Spring + Summer Income Report: Joint Venture Webinar Edition

Last Updated on August 6, 2026

A joint venture webinar is a live class you teach to someone else’s email list, splitting the revenue with them. I ran four of them between April and July 2026. Two produced three sales combined. One banked $27,700. And one booked $236K on zero ad spend. I also hit my annual goal of 500k before July was over, even though I also had my lowest revenue week on record. Here is every number from five months, including the ones that make me look bad.

Welcome to installment #16 of my income reports, and the first one covering five months at once. I skipped four of them. Then June happened and the gap started to look less like laziness and more like foreshadowing. (It was mostly laziness.)

The whole archive of past income reports is here if you want the slower version. Short story: I stepped back from my ads because I was frustrated with them, leaned on partnerships and AI instead, and got a much less tidy lesson than the one I’d have preferred to write.

The Numbers: My Online Business Profit Margin, March–July 2026

My online business earned $438,706.15 across five months at a 58% pre-tax profit margin, averaging $87,741.23/month in revenue and $50,855.02/month in net profit. That works out to $1,661.93 a day in profit before tax.

12-Mo Rolling Revenue $737,698

Avg Monthly Revenue $61,475

12-Mo Net Profit $431,864

12-Mo Profit Margin 58.5%

Month by month

Month	Revenue	Net Profit	Margin
March 2026	$37,544.61	$23,987.19	63.9%
April 2026	$29,307.97	$9,987.25	34.1%
May 2026	$57,645.34	$36,971.08	64.1%
June 2026	$120,687.52	$71,765.98	59.5%
July 2026	$193,520.71	$111,563.59	57.6%
Five-month total	$438,706.15	$254,275.09	58.0%
Monthly average	$87,741.23	$50,855.02	58.0%

My books wanted to show a 78.8% profit margin. The real number is 58.0%, because $91,213.05 of what looked like profit belongs to my partner and hadn’t left my account yet.

Why the affiliate line matters more than the rest

$94,882 of that commission belongs to one partner, and I won’t pay most of it until August because affiliate payouts run on a delay. My books wanted to show an 87% margin in June, because the cash had landed and the bill hadn’t.

I counted the commission in the period that earned it. That’s why the margin above says 58% instead of something that would look better on Pinterest. And to be clear, I went into that partnership knowing and happily agreeing to the 50% split — those were sales I never would have made without her.

Where the money went

Line Item	5-Mo Total	Monthly Avg	Notes
Revenue
Total Revenue	$438,706.15	$87,741.23	8.4% recurring
Cost of Goods Sold
Affiliate commission payouts	$105,442.14	$21,088.43	Mostly one partner’s launch commission. Want me to pay you too? Sign up here — it’s free
Payment processing	$15,659.37	$3,131.87	Stripe, PayPal + QuickBooks Payments
Total COGS	$121,101.51	$24,220.30
Adjusted Expenses
Contractors	$26,228.91	$5,245.78	Down from a $30k+/month team cost three years ago
Paid Ads	$21,402.50	$4,280.50	4.9% of revenue
Sponsorship Fees	$5,625.00	$1,125.00	AI Unlocked Summit ($5,000) + AI Exposed Summit ($625). Debriefs inside The $1k/Day Experiment
Software	$4,279.20	$855.84	Claude, Fathom Analytics, Descript, Airtable, ClickUp, Kartra, Beehiiv, Skool, Zoom
Training + Education	$3,425.50	$685.10	Weird Hermits, Mixermind, and a coach of my own
Accounting	$1,500.00	$300.00
Charitable Contributions	$112.50	$22.50
Total Adjusted Expenses	$63,329.55	$12,665.91
What’s Left
Net Profit	$254,275.09	$50,855.02	58.0% pre-tax margin

As always: I don’t count my W-2 payroll or owner distributions as an expense here, since I’m an S-corp and pay myself a salary separately. Taxes aren’t in my margin. Those run about 20% of revenue, putting real take-home near $1,329.54/day.

Five Months in Fast-Forward

Two launches happened in June and July, and they’ll get their section as they do make up the bulk of my income during this period. But five months is a lot more life than two launches, and the launches only worked because of everything underneath them.

March I ran a live cold-traffic webinar exactly once: 496 registered, 40 showed up, zero sales on the call. I killed the experiment after one run and logged my lowest revenue week on record, $4,136.75. A report that only shows the good weeks is an advertisement. Inside the $1k/Day Experiment, you get all the nitty gritty of how terrible March was. It was also the month after my beloved cat of 16 years died, and I was very much not okay.

April my father-in-law’s heart stopped at the airport. He spent a week on ECMO life support at Emory, and made what all of the cardiologists there said is one of the most miraculous recoveries ever. I planned my work in one-hour blocks from the ICU and the business floor held without me. I also fell down a spreadsheet rabbit hole with 7,844 ad leads that changed how I measure everything (more below).

May a new protocol for my chronic fatigue started working and I began waking up before 8 am actually wanting to get out of bed (a first for me in YEARS!). I finished migrating my email to Beehiiv as part of my goal to turn Success with Soul into a hybrid media and education company, rewrote my welcome sequence from scratch (100+ replies from new subscribers in week one, oh, and did I mention I scheduled everything directly from Claude using the MCP, which has completely changed how I use email in my business in the best possible way), and sponsored the AI Unlocked Summit, which brought in 1,021 leads at about $4.90 each. I also did a JV partnership where I was the partner promoting somebody else’s offer this month and had the most success I’ve had in a JV partnership in a few years.

June I packed my family up and drove cross country with two kids and a dog from Atlanta to New Mexico and spent the entire month working from Santa Fe with a sauna, a cold plunge and the biggest launch of my entire career running in the background while I hiked and healed in Mother Nature. One of the best and hardest months of my life!

July I got two kid-free weeks as my in-laws took them for Camp Grandma, I ran a second uber successful JV webinar launch, finally turned my ads back on, and crossed $500,000 for the year before July 31 — the goal Rachel and I set for all of 2026, hit at the halfway mark. To be honest, I’m a bit speechless about this, as I didn’t even really see it coming somehow!

Revenue Breakdown: March–July 2026

Mindful Business Academy produced 69.7% of five-month revenue at $305,730.49, averaging $61,146.10/month. One offer, one partner, one three-week window produced most of five months — take the partnership out and this post says $248,000.

Revenue Stream	5-Month Total	Monthly Avg	% of Total
Mindful Business Academy	$305,730.49	$61,146.10	69.7%
Affiliate Income	$38,725.07	$7,745.01	8.8%
Recurring Memberships	$36,836.00	$7,367.20	8.4%
Pocket Products (shop)	$29,878.00	$5,975.60	6.8%
Coaching	$18,406.60	$3,681.32	4.2%
Sponsorships	$7,462.00	$1,492.40	1.7%
Other	$1,667.99	$333.60	0.4%

My hedge against that concentration is everything under it: recurring memberships, the shop, coaching, and affiliate income all kept producing with zero launch energy attached.

May is the row I’d point at if you’re building something smaller. $22,426.74 of that month came from me promoting other people’s products as an affiliate — commissions earned by sending emails to a list I already own, recommending tools I already use.

If you have an email list of any size, affiliate income is the fastest revenue stream to switch on, because someone else built the product, the sales page and the delivery.

What Does an Online Business Earn Without Launching?

Strip out every partnership and this business still cleared roughly $2,400 a day. That’s the number I watch, because anybody can have one good month.

The real question is what the machine does on a Tuesday in March when nobody’s buying because of a deadline. March, my worst month here, did $37,544.61 with no launch and ads I was actively avoiding.

The floor comes from things I built once and stopped touching. An evergreen funnel — an automated sales system that runs without live launches — plus blog posts from 2022 still ranking, a welcome sequence, and three memberships that bill whether or not I open my laptop.

$36,836 of these five months was recurring revenue that arrived without a single sales conversation, averaging $7,367.20/month before I did anything at all.

This isn’t one launch inflating the numbers. The baseline rose. We hit our $500k annual revenue goal in July — halfway through the year — with a team of two, both working under 30 hours a week.

How Much Does a Joint Venture Webinar Actually Make?

A joint venture webinar — a live class taught to a partner’s email list with revenue split between you — made me anywhere from one sale to $236,648 depending entirely on which partner I ran it with. I ran four in four months. I’m not naming my partners here because two of these launches didn’t go well, and that’s my data to share, not their reputation to carry.

Partner	When	Registrants	Sales	Conversion
Partner A	April 2026	139	1	0.7%
Partner B	May 2026	184	2	1.1%
Partner C	June 2026	6,493	150	2.3%
Partner D	July 2026	1,001	19	1.9%

Same webinar. Same offer. Same me, teaching the same class for the fifth time in a year. Results ranged from one sale to a hundred and fifty.

The June launch, by the numbers

Partner C’s launch banked $190,326 gross and $95,444 net to me after her 50% commission, on $0 in ad spend. Once the 35 payment plans finish paying, the booked total reaches $236,648 gross and $118,557 net. It also added 6,493 people to my email list in one month — more than six months of Facebook ads delivered.

Partner D’s launch was a fifth the size and still real money: 1,001 registrations, 19 sales, $27,700 banked and $33,155 booked, split 50/50. Her registrants were worth $13.84 each to her across the full funnel.

I’d do both again tomorrow, and I want to be exact about why: I rented access to audiences it would have taken me a decade to build, and I only paid when it worked.

What’s a good show rate for a JV webinar?

My two biggest launches showed at 14.8% and 17.2% live. Univid’s 2026 benchmark report, built on 325,000+ tracked attendees, puts typical live show rates at 47–49% — but those are warm audiences attending webinars they signed up for from brands they already follow. The rule of thumb in the creator space for launch webinars is 20–30%, and a fully borrowed cold list runs lower still.

The replay and the emails do the heavy lifting anyway: 26% of my June buyers never registered for the webinar at all. They bought from the cart emails. Email is the asset; the webinar is the excuse to email.

Why did the same webinar produce 1 sale for one partner and 150 for another?

List size explains part of it. How the partner shows up explains the rest, and that gap is enormous.

Partner C built a pre-launch runway so her audience knew my name before she mentioned the webinar. She created a bonus offer to incentivize her audience to buy through her link. She emailed her whole list, not a segment. And she co-sold with me live on the webinar for over two hours.

My other partners sent a couple of invitation emails, didn’t attend the webinar themselves, and sent little afterward. No shade at all — I’m grateful to every one of them, and they owed me nothing beyond what we agreed to.

But I can’t help but notice that the partners who treated this launch like their own got results like a six-figure launch, and the partners who treated it like an afterthought got afterthought results.

If you’re evaluating a JV opportunity on list size alone, you’re reading the wrong number. How a partner shows up determines what they earn, and most of the earning happens in the follow-through.

The failure rate is the real lesson

My first two joint venture webinars produced three sales combined. If I’d quit there, I’d have been wrong by about $275,000.

If I’d stopped after April and May, I’d have decided the channel doesn’t work for my audience — a conclusion built on 323 registrants and three sales.

The full teardowns — order bump attach rates, the Voxer experiment where question-askers bought at six times the rate of lurkers, and the honest unsubscribe cost of mailing borrowed audiences hard — live inside The $1k/Day Experiment.

Why Did I Stop Running Ads?

My ads didn’t stop working. I stopped working on them — and those are two completely different problems with two completely different fixes.

The honest version

Ads work. I’ve had months where they were the main lead engine. What happened this spring is that I’d learned an enormous amount about paid traffic and wasn’t getting results I knew were possible, including results I’d already gotten.

Watching a thing you understand underperform is a specific flavor of demoralizing. I responded the way I respond to most demoralizing things, which is by finding something else to look at.

So I procrastinated. Some version of “get the ads sorted” sat unchecked on my to-do list nearly every single month of these five. Every time I opened Meta Ads Manager I felt overwhelmed about what to do next, closed it, and went somewhere I could see the finish line.

Eventually I gave myself permission to stop white-knuckling it and put that energy into partnerships instead. Spend dropped to $1,810.60 in June, my lowest spend month in 18 months, and revenue tripled, for reasons that had nothing to do with the ads.

What four hours in a spreadsheet showed me

In April I pulled every one of the 7,844 leads my Meta ads have generated since February 2025 and went through them. Two things fell out.

8.8% of ad leads eventually bought something, against a 1–2% benchmark for course creators. The ads were working. I was measuring them on the wrong clock.

You can’t just watch Day 1 revenue, you’ve got to track it over time. Revenue per lead was $5.60 on day zero, $8.10 by day 30, and $11.52 by day 180. I’d been killing campaigns at two weeks and filing them under failure.

Ads got turned back on by the end of July thanks to a new software I’m completely obsessed with called EverAds. The diaries on what it’s actually doing are inside The $1k/Day Experiment.

Traffic Without Social Media

My traffic data for this period is partly garbage, and I’m going to show you why instead of quietly rounding it into something flattering.

Why the headline number is unusable

Fathom Analytics logged 193,518 visitors across March–July. Roughly 61,591 came from a Kartra page belonging to someone who isn’t me (an issue with a client using one of my templates that I accidentally left my pixel in).

Bot filtering also wasn’t fixed on my account until June, so March through May is inflated by data-center traffic from Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore that was very much not buying my course.

The pages I actually believe

Page	Visitors	Avg Time	Bounce Rate
JV webinar registration (June)	15,168	55s	62.2%
MBA sales page	9,218	54s	66.4%
Homepage	7,334	75s	43.9%
Income reports archive	6,795	87s	87.7%
MBA launch page (June JV)	5,197	255s	73.2%
Tripwire checkout	4,738	86s	4.9%
The Everything Page	3,015	94s	31.2%

Four minutes average on the launch sales page is the number I’d frame. A 4.9% bounce rate at tripwire checkout is the other one.

One honest caveat on sources: Facebook and Instagram sent 13,859 visitors combined, and that’s my own ad traffic, not organic reach — I haven’t posted on either since 2021. The referrers that required nothing from me this year: Google sent 4,630 and Pinterest sent 1,026, both from content I made years ago.

How Do You Grow an Email List Without Social Media?

Borrow audiences that already exist. My list went from roughly 10,600 in April to 18,339 today at a 42.35% open rate, and almost all of that growth came from other people’s people — 12,022 gross new leads across five months.

One partnership out-delivered my entire paid acquisition effort and cost nothing up front. The summit sponsorship is the quiet one worth copying: $5,000 bought 1,021 leads from an audience already interested in exactly what I teach.

The full menu of borrowed-audience channels

Guest podcast appearances, virtual summits, bundle promotions, list swaps, affiliate JVs, quiz funnels, lead magnets and content upgrades all run on the same engine: somebody already trusted points at you, and their credibility transfers.

I run all of it through Beehiiv for email and Kartra for checkout, funnels and course delivery, with Airtable tracking partners and Zapier moving people between the two. None of it requires an Instagram account.

The reason I put this much weight on email is that it still outperforms the alternative. Email marketing generates $42 for every $1 spent according to the DMA’s Marketer Email Tracker, and Campaign Monitor puts email conversions at 174% higher than social media.

The mechanics are in Social-Free Visibility and Email List Love.

What Five Months Actually Taught Me

You can’t quit too soon. My first two JV webinars produced three sales combined, and I nearly made that tiny sample size mean something about the strategy. It didn’t mean the channel was broken. It meant I hadn’t failed enough yet.

I don’t have to get it right on the first try, as long as I’m committed to getting it right eventually.

Price is the lever most people never pull. In January I started raising prices across the board — The Room doubled from $97 to $197 in March, and MBA went up this month. Every time, I’ve made more money overall even when unit sales dipped, and churn dropped with each increase, which has been better for my mental health and my customer service inbox than any productivity system I’ve ever built.

The baseline is the business. The launches get the headlines, but what actually changed this year is that the evergreen floor rose — systems, automations and AI compounding until an ordinary no-launch day clears $2,400. Launches on top of a rising floor is a completely different business than launches instead of one.

Booked and banked are different numbers, so I plan on banked. This isn’t a lesson I learned the hard way, just physics of payment plans that nobody publishes: my June launch banked $190,326 against $236,648 booked, and 35 payment plans deliver that gap over the next year and a half. I celebrate the banked number and let booked be a bonus that shows up later.

We’re pushing annual plans on purpose. My recurring revenue percentage fell to 8.4% while recurring dollars grew every month — partly because the denominator exploded, and partly because we’re deliberately moving $1k/Day and The Room members to annual and pay-in-full. Guaranteed income up front, less churn, fewer failed payments to chase. Still recurring, just paid like it means it.

What’s Working Right Now

Building a business without social media comes down to layering a few systems and leaving them alone long enough to compound. Here’s what’s actually driving revenue.

What’s Working Right Now

Building a business without social media comes down to layering a few systems and leaving them alone long enough to compound. Here’s what’s actually driving revenue.

Fall 2026 Goals

First, the part I refuse to rush past: we set a $500,000 revenue goal for 2026 and hit it in July, with a team of two, working under 30 hours a week, after 12+ weeks of time off. I’m proud of us, and I’m saying so in writing.

1. Keep raising the evergreen baseline. The systems, automations and AI we’ve built are why an ordinary day clears $2,400 — that floor is the whole strategy, and it gets more investment, not less.
2. Deepen the relationships. The launches that worked this year were fueled by real partnerships, so I’m building the JV pipeline like the asset it turned out to be.
3. Make the back half easier, not just bigger. I’d genuinely be thrilled to earn the same amount again by December — but better, easier and more fun than the first half.
4. 35,000 email subscribers at a 40%+ open rate. I’m at 18,339 and 42.35%, so the open rate is handled and the list is 52% of the way there.
5. Keep the ads profitable now that EverAds has them back on and running.

What This Means for You

Vet partners on how they show up — and yes, list size matters too. Ask what the promo plan actually is: whole list or a segment, will they be on the webinar with you, is there a pre-launch runway. But I won’t pretend size is irrelevant. My June partner sent one email and 3,000 people registered. Watching that reinforced my own goal of growing to 35,000 subscribers, because a big list you actually nurture is leverage nothing else replicates.

When you’re the one promoting, get the commission rate in writing before you send a single email. This whole post is about partners promoting my offers, but I promote other people’s offers too — and on one of those deals this spring I assumed 50%, got 35%, and it cost me $9,413. Once the promo is live, your leverage is gone.

Judge ads on a longer window than feels natural. If your cost per lead looks ugly at two weeks, pull the revenue those same leads generated at day 30, 60 and 90 before you kill anything. Mine doubled between day zero and day 30.

Name the real reason you’re avoiding the thing. I told myself for eighteen months that I hadn’t “gotten to” my ads. I’d gotten to them. I’d open the account, feel overwhelmed, and close it. Procrastination and incompetence want different fixes, and I spent most of a year applying the wrong one.

Build the systems while you have capacity. April was a hospital-waiting-room month and June was an emotionally underwater month, and the business grew through both — only because the funnels were built earlier, when I felt fine. Build your Fridays now.

If You Want to Watch Me Build This

If these five months landed somewhere in you — the idea that your business could keep running while you’re in a hospital ICU waiting room, or in Santa Fe, or just really tired — I want to tell you about The $1k/Day Experiment.

It’s my behind-the-scenes membership: weekly diaries of exactly what I’m testing, the income reports with real numbers, live office hours, and the full teardowns I don’t publish here. The complete June launch breakdown, the sponsorship debriefs, and the EverAds diaries are in there right now.

Less like a course, more like a business documentary that updates every week. $27/month or $197/year. Join The $1k/Day Experiment here.

The Bottom Line

Five months, $438,706.15 in revenue, $254,275.09 in actual profit after paying my partners their share. I crossed $500,000 for the year on July 31, five months early, and finished the month at $509,440.05 gross revenue.

I did it with ads I was avoiding, no social media since 2021, and a working week between 15 and 25 hours a week. My first two partnerships produced three sales combined. I kept going, and the next two banked almost a quarter million dollars.

FAQ: Joint Venture Webinars

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What’s the strategy you wrote off on a tiny sample size? Tell me in the comments.