I recently went to look at a house in my area that was completely outside of my budget. It was the kind of house where you walk in, look around and think, oh my gosh, I could totally live here. Every fixture was perfect, the trim was so high quality and it was obviously a very high end luxury home.
I wanted it. I really wanted it, and almost immediately I started doing that thing where you talk yourself out of it. Boy, it must be nice for other people. Maybe when we’re way older. And if I’m honest, I got a little judgey too, like who even makes enough money to afford a house like this?
Then I caught myself thinking, wait a minute, what would my business need to look like for me to afford something like this? Is that even realistic? I don’t want to get my hopes up.
This post is about getting your hopes up anyway, being honest about what you actually want, understanding the work it would take to get there and deciding you’re willing to go after it.
My Dream House Was Only 20,000 Customers Away
I was voice texting back and forth with my friend Amber McCue, telling her how beautiful the house was and how it felt to be in it, as cheesy as that sounds. She asked me, “Well, Allie, what’s your average cart value?”
I told her, and then she asked what my average cost to acquire a customer was. I had my Claude dashboard spin up the numbers so I had them right in front of me, and she lovingly pointed out that, even with the rough math we were doing, my dream home was only 20,000 customers away.
When you think about it in terms of humans, how many people you would need to help in order to get the thing you’re dreaming about, it completely changes the perspective. That conversation hasn’t left my head since, because suddenly I knew exactly what I had to work on, and I had a clarity I hadn’t had in a really long time.
I’m sharing this while I’m in it. I haven’t bought the house. This is the part where I’m deciding to take the possibility seriously, deciding to work as hard as I possibly can and follow my own playbook to make it happen.
How I Shrank Back to What Felt Safe
If you’re new here, I grew a $7 million business. My biggest month was $315K, followed by months and months of holding steady at $280K a month, and that happened smack dab in the beginning of COVID with three little kids at home.
I found myself hiring and managing more people than I ever had, getting a lot of attention I’d never gotten before, invitations to be on podcasts and travel, and an amount of stress my nervous system wasn’t ready for. A $315K month sounds pretty dang good, and I completely crumbled.
I stopped the marketing systems that were working really well for me, including a weekly webinar that was crushing it. I went back into my comfort zone and slowly started shrinking and hiding, back to the set point that felt safe. By 2021 and 2022 I had scaled down my team and my ad spend.
At the same time, ads started changing, and I told myself a story that I didn’t know if my strategy worked anymore. My whole strategy is Start Tiny: run ads to a low ticket digital product, then invite the people who buy into your high ticket group coaching. I kept running the same ad play over and over, the same old static images and the same offers. I wasn’t following my own advice to test things, and I stopped learning from other people because I was afraid I’d copy someone.
I never had a single zero dollar day, and I could still watch my revenue slowly shrink as I personally shrank. As I wanted to be less visible, my revenue followed.
Why I’m Done Talking Myself Out of It
For a long time I was making enough. We’re very blessed, we bought real estate, my bills are paid and we live in Northern Minnesota where things are inexpensive. I had everything I needed, and I didn’t let myself make extra.
Then I turned 40 last August, and within a week all three of my kids will be in double digits. They don’t need me the way they used to. It feels like I’m entering my “I don’t care what anyone else thinks” era right as I’m realizing time is moving. AI is coming too, and if I’m going to be successful selling information, I want to do it now. On top of that, in the last week and a half I’ve cracked the code on getting my ads scaling and profitable again with a new style of ad.
A lot of us get stuck thinking what we have is enough. We talk ourselves out of believing something is possible, and we don’t give ourselves a chance to find out what our potential really is. For me it’s a house, a bigger business and the ability to make a ton of extra money. For some of my clients it’s working when they want, taking more vacations or quitting their jobs. Whatever your version is, we love to stop ourselves and “be realistic.”
“Get Your Hopes Up!!!”
I told my ad guru friend Tara Zirker my goal. I’d run the numbers on what it would cost me in daily ad spend to reach and help 20,000 people, which means 10X, maybe 100X, what I’m spending on ads right now.
I expected her to tell me to be patient because scaling is slow. Instead she was giddy. She was squealing excited in her message, told me how she would structure it and how many ads to create every day (yes, every day) and asked for access to my ad account so she could look at it for me.
When I told her I’d been afraid to get my hopes up, she wrote back in all caps: “GET YOUR HOPES UP!!!”
That’s what this whole thing comes down to. What are you blocking yourself from having because you don’t want to be disappointed, or embarrassed, or plan for the wrong thing? Look at where you’re collecting evidence that those things aren’t possible for you, that people like you don’t have things like that. We all carry voices from growing up and from our families that tell us what’s realistic for someone like us, and we don’t have enough people telling us to go try the thing we think is impossible, figure out the math and work backwards.
You Can Be Grateful and Still Want More
Maybe you’re thinking you don’t have the money, or the audience, or you’ve tried this before, or you should just be grateful for what you have. I can be grateful for my life and still want that house. I can love my family and everything we’ve already built and still step into some curiosity about what would happen if I went for it, and who I would become in the process.
When you go after a new goal you take on a new identity. So what does the person look like who can afford a luxury home on a lake like that one? Wanting a beautiful house doesn’t have to become a character flaw. I like it, I want to live there, and that’s allowed.
I’ve gone to open houses and tour of homes events for years and always said, “Someday I’d love an amazing house,” and left it at that. This one was different. It brought up a ton of excitement and a little doubt, and a real conversation with myself. Do I believe this is possible for me? If not, why not? If it is, who do I need to become, and what thoughts have to become my default instead of “this is fine, this is enough, who am I to want something like that?”
It’s funny, because I teach people how to sell things online. I watch other people build incredible things, and a little part of me was still saying, that’s fine for them, but I have to stay small.
Turn the Dream Into Math and Work Backwards
What I love most about Amber’s response is how quickly she brought me back to something I understand. I’ve been teaching average cart value and customer acquisition cost since 2015. I’m having an entire emotional experience about a house and she’s asking about my checkout numbers, and it tied it all together for me. I just need to do more, and all of it is a decision: to make more ads, spend more on ads, scale them the right way and get support where I need it.
This is where a system like Tiny Offers makes growth predictable. You can’t scale organic traffic on command. You can’t decide a reel is going to go viral and bring you a certain number of sales. When you know you spend $30 on ads to get a $120 cart value, you can look at taking daily ad spend from $400 a day to $12,000 a day (yes, those are the actual numbers I’m looking at) and see why it would work.
The businesses I admire that spend half a million dollars a month on ads made ad creation their job. They have more creative, more tests, more buyers and more budget, and they’re willing to scale every day. I’ve spent about the same on ads for the last three or four years.
So my plan is to spend a little more next week, a little more the week after that, keep increasing the budget by about 20% and add new campaigns that start bigger than I’ve ever started them. The 20,000 customer number started the conversation, and the plan I’m building by working backwards holds me accountable: the cost of delivering the offer, business expenses, taxes, the life I’m already living, the real estate we already own and what I need to set aside on top of all that.
And there are so many more tools now than there were in 2018. Claude can build my pages and practically build my ad campaigns. I still need my face on camera and the human side of it, and I can do this with a really lean team, maybe even solo.
Maybe this house sells before I’m ready. I believe in “this or something better.” What matters is the number got me to sit down and do the work. “I could never afford that” used to be the end of the conversation. Now I have questions I can actually answer: who I need to become, who I need to hire, what my offers need to look like, who I’m talking to and how I show up.
Start Tiny and Stay on One Play
I’ve had so many clients who were inches away from hitting the diamond in the mine and walked away because it got tough. You hit that dark stretch of growth and decide it’s not working, so you launch a new offer, switch your niche or rebuild your website, and then you get another idea for a different offer. That’s where we get stressed out and can’t scale.
So I’m focusing on one offer and one business with that goal in mind. I know what I’m advertising, what comes next and the phases of when I’ll bring someone in. Customer acquisition has become methodical for me because of tiny offers. If you buy a customer for $30 and make $120, you know that spending $60 makes you $240.
If you’re thinking about this for your own business, figure out how you can run ads profitably, sell low ticket products that pay for themselves and bring those buyers into your higher ticket offer. If you’re at the very beginning, that’s what my Tiny Offer Starter Kit walks you through, and inside Tiny Offer® HQ we work on growing, running ads and next steps at every level.
So here’s my question for you. Can you let yourself get clear on what you say you want? Can you do the scary things, like spending more on ads than you ever have, and trust the process? Those dreams wouldn’t be in your heart if they weren’t possible. It’s time for all of us to get our hopes up.
I’m going to keep you updated on how this goes, ups and downs included. If you want the whole story, listen to the full episode of Start Tiny right here on this page.