She Turned $550 Into $2M (in 9 Months)

this is Katherine she turned $550 into a $2 million self-development company but the most impressive part is that she did this in just 9 months pre-selling over $300,000 of the product first to validate the demand I did not know I was getting started as an entrepreneur I just was starting a business solving problems and I remember the moment where I it funded 326k I think in like a month and then in 9 months we hit 2.2 million in sales but Katherine didn't start as an entrepreneur she actually started her career as an architect with no

business experience I mean I think like stepping in entrepreneurship like doing something every day to like get you into a better situation so when I Was An Architect I was making like 30k a year and I was I had a 45 minute commute fast forward to today and she sold over $45 million of products online and even sold her business and recently just bought the company back but this time instead of hiring a team Catherine's taken a different approach a lot of things that I previously would have needed people for I could use AI for

I would do everything Scrappy I'm like starting with okay how do I just do it in a cheaper place and then eventually how do I get AI to do it and in my favorite part of the interview she talks about specific ways she's leveraging Ai and software to work smarter wow that's really good okay here are the top things that if my M got deleted I put on right away in this episode Katherine shares exactly how she launched her first million-dollar business specific examples how she's using Ai and software and how she built an entire

business just by solving her own problems let's dive in Catherine you're one of the scrappiest entrepreneurs on the internet tell us how you get started in entrepreneurship I started I basically worked in architecture for about a year and I was like I don't think I want to do this forever so I started a side business a shop supp store back in like 2012 and I was just designing posters and like graphic art things my advertising was basically like I would put whatever I made up on my Tumblr blog and then people would buy it and

and then when if I got a bunch of sales some of my stuff was on like MTV and like Fast Company and they just like the design stuff and that's how I would get traffic like I didn't know anything else how did you approach leaving your full-time job into taking the leap into entrepreneurship the business I had on the side the like graphic art business was making more than my like day job was so I was like well I could just do this as like my freedom vehicle to figure out what I want to do

next I wasn't like I'm going to leave here and this is going to be my thing I just was reading a lot of my personal development and then my business was starting to do better and so I'd create these like Frameworks for myself and that's eventually what became best self and how did you first validate that there's demand for best self in some of these Frameworks I had some experience with kickstarters I did this journal essentially for the architecture school as part of my thesis project I actually didn't think it was going to be a

business I just wanted it for myself and I was trying to crowd fund the idea of everyone else buying one so that I could have one without paying like an extortion of Mine At what point in after the kickstarter campaign were you like oh those is a real B business and did you double down and and how did it Grow from there we launched the kickstarter it funded 320 6K I think in like a month and I remember being like looking at my other businesses that I had and I was just like and they weren't

doing yearly as well and this was the one that I actually enjoyed and had passion for I just didn't think it was a business and so that's when I was like I'm just going to do this only so over $300,000 in pre-sales for a journal yeah that's crazy what are like rough margins on something like that it's 90% gross margin how would you describe what best self is and the products is it just the journal or you have a bunch of other products now today yeah so we started with the journal and I this is

actually how you come up with new product ideas cuz we were trying to sell another product which was a blank notebook and so I was like okay people are going to sit down to this notebook what what are they going to see someone on the TU is like oh we'll create a prompt notebook where it's like a question at the top every day which I like idea but then I'm like but what if I open this journal and the prompt I don't really feel like writing a b today so then I have to skip a

page and so I'm like oh it would be better if it was like cards and so we have these Discovery decks that's the collection and it started as prompts to help people Journal so we came up with an idea deck a writing deck and a deck to like help people make decisions what did the first year look like once you decided to okay I'm going to start this business yeah we won the build of shop I build a business competitions yeah so we entered it and then in 9 months we hit 2.2 million in sales

and one in our category whatever that was I forget we've only been direct consumer so 80% on our store and then slowly like we put more energy into Amazon and so I think when I the business was acquired in 2022 it was like 60% DDC and 35% Amazon something like that I've noticed you've done a few like Scrappy things along the way like you got really into defi when crypto was going out you got really into like creating content and making videos you did that like 100 days of doing and I'm curious now what you've

learned from some of these experiments that you're applying into the business maybe starting with AI uh I mean I like just figuring stuff out I think I'm a generally an early adopter mindset I always just like to be learning and so I think challenges and accountability is a good motivating factor cuz like I can say to myself I'm going to do something and that works some of the time but I'm much more like a I'm going to have to tell a group of people that I didn't do this thing if you do something for like

30 days and then you can share it so you're not getting the dopamine hit from the saying the goal before you've actually done it and if you have some accountability around that it's good and how about like the the way that you surface some of these like golden nuggets from product reviews can you talk about that this is the biggest game changer for AI and marketing and specifically figuring out different Golden Nugget reviews so like finding the way a customer says something that you would never of like said but it's like oh this is perfect

and it works really well in an ad what AI can do is like you can pull a spreadsheet of all of your reviews you give it a prompter on like pulling out these golden nuggets and then you give it a spreadsheet of thousands of reviews and it will give you golden nuggets based on different types of your audience you could be targeting so be like productivity relationships um and you can test those in ads and it takes 10 seconds of AI if that I would do everything Scrappy I'm like hiring like a breather space or

an Airbnb but like everything is expensive it adds up like 15K a day with everyone and I'm like starting with okay how do I just do it in a cheaper place and then eventually how do I get AI to do it we have such limited time especially now that I have like a kid that I don't want to be dealing with this stuff that like suck your energy and that's actually one thing is like managing your energy and not your time and so AI helps me deal with all the BS that I don't want to

do not that I wasn't doing it before it would just takes so much more energy for the payoff not being a big deal and so when I think of what I would value like everyone's like AI is going to take our jobs like it can help us do our jobs better like I even tell I show my team how to do things better like okay don't start from zero like you can get AI to do 50% of this so you're not starting off with a blank page and then going from there so it's just a

way to like save a ton of time and like brain damage so you have a unique story where you've not only sold your business but you bought it back and now we're running it again let's go back to you selling your business how did you sell it and were you trying to do that I wasn't like trying to sell it someone approached me with with an offer to buy it but I I didn't love their offer I was in like a few small slack groups so I would keep getting on calls with random people and

then eventually like they gave me an Eli and it was just a funny thing because I was just jumping on calls and saying yes to conversations without expectation and that ended up leading to when the business was acquired and at that point like what were you doing roughly in sales and how big was the team when I sold it in 2022 I think we did 8.6 million in sales my team I believe was about 10 full-time people majority in the US okay so you go through this period and then how did you decide what you

want to do did you approach the company or did they approach you um I think they came to me 14 months later like they're basically like look we didn't hit our numbers were like 11% off and so you're not going to get your earnout at the end of that call he was like you're not going to get your earn we're actually going to be closing D do you want to buy the business back and at the time honestly the fir my first gut reaction when he asked me that was like No And so there's a

few reasons I bought it back a lot of things that I previously would have needed people for I could use AI for not that it can replace people but there's a lot of minutia in business that like a lot of things that a machine can do much quicker and better and more efficiently I wanted to see like how I could test running AI things on an actual business and then oh yeah I thought it would be like a cool story I like I was like it let's do it for the story yeah so before you

sold it you had like 10 or so full-time employees us-based what do you have now after you bought it back so when I bought it back there's nobody and the PE firm let go of my old team after six months and I knew this and I helped them get other gigs uh so actually one friend of mine who runs an Ecom company I think he has four of my old team on his team but when I bought it back few people asked me oh you going to bring back your old team and by that point

they'd all find their positions and I also was like if I put back the same people I risk falling into the same patterns that I before and instead of starting with like this is who I hired before so I need the same team it's like I'm just going to start myself I hired I actually used Fiverr a bunch in the beginning to like I had someone do an Amazon audit which the day I closed I got the audit back or it started and they did in two days cuz I was like what do I need

to fix here and so I I've used you don't have to hire full-time people you can hire people to solve like a very specific problem you have and that you don't have like long-term investment and then adding people as I needed it so I used um quick hire VA this guy Stefan he's awesome he basically gets you three people like EA VA type people for something like 300 400 bucks it's like very affordable and I almost am like you should raise your price but not yet um but he he brought me three people and I

hired two of them one wasn't a good fit but the other one is still with me and he's amazing so I would highly recommend his service and then near Shoring I've used this thing called Sean passport where I hire people in Latin America imagine that your your MacBook gets wiped today what are the top tools that you use to work smarter okay here are the top things granola for meeting notes in your Fus for just reminders that I have stuff going on clean shot for screenshots doing quick diagrams one password for sharing passwords for your

whole team AI wise there's a app called super whisper and it's just a little icon on your screen when you want to record something you just click on it so I'll be like I want to write an email to Mitchell tell him that I'm not interested in it and it sounds like a terrible idea but can you say it in a nice way just say I'm really busy let's see what this thing comes up with wow that's really good I'm so glad I didn't receive that email but you can hook in with different AI models

cuz for a while I was just having a transcribe and then what I realized is you can actually have it just do it that's taking something that might take you 20 minutes to respond to and like 3 minutes Arc browser it takes like a couple days to get used to like the different way they do things but it's Game Changer some are like Ecom specific so I started using this thing called final Loop which for our accounting and bookkeeping it's so integrated into all your tools at any point I can look at my p&l and

I don't even have a um I have a finance guide that helps me like forecast cash but other than that I don't have a bookkeeper cuz this thing like takes care of it it's amazing like Loom I use it all the time and it's good for both like recording something but then also doing Sops do you have all sorts of books around here any favorite books or specific things that you've learned one of my favorite books and I don't hear a lot of people talk about this one but it's really good cuz it's like key

ideas in it that are really powerful and it's called how to fail at almost everything and still win big and it's by Scott Adams who's the creator of Dilbert so he talks about this idea of skill stacking where how do you become much more valuable in the marketplace is you add skills that make you more unique so like an architect who can make stuff and then maybe they learn copywriting and then and they can also make products when I first got into entrepreneurship I actually thought my design background because I didn't have a business background

would be a negative because I was thinking like oh everyone here has done business and I've never done that I only know like making stuff and design and I realized when I got into it even after a few years I was like oh the design Parts like I know how to make stuff and the business you can learn that in books and pick it up along the way of course like you make mistakes and it would have done some things differently but yeah you can learn every skill that you take in life and apply it

in a different way and I guarantee if you keep learning skills like someone that's learns Ai and applies it to their job is going to be much more valuable in the marketplace so I would think we think about AI stealing our jobs like AI is going to steal menial jobs that don't require a lot of creativity at least in the beginning and so how you say ahead of it is like you get unique skills and if you have layered skills stacked on top of each other and you just figure it out then you're going to

be totally fine if you weren't doing best self right now what other like business ideas would you do if you have specific ones or like how would you approach finding that for somebody watching so I mean the best businesses are businesses that solve problems I I think if you don't know where to start start with like writing D everything that annoys you in a day well I started best self as in thinking that your best self was your typ a most productive self and what I realized after I was like hitting all these business goals

I'm like oh actually there's more to life than these achievement and so then I went into like okay how do I have better relationships and and so I called the company best self but when I started it was very much like you're only your best self when you're achieving again kind of what I went through is like oh if you're not making money and achieving and like successful on the outside then you're like that is your best self and then I realize oh actually there's more to life in that and so then we got into

those products and so it's like almost like a trojan horse of personal development it's like how do you make becoming better at something fun and creating Frameworks so that people don't feel like they have to start from scratch to do something that they want like you don't have to literally buying this game and doing it with your partner will bring you closer just by doing it and I want to create products that like take all the friction out of doing something and just make it easy but people have to do it to see the change

if you were to give that younger version of Katherine start like back when she's starting best self for the first time words of wisdom like what would you tell her what would I tell her I think I would tell her to be more confident in herself and don't discount her skills cuz I think at the time I was like oh I don't know what I'm doing and now I realize like I don't know what I'm doing but nobody else does either and so that makes easier um and like in general I think everyone's trying their

best amazing this has been awesome any final words of wisdom that you want to give the the the viewers for people who are wanting to either become their best self or to step into entrepreneurship or grow their own business I mean I think like stepping in entrepreneurship is like what does that look like on a Thursday I think stepping is just like doing something like doing something every day to like get you into a better situation so when I Was An Architect I was making like 30k a year and I was I had a 45

minute commute like if I got the express train that was like what I was looking at you know two times a day and so I would start reading books that was where I got into like personal development books and reading so I'm like okay I don't I only hang out with Architects right now and I'm if you're around the people and you're looking around and you're like I don't want no not offense to your friends but if you don't want to live that life moving forward and there's no one in your Social Circle that is

doing what you want to do you need to change your Social Circle and you also need to change change like the content that you consume go outside of yourself you'll learn more and then you'll be able to do better once you know better but a lot of times it's like they don't even know where to start and so I would start find someone that you look up to or you want to do what they want to do even if it's like one step above and ask their advice or just be like what book would you

recommend I read first do things better so I would just say like figure out what the smallest version of doing something different is and then start doing that and then do it every single day