The argument in one line.
Selling digital products at scale comes down to relentless simplicity and volume — fewer priorities, lower prices, more pitches, and more consistency — not new tactics or bigger offers.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You sell or want to sell low-ticket digital products (ebooks, templates, mini-courses) and are stuck on strategy rather than tools.
- You already have an audience or are running paid ads and want to know where to focus next: traffic, price, or upsells.
- You're overwhelmed by too many business activities and want a filter for what to cut.
- You want a founder's real operating rhythm (a two-day work week, no meetings) rather than hustle-culture advice.
SKIP IF…
- You sell high-ticket services or physical products — the pricing and upsell math here is specific to low-cost digital goods.
- You want tactical how-to (funnel builds, ad copy, platform walkthroughs) — this is principles-level, not a tutorial.
The full version, fast.
After $17M in digital-product sales, Maria Wendt's operating lessons cluster around simplicity and volume rather than new tactics: send traffic to the checkout page, charge less rather than more, cut meetings and busywork, and let two or three activities carry the whole business. Ads work at any experience level now, upsells are where the real profit lives, and most people quit right before their breakthrough. The back half is about output volume — pitch far more often than feels comfortable, get hyper-specific with offers, stay consistent over being creative, and let the business serve a chosen lifestyle rather than consume it. She closes on an unsexy claim: there are no secrets, just consistency and cleaning up your own personal conduct, which she says customers can sense.
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00:00 – 01:47
01 · The number, and why this video exists
Revenue reveal ($17-18M), framed as the list of lessons she wishes she'd known starting out.
01:47 – 02:57
02 · Lessons 1-2: Traffic and pricing
Focus on checkout-page traffic above all else; charging less produced more revenue than charging more.
02:57 – 05:11
03 · Lessons 3-4: No meetings, no working harder
A 22-person team with zero regular meetings; scaling comes from simplifying and eliminating, not grinding.
05:11 – 07:56
04 · Lessons 5-6: Ads for everyone, stick to the plan
Anyone can run effective ads now (the 'elevator ads' reinvestment loop); switching strategy resets progress to zero.
07:56 – 11:56
05 · Lessons 7-8: Upsells are the profit, don't quit early
Turning a $24 order into $400 via upsells; most people quit one or two steps before their breakthrough.
11:56 – 15:39
06 · Lessons 9-10: Products worth begging for, pitch more
60% repeat-customer rate from product quality; every piece of content should carry a pitch, direct or subtle.
15:39 – 19:22
07 · Lessons 11-12: Get hyper-specific, expect to feel sick of your pitch
A wardrobe-for-$100 course beats a 'fashion' course; feeling exhausted by your own repetition means it's finally working.
19:22 – 23:05
08 · Lessons 13-14: Business serves the lifestyle, consistency over creativity
A two-day work week, shown via an Instagram screen-time screenshot; prioritizing consistent output over novel content.
23:05 – 25:42
09 · Lessons 15-16: Cut what isn't making money, there are no secrets
Permission to stop non-revenue activities; the fundamentals (traffic, integrity, consistency) are the whole playbook.
25:42 – 29:26
10 · Lesson 17: Do the personal work, and close
Integrity, transparency, and ego as commercial assets, tied back to her own $100K-in-debt period; closes asking viewers which lesson landed.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Sending eyeballs to your checkout page matters more than almost any other single activity in a digital-products business.
- Charging less produced more total revenue than charging more — the biggest income jump came after lowering prices, not raising them.
- A 22-person company with zero regular meetings runs on hiring talented people, paying them well, and getting decisions over email instead of calls.
- Businesses scale by eliminating activities, not by working harder — every student who crossed $1M did it by doing less, not more.
- A $5 ad spend that returns $27, which gets reinvested to return $100, then $300, is called an 'elevator ad' — the reinvestment loop is the scaling mechanism, not the initial spend.
- Changing strategy every time it feels hard resets progress back to zero, which is why sticking to an unglamorous plan outperforms switching plans.
- Upsells turned a $24 order into a $400 order in this business — the profit is concentrated in what's offered after the first purchase, not the first purchase itself.
- Most people quit one or two steps before their financial breakthrough, so the urge to quit can itself be a leading indicator that a breakthrough is close.
- A 60% repeat-customer rate versus a 15-30% industry average was attributed directly to product quality, not marketing.
- Every piece of content should carry a pitch — direct or subtle — because pitching a handful of times a week is the actual gap between low and high digital-product income.
- A course on 'fashion' is too broad to sell; a course on 'redoing your wardrobe for $100 or less' sells because it combines a specific desire with a specific constraint.
- Feeling sick of repeating your own pitch is a sign you're finally marketing correctly, not a sign to stop.
- The business is structured to serve a chosen lifestyle (a two-day work week) rather than the lifestyle serving the business.
- Consistency was prioritized explicitly over creativity in content strategy, because proven formats outperform novelty for revenue.
- The single largest hidden cost in a growing business is continuing activities that were never actually driving revenue.
- There are no secret tactics behind $17M in sales — it is the same fundamentals (traffic, integrity, consistency) applied at high volume and for a long time.
- Customers can sense a lack of personal integrity, which is framed as a direct commercial liability, not just a personal one.
The whole playbook is simplicity, volume, and personal integrity.
WHAT TO LEARN
Across 17 lessons, the recurring pattern isn't a new tactic — it's doing fewer things, pricing lower, pitching more often, and being honest, then repeating that for years.
01The number, and why this video exists
- Sending traffic to the checkout page matters more than almost any other single activity — no eyeballs means no sales, regardless of how good the product is.
02Lessons 1-2: Traffic and pricing
- Sending traffic to the checkout page matters more than almost any other single activity — no eyeballs means no sales, regardless of how good the product is.
- Charging less produced more total revenue than charging more, contradicting the common advice to raise prices as you grow.
03Lessons 3-4: No meetings, no working harder
- A team can run with zero regular meetings by hiring capable people, paying them well, and defaulting to email instead of calls.
- Scaling comes from eliminating activities and simplifying, not from working more hours — every million-dollar case cited did less, not more.
04Lessons 5-6: Ads for everyone, stick to the plan
- An 'elevator ad' reinvests each round's profit into the next round's spend, turning a $5 test into a compounding scale-up rather than a one-off win.
- Switching strategy whenever it feels hard resets progress back to zero, so sticking to an unglamorous plan outperforms chasing a better one.
05Lessons 7-8: Upsells are the profit, don't quit early
- Upsells are where the real profit sits — a $24 order became a $400 order through post-purchase offers, not the initial sale.
- The urge to quit often shows up right before a breakthrough, so it can be read as a leading indicator rather than a stop sign.
06Lessons 9-10: Products worth begging for, pitch more
- A 60% repeat-customer rate against a 15-30% industry average was attributed to product quality creating demand for more, not to marketing.
- Every piece of content should carry a pitch, direct or subtle — pitching a handful of times a week is described as the actual income gap for most creators.
07Lessons 11-12: Get hyper-specific, expect to feel sick of your pitch
- Hyper-specific offers (a wardrobe refresh for under $100) outsell broad ones (a general fashion course) because they combine a clear desire with a clear constraint.
- Feeling sick of repeating your own pitch is treated as a sign the message has finally been marketed at sufficient volume, not a reason to stop.
08Lessons 13-14: Business serves the lifestyle, consistency over creativity
- A business can be structured to serve a chosen lifestyle — in this case, a two-day work week — rather than the lifestyle absorbing whatever the business demands.
- Consistency was prioritized over creativity deliberately, on the reasoning that proven formats posted reliably outperform novel ones posted sporadically.
09Lessons 15-16: Cut what isn't making money, there are no secrets
- The largest hidden cost in a growing business is continuing activities that were never actually driving revenue, and cutting them frees real time.
- The claimed absence of 'secrets' reframes success as fundamentals (traffic, integrity, consistency) applied at high volume over a long period.
10Lesson 17: Do the personal work, and close
- Personal integrity is framed as a commercial asset because customers are described as able to sense dishonesty, tying private conduct to business outcomes.
Terms worth knowing.
- Elevator ads
- An ad-scaling pattern where each round of ad spend is funded by the profit from the previous round — spend $5, make $27, spend the $27, make $100, and so on — rather than reinvesting fresh capital each time.
- Low-ticket digital product
- An inexpensive downloadable or self-serve product (an ebook, template, or short course) that requires little to no manual delivery or fulfillment after purchase.
- Upsell
- An additional product offered to a customer immediately after their first purchase, intended to increase the total order value from a single buyer.
Lines you could clip.
00:03
“We're actually very close to $18,000,000, but I like to keep it honest here at Maria Wendt Incorporated.”
02:30
“You make more by charging less.”
09:12
“We can take a $24 order and turn it into a $400 order, which is insane.”
09:23
“Most people quit right before their big breakthrough.”
18:16
“You will get bored before they even hear of you.”
24:30
“There's no secrets. There's no silver bullets. There's no, like, hacks.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogy
00:00We're actually very close to $18,000,000, but I like to keep it honest here at Maria Went Incorporated. And so we've not yet crossed over 18,000,000.
00:10Although, if you count sales from my website, we actually probably are over 18,000,000. But potato potato, $17,000,000, $18,000,000.
00:19It's still incredible. All with digital products, all very low to minimal delivery at all.
00:26It's been incredible. And you can kinda see here, last year we did almost 10.
00:32This year, we're about a month and a half in, and we've done 1,500,000 already. So we're doing about a million dollars a month, a little a little under $1,000,000 a month.
00:43I'm hoping we're projected to do 15 to 20,000,000 this year. Um, we'll see.
00:49We'll see definitely more than we did last year. That's for damn sure. What I have here is 17 lessons I've learned after making $17,000,000 with digital products.
00:58Basically, this video is gonna be what I wish I knew when I was just getting started, when I had no idea what I was doing, um, but I really wanted to make a lot of money selling low ticket, inexpensive digital products. Things like ebooks and templates and little mini courses.
01:16This is the this are the these are the things I wish I knew. Uh, in case you don't know me, my name is Maria Went. I usually introduce myself by telling you that I made $17,000,000 selling digital products, but you already know that.
01:28I make YouTube videos like this because they're fun and it's stuff I wish I knew, and about 1% of you guys decide to go a little deeper and buy a little course or two here or there and that's awesome too.
01:40Certainly no pressure and 99% of you guys don't and that's amazing. Okay. 17 lessons after making $17,000,000 with digital products.
01:48Lesson number one, focus on traffic to your checkout page. So you are focusing on a lot of different things, but the thing you actually should be focusing on is sending eyeballs to your checkout page. If you do not get eyeballs, you will not get sales.
02:01But when you do get eyeballs, you do get sales. It's actually really crazy how that happens. And so if you're focusing on a bunch of other things, stop focusing on it.
02:09Start focusing on getting traffic to your checkout page. Lesson number two, you make more by charging less. This is a really big myth in our industry where they think that like you do you always hear things like charge your worth, raise your price, you need to raise your prices, keep your prices high.
02:27Um, there's all kinds of stuff about it, but I actually think that's wrong. Um, in those earlier years where you don't really see any income tracked at all, so 2014, sixteen, eighteen, twenty, relative to the graph, it doesn't even show up.
02:41I until I started selling, like, very inexpensive stuffs, I didn't make a lot of money. Once I started charging a lot less, I started making a lot more. Um, it's remarkable how much you make when you're not charging $10,000.
02:54Just saying. So you make more by charging less. That's my experience.
02:57Lesson number three, stop having meetings. We are meetings free company here at Team Maria.
03:04We have 22 people in our Slack right now. Probably the most it's ever been and we don't have any meetings.
03:13We we literally avoid meetings like the plague. My solution is to hire very talented people, pay them well, and let them do what they do best.
03:23And so talented people don't like to waste their time in meetings. Professional people would rather just say, uh, awesome.
03:33I'm gonna get this done. I wanna stay focused on what I'm doing. And so if your day is filled with meetings, whether it's to your clients, whether it's with your team members, whether it's networking meetings, whatever your calendar is filled with, um, really evaluate each and every one of those meetings.
03:52People ask to get on the phone with me all the time. Hey. Do wanna set up a meeting to go over that?
03:55I'm like, no. Just send me an email with the details. Like, I I will literally tell people, no.
03:59We're not getting on a meeting. Um, and you know what's shocking and remarkable? They send me the information that I need in an email.
04:06Works great. I get what I need to know, and I didn't have to spend an hour getting it. Meetings are one of the biggest time sucks for you as you scale.
04:14Stop having meetings. Lesson number four, you don't scale by working harder. This is kinda hard to wrap your mind around if you're someone like me.
04:22I have a really strong work ethic. I love working hard. I do work hard.
04:25But you don't scale by working hard. You actually scale by dramatically simplifying.
04:30Every one of my inner circle students who have hit over a million dollars did so by doing less. They didn't work harder.
04:37They stopped doing a lot of things. They stopped working hard, and they just started dramatically, shockingly simplifying.
04:45Um, and so this is one of the biggest things I had to unlock to start making like millions of dollars selling digital products is that I can't work to this level. I have to use my brain. I have to eliminate.
04:56I have to stop doing a lot of things so I can scale one or two things that actually work well. And that's a big thing that we talk about in our inner circle is stop doing pretty much everything and then triple down on one or two things that are actually gonna make you money.
05:11Lesson number five is everyone should be running ads. I don't care how new you are. I don't care like, the way AI has changed ads, specifically meta ads, um, we have students who spend $5, make a $27 sale within a twenty four to forty eight hour period, and then they just infinitely scale it.
05:29We call them where you spend $5, you make $27, you spend the $27 in ads, then you make a $100, then you spend the $100 in ads, now you're making 300 a day or whatever it might be.
05:40Um, and so we have people scale up really quickly by running ads. Everyone should be running ads. It has never been easier to run ads.
05:49It has never been more simple to run ads. I tell people if you can post a post to Facebook, if you can upload a picture to Facebook, you can run an ad.
05:57It's it's they've done Facebook's done all the the work that used to have to be done manually by ads experts.
06:04They've done it. And so beginners think about it from a business standpoint from meta's perspective. The easier they make it for people to run effective ads and get customers, the more people are gonna spend on advertising.
06:15We spend $300,000 a month on ads. That's a lot of money.
06:19Um, but we make, uh, what's called a two x return on investment. So we spend a dollar, make $2. So we're super motivated.
06:26We wanna spend as much money as we can because for us, Meta Ads is a machine to turn $1 into two. Of course, we wanna do that. So everyone should be running ads even if you're just getting started.
06:37Uh, number six is really important. It's to stick with the plan. And what I mean by that is every business is hard in its own way.
06:48Everything has seasons where you wanna quit, where you feel like changing the plan. You're like, oh, maybe this isn't for me.
06:57I should change up what I'm doing. But the problem is every time you change up what you're doing, you start back at the very beginning. You start back at zero.
07:05And so then you're you lose all your progress. You lose all your momentum. And so you never really see significant revenue because you're always changing things based on how you feel.
07:15Um, and so just stick to the plan. If you said that you were gonna post three times a day, post three times a day whether or not every post is going viral. If you said that you're going to, um, run ads, run ads.
07:27Whatever plans you make for yourself, it's so important that you just stick with them. Not just for you to actually see results, but for you to start trusting yourself. Because if you keep changing the plan every time you feel like changing the plan, your body doesn't trust yourself, your brain doesn't trust yourself when you make a new plan.
07:41Because you have a personal history of quitting and switching things up and changing things, and it's not gonna work. You're not gonna scale.
07:51Uh, okay. Number seven, they're all important. I'm gonna say this lesson's so important to everyone because they're all so important.
07:57Lesson number seven is that your profit is in the upsells. So one of the things that we do on a regular basis is we interview our successful students in my studio here in Newport Beach. It's fun.
08:08We all get together in the studio. We you and I get to spend time together. We have a lot of fun with it, but then what I do is break down the successful students, like, what they did.
08:19And over and over and over again, the course that comes up is my course on mastering upsells. If you don't know an upsell, it's kinda like at McDonald's where you go to order a burger, and then the cashier says, would you like some fries with that? That's an upsell.
08:32So when you sell one product, you offer additional products for that customer to buy if they want to. Or your profit is all in those upsells. We've gotten so good at this that we can take a $24 order and turn it into a $400 order, which is insane.
08:46And so that's profit. Right? Because whereas one business would get $24 from a customer, I'm getting $400 from a customer.
08:54And so mastering upsells has obviously dramatically increased the amount of profit I'm taking home to the bank, um, and that is what we hear over and over again from our successful students who are coming into the studio is mastering upsells was a game changer for me. So your profit is in the upsells.
09:09If you are in the low ticket digital product space, you have to learn how to master upsells or you I mean, you don't have to, I guess, but you'll just make a lot less money. Lesson number eight, most people quit right before their big break breakthrough. I've seen students do this sadly over and over again where they I know because I've done this for so long.
09:29We just crossed over our hundred thousandth, um, customer, and so I've helped literally thousands and thousands of students. And so my Spidey senses know exactly right before a student is about to have a big breakthrough.
09:42And there's something about that. This is just what I noticed. People are in that moment right before they have their big breakthrough.
09:49When I say big breakthrough, like, I'm talking about, like, your first $40,000 or a launch that goes phenomenally well and you bring home $20,000, like a big significant cash infusion into your business.
10:01People, I just noticed over and over again, they seem to do one of two things right before their big breakthrough.
10:08They quit and give up and try something new because they couldn't persevere through whatever hurdle it was, and that's some people. And then the other camp of people, they take the bull by the horns, they kinda say f it, and they just ride through.
10:25And those are the students who come to my studio and we interview their success stories. They have or they post in my Facebook group if they're not able to come to me. Right?
10:32They they share their success story. And so I've gotten really good at when a student is, like, two steps away from a big breakthrough, one step away from a big breakthrough.
10:44And what kills me is I can say the same thing to two people, which is do not quit. You are so close. You are right there.
10:53And one student will trust me and will persevere and get their big payday, and then the other student won't. And I can't control that.
11:01Like, student might quit, try something new, start completely over, and they start back at zero.
11:08And I've learned over the years as someone who's been doing this for a very long time, like, I can't control those students and I wouldn't even want to. Like, you have to seize your own greatness. Um, but just so you guys know, historically, a lot of people quit right before their big breakthrough.
11:23And so if you feel like quitting, that could be a sign that your big breakthrough is right around the corner. Um, for us ladies who have had babies, um, they always say, like, right when you wanna quit when you're in labor, that's right before the baby comes. And that was my experience in labor.
11:38Was like I was done. I was ready to quit, and then I had Ellie, like, thirty minutes later. And so in my experience, that's true in business too.
11:45People wanna quit right before their big breakthrough, and so pay attention to that feeling of wanting to quit cause it could be an indication that your big breakthrough is right around the corner. Uh, okay. Lesson number nine is that your product should be so good that your customers pant for more.
12:03They're desperate for more. They're hungry for more. And I'm coming at this from our experience.
12:08We have a 60% repeat customer rate, meaning, you know, our customers buy from us over and over and over again. Our industry average is 15 to 30%. So we are at least twice as good as the average business in our industry is at getting customers to buy from us.
12:24And the reason we're so good at that is because people get results from our products. So they buy a little course, it's amazing, it blows their mind, and then they buy the next one, and then that one brings them in, and we're so good at that. And again, as someone that's made almost $18,000,000 doing this, I'll be able to say $20,000,000 soon, um, it's because we are good at creating products that people, like, beg us for more.
12:48Like, we have students when we ran a Black Friday sale, they were upset because we didn't they had purchased every product we had created, and there was nothing left for them to buy during our Black Friday sale.
13:02So they've purchased every product we've put out and they are upset because there's nothing left for them to buy. And so our bottleneck isn't getting customers.
13:15Our bottleneck isn't sales. Our bottleneck is we cannot launch products fast enough. We need to launch products a hell of a lot faster than we are because the people are demanding them.
13:25And I that has been so beneficial to us as business owners. Obviously, you get repeat customers over and over again. That's fabulous for your profits.
13:31And so, um, we don't talk about it enough, I think, in our space creating a really good product, but our standard has always been a, every product has to be better than the last, and b, um, we should be able to charge a 100 times for it than we are.
13:47So we should be able to, like, sell. And when I say, like, sell, it's like we can actually get that. Um, and so because that's been our focus, we've had a really successful business because we don't put out crap.
13:58We put out really good products that really help people get really good results. That's what we want. Um, okay.
14:06Another one is nurture less and pitch more. There's an emphasis especially, um, amongst the ladies in my community that we have to overly nurture.
14:15I don't know why. Um, it's just something I noticed women tend to feel weirder about pitching than men do. Um, every single piece of content you put out should pitch.
14:25Now I put out tons of helpful content, thousands of helpful content, and about, like I said, about 1% of people who watch my free content buy. 99% of people see they'll go off.
14:37I get emails and text messages or not not text messages, but, um, Instagram messages every day from people who watch my free stuff and made money from my free stuff. They never bought anything from me. They never become a customer, and that's that's fine.
14:49That's totally fine. Um, and so when I say nurture less and pitch more, it means that you should be less worried that you can still make really good nurturing content, but you need to be pitching way more than you are.
15:05So every piece of content that I put out has a pitch. Now it can be a direct pitch that's like comment keyword to buy my thing. It can be a subtle pitch where you reference a product and that's kind of a subtle pitch, but every single product, every single piece of content that I put out pitches.
15:23Most of you guys are maybe pitching once a week in your content if that. And that's the gap in your income from digital products versus my income from digital products. I just pitch a bazillion times more than you do.
15:34That's that's like a big part of it. And so nurture less, pitch more. Along those lines, hyperspecific sells.
15:42So what do I mean by that? You need to solve a hyperspecific problem. Your content needs to speak to hyper like, hyperspecific problems, hyperspecific people.
15:49Hyper specific is very, very specific. Meaning, like, you're not gonna make a course on how to dress, like, hot like fashion.
15:59You're not gonna make a course called fashion. K? That's way too broad.
16:02Fashion is way too broad. How to look good in your clothes is too broad. A course that would do really, really well is how to redo your entire wardrobe for a $100 or less.
16:15How to elevate your wardrobe for a $100 or less. That would do incredibly well because you have a thing people want which is to look elevated, to look polished, to look rich.
16:28And then you have this other thing which is like they're on an extreme budget so they have to look really good on a budget. And just in case you're curious, like, what would a course like that look like?
16:37I would start by saying things like, okay, part of looking elevated is you never leave the house with wrinkled clothes. You never leave the house with threads hanging off your clothes. You never leave the house in bright neon colors.
16:50Um, just again, as an example. And then you teach them how to thrift, how to set up a clothing swap in your neighborhood. We have a clothing swap in our neighborhood, and it's incredible.
16:59We got all this awesome clothes. It's super sustainable for the earth. So again, like, not as a side tangent, but, um, hyper specific.
17:09You guys, one of the reasons your offers might not be selling is because you're not solving a specific enough problem and there's not a value in solving a more general problem. It's the more specific the better. To use my own courses as an example, uh, like I would never do a course on making money online.
17:25Way too broad. Um, I make courses on like how to get more sales with your Instagram stories. So that's a course that walks you through specific things to put on your stories, specific ways to lay your stories out, specific time of the days to do stories, specific ways to set your stories up, all to make more sales.
17:45That's super specific and it does really well. There are tutorials and people like that. Okay.
17:51Another thing, number 12. Uh, if you are making any kind of content, if you're talking about your services, if you're promoting yourself, here's the lesson.
18:00You will get bored before they even hear of you. So you will be saying that if you're doing it right, you will be saying the same thing over and over and over again and you will be so bored and they will not even know who you are.
18:13They will not even know what you're selling. You feel like you're inundating everybody with your pitches and your promos and you talking about your business. They don't even know they haven't even seen it.
18:22K? And so you will get a mark of someone who's marketing a product correctly is that they're physically nauseous thinking about promoting again.
18:33Like you're that sick of it. You get to the point where you're physically like if I have to pitch this damn product one more time, I'm gonna barf. Like that's oh, now you're actually marketing a product.
18:42You've thought of every angle. You've used all the nine urgency angles you can use. Um, you've done an entire year of different holiday promos.
18:51Like you have marketed this thing to hell and back, then you get to feel tired. Okay?
18:56Then you get to feel bored, and then they'll start to hear about you. But if you're doing like three pitches a month, I mean, I do more than that in a day.
19:06And so you just have no concept of the volume that it's required to get to millions of dollars in digital product sales and I can assure you that if you're doing it right, you will get bored before they even hear of you. And that's just how it goes.
19:19So don't worry about pitching too much. Okay. Lesson number 13.
19:24We are coming to a close here. Lesson number 13. The business serves a lifestyle not the other way around.
19:30So you do not live to work for your business. The business exists to work for you. And so it's so important like I work and I work really hard but I work on Tuesdays and I work on Fridays and that's it.
19:44I do not check my phone. I do not pull up Instagram like I I don't think I have oh I do have this one. Wanna I show you a screenshot and I was gonna make a piece of content on that because I thought it was really interesting.
19:54Um, let me okay. So I don't know if you can see this. This is my, um, daily average for Instagram.
20:02It's thirty seven minutes per day. If But you kinda pay attention to it, today's Friday, so that's today, and that's Tuesday.
20:09Flatlined. Flatlined the other days. So I was three hours and forty five minutes on Tuesday.
20:16That's when I did my content for the week for like half a week. And then I did I'm doing the rest today. That'll be another spike.
20:23That's it. And so it's so important. And again, that your schedule might look different.
20:28Maybe you work two hours every day or something like that. But the business serves the lifestyle, not the other way around.
20:35If we're working all the time constantly, what the f is the point of this? The whole point of a digital products business is to make a lot of money and have time freedom.
20:47I go to the beach almost every single day with Ellie. I go to the library constantly with Ellie. I read my own books that aren't business books, and I enjoy doing it.
20:55We go on hikes in nature. Like, we do so much stuff. I don't work on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays, or Mondays.
21:04I only work on Tuesdays and Fridays. That's it. Today's a Friday.
21:07I'm filming my YouTube videos. They're gonna be done for the next two weeks. Not gonna worry about it again for two weeks.
21:11The business serves the lifestyle, not the other way around. Do not get it twisted. It is so and again, I'm speaking from experience here.
21:17That's how I know. It is so easy to because digital product business is easy.
21:22Right? There's no delivery. You just have to learn how to market.
21:24It's gonna be the easy that's the easiest business, in my opinion, easiest business model by far. It is it's hard to mess up a digital product business. And so because of that, once you start making money, it's very easy to be like, oh, shit.
21:36If I just do this, if I just do this, if I just do this. And the business serves the lifestyle.
21:42It's the whole point of a digital products business in my opinion. Maybe for you you like working and you wanna work around the clock and that's fine. That's totally different conversation.
21:49For most of us I think, we want this digital products business to serve our life so we can make really good money and have a lot of free time. Best for me at least. Okay.
21:59Lesson number 14, worry about consistency not creativity.
22:04So I see a lot of newer content creators worrying about being consistent or worrying about being creative. I wanna make something different. I wanna you know, everyone's always making content like x y z.
22:14It's like, do you know why everyone's making content about x y z? Because it fucking works. Okay?
22:18So you go ahead and make content like x y z too. Don't worry about creativity. Try to get a post out once a day.
22:23Right? Like, worry about the thing that actually is gonna drive revenue in your business. And so you have got to get consistent with your content creation.
22:32You've got to cons get consistent with your outputs or with your inputs, what you're putting into your business. Um, if you are not consistent, it's just not gonna work.
22:40Like, that's I'm being honest. That's the reality of this. You've gotta be consistent.
22:43And so it could it doesn't mean you're working on this every single day. You just saw my thing. I create my content for the week on Instagram in three and a half hours.
22:50K? It's not like it's taking up a ton of time, but I schedule out four pieces of content every single day. Right now, I'm doing it all by myself.
22:57And so it's possible. It just has to be a priority. Do not worry about being creative right now.
23:03Just worry about being consistent. Kind of along those lines, lesson 15 is that most of what you're doing isn't making money, and you should stop doing it.
23:12At our event last October, one of the things that people loved that we did is we helped them get really clear on all the activities in their business that weren't making money, and we literally just gave them permission to stop doing it. So we said, you should do more of this, and we do this in the inner circle too. You should do more of this, and you should do more of this, and triple down on those two things that are actually making you money, and it's different for everyone.
23:33Everyone's got different things that are making them money. But we are very good at identifying, like, the two things you need to triple down on, and then you stop doing everything else. So many entrepreneurs are so damn busy on things that aren't making them money.
23:49You might as well go outside and play for you're accomplishing the same thing except you probably would be mentally happier if you were not doing stupid stuff on the computer that isn't actually making you any money.
24:02And it kills me because I love good work ethics. I love to see how much my entrepreneurs, they want to work.
24:08I think that's amazing. But like I say, let's dial up our thinking caps a little bit here, and let's pay attention to the activities in our business that are actually making us money. And it's like two things typically.
24:21Like one or two things you're doing right and about everything else is not right and that's okay. Right? Even in my own business I do that.
24:27Um, but we gotta pay attention to things that are making us money and more importantly pay attention to things that are not making us money because we free up so much time on our calendar when we just give ourselves permission to stop doing things that aren't working. Lesson 16, there's no secrets.
24:41There's no secrets. There's no secrets. It's it's everything you've ever heard every successful person say to the end of time ever.
24:47Take good care of your customers. Focus on generating traffic. Be a person of integrity.
24:55Show up consistently. Run ads. These are things people have been teaching since the dawn of time.
25:01There's no secrets. There's no silver bullets. There's no, like, hacks.
25:07It's just the same hard things which is to be consistent.
25:15Really consistency. Like, honestly, if I could just pick one thing that would eventually lead to success, it's consistency. Because if you're consistent, everything else flows from that.
25:23There's no secrets. And the minute you accept that there's no secrets and it's just a lot of the same thing over and over again, it's reliability, it's showing up day in and day out.
25:34Consistency, if you the minute you realize there's no secrets, now you're fully free to actually go get the results you want. And then kind of along those lines, the seventeenth lesson that I've learned after making $17,000,000 is that you have to work on your personal shit.
25:52You've gotta stop gossiping, you've gotta stop cutting corners in other areas of your life, stop breaking your word to yourself.
26:02The more you clean out your own personal shit, the better you become. Better entrepreneur you become.
26:09The better your team members respect you, the better your customers can tell like I'll tell you what, customers can sniff bullshit from a zillion miles away. They just know. And I have no secrets.
26:21There's nothing hidden in my closet. I am so transparent. I publish my freaking tax returns on my website.
26:27There's no skeletons in my closet whatsoever. Um, I'm so open about my divorce. I'm so open about, like, the struggles of being a single mom.
26:35I'm so open about my business expenses, my personal life expenses. You can go online and literally see what I spend every month on clothes. It's not a lot, but you can see what I spend on eating out.
26:44Again, it's not a lot. I like to live very simply. I don't even like, I just have been driving the same paid off car for since, like, 2019.
26:50Like, I I have no skeletons in my closet. I have no secrets. I'm super transparent, and I genuinely believe that that's partially why I have so much success is because I'm someone people trust.
27:01And so even in myself, the more I work on my issues, showing up when I'm afraid, saying like, continuing to treat others with respect. Um, working for me, a big one I'll share, is being prideful.
27:15That is my thing I work on so much because I have an ego, and it's hard not to have an ego after you start speaking on stage and after you have, you know, millions of followers between all my platforms. And so it's hard to not have an ego, but I really work on it because nothing is more annoying than a person who thinks they're super great.
27:32Like, that's just annoying. I really wanna continue to say as humble as I possibly can, um, and so that's my thing I'm working on. But I know that as I continue to ground myself, as I continue to say humble, as I continue to ask those around me to call me out, like, some of my team members are so good at calling me out and I hate it, but it's really good for me to have team members like that and I'm so grateful to them for that.
27:52And so, um, you know, the more we work on our personal stuff, the more money we're gonna make.
27:58And I see a lot of entrepreneurs who complain, who get distracted, who have victim mentality, who don't understand that they are the solution to their problems, who keep making bad relationship choices, who make bad financial these things, and they can't connect the dots that that's why they aren't that's also why they aren't successful in business.
28:20But I'm sitting, you know, and I can kinda see from a high air balloon because I used to be that person. I used to be that person who was super in debt and always spending money, and I was always broke. I always was overdrafting.
28:30Like, I was constantly having my bank account be in the negative. That was my reality all the time, and not even that long ago.
28:37Like, 2017, 2016 for sure, those were the years where I was constantly overdrafting.
28:43I was a $100,000 in debt. Like, I I had a massive car payment. Um, I just was it was a mess.
28:49And so the more I clean up my personal act and genuinely just try to be a person of integrity, the more my business grows.
28:57And I know that that's just gonna continue to be a thing. So thank you for watching.
29:01That is 17 lessons I've learned, making $17,000,000. I'm very curious to know in the comments which lessons stood out to you, um, which one was helpful, which one was interesting. I'd love to know.
29:11If you wanna make more videos like this that are a little bit less tactical, but are a little bit more like bigger picture strategy stuff, let me know. I'll make more of them.
29:19They're super easy for me to make. They're fun for me to make, so I'd be happy to make more of them if that's something that you guys want.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
She opens by correcting herself down from $18M to a more honest $17M, live revenue dashboard visible over her shoulder the entire time — the number itself is the hook, and the rest of the video is what she says it took to get there.
Named ideas worth stealing.
05:22concept
Elevator ads
- $5 spend → $27 sale
- reinvest $27 → $100
- reinvest $100 → $300+
A compounding ad-reinvestment loop where each round's profit funds the next round's spend, used to scale a campaign from a $5 test to hundreds of dollars a day.
Steal forany low-ticket paid-acquisition funnel with a fast, provable ROAS
How they asked for the click.
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
