September 2026 Income Report: My Digital Product Income

Last Updated on October 28, 2026

September 2026 was the month I turned 39 and celebrated by selling a Claude skill a day for $39 each.

My online business brought in $142,475 in revenue and $81,750 in profit, a 57.4% margin, and it was my fourth six-figure month in a row.

Below is every number from the birthday sale, a JV webinar with one of my mastermind friends and the $7,000 course I bought myself, plus what all of it taught me about digital product income.

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Welcome to installment #18 of my income reports (the full archive of past income reports is here if you want to binge).

If you’re new, I publish these to show exactly how a social-media-free business makes money, down to the ad spend and the experiments that flopped.

September was a lot. My $39 for 39 Birthday Skill Drop ran the entire month, with a brand-new Claude skill on sale every morning for 24 hours.

In the middle of it I taught a JV webinar to a fellow mastermind member’s audience, bought the most expensive course I’ve ever bought, and hosted what felt like every birthday in my extended orbit.

I closed the month in Las Vegas with my operations director, Rachel, planning 2027 by a pool (we did not gamble, unless you count the $20 we did gamble).

A few of the decisions we made there show up in this report, because they came straight out of September’s numbers.

The Numbers: My Online Business Profit Margin in September 2026

My online business profit margin in September 2026 was 57.4%, which works out to $81,749.90 in profit on $142,475.47 in revenue, or about $2,725 a day.

Over the last 12 months, the margin was 55.9% on $974,207.92 in revenue, with partner commissions counted in the month each sale happened.

That 12-month number is $25,792 short of a million-dollar year, a goal I had filed under “someday, no deadline” back in August (someday is apparently getting impatient).

It’s also my fourth six-figure month in a row: June, July, August and September all cleared $100,000.

The 12-month rolling picture

September 2026, line by line

A few notes on those lines, because a table can’t do parentheticals:

• Training + education was $7,000 of Paid Ads Academy (affiliate link) with Ashley Brock, the most I have ever spent on a course, plus $1,310 of smaller trainings. More on why below.
• Contractors was mostly Rachel’s retainer plus her bonus. Paying my people well from a place of plenty is still my favorite line on this page.
• Partner commissions are me paying out my affiliates (want me to pay you too? Sign up here! It’s free).
• Software covers my stack, things like Claude ★, Beehiiv ★, Fathom ★, Descript ★ and Lovable ★. A star means it’s an affiliate link, so I earn a commission if you sign up (at no extra cost to you).

As always, I don’t count my W-2 payroll or owner distributions as an expense for these reports, since I’m an S-corp and pay myself a salary separately. Taxes aren’t included in my margin either.

This year they’ll run me closer to 25–35% (my accountant is still finalizing my projections now that I’ve jumped tax brackets), so September’s profit is roughly $53,000–$61,000 after tax.

September 2026 Revenue Breakdown

Mindful Business Academy and my shop brought in 81% of September’s revenue between them. The shop line, which I call Pocket Products, was $52,687, mostly from the birthday sale, and its biggest month of the past year.

Pocket Products jumped from $6,397 in July to $49,351 in August (my AI virtual event) to $52,687 in September. Two months of low-ticket sales in a row is a pattern I’m happy to keep.

How much of MBA was pay-in-full vs. payment plans?

About two-thirds of September’s MBA money came from people paying in full, and $17,614 came from 163 payment plan installments.

Another $5,141 came from students paying off their plans early. I treat installments as semi-recurring revenue, because they land whether or not I’m selling anything.

Add those installments to my memberships and my recurring revenue was about $27,200, or 19% of the month. If you sell anything over a few hundred dollars, a payment plan is one of the easiest ways to smooth out your income.

What Does My Online Business Earn Without Launching?

September had a sale running every single day, so my honest answer this month is an estimate: about $49,600, or 35% of revenue, came from sources that don’t depend on a launch.

That’s memberships ($9,589), MBA installments and early payoffs ($22,754), affiliate income ($7,387), coaching ($6,226) and sponsorships ($3,600).

It mixes my sales tracker with QuickBooks, so treat it as close rather than exact (and it leaves out shop sales that would have happened without a birthday attached, which I can’t separate).

I call this number my business’s resting heart rate, and it’s up from about $44,000 in August. The evergreen system behind my daily sales is the place to start if you want one of your own.

What 1,027 AI Skills at $39 Taught Me About Digital Product Income

My $39 for 39 Birthday Skill Drop sold 1,027 Claude skills to 338 buyers across the full sale (Sept 1 – Oct 2), bringing in $46,286 on the skills side after refunds.

Another $29,342 of MBA was bought during those same 32 days. It was the clearest experiment in digital product income I’ve ever run, because almost nothing changed from day to day except the product.

What the sale was

Every morning from Sept 1 to 30, a new Claude skill went on sale for 24 hours at $39.

Each skill was a named AI employee with a job title, like Sage the SEO/GEO blog post writer and Paige the branded workbook builder (if you’ve never used a Claude skill, it’s a reusable set of instructions that teaches Claude to do one job your way).

Then all 30 came back for a secret 29-hour encore on Oct 1–2.

Every checkout had a $39 order bump and a one-click upsell. Every email also mentioned that all 30 skills live inside Mindful Business Academy, which made the math easy to do: 30 skills at $39 is $1,170, and MBA is $2,497.

The headline numbers

Half of the buyers came back for a second skill, and 64 people bought five or more.

Those 64 people bought 57% of every skill sold, and 233 buyers (69%) had never bought anything from me in 2026, so a $39 skill turned out to be a very easy first yes.

What sold, and what didn’t

My abandoned-cart skill is the cleanest example. Its email pulled 122 clicks, slightly above my morning average, and it sold two copies that day.

People loved the idea of recovered money, and most of them don’t have abandoned carts to recover (a click is curiosity, and a purchase is a different decision).

Three things I changed in the middle of the sale

• I swapped the order bump on Day 21. By the third week, 52% of buyers already owned the bump product, so it had become a button with no reason to press it. I switched to Coffee with Claude, and Claude went into Kartra ★ and changed every remaining checkout for me.
• I swapped the upsell the same day. The Room annual at $777 converted 2 of 216 buyers (0.9%). The $1k/Day annual at $97 converted 15 of 220 (6.8%). Almost the same money, and 15 people now watching my business from the inside instead of 2.
• I added an 8pm email. It mostly moved when people bought (evening sales went from 16% of a day to 24%), and daily sales barely changed. Next year I’ll hold out part of the list to find out whether it earns its keep.

What I’d do differently

I never wrote down a revenue goal, which meant that on Day 12, when I sold 13 skills, I had no way to tell whether that was a problem or just a Saturday.

I estimate I left about $13,600 on the table, mostly by not offering MBA to the people buying five or more skills while the sale was still running.

The full debrief, with all 30 skills ranked, every email stat and the ad numbers I can’t verify, lives in The $1k/Day Experiment.

If you want the strategy behind a sale like this one, start with my post on building your own team of Claude skills.

How Did My JV Webinar With a Fellow Weird Hermit Go?

My September JV webinar, with a partner from my peer mastermind the Weird Hermits, banked $20,475 with zero ad spend through Sept 23, and I sold 8 MBA spots against a goal of 10.

We split everything 50/50, so I kept about $9,800 after processing fees.

A JV webinar is a joint venture: I teach a free class to someone else’s audience, pitch my offer at the end, and pay my partner a commission on every sale.

I taught how to make daily sales without ever posting on social media, to 331 registrants, and 58 of them showed up live.

I promoted a 60-minute class and taught for 138 minutes, which is where it went sideways. At minute 60, 39 people were still there.

When the coupon hit the screen at minute 105, eleven were. I taught a good class to 39 people and made the offer to 11 (I went 78 minutes over).

A fifth of the money came from 40 people who said no to MBA and yes to something small, like a tripwire or a single skill.

That only happens if every checkout in your funnel has something on it. My Spring + Summer income report has four more JV webinars broken down if you’re weighing one.

Why Did I Spend $7,000 on a Paid Ads Course?

I bought Paid Ads Academy (affiliate link) with Ashley Brock for $7,000 because ads are my number-one growth priority and almost every dollar of my ad budget lives on one platform.

I spent $18,965 on ads in September, 13.3% of revenue, almost all of it on Meta.

I joined after sitting in on their live bootcamp, and the plan is to start testing Google ads and other platforms that aren’t Meta.

On the Sept 22 kickoff call I was, for one hour, the newest and least experienced person in the room (after more than a decade of coaching other people, a humbling and very useful hour).

The rules stood out more than the content.

You have to finish the core training before you’re allowed to ask a question live, questions get submitted a week ahead, and you’re told to watch everything twice, once to learn it and once while you build.

If you run group coaching, sit in someone else’s program and pay attention to the scaffolding instead of the content. Most of my notes from that hour about my own program, The Room, were some version of “why don’t I do that?”

Where September’s ad money went

Most of it went to my evergreen Beyond the Scroll Challenge funnel, which leads into a $17 tripwire offer. Its ad landing page had 7,292 visitors in September, by far my most-visited page.

I also spent $2,925 (Sept 1 – Oct 2) retargeting the birthday sale to people who already knew me, and I can’t tie those ads to a single sale, because the same people were getting my emails every morning.

I still think they helped, and that’s a belief I can’t back with a number.

A retargeting ad’s job is to catch the people who skipped that morning’s email and remind them the sale is still on.

But ad tracking mostly counts a sale when someone clicks the ad and buys soon after, so a person who scrolled past my ad at lunch and bought from my 8pm email shows up as an email sale.

Since Apple’s privacy changes, Meta also loses track of a lot of people between the ad and the checkout, so nobody, me or Meta, can say which nudge actually closed the sale.

Over the last 12 months I’ve spent $88,564 on ads, about 9.1% of revenue, while total revenue ran 11 times my ad spend.

If you’re weighing ads against posting, I wrote about why paid ads and organic social media are not the same thing.

How Many Hours Did I Work in September?

I worked less than 25 hours a week on average in September, though I only tracked one week to the minute.

That week (Sept 21–27) came in at 27.75 hours, heavier than usual because of a full call day, and the business made $24,778 in sales across the full seven days, about $893 an hour.

After Tuesday’s 10-to-5 call day, my POTS body was back in bed by 9:45 on Wednesday morning (Day 23 of my cycle, so that tracks).

Batching calls into one Tuesday buys me the rest of the week as hermit time, and this week showed me the full price, because the call day ran a day and a half.

That’s part of why, in Vegas, I stopped selling 1:1 calls. People were paying $397 an hour, and Rachel asked whether I’d be excited to see that Tuesday calendar at $1,000 a call. I wouldn’t.

It’s not that I value my time at that. It’s that I don’t want to do them.

The full hour-by-hour diary is in The $1k/Day Experiment.

Where Did My Website Traffic Come From Without Social Media?

My sites had 22,688 visitors and 40,972 pageviews in September, according to Fathom Analytics (affiliate link). Ads sent 8,447 of them, my newsletter sent about 3,600 through tagged links, and 7,246 came direct.

I checked Fathom’s domain report first, since a stranger’s site borrowing my tracking code polluted my numbers this spring.

September was clean: every visit came from my own sites. Across the full birthday sale (Sept 1 – Oct 2), the sales page drew 4,311 visitors, and 7.8% of them bought a skill.

What’s working in search, and what isn’t

Search sent 1,937 visitors, about 8.5% of my traffic, and AI tools sent 20 (16 from ChatGPT, 3 from Claude and 1 from Gemini). That AI number is tiny, and growing it is part of my blog refresh.

My income reports are still my most-read blog content, with 245 visitors to the archive page in September and an average of over four minutes on August’s report.

• Write the posts only you could write. First-hand numbers and real results are what both Google and AI tools quote. A post like this one is the format I’m doubling down on.
• Refresh before you write new. Updating an older post that used to rank (new stats, the answer in the first two sentences, a short FAQ) usually does more than starting from scratch.
• Point every post somewhere. Search visitors only become subscribers if the post offers them a next step.

That’s the core of Anti-Social SEO + GEO, and it’s the refresh I’m working through on my own blog.

How Do You Grow an Email List Without Social Media?

I grow my email list by running ads and borrowing other people’s audiences, and in September I added 2,690 new subscribers on Beehiiv (affiliate link).

2,656 people unsubscribed, so I ended the month up 34, at 21,270 active subscribers.

2,074 of those unsubscribes (counting through Oct 2) came from the sale’s 54 emails in 32 days, at almost exactly my normal rate: about 38 per email, against 37 in August, when no sale was running.

Per 1,000 emails delivered, the sale ran lower (2.1 against 2.6). And 199 people clicked a “skip the birthday emails” link instead of leaving, which makes it the cheapest retention tool I own.

Since September the list has grown to 23,739 active subscribers (as of Oct 28), 68% of my goal of 35,000 by the end of 2026. At my pace over the last 90 days, I’d finish the year around 27,400.

Email is worth the effort: the DMA found email returns $42 for every $1 spent, and McKinsey found email is 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.

The partnership side of list growth is what Social-Free Visibility teaches.

What September Taught Me (and What It Means for You)

Sell the finished thing. If you sell digital products, the ones that hand someone a finished page, post or workbook will outsell the ones that analyze what they already have.

Put your “fix your system” ideas inside your bigger offer, and lead with the ones that build.

Price the upsell as the next step up. Going from $39 to $97 converted eight times better than going from $39 to $777, on almost identical traffic.

A 2.5x jump feels like a natural next yes, and a 20x jump feels like a whole new decision.

Write the goal down first. Three numbers (good, better, best) before the first email goes out, so a slow day reads as a slow day instead of a crisis.

Setting that number is exactly what The Room’s fourth-Tuesday revenue planning call is for: breakout rooms of three, one question (how will you make money next month?), and a push to get specific about which promotion, how many emails and which dates.

The Room is $997 a year or three payments of $397.

Count the recovery as part of the batch. If your call day eats the next morning, you’re running a day-and-a-half block. That’s still a trade I’ll make sometimes, and now I plan for the half.

What’s Working Right Now

Building a profitable online business without social media comes down to stacking a few systems that each do one job well. These four did the most for mine in September.

Goals for the Rest of 2026

1. Write good, better and best revenue targets before every promo. Black Friday already has its three: $25,000, $40,000 and $75,000.
2. Run Black Friday as two short membership sales, The Room and then The $1k/Day Experiment, with no discounts, and bring both back for Cyber Monday.
3. Test Google ads with what I’m learning in Paid Ads Academy.
4. Keep growing toward 35,000 active subscribers by the end of 2026.
5. Let December be December. Fall is full on purpose, and winter gets to be winter.

If You Want to Watch Me Build This

If September’s numbers landed somewhere in you (the idea that your business could keep running while you’re hosting birthday parties, or in bed recovering from a call day, or just really tired), I want to tell you about The $1k/Day Experiment.

It’s my behind-the-scenes membership, with weekly diaries of exactly what I’m testing, the debriefs and dashboards I use to make decisions, and office hours (they’re live but asynchronous, so you can drop your question in whenever it comes up).

The complete debriefs from $39 for 39 and the JV webinar are in there right now, and members get the new $1k/Day app on their phones.

Think of it less like a course and more like a business documentary that updates every week. It’s $197 a year (that’s $127 less than paying monthly, about five months free) or $27 a month. Join The $1k/Day Experiment here.

The Bottom Line

September was a birthday party disguised as a product experiment, and it taught me that my people pay for finished things.

So far in 2026 I’ve brought in $782,010, which is 156% of my $500,000 goal, and averaged $1,538 a day in profit against a goal of $1,000, working less than 25 hours a week with no social media.

FAQs: Digital Product Income, Profit Margins and Email

Your turn: if you sold one cheap, finished thing tomorrow, what would it be? Tell me in the comments.