The argument in one line.
A membership built around one hyper-specific niche and constant customer obsession can hold a ten-month retention rate while its owner scales ad spend from five dollars a day to ten thousand a week.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You run or want to run a membership and want a real account of what actually keeps members subscribed for months instead of one billing cycle.
- You're scaling paid ads past your warm audience and want an honest description of what a normal, non-catastrophic down week looks like.
- You're weighing whether to quit a day job for your business and want a concrete way to run the numbers instead of deciding from fear.
SKIP IF…
- You want a step-by-step ad-account tutorial — this is a first-person story, not a walkthrough of campaign settings.
- You're not interested in personal-mission or faith framing; it runs through a good third of this conversation.
The full version, fast.
Heidi Easley runs a membership that teaches artists and crafters how to make money hosting paint parties, and grew it by 341 members and roughly $130,000 by pairing hyper-specific courses with heavy customer obsession — she describes her members as 3,000 bosses she wakes up to serve. Her retention sits around ten months against a commonly cited 'good' benchmark of three. On ads, she scaled from $5 a day in 2016 to $10,500 a week today, treating each stage as a deliberate step rather than a jump, and expects a rough patch once spend outgrows the warm audience that already knows the brand. Her biggest turning point was sitting down and running the actual household budget before nearly quitting the business for a lower-paying teaching job — the math, not motivation, made the decision for her.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00hostMaria Wendt
00:00guestHeidi Easley
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 00:24
01 · Cold open
Fast-cut trailer teasing Heidi's headline numbers before the real interview begins.
00:24 – 01:49
02 · Disclaimers and catching up
Maria states her results disclaimer, then the two catch up on Heidi's trip to Orange County.
01:49 – 03:07
03 · The niche and the stick-rate benchmark
Heidi describes teaching artists and crafters to run paint parties; Maria introduces 'stick rate' and Heidi's ten-plus-month retention.
03:07 – 05:51
04 · Why members stay: obsession and mission
Heidi credits retention to treating members as '3,000 bosses' and to a personal mission of sharing faith through art without being preachy.
05:52 – 08:47
05 · Finding Maria's courses and relaunching Art Kit
Heidi describes buying Maria's course, canceling plans the next day, and refilming her own course using the new format within 24 hours.
08:48 – 10:03
06 · Why hyper-specific courses win
Both agree broad, generic courses are declining while narrow, in-depth courses that solve one specific problem are working.
10:04 – 13:56
07 · The ads journey: $5 a day to $10,500 a week
Heidi traces her ad spend from a $5-a-day start in 2016 to $10,500 a week now, and Maria coaches her through a recent off week caused by tapping out her warm audience.
13:57 – 15:40
08 · Bankruptcy and the surfboard hustle
Heidi describes losing everything, then healing through art and selling hand-painted surfboards for over $20,000 in two months.
15:41 – 17:20
09 · The opportunity of this era
Both reflect on how phones and targeted ads give niche creators access to audiences that were never available to earlier generations.
17:21 – 20:17
10 · Crying on the floor: running the numbers
Heidi recounts nearly quitting for a lower-paying teaching job, then comparing real take-home pay before deciding to stay in the business.
20:18 – 22:21
11 · Closing advice: take action immediately
Heidi closes with the ebook-sold-before-it-was-written story and a call to act on inspiration right away.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A membership with a 10-month average retention beats a commonly cited 3-month industry benchmark by more than 3x.
- Scaling ad spend from $5 a day to $10,500 a week took roughly a decade of incremental, profitable steps, not one leap.
- Once ad spend crosses somewhere around $40,000 to $100,000 a month, a business exhausts its warm audience and has to start selling to people who've never heard of it.
- Hyper-specific courses that solve one narrow problem are outperforming broad courses like 'how to build wealth,' which are declining.
- Comparing real take-home pay before quitting a job — $7,500 a month self-employed versus $3,300 a month salaried — turned an emotional decision into an obvious one.
- A one-time offline product (hand-painted surfboards sold at a beach town) generated over $20,000 in two months and became the turning point after a bankruptcy.
- Selling an idea before writing it — then delivering within 48 hours — forced fast execution instead of speculative work.
- Framing subscribers as '3,000 bosses' rather than customers reframes retention as a daily obligation, not a metric to optimize.
What decides whether a membership actually keeps its members
RETENTION LESSONS
A niche membership held members for ten-plus months and scaled ad spend from $5 a day to five figures a week by treating retention as a daily obligation and every major decision as a math problem, not a feeling.
03The niche and the stick-rate benchmark
- A membership built around one narrow skill can outperform a broad one because every member self-selects into exactly what's being taught.
- Retention gets measured in stick rate: how many months a member stays before canceling. Three months is a common 'good' benchmark; this membership runs at ten-plus.
04Why members stay: obsession and mission
- Treating members as '3,000 bosses' rather than customers reframes the owner's job as daily service, not passive collection of subscription fees.
- A personal mission behind the content gave the owner a reason to keep showing up that a purely financial goal didn't provide.
- Sharing a personal belief system without being preachy — modeling it through the work rather than stating it directly — avoided alienating an audience wary of being sold a worldview.
05Finding Maria's courses and relaunching Art Kit
- A single course purchase led to a same-week decision to refilm an entire existing product using the new framework — speed of implementation, not the framework itself, produced the result.
- Borrowing a proven course structure and applying it to an unrelated niche worked because the structure, not the subject matter, was the transferable part.
06Why hyper-specific courses win
- Broad, generic courses are losing to hyper-specific ones that solve one exact problem for one exact audience.
- Going deeper on a narrow topic outperforms covering more ground shallowly — students act on what actually solves their problem.
07The ads journey: $5 a day to $10,500 a week
- Ad spend scaled in deliberate stages — $5 a day, then $10,000 a month, then $10,000 a week — with profitability confirmed at each stage before moving to the next.
- A single unprofitable week after months of profit isn't a signal to panic; it's often just normal variance at a new spend level.
- There's a real ceiling where a brand's existing warm audience runs out — cited here around $40,000 to $100,000 a month in spend — after which new spend has to reach people who've never heard of the brand.
08Bankruptcy and the surfboard hustle
- A creative side project born out of financial crisis turned into an unplanned product line that generated over $20,000 in two months.
- Past hardship, once processed, can become a source of steadiness during later high-stakes decisions like scaling ad spend.
09The opportunity of this era
- Access to an audience via a phone and social media removes a historical barrier — credit, capital, gatekeepers — that once kept niche creators out of any real market.
- A niche too small for a national ad campaign is exactly the kind of niche targeted digital ads make viable.
10Crying on the floor: running the numbers
- Comparing actual take-home pay of the current path versus the 'safe' alternative turned a fear-based decision into a math problem.
- Tracking every dollar in and out for a full month or two before a major decision replaces speculation with a real number to react to.
- The fear of quitting a stable path is often about identity and safety, not actual numbers — running the numbers can dissolve it.
11Closing advice: take action immediately
- Selling a product before it exists creates a deadline that forces the work to get finished.
- The gap between people who consume content and people who act on it is described here as roughly 99 to 1 — action, not more information, is what the other 99% are missing.
Terms worth knowing.
- Stick rate
- How many consecutive months a subscriber stays in a membership before canceling; three months is cited here as a common 'good' benchmark.
- Return on ad spend
- The revenue generated per dollar of advertising spend; used here as the test for whether a new, higher spend level is still profitable before scaling further.
- Warm audience
- People who already know a brand through past purchases, retargeting, or repeated ad exposure, as opposed to a cold audience seeing it for the first time.
Things they pointed at.
07:27productPassive Income With Instagram (Maria Wendt course)
07:27productArt Kit course (Heidi Easley's product, rebuilt on Maria's format)
Lines you could clip.
03:15
“My waking goal every day is to wake up and help my members make money.”
03:32
“I always think I have 3,000 bosses.”
11:15
“This is what people don't understand about ads. You don't go zero to ten thousand a day. You go ten thousand a month, then ten thousand a week.”
19:36
“Fear is false evidence appearing real.”
20:18
“I don't want to help a few people make millions of dollars. I want to help millions of people make a few extra thousand dollars a month.”
21:16
“I literally jumped out of the pool, went and changed, went home, sold the ebook, and then wrote it.”
Word for word.
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metaphorstory
00:00Hi. I'm Heidi Easley, and I have brought in 341 new members and brought in almost a 130,000 extra dollars.
00:07I used to designate $10,000 a month to Pat. Now we're at about 10,500 a week.
00:13My goal is to, like, get to a 100,000 a month. I have been creating funnels for years, but we wouldn't get by.
00:20And so I have been literally for over four years trying to solve this problem. So I basically was like, okay. If Maria's stopping here to do a testimonial for one minute, I'm gonna stop here and show what my students are doing.
00:32So I basically took your format, but then turned it into my Artkit course. Like, oh my gosh.
00:38This works. Hi. I'm Heidi Easley, and I have brought in 341 new members to my membership thanks to Maria's courses and brought in almost a 130,000 extra dollars.
00:49Amazing.
00:50Thank you so much for being here. Hi. You're welcome.
00:52Thanks for having me. Of course. Okay.
00:53So I gotta say my disclaimers, and then we can kick this interview off. So Perfect. Disclaimers, everyone.
00:58Results are not typical and depend on individual effort. These students, Heidi, took consistent action, and their outcomes are not guaranteed for everyone.
01:07I always like to say what you put in is what you get out. So, Heidi, thank you so much for being here. Aw.
01:11Thanks for having me. Yeah. You flew in from Nashville.
01:14So, yeah, was it an easy flight? Yeah. We've been here two weeks.
01:17We went on a me and my daughter went on a cruise, and then we went to Jasmine Starz Mastermind, and then we went to Disney. Like, we've had a lot of fun.
01:26And you could not have picked a better time weather wise. You have had Perfect. The nicest weather the last two weeks.
01:32Oh my gosh. It's been lovely. Yeah.
01:33It's, like, 20 degrees in Nashville right now, so we're not gonna home soon. Yeah. Tomorrow.
01:37Yeah. Alright. Go to the beach one last time before you go home.
01:41Yes. Um, okay. So talk to me a little bit about your story.
01:45You have something very interesting that a lot of my students don't, which is a membership. And so I'd like for you to tell just a little bit about who you are, who you help, um, and talk about that membership, I think. Okay.
01:54Um, so I teach artists and crafters how to make money teaching paint parties.
02:00So it's very, very niche. It's very or niche, however you say it. Um, and so, basically, I take starving artist mentality and turn them into making money consistently.
02:10Um, so one of my my biggest things is just helping people you know, I was an art teacher for ten years and helping women especially realize that you don't have to be a starving artist, that you can take our craft hoards that we have at home and turn them into something cool. Amazing.
02:27And you do it in a membership, which typically I tell you know, I share with my students that memberships can be very hard to be successful.
02:36And really, the the main reason is the amount of effort on the membership creator to have they have to put into it in order to get people to stick.
02:45But you have an incredible stick rate. Basically, for those of you at home, stick rate is how many months or how long of a period someone signs up for a membership and then stays and doesn't cancel. Right?
02:56And so if I have a bad stick rate, they come in and they cancel the next month. Right? That's a bad if I have a good stick rate, typically, in a lot of industries, it's like three months.
03:04Better than three months is considered good. What are you? We're just over ten months.
03:08Ten months. So what do you think it is you're doing so well that gets your members to stay as long as they do?
03:14I think, you know, like you talk about, we really, really obsess over our customers. Yeah.
03:20We take really good care of our customers. My waking goal every day is to wake up and help my members make money. Like, that's what my job is.
03:29And I never ever think of myself as I'm the boss. I always think I have .
03:35Yeah. Like, the people in my membership are my bosses, and so that's my job is to wake up and help them. And and I think in order to have that level of obsession,
03:44you have to care about. Like, you actually your heart has to care about your customers. I don't think that you can have that level of dedication, which I agree.
03:51We have we have the same for our customers. We really say, like, we wanna have you come into our world so we can take good care of you, and we mean that. And our customers feel that, but it's because and I can tell just even from your numbers because you showed some your numbers, I can tell that you actually take very good care of your customers and you love them, and there must be some impact that you feel that you're making by doing that.
04:13Yeah. I my whole thing has always been sharing God's love through art. And that's kinda like the backbone of everything I do Wow.
04:20And how I can go into a paint party and teach a painting and share God's love without ever having to, like, you know, bring out a Bible or, you know, hit somebody on the head with Jesus. Like, you know, you don't have to do that.
04:33And I feel like one of my missions is sharing God's love through art and how can I teach you know, I'm only one person? I can only go out there and teach one paint party at a time. But if I can have, like, thousands of people all over the world teaching paint parties and sharing God's love through art, how cool is that and how kindness kinda spreads that way?
04:51And I think I think there's so much there to unpack, Heidi. I think that one, it's the effectiveness
04:56of sharing God's love, not hitting them over the head with the Bible. I think so many of us, myself included, have religion wounds.
05:03Right? Yes. And and so worse, at least for me, can speak for myself, I'm sensitive to shoving God down people's throats because I experienced that and it got me nowhere.
05:13It actually pushed me away from God. And so I think that I think about a lot, like, how can we effectively share this joy and this love with people without feeling like we have to bring out a Bible?
05:25The thing that I have found works, and it sounds like you've done something similar, is share it in different ways without even having to say it.
05:33So I talk about like the peace that I found. Right? That's very attractive.
05:36A lot of entrepreneurs don't have peace. And so there's a lot of different ways you can skin that cat, but I love that you mentioned that because I think it is important, and it becomes a mission. I think when it becomes a mission, then it bleeds into all these other areas of our business, and then we get, a long story short, we then end up with great data and great numbers and a great thriving business, which is beautiful.
05:52Talk to me about how you came into my world. How long ago was it? How did it happen?
05:57What does that look like? So
05:58about a year and a half ago, me and my husband were trying to figure out where we were gonna move. So we were living in Texas, and we thought we were gonna live either in Utah or we were gonna go to, um, Florida. We lived in Florida for ten years.
06:12We were gonna go back to Florida, or our third choice was Nashville, which we ended up moving to Nashville. And so here I am in Utah. We were there for a month, and I was just working from my computer there.
06:22And, um, I came across one of your ads where you talked about, like, here's my income, and you had, like, a screenshot of your income. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And so I find myself within seconds buying the course, going through the course.
06:36The next day, I canceled all plans we had, and I filmed refilmed another one of my courses based on your info and immediately started selling it. And I was like, oh, this this girl knows her stuff. I was like, this you know, because, I mean, I could, like I was just excited to see how, like, driven and passionate and how much the stuff you were teaching was right, which I love.
06:57And so then I just started diving into other courses, and it really started making us money, like, a lot. I mean, we were already making money, but it started really helping us this last October when I used your methods and did the Art Kit course
07:11and refilled it. That. So so October is about last October, you you that's when you found me.
07:18Yeah? Last September. So a little over a year ago, I guess.
07:21Okay. And that's when you relaunched your course. Mhmm.
07:24What was the biggest thing? So first of all, what course did you take? Do you remember?
07:28Let me see. How did you feel? Hang on.
07:30Was it passive income? Yeah. Okay.
07:32It's passive Everyone the one that gets such good results is the passive income with Instagram. It's really, really Spoiler alert, everybody.
07:38We're updating it. So I'm I'm refilming it, and I'm re I'm like because it's been a couple years since I've made it, so it needs some tender, loving care. But it's gotten such good results for our students, so I'm not surprised at all that it, you know, did so well.
07:50What was the big takeaway you took away from that passive income course? I think it was just the way I had so because I'm in the membership world Mhmm. And everything I was doing I mean, I had been creating funnels for years.
08:02Literally, I mean, we're almost in our eighth year of the membership. And so I've been creating funnels, and then the funnels would kinda go somewhere. We'd get more emails, but we wouldn't get buys.
08:11Mhmm. And so I have been literally for over four years trying to solve this problem. Thank you, Maria, because you're helping me solve it.
08:18That's my pleasure.
08:19And so it's been think? Such What a the what made the the shift?
08:23Like, what was it? I think it's the way you lay out your courses.
08:28So I basically was like, okay. If Maria's stopping here to do a testimonial for one minute, I'm gonna stop here and show what my students are doing. So I basically took your format but then turned it into my Artkit course.
08:40So, like Smart. If you were doing this, you know, funnel hacking one zero one. Right?
08:44Like, oh my gosh. This works. And it was just going through the same process.
08:48So I think what is happening, and this is what I'm hoping and guessing based on the numbers, is people are going through the courses and going, oh my gosh. Like, they're getting the value they need, where maybe before I wasn't going as in in-depth.
09:01And that's what I appreciate about your courses is you go freaking in-depth. Like, you share it all, you know, and it's That's so the thing. You have to.
09:08I think that and I think and this is really what we're learning. You know, there's been so much
09:14rumors recently, oh my gosh, online courses are dead. No, they're not. I think the old way of online courses is dead, where it was very broad and it was very generic and it was very like how to build wealth or how to interior decorate.
09:29Those kinds of broad courses, I do think those are dead. But hyper specific courses that solve a very specific problem, in your case, having a successful paint party, for example, that's a very, very specific kind of problem that you're solving for your students. And I think those kinds of that kind of way information is being shared, whether it's in a membership, whether it's in a course, but very, very specific like that.
09:50And in-depth, like you said, where you're not you're not holding anything back. You're really solving the problem for them. Mean, I no wonder it's doing as well as it is.
09:57The other thing I wanna talk to you about, Heidi, is you shared your data here. You started running ads, and you said you've been spending quite a bit of money every single day on ads.
10:09I wanna talk to did you start from zero with ads? Had you ever run ads before? Like, tell me more about your Maria's experience with ads, like that whole journey.
10:17So
10:18backing up to when I very first started ads back in probably 2016, February, like, when, you know, I was first learning about it, I was so broke.
10:30And I remember thinking, I'm spending $5 a day. I don't care if I have to go work at McDonald's. Like, I am spending this money because I knew, you know, just the impact of more people seeing you, the more possibility of having more sales.
10:42So I always tell people, and it's so funny when I saw you say $5 a day. I was like, that's what I started with. Yeah.
10:47And so now it's just been a matter of I used to designate $10,000 a month to ads. Now we're at about 10,500 a week.
10:56Oh, wow. You 4x ed. Yeah.
10:58My goal is to, like, get to a 100,000 a month. Yeah. My start.
11:02Yeah. But my goal is to hit $2.50 a month in In ad spend? No.
11:06In profit. Profit. Yeah.
11:07Which I know you're way above that. Yeah. No.
11:09No. No. No.
11:10But this is good. This is good because this is how you do it. You do it incrementally.
11:13Like, I think that is ads.
11:15This is what people don't understand about ads. You don't go $0 to, you know, what we're doing now, which is $10,000 a day.
11:22Right? You go $10,000 in a month, then you go $10,000 every week, which is what you just said. Right?
11:28You're up you're up to $10,000 a week, but you did it profitably. You got a return on ad spend. You used the money that you made to, a, take a profit and, b, pay for the next ads.
11:35Mhmm. But I think in order to do that, it takes some emotional regulation. So I wanna talk to you about that.
11:40You've you've scaled your ads from, like you said, $5 a day up to now $10,000 a week, which is about a little over $40,000 a month. Yeah?
11:48Mhmm. How have you regulated yourself during that process? Oh, I'm such a risk taker.
11:54I love it. Like, I feel like it's again, I think when I was in survival mode of entrepreneurship, going through bankruptcy, going through such a a crazy time in my life, it's like now that I'm in this spot where I'm not in survival, and it's, like, so much fun.
12:10It's just like, okay. Put this in. Put the and it's funny because this last week, we've had the past six weeks, we've had profit off of everyone.
12:18Like, we put 10,000 in. We bring, you know, thirteen five out. And so this last week, we were negative 700.
12:25And I was like, that's not right. So I was asking my team this morning. I'm like, I'm going to interview with Maria.
12:31What's going on? What's going on with Maria? Numbers or and they're like, I'm not sure what happened, so we're trying to dissect to see.
12:36But I don't have I don't have any feeling about it. I'm not mad about it. I'm not frustrated.
12:41I'm just like, it is what it is. Like, you get some Well, if I could share, let's do a little coaching right now. Okay.
12:46Sometimes, and just this is something just to look into. When you because you've significantly scaled, yeah, even like in the last few months with your ad spend. You start to tap out of your very the very edges of your warm market, and now you're like in very cold like Siberia.
13:02Yeah. And that's the new challenge is we noticed that I think right around like 40,000, even like closer to a 100,000.
13:09So it might have just been an off week, don't panic. But like, I know for sure once we were spending around a $100,000 a month in ads, anyone who had possibly heard of us organically at that point, we had tapped out. And so it was like, now we have to reach people who've never heard of Maria Went at all.
13:22And so if you haven't hit it yet, you will. And it's just part of it. Have students in my inner circle, we talk about this all the time where they've spent so much money on ads, they're now at the next level where it's like, okay, we have to take the cold like, is cold like, you don't know cold until you like, oh my god, then no one knows who I am.
13:37I'm and that's the next challenge, but you've you've figured that out to your point. Like, you're not worried. You're not overwhelmed.
13:42You're not even really stressed about it. It's only coming up in context of this conversation. You didn't run screaming into the studio being like, oh my god.
13:48Like, you just you get regulated with it, and that is a sign of someone that knows what they're doing with ads and someone who's going to be very successful with ads. Aw. I'm sure that you've had experiences like that, though, in the past that have built up that resiliency muscle.
14:03And you mentioned bankruptcy. That sounds like that was a big part of your story that maybe helped bring up some resiliency.
14:10Yeah. Yeah. That really helped, I think, going through that.
14:14Mhmm. At the time, I didn't realize that, you know, it's all part of God's plan Yeah. And we got through it.
14:19But, oh my gosh, I remember just losing everything and then realizing, like, what am I gonna do? You know, she was a toddler at the time and trying to figure that out.
14:30And so as an art teacher, I was using art to heal. So I started taking these Okay. Wooden surfboards and painting them, and so I'd bring them to school, and I had 850 students that I taught every week.
14:42It was a lot. It was a catapult. Massive thing.
14:44Lot. Yeah. And so they would come in and they would go, miss Easley, put my name on a surfboard.
14:48And I'm like, no. I'm doing this to heal. Leave me alone.
14:51You know? Like and they go, no. Put my name on it.
14:53And then, like, a 150 kids, like, literally, by the end of the day just kept saying, I want a surfboard, miss Easley. And I was like, wait a minute. Maybe I could sell these and make some money.
15:03And so, um, I talked to my mother-in-law, and she's like, okay. You know, let's fifty fifty. We ended up setting up this little surfboard place in Panama City Beach and selling these surfboards, and we ended up making over $20,000 in just two months, and it just changed my whole perspective.
15:19It was like from, you know, done, count me out, nowhere to go, to, like, God scooping me up and going, not only is it gonna be okay, but you're gonna be able to do what you love forever, which is paint. And so now I feel like I'm just on this mission to help the underdog, the starving artist to realize, like, no. You have skills.
15:36And especially with social media, like, it's unlimited.
15:40I say that all the time. We are living in an era where we have attention and eyeballs that we could have never had first of all, like, as women. Like, let's be real.
15:48Like, our grandmothers couldn't even get credit cards unless a guy signed for it. Right?
15:52So for us as women, this is a special opportunity. But even for just us as humanity Yes. Anyone in any country, we can look at every country and find someone who who who had access to opportunities that we would have never had access to.
16:05You just pick up a phone and you just start filming. And before, you know, it would guys on Madison Avenue who were spending millions of dollars, and there was very like you had to run generic commercials, right?
16:15Like, that's why brands like cereal did so well because it was generic generic stuff. Like you said, it's a kind of a niche thing what you teach. Probably wouldn't have done well on national television.
16:22You know? And that's the same for me. And that's the beauty of targeted ads.
16:25That's the beauty of the world that we get to play in. And we do get to make a lot of money doing what we love, and it is something to be so it's I just always say I'll be doing something random with my team, I'm like, guys, can you believe this is what we're doing on a Tuesday afternoon? Like, or even what we're doing right now on a Monday afternoon.
16:39This is what we're doing. This is our job. This is what we get to do, and I'm forever grateful for it, and I could sense that same feeling in you, which is really special.
16:46I'll tell Pixie sometimes we'll be doing a paint party or something, and we do them now just to have social contact. Yeah. Yeah.
16:52But he won't really need to do the paint parties anymore. And I'm like,
16:55man, this is a hard job, but somebody's gotta do it. We gotta go paint, have a bona whide. You know?
17:00It's like, oh, I'm just so grateful for this opportunity.
17:03I'm sure at some point and I'd like you to talk to this student. Like, there was a point where you weren't sure if you were gonna take that leap and continue. You know?
17:11Like, it's what I think it's one thing to, you know, have almost like a one hit wonder with the surfboards and then say, actually, no, this is gonna be like my business. Yeah. What would you say to someone who's thinking about starting to monetize something they love Mhmm.
17:24And needs that, like, push to get off the fence? So I remember
17:28being on the the floor crying. I was I had a 117 members at the time, and we have almost 3,000 now.
17:36But back then, I had a 117. I was teaching part time still because I was so scared to quit my job just in case. And then I was teaching paint parties, and I was like, I can't do this anymore.
17:49I was on the computer. I was looking up a middle school art teaching job, which is, like, the worst grade.
17:55Hate teaching middle school. So hard. It's so hard.
17:59And so I'm sitting there crying, and my husband comes in, and he's like, step away from the computer. He's like, what are you doing? And I remember being on the floor, like, just crying going, I can't do this anymore.
18:10This is too hard. And so he's like, Heidi, you've you've been at this so long. Like, you can't stop.
18:16You know, we've been I've been teaching paint parties nearly twenty years, almost her whole life. And so it's like, you can't do this. You you gotta stop.
18:23And so I was like, well, let's look at our budget. So what I would tell people is we basically, for the next thirty days, this I think we did it for two months straight. Mhmm.
18:32We looked at every single penny that went out and went in. And at that time, I was making $7,500 a month through teaching part time, my paint parties, and my membership.
18:42If I would have quit and went to the middle school art teaching job, I would have dropped my pay to 3,300 a month. And so once we saw it in plain day, like, no. If I quit my business, I'm literally halving my family's check.
18:56And so that's been a big push is, like, making it okay for my family and realizing, like, okay, this is in pursuit of something way bigger, and we don't have to worry about her having student loans or a car payment or things like that and then teaching her, you know, my daughter, teaching her how to make her own business and how she can control her finances.
19:17Like, all of that is just now, like, my core mission for helping her. It's your why. And I think you said something there that I think was so important, and I think it's missed sometimes
19:27as someone thinking about making a leap. It's so important, I think, to run the numbers. Yes.
19:33Because numbers are data and logic and facts, and sometimes when we're in that stage, we kind of feel emotional. Either emotional like I can't do it, either emotional like I should do it and it's too soon, and then I get burnt out and then I quit and I never try again.
19:46Like, there's so much wisdom. And so I did the exact same thing. There's so much wisdom in just sitting down and running the numbers.
19:52And oftentimes what people find is exactly what you said. Oh, all these things I've been worried about aren't even real. I'm just you know, it's the most cliche thing ever, but fear is .
20:02Right? Like, you had all these fears, then you sit down, you're on the numbers, and you're like, oh, well, first of all, if I just stop DoorDashing and I stop eating out as much as I am, I could just not worry about it at all. And secondly, oh, it's actually so much this is so much more doable than I thought.
20:15I always say, I don't want to help a few people make millions of dollars. I want to help millions of people make a few extra thousand dollars a month, which I think is super realistic and is a game changer for so many people.
20:26Yeah. Okay. Last question before I let you go.
20:31What would you say to someone who's kinda in the audience watching, you know, some of my YouTube videos, maybe they follow me on Instagram. 1% of people in my world, they buy, but 99% of people just watch and never do.
20:42So what would you say to that 99? They're maybe thinking about learning from me. They're thinking about getting started, maybe monetizing something they love.
20:49What would you tell them?
20:50You gotta take action. So years ago, I was trying to figure out how to make money for my mortgage, and I remember taking a swim class.
21:00I was doing a water aerobics class with my mother-in-law. And we were in there and, I mean, we were like the youngest people in the the pool. But halfway through it, I had this great idea for a ebook.
21:12And I literally jumped out of the pool, went and changed, went home, sold the ebook, and then wrote it. Because I said, well, if I sell it, then I'll write it within forty eight hours.
21:22You know? Because I already knew what to write, but I didn't wanna spend all that time writing it if nobody was gonna buy it. But then ended up, you know, making enough for the mortgage by the end of the day.
21:31And I think there's something to be said whenever you get that inspiration, Take action immediately. So if you're watching this and you're like, this sounds awesome.
21:39Well, buy the course, then take the course, and then immediately take action even if you have to stay up all night. Like, take action. I've done that many, many times, and it's always something I never regret.
21:49I'm always glad I do it. And I noticed you you you even said that when you talked about the first course of mine, you about the passive income with Instagram. You canceled you were in Utah.
21:56You said you canceled your plans the next day, and you just implement and that fast implementation,
22:01I couldn't have said it better myself. Like, that is what makes us successful. So Yeah.
22:04Heidi, thank you so much for being on here. Really appreciate you sharing your story and encouraging people who maybe have something they love but need a little bit of that push to say, actually, this is something you can do and have a lot of fun doing.
22:14So thank you so much. You're welcome. Thanks for having me, and take her courses.
22:18My gosh. Thank you. You, Heidi.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
A fast-cut trailer opens with Heidi Easley's numbers before the interview even starts: 341 new members, roughly $130,000 in added revenue, and an ad budget that's grown from $10,000 a month to $10,500 a week. Then Maria Wendt sits her down to find out how.
How they asked for the click.
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
