What Are You Afraid Will Happen If It Works?

There’s probably something sitting on your to-do list right now that has been there longer than you want to admit.

Maybe you’re going to create the offer. Raise the price. Send the email. Hire someone. Launch the program. Pitch yourself for the opportunity.

You’ve decided to do it. You know it matters.

And somehow, at the end of another very busy day, everything else got done except that.

So you move it to tomorrow. Then tomorrow becomes next week. Next week becomes next month.

Eventually you’re spending more energy thinking about doing the thing than it would probably take to actually do it.

People love to say, “Do it scared.”

But there’s a problem with that advice. Sometimes you don’t know you’re scared.

Fear of Success Doesn’t Always Feel Like Fear

Fear can feel like needing more clarity. It can sound like:

• “I need to research this a little more.”
• “I should see what everyone else is doing first.”
• “I’ll have more capacity next month.”
• “Once the kids are older, I’ll be able to focus.”
• “I’m just not quite ready.”

And sometimes those things are true. There are real seasons where you need more support, more information or fewer things on your plate.

The question is what happens when the same project keeps getting postponed. That’s when I think it’s useful to ask:

What am I predicting will happen if this works?

We spend a lot of time talking about fear of failure. What if nobody buys? What if people judge me? What if I launch something and it flops?

Those fears are usually easy to recognize. Fear of success can be much sneakier.

What Do You Think Success Is Going to Cost You?

You might want a bigger business on paper while simultaneously believing:

• If I become too successful, I’ll outgrow my partner.
• If I make more money, I won’t have enough time for my kids.
• If my business gets bigger, I’ll have to work all the time.
• If I charge more, I’ll become greedy.
• If I become really visible, everyone will have an opinion about me.
• If I have a huge launch, I’ll have to keep performing at that level forever.
• If I make more money, I might become one of those successful people I don’t even like.

You might never say any of those things out loud. You may not consciously think them at all.

Instead, you just keep putting off the actions that could create the growth you say you want.

Sending the email is easy. What makes it feel heavy is the imaginary chain reaction you’ve attached to what might happen after the email works.

You’re Living Through a Future That Hasn’t Happened

This can happen with almost every type of business growth.

You think about hiring someone and immediately picture yourself managing them all day.

You think about launching a program and picture customers needing you around the clock.

You imagine becoming more visible and picture strangers picking apart everything you say.

You imagine a successful launch and immediately think, “How am I going to keep this up?”

Suddenly you’re exhausted by a business you haven’t even built yet.

I’ve done this in my own life. One fear I’ve had is that becoming too successful would somehow change my relationship with my husband.

I had seen enough examples of people becoming more successful, changing dramatically and eventually getting divorced that my brain started treating that sequence of events like a potential rule.

So I finally said it out loud. I told my husband I was afraid that if my business became too successful, we might grow apart.

His response was basically, “I’m not scared of that. Go get it. We’ll figure it out together.”

We’ve been married for 18 years. If something starts feeling wrong, we can talk about it.

The conversation reminded me that I had been trying to solve his hypothetical reaction without actually asking him how he felt.

Maybe You Want the Empire and the Chickens

There are all these Reels about wanting to build an empire on Monday and wanting to disappear into the country to raise chickens and bake sourdough by Tuesday.

I relate. A lot of entrepreneurs do.

Part of you wants to know what you’re capable of. You have ideas, ambition, work you’re proud of and things you still want to create.

Another part of you says:

• I want slower mornings.
• I don’t want everybody to have access to me.
• I don’t want to spend my entire day managing people.
• I don’t want my business to require constant interaction.

Those things don’t automatically have to be opposites. Instead of choosing between “empire” and “chickens,” get curious about what each one represents.

What do you want from the empire? Freedom? Money? Impact? Work that you’re proud of? The ability to travel?

What do you want from the chickens and the sourdough? Quiet? Fewer interruptions? Time with your family? Something you can do with your hands and finish without asking anyone’s opinion?

There might be pieces of both that belong in the life you’re building.

Some of Your Resistance Might Be Practical

This is where the conversation gets especially interesting for business owners.

Sometimes you say you want to make more money, but your current business model has taught you that more money means more clients. More clients means more hours. More hours means less freedom.

If that’s the equation you’re working with, of course part of you is resisting growth.

There may be nothing mysterious about that resistance. Your brain might be correctly identifying that the way you currently make money has a capacity ceiling.

If you’re already overwhelmed serving one-on-one clients, doubling your revenue by doubling your client load sounds terrible.

That’s where creating a scalable offer becomes relevant.

A Scalable Offer Shouldn’t Create a Bigger Job for You

I caught myself doing this a few years ago while designing a new offer.

I was trying to make it incredibly valuable. I wanted it to feel like a no-brainer. And somehow social media management started making its way into the offer.

Actual social media management. The thing I was doing for clients back in 2011 and 2012.

I had to stop myself. Allie. Ma’am. You speak at Social Media Marketing World. You consult on social media. You do not want to manage 20 people’s Instagram accounts.

Nobody was forcing me to include that service. I was creating the offer.

But because I knew how to do it, and I knew clients would value it, I almost built myself another job.

You don’t have to put something into an offer simply because you know how to do it. You also don’t have to keep selling something you no longer want to deliver.

Start With the Result

If you currently help someone one-on-one, start by asking what result you actually create.

Maybe you help a client get more visibility, write a sales page, create a marketing strategy, build a funnel or develop stronger messaging.

Now ask: How could someone reach that same result through a group program?

• Could you teach the framework?
• Could you create a step-by-step process?
• Could you give them a template?
• Could they bring their work to a group coaching call for feedback?
• Could part of the process become self-paced?

A group program or course does not automatically become less valuable just because you aren’t personally doing every step for the customer. The delivery mechanism changes. The result can still be incredibly valuable.

And once you separate the result from the exact way you’ve always delivered it, you can start designing the offer around the business and life you actually want.

• What support will you provide?
• How will questions get answered?
• What will you personally review?
• What is the customer responsible for implementing?
• How can you create one-to-many support without multiplying your workload every time you make another sale?

Those questions can completely change your relationship with growth.

Instead of “Do It Scared,” Start Tiny

You do not have to solve every possible future version of your life before you move forward.

You don’t need to convince yourself that becoming wildly successful could never affect your marriage, your family, your time or your priorities.

You need the next step.

Maybe that means having the conversation with your partner. Maybe it means establishing working hours before accepting a new opportunity. Maybe you need to hire someone. Maybe you need to simplify your offer. Maybe you need to stop asking five other people what they think and listen to your own gut. Maybe you need to create the minimum viable version and put it in front of real people.

So look at the thing that keeps getting pushed to the bottom of your list and ask yourself: What am I predicting will happen if this works?

Figure out which parts are real logistical problems you can plan for and which parts are hypothetical outcomes you’ve been treating like guarantees.

Then start tiny. Take one step. Then take the next one.

If you want help designing an offer that lets you serve more people without simply creating more work for yourself, my $27 Scalable Offer Workshop is open at tinyoffer.com/class.

I talk through all of this, including my own fears about what success might cost, in the full episode of Start Tiny. Hit play at the top of this page, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

---

This post is based on an episode of the Start Tiny Show. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, and if it resonated, send me a DM and tell me the one tiny step you’re taking this week.

Read More about What Are You Afraid Will Happen If It Works?

Just Handle It: How to Stop Overthinking Your Business

I once started a cleaning company on a Wednesday.

I love ideas. I can make a very convincing case for just about any new offer or business idea to myself. I can get excited about the possibilities, imagine how it could work, and start making plans.

I also know what it feels like to spend so much time considering every possible direction that I never settle on what I’m actually going to do.

You end up with 14 tabs open, a few Google Docs, and a ChatGPT conversation full of ideas. By Friday, you have a different plan than the one you started with on Monday.

A question I saw online recently helped me look at that pattern differently.

What would you change if you had to make your current business work?

Imagine that starting over is off the table.

You have to keep your niche and your existing offers. You can change your role. You can get more help. You can change how you run the business. But you have to work with what you already have, and you have to make it fit the life you want.

What would have to change for you to actually want to keep running it?

For the sake of this exercise, you have to stay with the problems in front of you long enough to figure them out. The delivery problem still needs a solution. The offer still needs customers. The project you keep revisiting still needs to get finished.

I like this question because it takes away the option of escaping into a brand-new idea. It makes the work in front of you much harder to keep talking around.

The decision I spent two years circling

At Social Media Marketing World, my friend Tara Zuercher and I were sitting by the pool, planning our next 12 months. We were both speaking at the conference, and we were putting launches, offers, and ideas on the calendar.

I told her I was having a really hard time being on camera.

I had gained weight heading into the last years of my 30s, and it was affecting how willing I was to show up online. I knew I wanted to record more content. Then I would record something, hate how I looked, and feel embarrassed.

I had been counting macros, weighing my food, and working with a coach. I was thinking about keto, Whole30, going back to being vegan. I had a whole menu of possibilities.

I was basically verbal vomiting on her.

Then I mentioned that I had been considering a GLP-1 for two years. I had health anxiety, and I was scared of the side effects and long-term effects.

Tara put her notebook down on her lap, looked at me, and said, “Allie, just handle it.”

Those words have lived rent-free in my head ever since.

After that conversation, I went to the appointment I had already booked. I started taking a GLP-1 in May, and I’ve since lost almost 30 pounds. I’m sharing my own experience here, and this is what has been working for me.

What I keep coming back to is how much room the search for another possibility was taking up in my life. I was thinking about it constantly. I had spent two years considering paths, worrying, and trying to figure out which combination of options would finally work.

Now, when I catch myself circling something in my business, I hear Tara.

Okay, Allie. Just handle it. What does handling it actually look like?

The excuse I kept giving myself

I had a version of this pattern long before I owned a business.

In college, I was an art student. For one of my 3D sculpture classes, we had to build a creative chair. In true Allie form, I waited until the weekend before it was due.

I decided my chair was going to look like a giant piece of cake.

I was cutting wood and shoving yellow fiberglass insulation into it. I was itchy, I hadn’t researched the process, and I was trying to figure the whole thing out at the last possible second.

By Monday, the cake was beautiful. I loved that project. I wish I still had a picture of it.

I got a C.

A big part of our grade was class involvement, and I had spent the previous months socializing with my friends and hanging out on the patio of the art building. I was mad at my professor, even though I hadn’t done the work.

And I had a very convenient explanation ready: I only worked on it for a weekend. Of course I couldn’t expect the best grade.

That explanation let me avoid finding out what would happen if I fully committed.

If I started early, did the work, tried my best, and still got a C, I would have to look at my skills. I would have to see where I needed to improve. I would have to sit with the disappointment.

Procrastinating gave me an out.

I see the same thing happen in business. You launch something, skip the last five emails, and miss your sales goal. You can tell yourself you probably would have hit the goal if you had sent those emails.

Sending them means giving the launch a real chance. It also means being willing to look at the results and say, “Okay, something in this sales process needs work.”

Full sending it means getting something you can learn from

My son is a freestyle skier. I don’t love that for us, but he loves it.

He does flips and spins and all kinds of things I would prefer to not think about too much. He talks about “full sending” a backflip, because you can’t kind of commit halfway through it.

That conversation stuck with me.

In business, full sending something still leaves room for a disappointing result. You might do the work, finish the launch, and discover something needs to change.

At least then you have a completed attempt to look at. You can see where you bobbled. You have something to improve next time.

Keeping the project permanently unfinished leaves you guessing.

Look at your business like it belongs to somebody else

Imagine someone handed you a carbon copy of your company.

They have your offers, your audience, your budget, and your responsibilities outside of work. They ask you what they should do next.

What would you tell them?

This can be especially uncomfortable when you help other people with the exact thing you keep putting off in your own business. The copywriter without a sales page. The marketing consultant who isn’t marketing. The business coach who keeps creating new offers while their existing offer could use more attention.

When you’re looking at someone else’s business, you can usually stay focused on the problem they brought you.

An offer people have already bought gives you something to put in front of more people. A delivery problem gives you something specific to solve so customers can get support without you being available all day. A pile of unfinished projects gives you a choice about which one would remove the biggest constraint.

Inside your own business, those decisions come with history.

You remember the disappointing launch. You remember posting something and getting no views. You know what someone else in your industry is doing, and you start wondering whether their approach would work better.

Then you’re back to evaluating everything.

Looking at your business from the outside helps you get back to the problem you actually need to solve.

Make the next step small enough to finish

There are two things I feel like I say on practically every coaching call: minimum viable product and path of least resistance.

A minimum viable product asks you to get something done and into the world, even while you can still see ways to improve it.

The path of least resistance helps you find a way forward with what you have today.

Say your business needs sales. Start with the offer you can confidently deliver right now. Think about who you can put it in front of. Look at what needs to be completed for you to feel good about selling it.

Maybe the next step is emailing your list. Maybe it’s finishing something inside the offer. Maybe it’s getting help with the part you keep avoiding.

You can make an informed decision with the information you have today. You can decide what you’re going to finish this week, put a date on the calendar, and work toward that date.

The part I keep having to practice is staying with the decision when I hit a challenging point. That’s when another strategy, another offer, or another round of research starts looking very appealing.

Catch the moment you give yourself an out

I was supposed to record this podcast and go for a run.

Somehow, I ended up repotting my plants.

One of them looked droopy. I took a picture and asked ChatGPT about it. It told me the plant had root rot and needed to be repotted as soon as possible.

So I repotted my plants, lost track of time, and suddenly it was time to pick up my kids from school.

The podcast wasn’t recorded. The run hadn’t happened.

I had given myself an out.

Sometimes I do that with a plant. Sometimes it shows up as looking at new software, considering a rebrand, or having another strategy conversation about something I already have enough information to try.

Those are the moments I’m working on catching.

I care about what my calendar looks like. I want time with my family, and I want to enjoy running my business. I’m also working on the consistency required to follow through on the things I say matter to me.

What are you going to handle this week?

Come back to the question:

If you had to make your business work with what you have right now, what would you do?

Write down your answer. Then read it as though someone else handed you that question about their own company.

Give them the advice you would give a client or a friend. Look at what they can finish, what they can put in front of customers, and what they’ve been reconsidering for far too long.

That gives you somewhere to start.

For me, this means catching myself when I’m collecting options again and asking what I’m ready to decide. It means recording the podcast, staying with the plan, and doing some of the things that still make me uncomfortable.

And occasionally telling myself, “Allie, just freaking handle it.”

I talk through all of this, including the parts that may give me a vulnerability hangover, in the full episode of Start Tiny. Hit play at the top of this page, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

---

This post is based on an episode of the Start Tiny Show. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, and if it resonated, send me a DM and tell me what you’re going to handle this week.

Read More about Just Handle It: How to Stop Overthinking Your Business

Your Price Point Is a Business Model: How to Price Your Online Course, Coaching Program, or Membership

One of the questions I hear constantly from online business owners is:

“How much should I charge for my offer?”

And I understand why we want a simple answer.

$497?

$1,997?

$5,000?

$10,000?

Pick the number, slap it on the checkout page, and move on.

Except your price affects almost every other part of the business you’re building.

It changes how you acquire customers, how you sell, how much support people expect, the team you need, what fulfillment costs, your profit margins, and how involved you personally have to be.

So when you’re choosing a price point, you’re also making decisions about the company you’re going to have to build around it.

That is the part I think entrepreneurs miss.

First, What Is an Offer?

Your offer is basically what someone is buying from you.

That includes:

• The result you’re helping them achieve
• The way you’re helping them get there
• How the program is delivered
• How much support they receive
• How much access they have to you
• How long they stay in the program
• What they pay

Those pieces all work together.

Which is why changing the price can eventually change everything else.

There are exceptions to every pricing guideline I’m about to give you. Someone somewhere is probably selling a $5,000 self-study course with no support. Someone else is probably providing private coaching for $500.

I’m giving you the general framework I use when I’m designing offers and coaching clients through offer creation.

The $497–$697 Course: A Really Beautiful Business Model

I actually love this price range.

A good $497, $597, or $697 course can often be sold without a full sales team or a bunch of one-on-one conversations.

A strong evergreen funnel can look something like:

Someone sees your ad.

They watch your webinar.

They understand the framework, methodology, and result.

They buy.

You don’t necessarily need a discovery call, a setter, a closer, or somebody personally following up with every lead.

At this level, the buyer is usually asking themselves:

“Do I believe this system can help me solve my problem?”

They’re buying the roadmap, process, and shortcut.

And from the business owner’s perspective, fulfillment can be incredibly scalable.

If I’ve already created the curriculum, selling my 100th course doesn’t automatically add another 100 hours to my calendar.

There is real value in that.

We’re constantly hearing that higher ticket is better.

Charge more. Go premium. Sell high ticket.

I’m the Tiny Offer Queen, so obviously I’m not convinced that higher ticket is automatically the goal.

You have to look at the business wrapped around the price.

Around $2,000, Buyers Usually Want More Certainty

Once you start moving into roughly the $1,997-and-up range, I usually expect the sales process and offer itself to change.

At this point, a discovery call or sales conversation becomes much more common.

The buyer has more money on the line.

They want to know how your program applies to their business, their problem, and their specific situation.

And they’re often going to expect more support once they buy.

That could mean:

• A community
• Coaching calls
• Feedback
• Office hours
• Implementation sessions
• Direct access to someone who can help when they’re stuck

This is where the value starts moving toward implementation.

At a lower price point, I might happily pay for information, a framework, and a roadmap.

As I’m spending more money, I increasingly want somebody to help me use it.

I want feedback.

I want accountability.

I want someone to look at what I’m doing and tell me what I’m missing.

Please Don’t Add Another 50 Videos

One of the biggest mistakes I see with offer creation is assuming a higher-priced program needs more content.

If the $497 course contains 50 videos, surely the $2,000 version needs 100.

Please don’t.

Especially in the AI age, nobody is sitting around wishing they had another hundred videos to watch.

Information is everywhere.

We have ChatGPT. We have Claude. There is an absurd amount of free information available to anyone willing to look for it.

More content doesn’t automatically increase the value of your offer.

Better support does.

Better implementation does.

Better feedback does.

A clearer path to the result does.

You can dramatically increase the value of an offer without doubling the size of your course portal.

What I Would Expect From a $5,000 Program

If I were designing a $5,000 program, I’d probably start thinking in terms of a roughly 12-week implementation experience.

That might include:

• Weekly calls
• Structured curriculum
• A private community
• Subject-matter experts or guest coaches
• Audits
• Feedback
• Clear implementation milestones

At this level, I care a lot about what is actually different for the client when the program ends.

What did they accomplish?

What result are they leaving with?

The buyer at this price might be thinking:

“I could probably figure this out myself. I would rather get there faster, make fewer mistakes, and have somebody who has already done this tell me when I’m heading in the wrong direction.”

They’re paying for acceleration.

They’re paying for proximity.

They’re paying to avoid expensive wrong turns.

That is very different from buying another collection of videos.

Membership Pricing Changes the Membership

Communities are having a major moment again, especially with platforms like Skool making paid communities feel much more normal.

But there is a huge difference between what someone expects from a $17-per-month community and what they expect from a $497-per-month community.

At $17, $27, or $47 a month, someone might be perfectly happy with:

• A community forum
• Resources
• Occasional training
• Accountability
• Connections with other members

Once you start moving into $97, $197, or $297 a month, I think people start expecting better-organized resources, a clearer path, direct feedback, and more involvement from the person or company running the community.

At $497 a month, I’m expecting meaningful coaching and implementation support.

And recurring revenue comes with another important consideration.

Every month, your membership is back on the chopping block.

People have another opportunity to ask, “Should I keep paying for this?”

So you need to continue creating reasons for them to stay.

That is a very different fulfillment model from making a one-time course sale.

An $8,000+ Offer Needs a More Sophisticated Sales Machine

Once we get into $8,000-and-up offers, I start thinking about a deeper relationship, maybe six months or so of access.

Again, these aren’t hard rules.

But now your offer may include weekly or biweekly coaching, private support, specialist coaches, implementation help, a community, or even live events and retreats.

The customer is increasingly buying personalization, accountability, certainty, speed, and proximity.

Your sales process changes too.

An $8,000 program requires a lot more trust than a $497 course.

And acquiring that customer can get expensive.

I’ve seen businesses spend $1,500, $2,000, even $3,000 acquiring an $8,000 customer.

Your funnel could now include:

Ads.

A webinar or video sales letter.

An application.

A setter.

A closer.

Email follow-up.

Appointment nurturing.

A CRM.

A sales manager.

Leads might be followed up with for days or weeks.

There may be multiple conversations before somebody buys.

That can be an incredibly profitable business model. I personally love high ticket.

I also think we dramatically oversimplify it when we compare the math.

People will say some version of, “Would you rather sell 100 people a $1,000 offer or 10 people a $10,000 offer?”

Okay.

Now tell me how you’re getting the ten $10,000 customers.

Tell me who’s taking the calls.

Tell me who’s following up.

Tell me who’s fulfilling the program after they buy.

Low ticket is a volume game.

High ticket can feel a lot more like whale hunting.

Those are different businesses.

Your $10,000 Offer May Require a Team

If somebody pays you $10,000, they’re probably expecting personal feedback and implementation support.

That support doesn’t necessarily have to come directly from you, but somebody has to provide it.

Which could mean you need:

• Coaches
• Customer success
• Salespeople
• Operations support
• Community management
• Specialists

And depending on how you’ve marketed the program, the buyer may expect direct access to you as the founder.

Your price can quietly increase your own involvement in fulfillment.

That matters if the business you’re trying to create gives you less time, fewer calls, or more freedom.

Your Offer Can Look Amazing and Still Have Terrible Economics

I’ve seen entrepreneurs put together offers that sound phenomenal.

Six months of access.

Weekly calls.

Unlimited Voxer.

Private coaching.

Audits.

Community.

Templates.

Guest experts.

Custom feedback.

And then they’re charging $997.

As a customer, I’m thinking, “Wow, that’s an incredible deal.”

As a business owner, I’m wondering how on earth you’re going to fulfill it profitably.

There is very little margin and very little capacity.

And ironically, if the offer takes off, success can make the problem worse.

Now you’re drowning in fulfillment.

That’s why you need to understand the economics of the offer before falling in love with everything you could possibly stuff inside of it.

You do not want to accidentally create a work prison.

I Paid $150,000 for Information I Could Have Read in a Book

This is where masterminds get really interesting.

Masterminds can easily be $25,000, $35,000, $50,000 a year or much higher.

I once paid $150,000 to be in a mastermind.

And some of the material Russell Brunson taught us live in that room was the same material in his book Expert Secrets, which was already sitting on my shelf.

You could look at that and say, “Well, why would you pay $150,000 when you could buy the book?”

Because I wasn’t paying $150,000 for the information in the book.

I wanted Russell’s eyes on my funnels.

I wanted proximity.

I wanted to be in a room with other entrepreneurs who were operating at a level where they could make that same investment.

I was paying for conversations, relationships, networking, perspective, opportunities, and access.

At the mastermind level, the room itself becomes part of the product.

That’s the shift.

A $27 Tiny Offer customer might be thinking:

Just give me the answer.

A course customer:

Give me the system.

A group-program customer:

Help me implement the system.

A high-ticket coaching customer:

Help me implement this for my specific situation.

A mastermind customer:

Put me in a room with people, ideas, relationships, perspectives, and opportunities I probably can’t access on my own.

When you understand that progression, pricing gets a lot easier.

What Kind of Business Do You Actually Want to Own?

This might be the most important question in the entire pricing conversation.

A lot of entrepreneurs accidentally build businesses they don’t even want.

They see somebody selling a $20,000 coaching program and assume that’s the next level.

Maybe you’d hate it.

Maybe you don’t want private coaching calls filling your calendar.

Maybe you don’t want to manage closers.

Maybe you have zero interest in reviewing sales recordings.

Maybe you don’t want customer success managers or a team of coaches.

Maybe your dream business is a beautiful evergreen funnel selling a $497 course every single day.

Great.

Or maybe you genuinely love going deep with a smaller number of clients. You love strategy and coaching and knowing their businesses inside and out.

Then high ticket could be an amazing fit.

Maybe you love facilitating community and creating recurring revenue.

Build the membership.

Maybe you love live experiences and bringing incredible people together.

Build the mastermind.

The right offer has to work for the customer and for the company delivering it.

Questions to Ask Before Choosing Your Price

Before creating your next offer or doubling the price of your current one, ask:

What am I actually helping someone achieve?

How much support will they realistically need to achieve that result?

How much access do I want to provide?

How available do I want to be?

How much of that access actually needs to come from me?

How much can I afford to spend acquiring a customer?

What kind of sales process am I willing to build?

How many team members will this require?

What will fulfillment cost?

What profit margin will be left when all of this is accounted for?

Because your offer determines your marketing, your sales process, your team, your calendar, your expenses, and a huge part of your experience running the company.

Choose the price strategically.

And build a business you actually want to own.

---

This post is based on an episode of the Start Tiny Show. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, and if it resonated, send me a DM and tell me what you’re committed to doing until it works.

Read More about Your Price Point Is a Business Model

What If Abundance Means Staying With What You’ve Already Chosen?

There will always be another opportunity.

Another offer you could create. Another audience you could serve. Another business you could start. Another strategy you could try.

If you’re creative, ambitious, and maybe have a little visionary ADHD mixed in, coming up with possibilities probably isn’t your problem.

I can think of 17 before breakfast.

I almost started a flower business recently.

Seriously.

Then I had to remind myself: Allie, put the blinders back on.

Because I’ve been thinking about abundance differently lately.

We usually talk about an abundance mindset as believing there’s plenty available to us. Plenty of money. Plenty of clients. Plenty of opportunities.

I believe that.

But I’m starting to think one of the most powerful forms of abundance is being able to choose something and trust that it can be enough.

Sometimes “More” Is Actually Scarcity

I’ve spent a lot of my entrepreneurial life pursuing more.

More offers.

More opportunities.

Bigger rooms.

At one point, I joined Russell Brunson’s mastermind and eventually joined a higher-level mastermind that cost $150,000 a year.

Somewhere in my subconscious, I think I believed that if I could get into the right rooms and close enough to the right people, I could buy my way into recognition.

I wanted to get on the Funnel Hacking Live stage.

It never happened.

Looking back, I can see something I couldn’t see as clearly then.

I was searching outside myself for the next thing that would make me enough.

I’ve done versions of that with my business too.

Something works, and I mess with it.

Change the offer.

Question the audience.

Change the content.

Consider a rebrand.

Start another business.

Decide the thing I’m building isn’t big enough.

And I’m beginning to think real abundance sometimes requires the opposite skill.

Choosing.

“This is good. I’m going to make this work.”

Then giving it your attention.

Are You Actually Allowing Yourself to Get Paid?

There’s another side of money mindset that I don’t think we talk about enough.

Sometimes we literally won’t let people pay us.

I used to decide before a sales call that an offer cost $3,000.

I’d get on the call.

Talk to the person.

Get all the way to the moment where they asked about the investment…

And I’d say $1,000.

I would discount my own offer before they had the opportunity to object to the original price.

I’ve also experienced the opposite problem.

I remember cooking dinner during the final hours of a launch while my phone was blowing up with sale notifications.

Sale.

Sale.

Sale.

And eventually my brain went:

“Oh my gosh. Enough already.”

I caught myself.

Enough?!

I had spent all this time trying to generate sales and now I was irritated because there were too many?

That moment taught me something.

We all have a certain amount of success, money, attention, responsibility, and goodness that feels normal to us.

When we exceed it, sometimes we unconsciously try to get ourselves back to familiar territory.

Growing your business may require increasing your capacity to receive what you’ve been asking for.

Easy for You Can Still Be Extremely Valuable

One of the biggest lessons I want every expert to understand is this:

The thing that comes easily to you probably does not come easily to your customer.

My client Katie specializes in executive function.

I once told her my three tasks for the day were essentially:

Launch a podcast.

Create my ads.

Rework my webinar.

Katie pointed out that I had just named three projects, each containing dozens of individual tasks.

Oh.

That explains a few things.

Breaking a project down that way comes naturally to her.

It doesn’t come naturally to me.

That’s exactly why her expertise is valuable.

The same thing is true for you.

You’ve probably spent years, maybe decades, accumulating knowledge that now feels obvious.

Your customer isn’t paying according to how difficult the work feels to you.

They’re paying for the expertise you’ve accumulated that allows you to solve their problem.

You Also Get to Have Boundaries

Allowing yourself to make money doesn’t mean accepting every dollar available to you.

Experience teaches you who you work well with.

It teaches you which questions are red flags.

It teaches you which clients fill your energy bucket and which ones drain it.

It teaches you what you’re willing to do and what you’re done doing.

You are allowed to use that information.

You can turn down money.

You can stop offering something you hate.

You can decide someone isn’t a good fit.

You can price your expertise appropriately.

You can build a business around the work you actually want to do.

That’s part of abundance too.

Stop Going Back to Rep Number One

Here’s where all of this connects to consistency.

Can you stay?

Can you keep selling the offer when you’re bored with talking about it?

Can you make your 50th reel about the same topic?

Can you create another ad for the same funnel?

Can you run the same webinar again?

I sold the same offer using the same webinar every single week for a year.

Every repetition taught me something.

Your content is a rep.

Your ads are reps.

Your sales calls are reps.

Your funnels are reps.

Your launches are reps.

When something doesn’t work, you gained information.

Ask:

Interesting. What should I change?

Then do another rep.

If you constantly reinvent the business, you keep sending yourself back to rep number one.

You never get to experience what happens at rep 50, 100, or 500.

What Happens When You Don’t Need to Prove Anything Anymore?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in my own life.

I think some of the drive I had when I started my business came from wanting to prove something.

I wanted to prove I could do it.

Prove I was worthy.

Prove people wrong.

That energy can take you surprisingly far.

Eventually, though, you might realize you’ve already proven it.

Your life is comfortable.

You’ve healed some of the things that used to drive you.

You’re no longer building from that same place.

So why keep going?

I think this is where the process itself has to become meaningful.

Maybe the work becomes more about the people you’re serving.

The impact you can make.

The craft you’re getting better at.

The person you’re becoming.

You start falling in love with the reps.

I’m Not Setting a Revenue Goal

As I head into this next season of my business, I’m thinking differently about goals.

I’m focusing on process.

Daily.

Weekly.

Monthly.

What are the actual things I want to consistently do?

Because consistency gives the business time to compound.

And that’s what I want for you too.

So I want to leave you with three questions:

Where am I already seeing evidence that something is working?

What would happen if I gave this my full attention for the next year?

Do I enjoy the work required to become great at this?

That last question matters.

You’re choosing how you’ll spend your days.

There will always be unlimited opportunities.

There will always be another way to make money.

You don’t have to catch every single one.

Pick something.

Get really good at it.

Keep showing up when the novelty wears off.

Give yourself enough time to someday look around and think:

“I can’t believe I built this.”

Start tiny.

Then stay with it long enough to see where it goes.

---

This post is based on an episode of the Start Tiny Show. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, and if it resonated, send me a DM and tell me what you’re committed to doing until it works.

Read More about How Long Are You Willing to Stay?

I Lost $80,000 on a Single Webinar. Here’s Why I’m Glad It Happened.

What would you do this week if you were just ten percent less scared?

Hold onto that question. I’m going to come back to it, because almost every conversation I have with women building online businesses eventually lands on fear. And here’s the surprising part: for most of the women I coach, the loudest fear in the room is fear of success. What if I get so visible that my relationship dynamic changes? What if I get so successful I stop wanting to spend time with my kids? What if everything I want comes true and it turns out different than I imagined?

Those feelings are completely normal. And the fear underneath them is actually legitimate, because when you run a visible online business with clients and a team and real ad spend, things will go wrong. That part is unavoidable. What I want to show you is that going wrong and going under are two very different things. I have a hundred percent survival rate from every worst-case scenario that has ever hit my business, and I want to walk you through three of them.

The week I spent $80,000 on a webinar nobody attended

There was a stretch where I was spending up to $100K a week on Meta ads driving people to a weekly live webinar. One particular week, we spent $80,000 on ads for a single presentation.

Then the tech broke.

A team member had missed updating a date in the email delivery sequence, so the emails went out with the wrong information and no working link. Eighty thousand dollars of traffic, and nobody knew when the webinar was or how to get there. I sat in GoToWebinar watching an empty waiting room, waited five minutes, and felt my stomach drop as I realized what had happened. I nearly threw up. I remember sitting on my porch crying into Voxer messages to my coach, Julie Chenell, saying I had no idea what to do.

Here’s what she helped me see: I was too close to it. When you’re inside a crisis, your brain treats the worst-case scenario like an ending. You can’t see the label from inside the bottle. Julie helped me reframe the whole thing as a plot twist that needed a plan B.

So we built one. We promoted an encore webinar to my email list, did a big social push, created a story around why the encore existed, and ran it again. The following week we recovered the entire ad spend and made two times what we’d spent. The situation that felt like it would end my business turned out to be completely survivable, and even profitable.

I’ll be honest with you, though. My body still remembers that feeling. Scaling ad spend still brings up that core memory of watching money burn. Recovering financially and recovering emotionally happen on different timelines, and both are part of the work.

The clients who formed a group just to talk about me

When I first launched my group coaching program, about twenty to twenty-five people came into the first cohort. A marketer on my team pushed me to open a second cohort and add them into the same community and calls. It felt off to me, but he was the expert I was paying for exactly this kind of guidance, so I went with it.

A group of about five women from that first cohort got genuinely angry that I’d added people to what they saw as a closed container. In hindsight, I understand their frustration completely. What I still don’t understand is what they did next: they created a private Facebook group, called themselves the Tiny Offer Rebels, and recruited people into it for the sole purpose of talking trash about me. The whole group existed to say I was greedy, my system didn’t work, and I was a bad person.

That one cut deep, because I was badly bullied through elementary, middle, and high school. Being the target of a group of women turning on me pressed directly on one of my oldest wounds. And it followed a pattern I’ve now seen play out for so many online creators: people love bomb you when they discover you, and then when they want a reason to avoid doing the work, you become the villain overnight.

Here’s what matters, though. My exact fear came true, and I didn’t die. I came out of it with better boundaries, a real education in the psychology of rolling enrollment, and a much deeper understanding of what clients believe they’re entitled to when they join a cohort. I learned firsthand what happens when you change a container without preparing people for it, and that knowledge now protects every program I run.

The team member who made me feel like a fraud

The third story is about hiring, and about what happens when you hand your confidence to someone else along with the strategy.

I had a consultant in a CMO-type role who was genuinely good at pushing me past my comfort zone. He pushed me to send more emails, pitch harder, raise prices, and spend at levels I never would have touched alone. My brand grew fast because of that push, and I want to be fair about that.

But there was a dark side. On the day I won my Two Comma Club award, one of the proudest moments of my career, with my family up on stage with me, he said, “Wow, it’s really not fair that you get to be on stage when I’m the one doing all the work.”

That one sentence poisoned the whole thing. I couldn’t enjoy the moment. For a long time afterward, I couldn’t even look at the award on my wall without hearing that I didn’t deserve it. And I’ve noticed how differently this lands for women. A man in my position would likely have thought, “I hired you because I’m smart.” Instead, I defaulted straight to feeling like a fraud, and there’s real data on how quickly women sink into feeling less than.

Eventually I bought out his contract to get him off my team, and I went into significant debt to do it, because of what his presence was doing to my energy and self-belief. The $80K webinar disaster happened right after that, so I was already depleted when it hit. It took me a long time to climb out and to believe again that I was the one driving the strategy, that people came for my frameworks, and that hiring an expert to help you scale takes nothing away from your own expertise. If someone you hired makes you feel small, you’re looking at a personality problem on their end. That was never evidence about your worth.

What therapy taught me about all three stories

I put myself in therapy recently to digest all of this, and I found the thread that runs through every story: control and people pleasing. I believed I could control how every person interpreted me at every turn. I believed that if I behaved the right way, people would have to like me. Hypervigilance like that is a trauma response, and I genuinely think every entrepreneur should be in therapy, because your business is always downstream of your self-beliefs.

This shows up in my clients constantly. On a coaching call last week, a client admitted she’d been turning down her ad spend. Her ads were profitable. Everything was working. When I asked why, she didn’t have an answer beyond a vague feeling that she was spending too much. That feeling was scarcity talking, the same “what if I become too much” fear dressed up as prudence.

The framework that reframed this for me is the circle of control. Picture three rings. The center is you: your thoughts, feelings, energy, and actions. That’s the only ring you fully control. The middle ring is your sphere of influence, things like your relationships, where your behavior has impact without guaranteeing outcomes. The outer ring holds everything else: the behavior of people you hire, comments on the internet, clients who join your program and find a reason to be mad at you. Every single thing I feared lived in that outer ring, which means no amount of vigilance was ever going to prevent it.

The growth all happens in the center circle. Your energy, your effort, your next move.

So, what would you do if you were ten percent less scared?

Doing it scared looks tangible and specific. It looks like scaling the campaign that’s working even though your body remembers the last time ads went sideways. Posting the video. Putting your name on your framework. Owning your expertise even without the certification you think you need, because helping people rarely requires the credential your fear insists on.

You don’t need to be less afraid before you make the next move, and you don’t need to know exactly how it turns out. You just have to make the next slightly bigger move. Start tiny, show up a little bit bigger than your fear wants you to, and let yourself get a little uncomfortable.

So answer the question honestly. What would you do this week if you were just a little less scared?

Now go do some version of that.

---

This post is based on an episode of the Start Tiny Show. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, and if it resonated, send me a DM and tell me what you’re doing scared this week.

Read More about Do It Scared

<

The question every expert is asking right now

Allie has been hearing the same question on strategy calls, in masterminds, and in DMs: “If AI can teach everything I know for free, how do I keep making money?”

She opens with a story from her friend Colin Boyd, who ran a five-day challenge and watched attendees upload the transcripts to AI, build their own custom GPT from his framework, and decide they no longer needed his $3,000 program. The gate around expertise is gone.

The honest spiral

Allie gets real about her own crisis of confidence over the past year. Ads are more expensive across every industry. Meta’s Andromeda update changed how ads run entirely. Big names are shutting down programs and pivoting. Courses that deliver only information are in trouble.

But the data tells a different story than the doom does: buyers are still spending, arguably more eagerly than before. What changed is what they’re buying.

The 4 things people still pay for

1. Tools that do the work (tiny SaaS) Buyers used to pay to learn how. Now they pay for done. Allie shares two client examples:

• A headhunting expert with 20 years of experience had a multi-module course on writing job ads that had stopped selling. They rebuilt it as a micro app: answer a few questions, and her framework produces your finished job ad. The quick win went from “watch these videos” to “here is your completed job ad.”
• Another client had a revenue projection spreadsheet buried inside a mid-ticket course. With AI, that spreadsheet became an interactive calculator sold as a front-end product, backed by a creator walkthrough video so the expertise stays visible.

You can now be a software builder with the help of AI. These interactive front-end products are selling like crazy.

2. Personalized feedback and judgment AI gives you general best practices. It averages everything on the internet, which is exactly why AI copy has no rhythm. What it can’t do is look at YOUR specific offer with 15 years of pattern recognition and say “here’s what’s wrong and here’s what I’ve seen work in your niche.”

Allie shares what she keeps hearing on her 20-minute calls: “I just want your blessing. I just want the green light.” That demand for expert judgment is an offer waiting to be built. Audits that used to take hours of manual work can now be systematized and sold at low ticket prices, and buyers love them.

3. Speed and certainty People pay to skip the figuring-out stage. Finished assets, plug-and-play systems, decisions made for them, proof behind it all. Allie shares meeting Leah Gervais at Social Media Marketing World, whose best sellers are behind-the-scenes PDF breakdowns of her own launches with Loom walkthroughs. Buyers want the tea on what’s actually working inside other businesses, and AI can’t tell them why one email made $80K and another flopped.

4. Tangible hope Building on the last episode about selling hope: when someone plugs their numbers into an interactive calculator and sees what’s possible for THEM, that sells possibility. A personal, specific outcome beats any mini course.

Your homework this week

Look at your current offer and ask one question: does this do the work, or does it just describe the work? If every module, template, and bonus only teaches, it’s competing with free.

Then take your single best framework and sketch one way to make it interactive: a calculator, an answer generator, a quiz that outputs a personalized plan, an app that takes inputs and hands back a finished asset. You already own the IP. You’re repackaging it, and you can get it done in hours instead of months with a dev team.

The opportunity nobody’s talking about

There are vibe coders building incredible tools right now who have no idea how to market them. If you’re not comfortable building with AI yet, partner with a builder. Their tool plus your audience and expertise is a front-end offer that feeds your coaching world.

Small creators can move faster than anyone. You’re one tiny tool away from a new revenue stream.

Resources mentioned:

• Allie’s product naming tool
• The Offer Suite Wheel
  (Both updated for 2026!)

Join Allie Inside Tiny Offer® HQ

If you’re building a business around your expertise, come hang out inside the Start Tiny HQ community. Start with a 7-day free trial, then it’s just $3/month for access to Allie’s courses, the community, and two live workshops with Allie on Zoom every month.

Want more hands-on support? The $287/month level adds weekly Zoom coaching calls with Allie plus weekly copy coaching calls with the copywriter on her team. That’s two to three live coaching calls every week.

👉 LINK TO START TINY HQ

Connect with Allie

• Instagram
• Coaching and 1:1 Strategy: https://tinyoffer.com/coaching/

New episodes of The Start Tiny Show drop weekly. If this episode gave you a lightbulb moment, share it with a business friend who’s been watering down their copy.

Read More about The 4 Things People Still Buy in 2026 (Now That Information Is Free)

<

What Your Buyers Are Actually Paying For

The Start Tiny Show with Allie Bjerk

Episode Description

For years, a little voice in the back of Allie’s head whispered that she was “just selling hope.” That online business dreams, freedom, and money while you sleep were promises no ethical marketer should make. Then she went back and read hundreds of testimonials and found the same phrase over and over: you gave me hope.

In this episode, Allie unpacks why hope is one of the most honest things you can sell, the difference between real hope and false hope, and a dead-simple filter (she calls it the hope box) that will change how you write every headline, ad, and offer from here on out. If you’ve ever watered down your copy because a bold promise felt icky, this one’s for you.

What You’ll Learn

• Why “sell the transformation” freezes most business owners, and the one-sentence question that works instead
• The real line between selling hope and selling false hope (hint: it comes down to the vehicle behind the promise)
• Why hedging and qualifiers make your marketing weaker without protecting anyone
• How to lead with hope and tuck the work inside your offer, in that order
• The “hope box” filter to run every offer, headline, and ad through
• The responsibility that comes with selling hope boldly: over-delivering on the path

Episode Highlights

[00:00] The guilt spiral: “Am I just a hope dealer?” Allie shares the voice that haunted her every time she reread her own sales pages, ads, and launch emails.

[01:54] The testimonial pattern that changed everything. Hundreds of clients kept writing some version of the same sentence: “You showed me it was possible.”

[02:49] A walk in San Diego with Tara Zirker, who told Allie that watching her collect her 2 Comma Club Award as a mom with little kids was the moment she decided her own business was possible.

[05:10] Where the guilt started. After $7M+ in revenue driven by paid ads, Allie internalized the belief that painting a picture of someone’s better future was manipulative, and started shrinking her promises until they felt “safe.”

[06:16] The truth about hope: your buyers show up already carrying it. The mom scrolling at midnight, the burned-out corporate employee Googling “how to start an online business.” The only question is whether your message meets that hope or ignores it.

[06:39] Michelle Terpstra’s Trader Joe’s parking lot story, and why watered-down copy never makes anyone cry tears of relief.

[08:14] The mastermind leader who stood in front of 50 paying clients and told them most of them would never make it, and the vow Allie made in that room.

[10:08] Allie’s own buying behavior this year: a health coach, a leadership coach, a nervous system program. Every single purchase was a purchase of hope.

[12:20] The distinction that matters: false hope is a promise with no vehicle behind it. A proven framework, method, or system makes illustrating the result a service. Hiding it leaves people alone with the dream and no map.

[14:15] Coaching breakthrough inside the Accelerator: a homeschooling client who can’t promise “50% improvement in three weeks” because she works with children, family systems, and emotions. The reframe that gave her goosebumps.

[15:27] One-sentence hope statements in action: sales closers, elite athletes, homeschooling parents, and Allie’s own buyers (“hoping an online business can fund the life they actually want”).

[16:41] The hope box filter, and the trap almost everyone falls into: building offers that sell work (set up your analytics, learn the framework) when nobody wakes up hoping to do setup.

[17:21] The upgrade to Allie’s long-standing “sell the easy button, save them time” rule: save them time AND check the hope box.

[18:40] The formula: illustrate the hope, deliver the work, in that order.

[19:02] Selling hope with integrity. If someone buys the hope and you hand them fluff, that’s when it becomes sleazy. Bold hope requires over-delivering on the path.

Quotable Moments

“What is the hope that my audience is carrying? Can I say that in one sentence? That’s how simple it gets.”

“False hope is a promise with no vehicle behind it.”

“Illustrate the hope, deliver the work, and do it in that order.”

“You are allowed to sell hope. And if you have a real path behind it, you are obligated to share it.”

Your Homework This Week

1. Mine your own proof. Read your testimonials, DMs, and thank-you emails. Highlight every sentence about possibility, belief, or hope. That language is gold. Weave it into your headlines, copy, ads, and offers.
2. Draft your one-sentence hope statement. “My people are hoping ______.” If you can’t fill in that blank, you’ve found your real messaging problem, and no amount of funnel tweaking will fix it.
3. Audit your front end. Look at your current offer, headline, or best ad and ask honestly: does this check the hope box, or does it sell work? If it sells work, rewrite the front of it to lead with hope.

Join Allie Inside Start Tiny HQ

If you’re building a business around your expertise, come hang out inside the Start Tiny HQ community. Start with a 7-day free trial, then it’s just $3/month for access to Allie’s courses, the community, and two live workshops with Allie on Zoom every month.

Want more hands-on support? The $287/month level adds weekly Zoom coaching calls with Allie plus weekly copy coaching calls with the copywriter on her team. That’s two to three live coaching calls every week.

👉 LINK TO START TINY HQ

Connect with Allie

• Website: alliebjerk.com
• Community: Start Tiny HQ
• Learn the method: Tiny Offer® Lab

New episodes of The Start Tiny Show drop weekly. If this episode gave you a lightbulb moment, share it with a business friend who’s been watering down their copy.

Read More about What Your Buyers Are Actually Paying For

 Why Context is the Secret Sauce in Digital Marketing, Coaching, and Selling Digital Products
What’s up, everyone! Welcome back to another conversation where we dive into the stuff that really matters in marketing. Today, I want to share something that completely changed how I approach everything—from marketing campaigns to sales, even how I talk to people. And it all boils down to one word: context.
You’ve probably heard me say it before—because I say it a lot. But once I break it down, you’ll see why it’s a total game-changer. Context is the thing that ties everything together. Without it, even the best strategies fall flat.

What is Context, Anyway?

Context is basically the environment or circumstances that surround an event or message. In marketing, it’s everything. It’s not just what you’re saying, but when, where, and who you’re saying it to. Context is why some marketing campaigns take off and others fall flat.
For example, if you’re a coach selling a tiny offer like “Ditch the Diet” to someone recovering from a health scare—where strict dietary rules were necessary—that message could come off as super insensitive. But if you’re pitching it to someone who’s tired of diet culture, it’s going to hit just right. That’s the power of context.

Why Context is a Game-Changer

Let me take you back to a conversation I had with one of my team members. She pointed out something I hadn’t really noticed before. She said, “Allie, everything you do comes back to context.” And I realized, yeah, it totally does. I ask for the context on pretty much everything—sales questions, marketing strategies, you name it. Why? Because without understanding the context, you’re just guessing.
It’s the same with your digital marketing. If you’re not taking into account where your audience is right now—what’s going on in their lives or their business—you’re going to miss the mark.

The Role of Context in Growing Your Personal Brand

Building a personal brand is about being authentic, right? But if your messaging doesn’t match the context of where your audience is, it’s not going to connect.
For instance, let’s say you’re coaching beginners who are still trying to figure out what they want to sell. Pushing them toward advanced strategies like tiny offers isn’t going to work. They need to know what they’re passionate about, what they’re good at, and how to turn that into something they can sell before they’re ready for that next step.
That’s why I created my free course, “Sell What You Know”—to help people who are still figuring out what they want to do. Because here’s the thing: without context, even the best strategies don’t make sense.

How Context Impacts Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

When it comes to marketing, context is everything. Even if you have killer copy, if the context is off, it won’t resonate.
Take this for example—if you’re launching a $27 tiny offer to a high-level business owner who’s running a multimillion-dollar company, it’s probably not going to land. That’s because the context is wrong. Someone at that level isn’t looking for plug-and-play templates—they need strategy, they need someone who understands their bigger picture. They don’t want to waste time, they want results.
On the flip side, if you’re speaking to someone just starting out, trying to figure out how to make their first dollar online, you need to provide support, guidance, and empathy. The context totally changes based on who you’re talking to.

Timing, Platform, and Mindset: The Big Three of Context

There are three key things to consider when you’re thinking about context in your marketing: timing, platform, and audience mindset.

1. Timing: Get it Right

Timing is everything. If you’re selling a productivity course in December when people are in holiday mode, it’s going to flop. But if you launch that same course in January when everyone’s setting goals? It’s going to hit hard.

2. Platform: Meet People Where They Are

Different platforms come with different contexts. What works on Instagram might not fly on LinkedIn. You’ve got to adjust your message for the platform where your audience is hanging out.
For example:

• On Instagram, people want quick, visual content. Show behind-the-scenes stuff, share stories.
• On LinkedIn, focus on more professional insights and case studies.
• In email, you can go deeper and really connect with your audience on a personal level.

3. Audience Mindset: Know Where They’re At

You’ve got to understand what’s going on in your audience’s heads. Are they feeling overwhelmed? Stuck? Ready to take on the world? Your messaging needs to match their mindset.
If you’re talking to someone who’s just getting started, they need encouragement and support. But if you’re speaking to someone who’s running a six-figure business, they need strategic insights and next-level tactics.

Real-Life Marketing Missteps: When Context Goes Wrong

Context isn’t just theoretical. It’s super easy to get it wrong, even for big brands. Remember Peloton’s holiday ad from 2019? They wanted to show a fitness journey, but the context made it look like the husband was giving his wife a Peloton because she needed to lose weight. Ouch. The backlash was huge, and Peloton’s stock price took a nosedive.
Then there was Burger King’s tweet that said, “Women belong in the kitchen.” Yeah, they meant to highlight women in leadership roles in the restaurant industry, but the context was totally off, and people weren’t having it.
These examples show how important it is to get the context right in your campaigns, whether you’re running a tiny offer, launching a new course, or growing your personal brand.

Using Context to Crush It in Digital Marketing

Ready to use context like a pro? Here’s how you can start applying it in your business:

1. Know Your Audience’s Journey: Get clear on where your audience is. Are they beginners? Are they scaling their businesses? Your messaging has to meet them where they are.
2. Adjust for Timing: Align your launches with what’s happening in your audience’s world. If people are focused on goal setting in January, that’s the time to launch your productivity or business coaching offers.
3. Stay Aware of Cultural Context: Keep an eye on trends and societal movements. If something is happening in the world, like a big cultural shift, make sure your messaging fits the moment.

Wrap-Up: Context is Everything

Before you send out that email or hit publish on your next post, ask yourself: What’s the context here? Who am I talking to? What’s their mindset? What’s happening in their world?

Context is the secret sauce that makes your marketing messages land the way you want them to. Whether you’re growing your personal brand, selling digital products, or coaching clients, understanding the environment, the timing, and the mindset of your audience is what’s going to make your message resonate.

So, next time you’re working on a campaign or launching a product, don’t just think about the what—think about the context. That’s where the magic happens.

Read More about Episode 57: Why This Single Word is Everything in Digital Marketing

Join us in this inspiring episode of the Start Tiny Show as we chat with the remarkable Lynz Crichton, a musician and songwriter who has transformed her career through the Tiny Offer® method. Lynz shares her incredible journey, from struggling with sales funnels to achieving significant success with the support of the Tiny Offer® Accelerator program. Listen in as Lynz explains how she navigated the challenges of creating effective sales funnels without being a copywriting expert and how this method has proven to be versatile across various niches, including music and astrology.

Explore Lynz Crichton’s evolution from a musician to a mentor for independent artists in the “Musician to Educator” chapter. Lynz passionately discusses the importance of understanding the business side of a musical career and the hurdles musicians face in monetizing their talents. A pivotal moment came in March 2020 when a YouTube video about live streaming for musicians gained traction, leading to a successful course and the need for more accessible offerings. This conversation underscores the necessity for adaptable strategies in the ever-changing music industry.

In the “360 Content Calendar & Sales Strategy” and “Pathways to Value and Growth” chapters, we delve into the creation of a successful Tiny Offer® for musicians, including market research, content calendar development, and the excitement of building a second funnel. We also explore integrating coaching calls into an automated business model, balancing personal engagement with efficiency, and experimenting with pricing strategies. By focusing on creating value-centered sales funnels and leveraging targeted ads, Lynz highlights how musicians can boost visibility and sales, proving that with the right guidance and determination, success is attainable.

[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Read More about Episode 56: From Musician to Money Maker: Turn Your Passion Into a Cash-Making Machine

In this episode I take you behind the scenes of a significant decision in my business journey—stepping back from participating in masterminds. I dive into the mindset shifts that led me to this choice, sharing insights from my own experiences in various business communities.

I explore the reasons why many entrepreneurs, including myself, join masterminds for external validation rather than aligning with their true goals. From the desire for recognition to the pitfalls of shiny object syndrome, I discuss how these factors can lead to unnecessary detours in your business.

Join me as I recount a pivotal moment on stage where I realized I was in the wrong room, going through the liberating experience of finding supportive peer networks and the value of tactical programs highlighting the importance of being in environments that truly resonate with your mission. These programs foster self-sufficiency and practical skills, unlike some masterminds that may leave you feeling inadequate.

If you agree on the lessons I’ve learned, the value of focusing on what already works, and the importance of choosing the right support for your business growth, feel free to book a call with our team now![/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Read More about Episode 55: The Real Reason I’m Stepping Back from Masterminds