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Send us Fan Mail A customer bought a VIP pass for one of our HobbyScool summits and then emailed to tell me she was heartbroken by how much selling happens at our checkout. Upsell, upsell, upsell before completing an order, is how she put it. She did not expect that from a craft site. This episode is what I do with a message like that. I go through what a free event actually costs to produce, why the order bump and the upsell at checkout are the thing paying for the free part, and where I think the line really is between selling and being obnoxious. In this episode: - The email I got from a paying customer and what she said - What it costs to put on a free event, line by line - What Amazon and your local craft store do between the buy button and the receipt - The three questions I use to decide if selling has crossed a line - What happens to your revenue when you cut your marketing over one complaint - The three signals that mean a complaint is real feedback and not just noise One person's opinion is one person's opinion. It is not the data about your business. We run a live event every month inside the Creator's MBA Boardroom, and it is free to join. https://www.skool.com/creators-mba-boardroom Chapter markers (one per line): 00:00 The email that set this off 01:00 "Upsell, upsell, upsell before completing an order" 02:00 HobbyScool is a business, not a hobby about hobbies 03:00 What it takes to run a free event 04:00 Software, team, ads, and everyone who gets paid 05:00 The people who buy pay for the free part 06:00 Count the upsells in an Amazon cart 07:00 Craft stores, quilt shows, and conferences 08:00 Where I think the line actually is 10:00 Is the free thing good on its own 11:00 Why the volume of selling is not a character flaw 12:00 The two rude messages you will fixate on 14:00 The mistake that costs people revenue 15:00 Volume, who is saying it, and the numbers 16:00 Read it once, then go back to selling

Send us Fan Mail For a long time my Black Friday campaign started with a discount, and then I built every email and countdown around that number. Over the past few years I've changed how I do this, and now most of my Black Friday campaigns in Creator's MBA and HobbyScool don't have a discount on them at all. In this episode I walk through what a discount really costs you and five ways to structure a Black Friday offer that work better than a price cut, with real examples from both of my businesses and which kind of offer each one fits best. In this episode: - Why a 30% off sale on a $397 course means you need 43 more buyers to hit the same number - How a $70 gift card on a full-price membership got more sales than our 50% and 40% off days - How we bundled holiday workshops worth $1,545 into a $69 offer without marking anything down - How we presold a full year of summits that didn't exist yet - How a preview email to our best customers got people asking what was coming before Black Friday opened - Why tiered memberships let you give bigger bonuses to bigger commitments - Three questions to ask before you pick your structure Key takeaways: - Every time your price moves, your list learns to wait for the sale - Match the structure to your offer: a gift for higher-priced offers, a bundle for a back catalog, a presell for new ideas, early access for members and past buyers, and tiers for memberships - Start selling in every email now so your list is ready to buy by the time Black Friday gets here Chapters: 00:00 What a discount really costs you 02:55 Structure 1: Free gift with purchase 06:00 Structure 2: The bundle 07:15 Structure 3: Presell a new offer 09:05 Structure 4: Early access for your best customers 10:40 Structure 5: Tiered offers 11:45 How to pick the right one for your offer 14:05 Putting it all together Resources mentioned: - Black Friday Profit Party: https://lab.destinicopp.com/black-friday-profit The Black Friday Profit Party is a self-paced program with a 10-station Claude skill vault that plans your whole holiday season with you from November 1 into the new year. It helps you choose your offer structure, checks your plan against the hours you really have, and writes your emails, social posts and sales pages with you one campaign at a time. It's $97 through October 31 and then goes back to $297. If you're in Newsletter Profit Club or the Creator's MBA Mastermind, it's already included.

Send us Fan Mail Most creators plan Black Friday as one week. They pick the offer, pick the discount and count the emails between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, and then October is quiet, December is empty and January starts from zero. In this episode I walk through how Sephora, Target, Starbucks, Amazon and Apple ran their holiday season last year and what a digital product business can borrow from each one. None of them focus on just Black Friday week. They plan the whole season and Black Friday is one moment inside it. In this episode: - How Sephora ran its biggest sale of the season for members only and finished it before Black Friday even started - Why Target opened its October sale two days ahead of Amazon and Walmart and used it to sign people up for its paid membership - How Starbucks turned one season into five reasons to pay attention without running a single discount - What Amazon's made-up shopping holiday tells you about creating your own event in a slow month - How Apple sells at full price with a gift card, and the HobbyScool Black Friday promo that got more clicks than our 50% and 40% off deals - What a full holiday season looks like for a digital product business, from an October warmup through a January wait list Key takeaways: - Start in October with something that warms up your list and brings new people in, like a free challenge, a workshop or a lead magnet push - Let your members and past buyers in first, and give your highest tier the biggest bonus - Give people more than one reason to open your emails, like a new bonus revealed each day, and keep selling after Cyber Monday with gift memberships, an annual plan push or a next step for your Black Friday buyers Chapters: 00:00 Why a one-week Black Friday plan leaves money on the table 01:50 Sephora: early access for members, finished before Black Friday 04:25 Target: Circle Week, Deal of the Day and a free paid membership 06:20 Starbucks: five moments in one season with no discount 09:05 Amazon: inventing your own shopping holiday 11:50 Apple: full price plus a gift card, and our HobbyScool results 13:50 The pattern all five retailers follow 15:55 What a holiday season looks like for a digital product business 17:35 The Black Friday Profit Party 19:55 What to take away from today Resources mentioned: - Black Friday Profit Party: https://lab.destinicopp.com/black-friday-profit Plan your whole holiday season with me inside the Black Friday Profit Party. It's a self-paced program with a 10-station Claude skill vault that plans your season from November 1 into the new year, with a menu of 62 campaign types, and it writes your emails, social posts and sales pages with you. It's $97 through October 31 and then goes back to $297. If you're in Newsletter Profit Club or the Creator's MBA Mastermind, it's already included.

Send us Fan Mail You're posting, you're emailing, you've got people on your list and maybe a free community too. And still nobody is buying. Tracy Beavers says that's almost never a visibility problem, it's a conversation problem, and it's a much easier fix than most people think. Tracy is a business and sales coach out of Little Rock, Arkansas who spent 25 years in corporate sales before building her own business. In this conversation she walks through how to move people along what she calls the conveyor belt of your business, starting with the emails you're already sending. In this episode: - Why a 7,000 person list can still produce almost no sales - The conveyor belt, and why it beats thinking about funnels - How to write emails people actually reply to, including the band candy story - The one question Tracy asks people all the time that almost always gets an answer - How to start networking if you're an introvert, in one breakout room - What to say in a DM so it doesn't sound salesy - How to grow your business this week without creating another piece of content Take the sale out of it and go build the relationship. The income follows. Resources mentioned: Tracy's free Relationship Revenue Engine Workbook: https://tracybeavers.biz/conversations Tracy's podcast, Create Online Business Success: https://www.tracybeavers.com/podcast Tracy's website: https://www.tracybeavers.com/ If you know you need to be emailing your list consistently and you want the system for doing it, come join us inside Newsletter Profit Club. https://lab.destinicopp.com/newsletter-profit-club

Send us Fan Mail Most creators don't touch Black Friday until the first week of November, and then they're scrambling to throw an offer together and put a discount on it, hoping that one week carries the whole quarter. That's a lot of pressure to put on three days.  In this episode Ruth Poundwhite turns the tables and interviews me about how I actually plan Q4, which starts with treating November 1st through the end of December as one season instead of one weekend. In this episode: Why I have my promo calendar mapped out a year ahead, and how that changes what Black Friday even has to doThe October work that decides whether your Black Friday offer lands, including the warm-up sequence people skipWhy a pre-sale is one of the best things you can put out in Q4, especially if you don't have much to sell yetHow to take an inventory of your offers and decide which ones are worth promoting, plus the out-of-the-box offers worth testingUsing bonuses instead of cutting your prices, and how those bonuses doubled as market research for meThe sale structures we've tested inside HobbyScool, from a one-offer-a-day week to a twelve day December run to a simple three day flash saleWhat I'm handing to AI this year, what I'm keeping, and the automation that puts a page live and expires it without anyone touching itKey takeaways: Black Friday is a season, not a day. Plan November 1 through December 31 as one campaign and the pressure on any single day drops.Your audience has to be warmed up before the offer shows up. If you want to pre-sell something in November, the free gift, the webinar, or the sequence that gets them ready has to run in October.You don't have to discount. Adding a bonus to the plan you want people to choose, like the annual or lifetime option, protects your pricing and gets people better results.Take an offer inventory first. List everything you have, mark what you want to sell, and give yourself permission to test something new.AI can build the pages, the emails, and the images. It can't tell you what your market wants. That part stays with you.Resources mentioned: Black Friday Profit Party workshop, run every OctoberNewsletter Profit Club: https://lab.destinicopp.com/newsletter-profit-clubThe Creator's MBA AI Mastermind: https://mastermind.destinicopp.com If you want to sit down and build your November through December money plan with me, that's what the Black Friday Profit Party workshop is for, and I run it every October.  You'll find it inside the Newsletter Profit Club, so come join us at https://lab.destinicopp.com/newsletter-profit-club and I'll walk you through it. It's also included if you're already in the Creator's MBA AI Mastermind.

Send us Fan Mail You already have automations running. A welcome sequence, a few tags firing, maybe a workflow you built two years ago and have not looked at since. Then AI showed up and everybody started talking about automation like it was brand new, and now you are wondering whether what you have is still doing its job. Steph Blake has been in the online space for over a decade helping small business owners simplify and automate so they can work 20 hours a week or less. In this episode she walks through what she actually has running in her own business right now, from inbox drafts to call transcripts to a full lead dashboard, and she is clear about which parts she refuses to hand over. In this episode: - Why automating everything is the wrong goal, and what to look at instead - The one automation Steph thinks every business owner should already have running - How she turns every call into a searchable library of quotes, pain points and content ideas - The connectors she uses every single day and why your email tool should be first - How she built her own second brain in Google Drive instead of Obsidian - The 30 minute flash sale process that used to take her a day and a half Start with the things that do not need you, and keep a human in the loop everywhere else. If you want help deciding what to automate in your own business and actually building it, come join us in the AI Mastermind. https://mastermind.destinicopp.com/

Send us Fan Mail Almost everybody I talk to has been using AI for a couple of years now. They have a paid subscription, they have watched the videos, they can tell you what an AI agent is. And then you ask what systems they actually have running, and how any of it is helping them make more money, and there is not much of an answer. I open this one with the thing I changed in my own business, which is that I stopped building my slide decks in Canva and started getting a finished, polished deck in about ten minutes using Claude and Gamma. Then I walk you through the AI in Action Summit, running September 15 through 17, session by session, so you know exactly what is in it before you register. In this episode: - The ten minute workflow that replaced an afternoon in Canva - Why knowing how to use AI and having AI run part of your business are two different things - The one instruction I gave every speaker before they submitted a session - Who is teaching what, across agents and automation, selling your expertise, content and visibility, and client systems - My three live sessions, including the one where five people bring something they are stuck on and we build it live - How the summit week works and what is in the VIP pass The gap is not what you know about AI. It is whether any of it is running without you. Register free for the AI in Action Summit, September 15 through 17. https://lab.destinicopp.com/ai-in-action-summit

Send us Fan Mail The event we ran last month is the first one I did not touch. Not the funnels, not the products inside them, none of it. My team handled everything, and that was a first. Steph asks what is under the hood at HobbyScool. How we source speakers, who the three humans are, and what changed when Claude and the MCP connectors entered the workflow. In this episode: - The repeatable monthly system the whole year gets planned against - How we find speakers, and why their list growth is the entire pitch - Three people, and what each of them owns - What the Kit connector replaced - Why the marketing calendar comes before any AI question Map the next three months first. Then ask what AI can do with it. If the connector workflow is the part you want, we build it together in the mastermind. https://mastermind.destinicopp.com/

Send us Fan Mail A free summit does not make money. The pages behind it do. Registration page, VIP pass, order bump, upsell, membership, and a downsell if they say no to the annual. Steph walks me through the whole thing and I give her the actual numbers, including what the ads cost and how much goes back out to affiliates. In this episode: - The difference between an order bump and an upsell, and how I price each - The conversion rates I expect at every step - Why I use dollars off instead of a percentage above a certain price - The annual first, monthly as the downsell test that surprised me - A $37 VIP pass against a $17 cost per conversion Test the offer before you build another one on top of it. If you want to know where your own funnel is leaking, start with the scorecard. https://scorecard.destinicopp.com/

Send us Fan Mail I spend about five hours a week on HobbyScool. Three contractors run the rest of it, and the last event went out the door without me touching a single funnel. It took years to get here, and nobody starts at five hours a week. Kate Kordsmeier asks how it actually works. Who is on the team, what they own, how I manage people in a different time zone, and the two things I still will not hand off. In this episode: - The three roles that run a business doing an event every month - The twice daily report that replaced most of my management time - Building the thing myself first, then turning it into a skill and handing it over - The two things I will not outsource, and the control freak reason why - How long it actually takes, said honestly If a question keeps reaching you, the answer is missing from your documentation. If you want to build the AI skills that let you hand work off once instead of explaining it every time, that is what we do in the mastermind. https://mastermind.destinicopp.com/

Send us Fan Mail Most people know me as the Creator's MBA person. A lot of them have no idea I run a whole second company, in a niche I have zero personal interest in. I am not crafty. I built a craft business anyway. In this episode Kate Kordsmeier interviews me about HobbyScool: where the name came from, the two business models I tried before virtual summits worked, and how the funnel behind a free summit actually makes money. In this episode: - Why I picked a market I am not a customer of - The paid bundles that made revenue but did not grow the list - What a free virtual summit is, and how the VIP pass monetizes it - What speakers get when nobody is paying them to show up - Why I made sure the business was never about me You do not have to love the thing you sell. You have to be right about the market. If you want to know which stage of your own flywheel is holding the rest back, take the scorecard. https://scorecard.destinicopp.com/

Send us Fan Mail Kate and I live twenty minutes apart in Atlanta and did not know each other. In the exact same month we were both quietly trying to build the same peer mastermind. One person got asked by both of us and said, wait, is this the same thing? This is the behind the scenes of the Weird Hermits, the peer group I credit with more business impact than anything I have paid for. In this episode: - How two people building the same group in the same month found each other - The commitment rule that kept this one from petering out - Where the name came from, and the one it replaced - A normal week: the call, the ads call, the Telegram thread - The debrief calls where we share numbers nobody posts publicly The groups that fizzle are the ones nobody was really required to show up for. If you want a room like this and do not have one to build from, that is what the Council is. https://lab.destinicopp.com/council Learn more about the peer mastermind through Inside the Council: https://lab.destinicopp.com/inside-the-council

Send us Fan Mail Your best PDF is sitting in someone's downloads folder right now, unread. Not because it's bad. Because nobody wants more homework. This episode kicks off Beyond the PDF, my free event, with a look at more than two dozen creators who ditched the static download and built interactive lead magnets instead. Some are converting over 50%. And here's how I made it: I dropped every contributor story into NotebookLM and had it turn them into a two-host deep dive. In this episode: - Why the PDF worked for 20 years and what finally broke it - Why information being free changes what people will trade their email for - Claude artifacts, custom GPTs, and installable AI skills that do the work for your subscriber - Why diagnostic quizzes convert so well, and how to segment every person who takes one - Interactive calculators that let a B2B buyer close their own deal - The low-tech format that converted at over 51% with no AI The takeaway: stop asking your audience to read. Start helping them do. Sign up for Beyond the PDF (free, July 13-31) and build your own modern lead magnet during Get It Done Week, July 27-31: https://lab.destinicopp.com/beyond-pdf-registration

Send us Fan Mail The best decision I've ever made in my business wasn't a course or a tool. It was joining a small room of people who actually get it. In this episode I walk through why a curated peer mastermind changed how it feels to run my business, and why it's almost never the thing people assume it is. In this episode: - Why the big decisions get lonelier as your business grows - What changes when you stop deciding alone - The hot seat, and why you can't do it for yourself - Why curation is the whole product, and what it actually means - The real cost of staying in a room of one Resources mentioned: - The Creator's MBA Council: https://lab.destinicopp.com/council - The full article on this topic: https://destinicopp.com/blog/curated-peer-mastermind Not ready to apply? Take the inside look first with the free private podcast, Inside the Council: https://lab.destinicopp.com/inside-the-council

Send us Fan Mail This month I took my entire business apart. Sales pages, offers, what I was promoting, what I was spending money and time on. All of it went on the table. In this behind-the-scenes episode, I walk you through the full rebuild using my own Creator Growth Flywheel. I share where I think the market is headed, why the human element is the one thing AI can't replace, and how that belief is reshaping my events, my offers, and what I chose to cut. In this episode: - Why this rebuild is about where the market is going, not a one-time cleanup - The one thing AI can't replace, and how I'm building around it - A walk through all five flywheel stages: Attract, Engage, Nurture, Retain, Advocate - Why I'm going all in on live events - How I'm rebuilding my lead magnets backwards from the offer - The offer overhaul: the AI Mastermind repositioning, the new Council, and Revenue Stack Studio - How I used AI to build personalized affiliate pages in my partners' own voice - What I cut, including Pinterest and the HelloContent store, and why Your turn: - Got a question or want a hot seat on a future episode? Send it here: https://forms.gle/E71QahCpGjo8pmup7 - Want to speak at an upcoming event? Apply here: https://lab.destinicopp.com/creators-mba-events - Watch for my newsletter survey and hit reply. I read every one. Resources and offers mentioned: - Creator's MBA Events (Beyond the PDF, Closed Door Panel Talks, AI in Action Summit, AI Newsletter Summit, Creator Pivot Summit): https://lab.destinicopp.com/creators-mba-events - Creator's MBA AI Mastermind: https://mastermind.destinicopp.com - Creator's MBA Council (peer mastermind, starts January 2027): https://lab.destinicopp.com/council - Revenue Stack Studio (done-for-you tier): https://lab.destinicopp.com/revenue-stack-studio - Newsletter Profit Club: https://lab.destinicopp.com/newsletter-profit-club - Join the Creator's MBA newsletter: https://signup.destinicopp.com Want a question answered on the show? Send it in here: https://forms.gle/E71QahCpGjo8pmup7