I went from almost quitting my business to becoming a millionaire in 12 months.
This is a story I've never publicly shared before,
and it's not your average internet millionaire inspiration story because there
are donuts involved.
"Mmm, donuts.".
So I've been an entrepreneur since 2013 and full-time since
2014. And there's definitely different phases that my business has been through.
In the early days, it's kind of like the honeymoon phase, you know?
I was making $5,000, maybe $7,000 a month,
and I was able to live out my dream of working remotely and traveling to Bali,
Australia, Hawaii, and just being an awesome digital nomad.
That was the whole reason why I quit my day job was so that I could travel and
work remotely. Now, keep in mind, this was 2014,
so working remotely wasn't as common as it is today,
but it was still awesome. I got to work from this treehouse in Bali,
and life was good. I was making enough money to pay for my travel,
to pay for my living expenses, I still had a home base in Toronto.
That was how I started: the honeymoon period.
After a few years of living this life,
I decided it was great that I had location independence,
but what I really wanted was financial independence.
And when I looked back on my business' income over the years,
it was mostly the same as my salary from my day job. So my day job,
I was making about $50,000-$60,000 a year,
and with my business I was making $60,000 to $70,000 a year.
So it was enough to pay for my life,
but I wasn't growing financially independent. And so in 2016,
I decided, "What can I do about this?
How can I make more money and still live this amazing lifestyle?" So that
decision put me on the true path of having an online business. Before that,
I had a referral-based freelance business, an agency. But in 2016,
that's when I decided to start growing a personal brand on Instagram.
And I used all my travels, all my photos, all my stories to grow that brand.
And in 2016 was the first time I thought, "Hmm, I know where I wanna go,
there's probably someone who's already been there, done that,
so maybe I can hire them." I hired my first business coach in 2016,
and through working with that coach, I was able to launch my personal brand,
elisedarma.com, and I was able to start building my email list,
and for the first time, I asked my followers, "Hey, why are you following me?
Like,
what is it that you want from me?" And the answer I got back from my followers
was an astounding,
"We wanna know how you're growing on Instagram" and "We wanna know how you're
traveling so much." So I'm still kind of in the honeymoon phase,
but I'm growing up a little bit.
I'm putting on my big girl pants and I'm putting myself out there.
I'm hosting webinars,
and I decide to make my first digital course product all about how to use
Instagram to grow your business online. This was 2017. So back then,
this wasn't a common topic,
and I really had no idea how much potential that topic had. So in 2017,
I launched and sold my very first course. And honestly, things were awesome.
2017 was the year that I became a six figure business for the first time ever.
And I would say that I was starting to actually feel like I could call myself an
entrepreneur. Before that, I called myself a freelancer,
but I didn't really feel like I was a true entrepreneur. But in 2017,
I felt like I got there. Now,
launching a course and selling to your beta students is one thing,
but continuing to sell that course is a whole other thing.
So 2018 is when I really dove into things like funnels, webinars,
evergreen funnels, and automations. And I started running ads.
Back then I was able to run ads for three or six months at a time,
get a really good cost per lead. And I thought this was great.
I was getting people into my automated webinar funnel, and it worked for a bit.
I was able to continue to sell seats to my course, but by the end of 2018,
it started to work a little less. And by 2019,
I was banging my head against the wall because I couldn't figure out how to grow
this course-based business. Meanwhile,
I was still offering services to my clients.
2018 and 2019 were the tougher years. The honeymoon period was over,
and this is where I really had to figure out how I was gonna grow this business.
I would try things like doing another webinar,
like the webinar that worked the first time, but my course sales would flop.
I hosted retreats in 2018 and 2019,
but both times I didn't make any money from it. And in fact,
I lost money on both of the retreats. I tried new offers.
I came up with a group coaching experience called the Instagram Funnel Bootcamp,
and I only sold a handful of seats. By mid 2019,
I couldn't help but feel like I was failing at every single thing that I tried.
I had this course, I didn't know how to sell it, maybe it was already outdated,
maybe it was irrelevant, maybe I was irrelevant because on top of all this,
my Instagram account wasn't growing the same way that it had in previous years.
So in 2019, I was really having a moment.
I remember riding around Toronto on my bike, It was summer, it was amazing,
and I just thought, "What am I doing wrong?" I'm trying everything,
but nothing seems to be working with what my business needs right now.
It was at that time that I started to have some harder conversations with my
then boyfriend about what it would look like for me to quit my business and go
back to my day job,
because I was starting to crave the structure of a day job where you could just
check in at 9:00 AM,
check out at 5:00 PM and literally turn your brain off after that.
But as an entrepreneur, you don't have that luxury. When you have a problem,
it kind of plagues you 24/7.
And when you really start to feel like a failure and a fraud,
it's hard to get out of those negative emotions and get into action.
So my boyfriend playing devil's advocate would ask me these questions about
going back to my day job.
And that actually lit a fire underneath me because I knew I wasn't there yet.
I knew that I wasn't ready to seriously consider that as an option.
So what did I do? I looked at my whole product suite,
I looked at everything that I was selling. First, I had a $600 course,
then I had a $1,000 group coaching program,
and then I had sold retreats for between $2,000 and $3,000.
And yet there was one thing I hadn't tried.
It was what all the gurus at the time were telling me not to do.
And that was to sell a low ticket product,
something for less than a hundred dollars.
The gurus at the time were all about not devaluing my customer base by offering
a lower ticket product. At that time, it was all about high ticket, high ticket.
Why don't I create a $5,000 offer and a $10,000 offer?
And while I was trying high ticket offers, I just felt like it wasn't working.
It just wasn't working with my niche and my audience.
And so as a last ditch effort,
I went against all the common advice that I was getting at that time.
I had had the idea for this offer for about six months,
but because I had so much imposter syndrome and such a fear of failure,
I really didn't act on it until I had literally no other choice because I was
starting to get months in the red, meaning we were losing money,
not making money, feeling like my business was really paycheck to paycheck.
It felt like every month I knew I had set expenses.
And every month when the month started again from zero,
how was I gonna generate that revenue?
I had nothing consistent that I could rely on. So before I called it quits,
before I applied back for my old day job,
I brought out my plan for my low ticket product,
and here are a few things that I did to get it out there. First, I hid nothing.
I told my audience what my plan was.
I involved them in the process and their feedback directly related
to the product I created. In fact,
I went into one of my Facebook groups and I gave them all of my product name
ideas, and my students voted on the name that they liked the most.
And the name they chose was Story Vault.
This name turned out to serve me really well in years to come,
so thank you students for that. But I involved my audience in the process.
Because again, I felt like I had nothing to hide. So finally,
after six to eight weeks of building this product out, mid-December of 2019,
probably the worst time to launch a product, I did.
I launched Story Vault for $27 to my email list,
and I didn't really expect much.
The product itself was 365 ideas for your Instagram
Stories for business. And I thought it was a good product,
but I did not expect what happened next.
I sent the email out to my email list and literally there was a sale coming in
every few minutes. In the first day after sending out that email,
we sold 40 or 50 units of this one product.
And the amazing thing was was because this was a $27 product,
everything was done. A student bought it,
and then the product got delivered to them, and I had no other obligation.
I didn't have to host a call, I didn't have to host a Facebook group,
I didn't have to answer questions.
The psychology of offering a $27 product was really amazing for myself and my
students. Because for my students, it was a no-brainer offer.
This was a product that saved them hours of research and strategic thinking.
And for me,
it was no brainer because I had to make the product once and I could sell it
over and over and over again. And that's exactly what happened.
Throughout the rest of December, I went on holiday to Mexico, and again,
I had no expectations of what was going to happen,
but every day I would wake up and I would see more sales.
More Stripe notifications, more PayPal notifications, and I just thought, "Oh,
this is a really good launch." I think that month we did about $40,000 in sales.
January I got back to work,
I started to run ads directly to the sales page of Story Vault,
and people were buying. People were buying directly from an ad,
which told me that my audience did want something from me.
Maybe they weren't ready for a $600 course,
but maybe if they could get a bite-sized version of my teachings and my
trainings and they liked it,
maybe then they would be ready for that next level course,
or that next level offer between $500 and a thousand dollars.
And that's exactly what happened.
I continued to grow my customer base by bringing people into my Story Vault
product, and they naturally found their way... Well, not naturally.
I had a funnel in place to lead them to the next level course,
the $600 one, and at that point,
the $600 was all profit because I'd already acquired this customer who
loved Story Vault, and then they were buying my course.
And I didn't have to spend any money to acquire that next sale.
Without knowing it, by creating this low ticket product,
I changed the trajectory of my business completely.
2020 was a banner year.
Our revenue tripled from 2019 to 2020,
and it was all because I as a last ditch effort created a $27 product,
which then opened up my customer base to all the other offers that I had
just sitting there waiting for them. And by the end of 2020,
my business had done not just a million dollars in sales,
but multiple million dollars in sales.
So what can you take away from this story? Well, as an entrepreneur,
you know that you're always trying things. You're always looking at the market,
you're looking at the data, you're trying new things,
and you're assessing from there.
And the majority of the things that you try are going to be a flop.
But what I learned from that experience is that you never know which of the
things you're about to try is going to be the thing that turns it all around.
Take this bowl of flour, for example. This is dry, boring, bland,
not something that anyone wants to eat. With the right ingredients,
with the right steps, with the right strategy,
this bowl of flour turns into these amazing delectable donuts.
And the same thing for your business. You might be in this dry, boring,
bland stage where it feels like nothing's working.
It feels like you have nothing worth selling, but you keep trying.
You keep experimenting,
you keep looking at the data because you never know what's going to be right
around the corner.
And what is gonna help your business transform into something delectable and
delicious.
Not listening to gurus and going against the grain of my industry is what really
worked for me. I can't promise the same for you,
but if you're interested in getting my entire launch and strategy of Story Vault
for free, check out this video next.