole bunch. So being very clear on creating a community and a culture inside of your course and your business and your programs that you know is supportive and like-minded and aligned is invaluable. If you mess that piece up, everything else can get messed up. And I recently talked about this with one of my clients in this video. So I do recommend checking that out next because she did mention the community aspect of our programs is one of the best parts.

Number three, pricing. Man-oh-man, did I go through a journey with pricing. And I will now 100% say that you have to base your pricing on the value of your outcome, not on the amount of time that it takes to go through it, not on the amount of information because what people are paying for is the outcome. That’s what they’re investing into you for. And what is it currently costing them to not have that outcome? That’s what you base your pricing on.

Number four is do not, do not build a program without knowing exactly what is desired by your clients. It doesn’t matter what you think people need. It really truly doesn’t. What matters is what you know they need because you’ve listened to them. When you truly listen, and we call this the pop model, and this is how we get our clients’ courses to market so quickly is really understanding and listening to your ideal client to know what they need in the course. And by the time you go to sell it, they go, “Oh my gosh, have you been reading my mind? Because this is exactly what I’m looking for.”

And the fifth thing, this is true for everything with me, but I’ve really learned it in business is trust your intuition. So when I was first getting started, I actually vividly remember I got an email from someone that I had worked with in my last job prior to and they basically said, “Do you really think this whole social media thing is going to work out for you? I really think you should come back and be in a leadership position in our business.” I just couldn’t quite grasp why somebody would send that email, but I’ve always remembered it because I had to really trust myself and believe in myself that I was going to make this work and that my intuition about this whole social media thing, because at the time there wasn’t much going on and it wasn’t like this huge trend and huge thing like it is today where businesses rely on social media.

It wasn’t really like that as much at that point and I had to trust my gut because I knew my intuition lit up when I thought about the possibilities of doing this. So that business no longer exists and here I am everyone. So, no shame, that’s fine. You got to use some of that stuff as fuel too because there’s going to be a lot of people who doubt what you’re doing, but they may also turn around a few years from now and say, Wow, I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

Those are my five big takeaways. And honestly, each of those things have really led me to being able to build the business that I have today and to create the consistency that I have today, which is the greatest gift of all because I’ve been in positions where there’s no consistency, you’re constantly sprinting, you’re constantly burnt out and it’s just a really brutal place to be as an entrepreneur.

So I really hope that this helped you. It has been, like I said, six years since I really started understanding even what an online course was and then coming up on five years of actually having two online programs that work and that are really successful and that have attracted thousands of clients from all over the world. And I always look at things in terms of a bow and arrow phase. I talk about this quite a bit. Sometimes you have to go through phases where you don’t know what you’re doing and you have to take a step back and you have to kind of pull back and get quiet and go internal and go behind the scenes and fix things and work on your programs or work on your business in order to launch forward faster.

And that certainly was something that I have done over the last couple of years, and I still continue to have those periods as well because what you work on in a business and your products and your programs, they’re never complete. They’re always evolving. And I always look at everything like that because I can be a perfectionist, but instead I look at everything through that lens of test, fail, learn, grow, repeat, and constant evolution. Get it to market, evolve with time. Test quickly, evolve with time. So progress over perfection and patience with the whole process is so important.

Before I wrap up, if you are at a place where you’re ready to create your online course and you want my guidance and support on it, be sure to click this link to apply to be a part of our Authority Accelerator program and speak to a real human being on my team so we can guide you in the right direction. 

Thanks so much for reading and watching!