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What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
Hello. Today's episode of Plenty is a little sneak peek behind the scenes of our Relaxed Money Live event. This is a talk I gave at Relaxed Money Live this past February, and I wanted to share it with our Plenty audience because it takes you on a journey with me through how we started our online business, what exact steps we took, why we took them, and how it all worked out up until now. So I got started in 02/2010. I'm like geriatric in digital marketer years and I started with a blog.
Kate Northrup:And I had didn't even know at that time that you could make money online. I had no idea. I started the whole thing by accident. And then I started making money and I was like, wait, hold up. This is incredible.
Kate Northrup:So in today's episode, I'm giving you the good, the bad, the ugly, a lot of the mistakes we've made along the way, what worked, what didn't work, and why our business has grown dramatically in recent years, including increasing our profit margins, which is the most important part in my opinion, because you can make money all day long, but if your expenses are higher than your revenue, it won't make any difference in your life. So today's episode is about simplifying to amplify and how we built up until last year to nearly 3,000,000 in revenue, and what we're doing doing now is taking that even to the next step. So you're gonna get the full scoop in this episode. And if you are starting an online business, if you're wanting to start one, if you already have one and you're wanting to grow, scale, simplify, make things easier, you're gonna love this episode. It is quite detailed.
Kate Northrup:It is far more detailed than I ever get about our business, so enjoy the behind the scenes. Welcome to Plenty. I'm your host Kate Northrup and together we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy. And to have abundance on every possible level. Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of hunting.
Kate Northrup:Let's go fill our cups. So it's story time. I realized for years, I thought and this is funny. I thought or I think it's funny. I thought that the success in our business was because I'd been at it for so long.
Kate Northrup:And that's nice and something to fall back upon, but when I actually looked at the numbers, because the numbers always tell a story, and if we're not looking at the numbers we miss the story. And when I looked at the numbers, what I realized is that right now, relaxed money accounts for 80% of our company's revenue, which is great. Yeah. So awesome. And I'm going to tell you the story of that because we only started doing this at the very end of twenty twenty two.
Kate Northrup:And we basically replaced all of our revenue with one offer. Okay. The simplicity is divine. So I thought, oh, the reason stuff works when we promote it not everything, by the way, we have plenty of flops. But the reason some things work is that, you know, I've been at this for a long time, right?
Kate Northrup:I launched my blog in 04/20/2030. April '20 '10. I am geriatric in online years, Right? Yeah. Who?
Kate Northrup:Who? Anybody? Has anybody been hanging out since 2010? Okay. So like a couple of people.
Kate Northrup:Anybody brand new to this room, like you've never done anything I know we have two, never done anything before? Yes, amazing. Like, total brand newbies, like, I didn't really know who you were, like, a month or two ago. Okay. Okay.
Kate Northrup:That's nobody. So that doesn't really prove my point. But what what the numbers showed me when I looked is that in our most two in our two recent launches, 78% of our sales for a product that accounts for 80% of our revenue 78% of our sales came from people who had been on our email list for less than six months. So I was like, this is really cool because even though I've been at this for a million years, the ROI, the return on investment we get, has nothing to do with that. Like, anything is possible right now.
Kate Northrup:And I share that with you because it set me free. Because I was like, wait, if I want to do a ginormo launch in the spring, I just can because the people who are going to be my buyers may not even know who I am in February when they're going to check out April. And I don't think that's true for just me. So I want to share that with everyone in the room as the living example with data and pie charts, that anything is possible at any time. Your past does not at all equal your future.
Kate Northrup:Isn't that cool? Yeah. Okay. So, I'm going to share the story of how we got here today, some of it, salient points. We just crossed almost $3,000,000 year, which is the highest we've ever done.
Kate Northrup:It was also our most profitable year, and we also worked less. Continues to be surprising, the less we do, the more we make. Let's all say it. The less I do, the more I make. One more time.
Kate Northrup:The less I do, the more I make. Because it's not about productivity, it's about potency. Yeah. It's not about productivity, it is about potency. And the less mishegoss there is, the more potent the transmission becomes.
Kate Northrup:And I learned that, of course, the hard way. So, what happens when your creative life force does not have systems and structures? A demonstration. So, we have these desires, we have these creative impulses, they are beautiful. And then so many of us do the following with it.
Kate Northrup:We don't have a structure, we don't have a system, we're addicted to what's new, we're addicted to what's now, we're addicted to following the trends, to the shiny object, to following our inspiration all the time, and it goes like this. Has anybody ever felt that way in their business? Yeah. Right? Thank you, Tato, for bringing me balloons in my brand colors.
Kate Northrup:Okay. So, how many of you feel like you're juggling too much in your business and life right now? Yeah. I've so been there. I have so been there.
Kate Northrup:The thing is simplicity is actually the most powerful growth strategy. Simplicity is actually the most powerful growth strategy. Think about it like a river. You got water, you got river banks. The fewer tributaries, the higher the water pressure in the river.
Kate Northrup:The more flow, the less channels. Fewer channels, more flow. And channels mean everything. Ideas, projects, output, offerings, different kinds of people you serve, different ways in which you serve them. And just show of hands, who here actually does have a business?
Kate Northrup:Okay, great. If you don't, take this and apply it to your career, the way you run your household, the way you care for your children, take it and apply it to anything. It doesn't matter. We're all a business in some way. Do you have a business?
Kate Northrup:Yes. The answer is yes. Okay, great. Helpful. That's not exactly data, but like that was helpful.
Kate Northrup:Oh, by the way, this is totally unrelated. We're going to be sending out a survey. And I'm asking you right now with my mouth and my heart that when you answer those, it means so much to us, and I'll tell you why. Don't do it for me. Do it because the data we receive is really helpful for us to attract exactly the next right people.
Kate Northrup:So it is your way of paying it forward. If you've received a transmission, if you've received a transformation in this room or in Relaxed Money, and you receive a survey from us, please fill it out. It'll be easy. It'll take two seconds and it is a beautiful way for you to pass that gift along to the next person. Thank you.
Kate Northrup:Okay. So success, turns out, does not necessarily equal simplicity. So, I really made the business harder than it needed to be for years. For years. It was my way, I didn't even know I was doing it, and what ended up happening is that my unconscious created success through doing more, despite the fact that I wrote a book called Do Less, which is embarrassing.
Kate Northrup:And it just was what it was. I did less and less, but it still was more. And what it felt like is I had created something that sometimes I just wanted to get off the ride. Anybody ever feel that way? It's like, shit, I have to show up for this thing and I have to keep showing up and I just off.
Kate Northrup:I just want off. We were running multiple offers, chasing trends, constantly reinventing the wheel and, yeah. So, 2011 to 2016 was my over complication era faux show. So 2011 so 2011 was a big year. 2011 was the year I fell in love with Mike.
Kate Northrup:Twenty eleven, we spent in my Toyota Prius driving around the country. We did 42,000 miles. We traveled to 40 states, and we lived out of the Prius for ten months. And we didn't ever sleep in it, just to be clear. But that way, it was our vehicle.
Kate Northrup:And that year, through the curriculum that I created for myself that became Money a Love Story, I went from making $34,000 a year the previous year to making 125 ks. And it is yeah, it was a big jump. It was not because, as we discussed, it was not because I suddenly married a rich man. It was not because I got a fancy job. There was no inheritance and no one swooped in and saved me.
Kate Northrup:It was because I changed my insides. And, that was powerful. I got the book deal for Money, A Love Story, these shoes are the shoes I bought for that book launch party. These are the little shoes that could. They have ridden me through my career for many big events, and so I brought them out for this.
Kate Northrup:And we launched the Money Love course, that was thanks to Mike because this is just hot tip. First of all, surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. That's number one. And then number two, listen to your customers. So in 2012, Mike and I were living in my girlfriend's summer house on the East End Of Long Island.
Kate Northrup:We were just two kids trying to figure shit out. And I had this book deal for Money, A Love Story, and I was only selling other people's products at the time. I had never sold anything that I had made myself. We were affiliate marketers. But I had this book deal, and and I was blogging.
Kate Northrup:And I had grown a list. I had grown this following and they were emailing being like, hey, like, maybe you could sell something of your own essentially. Like, I signed up to learn from you, not all these other people. And I was like, well, you just have to wait until Money, a Love Story comes out. It'll be September 2013, so just hang tight.
Kate Northrup:And Mike said, we could actually make a course based on the book. I was like, oh, cool. Let's do that. So one weekend, because we had no kids, he like set me up with a microphone in front of the fireplace and we recorded the thing and did the thing. We sold it, before it had been created, hot tip, sell it before you make it so that you have proof of concept.
Kate Northrup:Okay? Nothing existed. But I made the sales video, I wrote the emails, we made $20 in one week selling a $97 product. And I was like, oh my God, the internet is like an ATM. And that was a really big moment.
Kate Northrup:And we sold that course for many, many years. We went on to sell over a million dollars of it, serve over 5,000 students. Anyone here take the Money Love course? Okay, a couple of people. But see, continued proof.
Kate Northrup:You can reinvent any time. Doesn't matter. Okay, great. So the thing is, when that book came out, I got to go on the Today Show, I got to do very cool media and speaking gigs, And then I shrunk from success because I did not have the somatic capacity to hold it. And my imprinting was a mother who the day she was on Oprah the first time, basically our dad left.
Kate Northrup:And so, the imprinting of bigness being associated with loss was really deep. So, I could never have articulated this, but I was so scared. I was so scared. And so, what did I do? I completely abandoned the money topic and was like, let me get out my balloon and have it go.
Kate Northrup:And I did that for, you know, really until 2016. Luckily, you know, we got married in the meantime. We had two beautiful children, like zero regrets, but my creative energy was all over the place. We launched this thing, we launched that thing, there was this strategy, brand new webinar over here, oh, let's do a five day challenge. Maybe a Facebook group, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah all freaking over the place.
Kate Northrup:Our revenue did continue to go up, but there was no system. It wasn't like, here's how we do this and then we repeat it. Every year was basically from scratch. And that was addictive. It felt so good.
Kate Northrup:What's gonna happen? If I pull out the rug from us over and over and over again, can I make it happen again? Yes, I can. Yeah. Cool.
Kate Northrup:Exhausting. Okay. Every time I succeeded, every time we succeeded, I added more. More offers, more launches, more different business models, sales methods, and instead of feeling like I had made it, I just felt confused about who I was and, like, maybe I should just quit all the time. I never it it took a really long time, literally, I feel like until this year, to finally be like, oh, yeah.
Kate Northrup:I know what I'm doing. Which is kind of a gift, but anyway, right, both ends. So how many of you feel like you're doing too much right now, not just workload wise, but trying to make too many things work at once? Maybe, a little bit? Too many irons in the fire?
Kate Northrup:Yeah. So, in 2016, '20 '17, I finally heeded the call. After Lil Penelope was born, my period came back, that's actually the month my period came back, I found that photo last night and I was like, jackpot. And I was suddenly fascinated. I was suddenly fascinated by cycles.
Kate Northrup:And I thought to myself, how is it possible that my entire adult life I've had this incredible cyclical wisdom that I have never been paying attention to, never organised my time around? And if this energy, if this pulse of life is responsible for all of human life on planet Earth, certainly it would be a good energy time management system for my business. So, that's where do less came from. That's where there's a cycle for everything came from. That's where the next body of work came from.
Kate Northrup:And I started a journaling practice which was every day I would write down what day of my cycle I was on, what phase of the cycle I was in, what the lunar phase was doing, and how I felt. That was it. It was very simple. And within a month, I no longer felt anxious. And I had suffered with severe postpartum anxiety.
Kate Northrup:And it was a miracle because for the first time, I had something I could depend on every single month that I knew was coming, and it was me. It was so beautiful. Was like a life raft. And in 2017, the first year we implemented a new way of doing things, this more feminine approach, this more cyclical approach, it was our first seven figure year. And that was a goal that we had been chasing for a long time.
Kate Northrup:So, at the end of that year, we had made 1,080,000.00 I don't know how to say that. I don't know how to say the big numbers. But, it was our first do less make more year. And what was amazing is we bought a spec house that summer, that May, May, June. And a year prior, we had submitted for a mortgage and we were not approved.
Kate Northrup:We had been we submitted for a mortgage for a $500,000 house or $4.50 or something like that and we were denied. And, that was with an $800,000 a year business. And, I felt like we felt I won't speak for you, Mike, but I felt like such a fuck up. I was like, how is it that I have an Ivy League education, I have this big of a business, and nobody will trust me to buy a house? We had a baby, we were living in a rental, which there's nothing wrong with that, we live in a rental now.
Kate Northrup:But I just was like, ah. And then a year later, we were buying a house, picking out the fixtures, doing the whole thing in a neighbourhood where our neighbors were cardiothoracic surgeons, lawyers, dentists. And I remember Sarah Tacey said, she remembered that I had shared a quote from Danielle LaPorte, which was, live in a house I bought with my dreams with ideas. I actually bought with my dreams. But I live in a house I bought with my ideas, and Sarah was driving away one day and she was like, I just stood there looking at who your neighbors were and looked at, like, you freaking built that house with your ideas.
Kate Northrup:So a year later, we were buying a house that was significantly more expensive than the one we couldn't get approved for the year before. Again, shit can happen fast. Who you were is not who you will be. So, I mean, it's not like then it was sunshine and rainbows. So then what happened was, in 2018, April, I pushed out this beautiful baby girl who's crying in this picture, but with her one hundredth percentile head size.
Kate Northrup:It was a real reclamation because she was a VBAC after the first birth was an unplanned C section that was very traumatic. And the minute I pushed her out, Mike broke into a full body rash that was this severe illness. And many of you know this story, so I won't go into depth about it. But it was fucking rough year. And in the fall of twenty eighteen, we had a failed launch where we thought we were going to sell over 100 spots and we sold three.
Kate Northrup:Overnight, our open rates had gone down to 9% over the summer, but because we didn't have the right systems and structures and KPIs in place, no one told us and I wasn't looking. So, essentially, we are an email marketing company, essentially. And if nobody's opening your emails, your business is going to tank. But we were so tired, sick, all the things, we didn't see it coming, so down the pike things kind of fell apart. We had a live event called what was it called, Origin Live?
Kate Northrup:Who was at Origin Live? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, we have a few in the room. I was hanging on by a thread. We had flown in a production company.
Kate Northrup:We had people flying in all the way from South Africa, all over the world. Mike had lost 40 pounds in one month. He could barely stand. He looked like this. He was wearing his coat inside at all times.
Kate Northrup:And for those of you who live with guy guys, they're constantly fighting with you to turn down the thermostat. So that was a sign that things were really bad, that he was wearing a winter parka inside at all times. He was constantly cold. And I remember breaking down in my car. I called my mom.
Kate Northrup:It was brutal, I just was like, it's all too much, I can't, like, it's I told her all the things that were going on, and God bless her, we've had a conversation about this after. She goes, well, sounds like you've got it all together over there. Got off the phone and I was like, okay. And I said, know. You were living in New York.
Kate Northrup:Sorry. So here's the point of the story. Know, because family's in the room. They're like, what the At Thanksgiving that year, we had Thanksgiving with both of our parents, which was, I think, unprecedented, highly unusual. And I will never forget, because during this time, I didn't actually know how bad it was, as evidenced by the fact that there are two incredible women here in the room who I didn't call.
Kate Northrup:And I'll never forget standing in our kitchen on Thanksgiving, and my dad walked in and he saw what Mike looked like, which you can see here in this photo. This is not good. This is a very sick man. And my dad walked in for whatever reason, we hadn't seen him in like a month and a half, you know, travel, whatever, and he put his hands on Mike's shoulder and he said, Don't ever let it get this bad and not call us again. Because my dad lived twenty minutes away.
Kate Northrup:There was so much help. There were so many other options. But, my identity was passed down from Edna Northrop, my grandmother, whose life motto was, don't ask for a lighter pack, ask for a stronger back. Yeah. So the obvious choice was to cancel the event, let our team go, and focus on my babies and my husband.
Kate Northrup:But what I did was send my husband to my mother's house because it was so painful to look at him so sick, and I couldn't help him, and I just was like, I have to focus on the business. We totally could have just stopped, but it didn't occur to me as an option. There may be somebody in this room right now who's in the middle of something where you are so identified with being the strong one that it is not even occurring to you that you could just get off the ride, or call your amazing mother-in-law, or your sister. Like, people will come help you, but you have to let them know. Anyway, long story short, Mike got better.
Kate Northrup:And, yay. But we were left with a bit of a financial quagmire. And we went into 125 ks of business debt. And in 2019, we got sober about that, and we cut our business expenses by $25,000 a month overnight. While I was on the road launching Do Less, Mike was letting everyone go, except for Takesha.
Kate Northrup:She's always the one who stays, or cutting their time in half. And, that year, we four x ed our profit and only increased our income by 20% I mean 10%. How cool is that? We 4x'd how much we kept, while only increasing the top line revenue by 10%. That's what's possible when you get fucking serious about your numbers.
Kate Northrup:There's so much more available to you. I think the point of this talk is there's so much more available, and it's right here. It's right here. Help, money, all of it. So, we launched our first high ticket offer that year, which was really exciting, and that year also I was sitting at Sarah Jenks' mother's house with us and Eliza, and Eliza said to me I'll never forget it, because at that time, there were years in here where affiliate revenue was still 50% of our revenue.
Kate Northrup:Meaning, selling other people's stuff continued to be a huge line item for us. And I thought that was great, because it was so easy to talk about other people. But Eliza said to me, you know, if any of you know her, her name is Eliza Allaway, she's amazing. She does work with teen girls. She said, you know Kate, I just need to give you this feedback.
Kate Northrup:It's really confusing to be on your email list and know that you're really brilliant at teaching business, but you talk about all these other people who teach business in a way that makes it sound like you're more enthusiastic about what they're doing than what you're doing. And I was like, shit. I had no idea. And I realized I was really outsourcing my power. I was really good at bringing people in and then sending them out like a hot potato, similar to my personality with money.
Kate Northrup:Not being able to hold the somatic capacity for that many beautiful humans, for that much money in the bank, for that much It's working for that level of steadiness. So, all these ways of unconsciously. So, we did know I made a commitment after that gathering, and that is the power of masterminds and mentorship. Right? People will hold your toes and reflect back to you what you cannot see in yourself.
Kate Northrup:So I said, no more big affiliate launches just for this year. I like to do small experiments, so just for this year. But it accounted for, the year before, 400 k of revenue. So letting go of that, I didn't know how it was going get replaced. That was scary.
Kate Northrup:But the cool thing is, when you make these leaps, and when you ask God, and you turn it over, it was more than replaced. And so twenty twenty one twenty twenty one, I will just say, we did fine. Okay? So I'll get to the numbers. It all worked out just fine.
Kate Northrup:The revenue was replaced. But I realized just because I had simplified, so just because we had cut down expenses, just because we had done some of the physical things with the money, I had not fully healed my relationship with money and security. And Mike got sick again in January 2021. And it showed me where I was still gripping. The thing is, the bigger we grow, the more safety we need to be able to hold it.
Kate Northrup:This is never a one and done. We're never just done with our expansion. And I really had to rewire myself to stop making things harder than they needed to be. Briefly, I think many of you have heard this story, but for those in the room who are new, 2021, we moved to Miami, somewhat under duress. Mike had gotten extremely ill again very suddenly.
Kate Northrup:It was awful. I had a lot of trauma coming up about it. It was awful for him as well, obviously, in very different ways. And we I had this loop, and the loop was, if Mike could just get healthy and make a bunch of money, everything would be perfect. So, basically, I am resenting him and I will not give myself permission.
Kate Northrup:I don't get to exhale until this other thing happens. And our therapist, David, who has already been discussed, David Goats, we love you, he had me close my eyes and he said, okay Kate, now imagine that Mike just walks in the door and he says, babe, I've just made $10,000,000 so how do you feel inside? What is your response? And, of course, I expected that I would feel elated, relieved, all sorts of different positive things. But what I felt inside was flatlined.
Kate Northrup:I felt dead inside. Not dissimilar to what Sarah Tacey was sharing about those few moments when she those couple of moments when she had resourced herself beyond belief, and she felt kind of dried up, and like, what's the point? And so, what that told me was I was addicted to stress and pressure. And when I imagined not having it, I felt dead. Can anyone relate to that?
Kate Northrup:Yeah. It's very sneaky. It is very sneaky the way we pull the rug out from ourselves to feel alive. So, the discomfort that I had with stability had been keeping me addicted to reinvention. And our business stayed right around the 1,200,000.0 mark, from 2018 to 2021.
Kate Northrup:I did a 90 day experiment. And that ninety day experiment was, Okay, I'm just going to deliver on the promises we've already given to our customers. I'm going to there was an amount that I knew we could go into the hole and be fine. It was 125 ks because two years before we had paid that off, no problem. So, I was like, Okay, dollars 125 ks I can overspend, be fine, and then or ninety days.
Kate Northrup:And during that time, every time I begin to create something from the place of pressure, stress, and addiction, Actually, my role was anytime I begin to create something, full stop. Like, I had to get off the crack. So, it was no creating anything, no new campaigns, no new marketing ideas, no new offerings, nada, nada, for ninety days. And every time I could feel that ramp up energy of blowing into the balloon, I just came down here to Biscayne Bay. We lived about 15 blocks up.
Kate Northrup:I came down here to the bay, I sat on the concrete wall, and I just asked the ocean what she would have me know. And, I felt the sun on my face and I screamed into pillows in the closet and I sat in the dark and I cried, sometimes on FaceTime with my friends, and I watched daytime television. That was my healing plan. And I'll tell you what, it felt like shit. It was not it was not fun, it didn't feel good at all, it felt like dying.
Kate Northrup:Because there was a part of me that was dying, there was an old way dying. But repeat practise over ninety days was very effective. And at the end of that ninety days, we had hit all our business goals, we had not gone into the hole at all. And, I will say, though, I just want to be fully transparent, that year, we made less money than the year before. Our email list shrunk, and so did our social media, and we were fine.
Kate Northrup:So, really want to normalize. You don't have to grow every year, at least, visibly. Yeah. Yeah. Right?
Kate Northrup:So when I finally, finally stopped over complicating and listen, this is going to be like an addictive pattern my whole life I'm aware of, but wow, the growth is tremendous. So 2022, summer of 'twenty '2, we had a scenario inside our company where many of the team were either let go or left. Takesha stayed. And we really were doing some reorganizing. And I had done enough work on myself by that time, and I called Mike in during a money meeting, and I said, Babe because at this point, Mike was doing his own consulting work and had started a different podcast and was doing some other work that was doing really well.
Kate Northrup:But, I called him in and I said, I need you back. I need you to come back. I need you to help me. I need you to save me. Like, I have just lit a fire inside the company, and I really need help fixing it.
Kate Northrup:I cannot hold this alone. And he was like, great. I'm back for a year, all in. And that was two and a half years ago. So we'll see what happens.
Kate Northrup:But, shortly after that, we were about to launch a money program, and I was really excited about it. And then Mike got hit by a car. October 25, on the day of the eclipse twenty twenty one twenty twenty two, he got hit by a car. Luckily, his head and spine were fine, but it hit the same knee he had broken eighteen months earlier, which was part of the previous story, I didn't even mention that part. And so we so I brag, I celebrate, any of Mama Geno's people, I brag, I celebrate that we paused the launch like a healthy human.
Kate Northrup:And Mike had two surgeries, we tended to him in the hospital, his mom came, spent Thanksgiving with him while I took the girls up to Maine. We did nurturing. We actually paid attention to the most important thing. And I just was like, the money will work itself out. I had finally learned how to relax inside even when all the external circumstances were such that it seemed like it was not a good time to relax.
Kate Northrup:But I just was like, what if this wasn't the reason we don't get to live our lives the way we want to? What if this is the reason we do? Like, what if we just live joyfully with Mike on crutches? What if we just incorporate this? And I can't say I nailed that every single day, but it was awesome, like the shift.
Kate Northrup:And so, finally, he was well enough, things were stable enough, we decided to launch Relaxed Money. And I had previously, to his accident, done this super fun photo shoot called Money Love the Revival, and I brought in Chicago Fosse vibes and did a whole character. It was really fun. And with no ads, and maybe one affiliate, we brought in over 14,000 sign ups for our free event, and it was bananas. It was bananagrams.
Kate Northrup:Nothing had been this easy in a decade. It was crazy. I was like, Wow, I guess we're on the right track. It just felt so easy. And then we made $7.50 ks in sales that first launch of Relaxed Money.
Kate Northrup:Anybody here from the first class of Relaxed Money? Yes. Amazing. Relaxed Money one point zero. And I taught it live and it was great.
Kate Northrup:And then we are now about to go into Relax Money five point o. So it'll be our fifth cohort, enrolling at the April. And what was so cool is at the beginning of twenty twenty three, so Mike is still on crutches, we go to, our annual planning retreat, which we always do between Christmas and New Year's. We're laying out the map of the year, and I was trying to fit in my mastermind retreats in the calendar, And it just felt hard with the scheduling Tetris. And I said, you know, hon, if we didn't need the money for the Mastermind, I wouldn't do it this year.
Kate Northrup:And Mike said, We never need the money enough for you to do something you don't want to do. And so, we had a few people enrolled, I refunded them, and we also decided to close down the Origin membership, which had been going since spring of twenty seventeen. Together, those two revenues equaled a million dollars that we were pulling. However, I had the sobriety to have a plan, And the plan was, this Relax Money thing seems like it's working. And we did a really strategic pivot where the people who were in the Origin membership, we invited them into Relax Money, there was a smooth runway.
Kate Northrup:Anyone take that runway? Anyone jump on that particular slip and slide? Beautiful. And we transferred them. It was a lateral transfer with lots of holding.
Kate Northrup:We didn't do it perfectly, but I think we did Okay. And so we shut down those revenue streams in 2023 was the year we pulled them both. And that year, we hit 2,200,000 We crossed the $2,000,000 mark for the first time, having said goodbye to half of our revenue at the beginning of the year. Again, your past does not dictate your future. And the Relaxed Money launch went really well.
Kate Northrup:I launched it twice in 2022, twice in 2023, and then 2024 we were like, I wonder what would happen if we took all the energy of two promotions and put them into one. And that was a risk because we said during the launch when we didn't know what the final numbers were going to be, we told everyone, this is the only time we're doing this this year. And I'm not the kind of person who will then turn around and come up with a bullshit story as to why we would do it again later when we had already said we weren't. So I was like, Okay, God. Let's see.
Kate Northrup:But what was really amazing is that because I knew, inside myself, we were only doing it one time, I gave it everything I had. The team gave it everything we had. We left it all on the dance floor this past spring, and we booked booked or banked booked 1,900,000.0 with one launch, when previously we had done 1.1 with two launches over the year. Which the Relax Money launch, I don't know how it looks in front of the scenes or behind the scenes or whatever. We're doing a lot of things.
Kate Northrup:It is not do less. It is very do more, and it is a total freaking delight. But we do a live workshop. There, we have over a hundred affiliates. There's we're running ads.
Kate Northrup:We have a social media campaign. There's a lot of freaking emails. There's segments. There's bonuses. Like, it's a whole thing.
Kate Northrup:So doing that only once and making nearly as much as we did before doing it twice was such a freaking miracle. But it's not a miracle because that's a law of the universe. When you channel your energy into fewer channels, fewer channels, more powerful potency. Fewer channels, higher potency. And then the thing I was really proud of was not the revenue increase because this year we came in just shy of 3,000,000, it was the profitability increase because revenue doesn't mean shit.
Kate Northrup:Revenue doesn't mean shit. And listen, I actually don't mind the like, I just had my million dollar year, I just had my hoodie whata whata. I don't do a tonne of that on social. I appreciate how magnetic it is, and I too lean in and I'm like, what are you doing over there? But I think, like, let's normalize sharing our profitability percentages.
Kate Northrup:Right? Because it matters so much more. It matters so much more. I don't care how much you made. How much did you keep?
Kate Northrup:Because what you keep is your life. What you keep is your life, and then what you keep, you get to grow. Right? Okay. Because that's how money works.
Kate Northrup:Yeah. That's how money works. Okay. What else? So body?
Kate Northrup:Body. Oh. I'm like, do we need a body break? Almost. Almost.
Kate Northrup:So we finally have landed. Finally. And listen, I've been friends with Amy Porterfield since, like, the early aughts. Marie and I, Marie Forleo and I met in a yoga class in 02/2009. I've watched these bitches take off with their one fucking thing, and watch them and be like, that is so boring.
Kate Northrup:I would die if I launched the same thing every year. Watch me now. So, like, bow to the women who came before and who were like, you know, you might wanna just do and I was like, no, I can't. So it's fine. Like our timeline is our timeline.
Kate Northrup:It's all super beautiful. I wouldn't trade anything. But I got to tell you, one customer, one problem, one offer, one freaking sales system. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And then, do you know what you can do with all that extra creative life force?
Kate Northrup:You can learn to crochet, you can have a garden, you can have sex, you can make soup, you can read novels, you can have overflow to serve your community in new and interesting ways. Anybody here watch Queer Eye? Okay, I love that show so much. We just watched an episode when we got to the hotel, naturally, and we There was a woman on there who was so beautiful, She, she crochets, she learned to crochet as part of her healing grief work after her divorce, and she crochets, plastic bags into sleeping mats for unhoused people so that they can have a softer sleep. Do you see?
Kate Northrup:I mean, that's little, but it's big, right? We can serve in such beautiful ways when we stop being the farting balloon and channel ourselves one customer, one problem, one offer, one sales system. At least two freaking start with. I'll never forget. Anybody here used to listen to Entrepreneur on Fire, that podcast with John Lee Dumas?
Kate Northrup:So, John Lee Dumas and I grew up forty five minutes from each other, and I'll never forget, I was at a thing with him, and I was asking him something about how do I decide what to work on, and da da da da da And he was like, he was like, focus. Follow one course until success. And I was like, gross, not sexy. Turns out he was right. And really simplifying your business model or your life does not limit your growth, it amplifies it.
Kate Northrup:Strong river banks, more flow. We don't want these soupy riverbanks that are like collapsing all the time, a million tributaries, strong riverbanks, more flow. Really, the future of business, I believe, belongs to the simplifiers with the advent of AI, who's using AI in any way in their career, yeah, or life, planning their vacations or whatever. Some people are freaked out, they're like, it's going to replace humans. I'm like, I don't think so.
Kate Northrup:What I think is that and my experience with it is that it has made me more human. It has made me stop wasting my energy on the things that are not a good use of my time, like analysing 15 transcripts for the themes. Like that's not a good use of my time. But you know what is? Reading through the results and then tapping into my heart and delivering something based on the summary.
Kate Northrup:So it is calling us into deeper humanity. It is calling us into deeper connection with one another. And it is our opportunity to stop getting bogged down and dimming our light and weakening our potency by running around doing 35,000,000 different things. That's the difference between the fine mist setting on your hose and the power spray setting. If you want to succeed and be a leader, be on the leading edge in our next era in this Pluto in Aquarius, right?
Kate Northrup:No, not Pluto in Aquarius, age of Aquarius. Yeah, Pluto in Aquarius. It is, yeah. In this Pluto in Aquarius era, simplification so that we can deepen our connection, presence, potency, and humanity. And when we simplify things, and when we allow ourselves to build the somatic capacity to stay with stability, to get really well acquainted with stability, and sit with it, and actually learn to find bliss there, we can expand in unbelievable ways.
Kate Northrup:And really, the people in this room are the people who are part of that age because out of 2,000 people who were invited to this event, 108 came. 108 was our final number. So you're special. You are on the leading edge. You are the ones who are part of building this next stage in business and beyond, the make more, do less, potency h.
Kate Northrup:So I'm going to ask you, what if you could create a business, insert life, career, that feels as good as it looks. Okay. Now that you have heard the full behind the scenes of our story of building a digital product business, you might be thinking, I want to have a digital product. Like, I wanna have something that sells $24.07 without me needing to trade hours for dollars. Or maybe you already do, but you're not selling as much as you want.
Kate Northrup:So my friend, my dear friend, he's also been a mentor of mine, James Wedmore, has done over 90,000,000 in sales in online digital products. And in fact, he built his business to $2,000,000 a year selling $97 courses. He is the master, and he has a brand new training called your first digital product, which is taking you from zero to sales. How to create a digital product that people will actually buy with his strategies that have taken him to over 90,000,000 in sales. So all you need to do to get this video series for free is go to KateNorthrup.com/first.
Kate Northrup:Kate Northrup Com forward / first, and you'll get that your first digital product training series from James. Enjoy.