March 2024 Progress Report: starting a business without social media

Last Updated on May 1, 2024

We’re sharing a profitable online business case study on starting a business without social media, building an email list, and sustainable business practices.

At the end of 2023, I thought about starting a new business.

It was both about the desire to do something totally different than what I had been doing and also there was this wild thought: what if I put my own advice from the Launch Lab and Mindful Business Academy to the test, embarking on a real-time case study to showcase the journey to a profitable online business?

But ultimately, I’m not in the business of self-torture (except when I doom scroll on Insta). And I know how overwhelming and all-consuming it can be to run 2 businesses simultaneously (it’s part of why I sold Root + Revel back in 2021).

So what’s a girl to do? 

Well first, because I was on sabbatical, I waited.

It’s my new thing: tolerating the urge to work as a distraction or attempt to prove myself. 

Learning to sit and wait for my intuition to guide me. And then, as my friend Lizzy G says, the shower gods spoke to me… 

 “Why not let Rachel be the entrepreneur, and I can play the role of the savvy, slightly less caffeinated partner/coach (like I do with my other clients)?”

See Rachel Silves, who’s been part of the SWS team for two years now, also just so happens to be a Registered Herbal Therapist and Certified Aromatherapist with over 2,000 hours of professional study in the field.

And she just so happens to have a new business called Seeds and Stalks, your all-access pass to mastering the art of family healthcare through herbs, without having to endure a lecture on the photosynthesis process or be bamboozled into joining an essential oil MLM (no “hey girl!” over here).

But I wanted more skin in the game than just being an advisor. I want to share in the thrills and chills of the entrepreneurial rollercoaster, just like I do with our 1:1 coaching clients in the Partnership model we follow. 

So, what’s the plan?

Instead of attempting to clone myself to manage another business, Rachel and I are teaming up. We’re going to build her business from the ground up, proving that you can indeed start and grow a business WITHOUT social media, all within a casual 10-hour workweek.

Because it turns out we actually do need sleep and a social life. Shocker!

You’ll get the dirt (quite literally) on herbs and essential oils through Rachel’s mission at Seeds and Stalks (aka how to confidently and practically take care of yourself and your family with herbs) AND we’ll be sharing monthly “Progress Reports” right here on the blog – think of them like my former Income Reports‘ less narcissistic sibling, where money isn’t the only measure of success.

Expect all the steps, mis-steps, plant casualties and happy accidents! To wit, here’s our very first Progress Report, officially kicking off our partnership that began in March 2024. Take it away Rachel!

March 2024 Income: $9

• Gross Income: $9
  • Course Sales: $9 tripwire sale of my course Build Your Home Apothecary 
• Expenses: $786.89
  • ConvertKit: $53.31 (this is my email service provider but I’m contemplating switching to Kartra because I love Kartra 1000% more!)
  • GSuite: $13.06 
  • Continuing Education: $662.88
  • Microsoft: $18.47 (digital storage; need to assess why I’m paying for this!)
  • LastPass: $39.17 (yearly renewal for my password management tool that makes sharing passwords and logging in seamless) 
• Net profit: -$777.89

It’s a bit sobering to see a net loss of almost $800 but at the same time, doing business costs money! 

The majority of my loss was from continuing education and this was a really good reminder for me to be a bit more judicious about what I sign up for and commit to. 

On the other hand though, continuing education and lifelong learning is a value of mine so I do think I’ll continue to spend money in this arena. 

On a positive note, I did make a sale (which was one of my goals in March) so that was great to see. 

Looking at my expenses also reminded me to assess what I really need because some of my expenses, namely the digital storage, could be nixed if I moved everything over to Google Drive (which I’m already paying for). Food for thought for next month. 

Before we get into the details, I also wanted to share my traffic totals for March 2024.

Traffic Totals

My website had been unmaintained and not active since 2019. March 2024 was the first month that I updated content, put a lead magnet on it, and started driving traffic to it.

Email List

Note: This screenshot comes from my dashboard in Convertkit.

List Growth: 8 new active email subscribers in March 2024, bringing my list to 939 subscribers at the end of March 2024. 

I had started an email list when I first started my business in 2019. I grew my list at that time by running some Facebook ads as well as participating in a couple bundles. Through ads and the bundle, I was able to grow my email list to 1,300 people in 2 years. However, during this time, I did not have an email marketing strategy and was not emailing my list with any regularity. 

When I decided to restart my business, I knew I needed to reengage with my subscribers. So, while I am starting my email list with approximately 1,000 subscribers, these are cold subscribers who haven’t heard from me at all for 3 years or with any regularity at all. 

The first step was importing my old list from ActiveCampaign, which was 1,052 subscribers. I had originally chosen to go with ActiveCampaign because an online program I was enrolled in recommended them.

As a new online business owner, I didn’t have much to compare to and because the program set up my sequences in ActiveCampaign for me, I followed their recommendation. After I came back to my business and started working in ActiveCampaign (plus the increased price tag since I had over 1000 subscribers), I decided to move to ConvertKit because it allowed me to access the Creator Network, which I could leverage to expand my reach to others.

I also liked ConvertKit because it was very easy to use (I signed up for a Free Trial to check it out before I committed). Plus they had a migration team help me get my contacts and tags set up. 

As a side note, while I do really like ConvertKit and I’m not quite ready to make another change, I regret not signing up for Kartra. With Kartra, I can do my payment processing and host my courses in one platform which would be so much easier than what I’m doing now (using a WordPress Plugin called LearnDash to host my courses plus WooCommerce to sell them). I am seriously thinking about switching to Kartra in the near future. 

The first thing that I did once I moved to ConvertKit was set up a re-engagement campaign (basically sending everyone again through a new welcome series) which resulted in about 113 people unsubscribing. This was actually great because I don’t want to be paying for subscribers if they aren’t interested in what I’m saying. Additionally, I want my list to be as engaged as possible, so getting people off my list who won’t ever open my emails anyway will help me connect with people who are really my ideal clients!

I learned how to do the re-engagement campaign and prune cold subscribers from Kate’s course, the Mindful Business Academy.

Some other cool stats were I’m getting upwards of a 40% open rate on my email broadcasts and my welcome series has a 74% open rate with a 5% click-through rate! **I’ve got to give credit here to Laura Belgray at The Talking Shrimp! I enrolled in her Inbox Hero email workshop and it’s been phenomenal with helping me write emails that get opened!

My current list building Freebies are: 

• Build Your Herbal First Aid Kit
• 5 Day Energy Kickstart mini-course

Domain Authority

Note: DA is a ranking metric developed by Moz that predicts how well a site will rank on Google, and is measured on a scale of 1 to 100. The closer you are to 100, the more traffic and better ranking you’ll have.

Clearly I have some work to do in this area! One way that I’ll be working to improve my domain authority is by following the advice and teachings found in the SEO Course (also in MBA) about publishing high quality consistent content so that I can show Google that I’m a reputable website and increase my E-A-T!

Hours Worked: 30 for the month

I’ve been working between 5-10 hours per week on my business. With most of my time spent on getting my tech set up (email list, welcome series, website updates and some content creation).

It’s been amazing to see how much progress I can make without making this a full-time, 40-hour-a-week job.

Rachel’s Takeaways

What I focused on this month

This month I focused on re-engaging with my business and my audience. I effectively had stopped working on my business in 2021 and hadn’t done anything with it in the last 3 years. To get into a little bit of my story, I joined a program in 2019 claiming to help brand new business owners grow their business to 10k months within 6 months! For obvious reasons, this sounded appealing.

I had experience owning a service based local business and was ready to start a different business in the health and wellness sector. Having a passion for herbs and essential oils, I decided that I would start my business helping women learn how to use herbs and essential oils in their lives. 

So, I made an investment in my business and joined a program. The program was very well organized, and at the end of 6 months I did have a lead magnet, welcome series, signature program, and all the “pieces” of the business set up. The only thing missing was getting clients. I hadn’t made a single dime. 

And no sales combined with spending money on my business didn’t feel good at all. 

This program taught a cookie-cutter approach to online business and sales. It taught me to to run ads, do a webinar, then get people on sales calls to sell my signature program. And I’ll be honest, it started to get hard. Plus I felt disconnected from the sales process and it felt slimy to me. No wonder I didn’t close any sales calls haha. 

The bigger issue though was that it felt like I had all these pieces of my business, but because the program was part done for you, I had no idea how everything worked together. I couldn’t see the forest through the trees. 

So, after putting together a webinar (which I never ended up delivering) and doing a handful of sales calls (which I didn’t end up closing), I felt like being a solopreneur was too lonely and hard and not for me. Which isn’t uncommon or abnormal by the way, I just didn’t have the support or self-coaching skills at that time to unpack all those thoughts and feelings!

I was still passionate about helping people build their businesses and had extensive experience with the operations side of business. I started working for an online business owner as a client delivery coach and quietly paused work on my own business. 

Sometimes, I would see clients on the side for herbal consultations but I wasn’t actively pursuing my business. Then I met Kate, and her teaching and approach radically changed how I thought online business owners had to operate.

It didn’t have to be a cookie-cutter approach. I didn’t have to do sales calls if I didn’t want to. I didn’t have to build my business on social media. Mind blown. 

So, at the end of 2023, with all the newfound knowledge that I learned and client successes I had seen, I started having a nudge from the universe to restart my business. I had also participated in a year long coaching program and learned how to coach myself and work through feelings of discomfort and how to handle situations when things got hard as an entrepreneur. This time, I knew what I was going into and all the ups and downs of being an online business owner. 

So in addition to reconnecting and restarting my business, this month I focused on rebuilding and connecting all the pieces of tech. I also needed to do an update to my entire website as my mission and focus had shifted since 2021. And I focused on collaborations and ways that I can start to get more visible. I was able to set up a collaboration with Ultimate Bundles and participate in their Live Ultimately Membership- which resulted in 3 new email subscribers!

March 2024 Goals

• Sell something this month ✅ I sold one of my courses- Build Your Home Apothecary
• Grow my email list by 50 people 🛑 this goal was a bit too ambitious for March since most of my time was spent getting my email list set up and on the tech. It reminded me that when you pick goals, you need to think about how realistic they are and can control or be responsible for the results. It’s also important to think about the specific actions needed to achieve the goals. Like it’s great to say “grow my email list by 50 people” but HOW am I going to do that and what specific actions am I going to take? That was what was missing from this goal in March. 
• Send weekly emails to re-engage my list ✅ I emailed my list weekly in March after everyone went through the re-engagement welcome series.

Goals for April 2024

• Grow my email list by at least 20 people
  • Post my lead magnet in my Facebook group. I have a residual Facebook group with 300 people in it from when I started my business in 2019.  I know that this time around, I don’t want to grow my business on social media, but I want to leverage the group that I already have to see if I can get some people from there to join my email list. PS: I’m not interested in using social because I don’t want to spend all my time on social media, I hate how fleeting the content is, I hate having to figure out how to stop the scroll, and I don’t like that Facebook owns all the data and can change policies and algorithms on a whim. If you’re interested in growing your business without social media, check out our 4 Day Beyond the Scroll Challenge.
  • Solicit one visibility opportunity 
  • Ask my email list to share my freebie sign-up with a friend
  • Write/update 2 blog posts
  • Fully set up my ConvertKit Creator Profile
• Personally connect with 5 potential clients
  • Add a CTA to respond in every weekly email that I send
  • Personal email outreach to anyone who has clicked links in my emails or responded. 
  • Tell people what I really do. I have had lots of people in my life asking me what I’m up to for work and I realized I haven’t been telling them about my business. I’ve been telling people that I’m a stay-at-home mom, which is super interesting and something that I’ve been coaching myself on! I realized that I was having difficulty fitting my different jobs and identities into one succinct statement. I was also having a hard time identifying as a business owner when my business wasn’t making money (“yet” adds Kate). I’ve been working through all of this and have been able to practice telling people: “I just started a new business where I’m coaching women on how to use herbs and essential oils” and it’s been feeling really good!
• Write funnel emails
  • Figure out what my first funnel will be for
  • Write 3-5 sales emails
  • Put emails into a sequence in ConvertKit 
• My guiding wisdom for next month:
  • Step into your identity with CONFIDENCE
• My guiding feeling for next month:
  • Curiosity 
• My mantra for next month: 
  • I am a success no matter what because I set my own standards for success. 

Thoughts + Self-Coaching

Overall, it felt great to restart my business this month. I’m feeling inspired and I’m embracing my identity as a business owner and coach. I am strengthening my mindset so that I can coach myself and support myself when challenges come up. I feel like this time around I have a much better understanding of the big picture and I know that my business is a long-game. I’m falling in love with my business again! 

Another lesson I’m relearning this month is I that connecting all the tech takes longer than I usually anticipate. So, I’m curious how I can support myself in planning my time appropriately AND giving myself grace when things take longer than expected? How can I build in white space into my calendar to help? 

It felt really good to make a sale of something so that tells me that external validation is important to me. Man it felt good to make a sale. Something that came up for me with this sale was some discounting because it was only $9.

But, I’m reminding myself that it means that another human being actually wanted what I’m offering and that they trusted me enough to take a risk with me. I also reminded myself that everyone starts by selling one thing at a time and that I can be excited about micro wins in my business without feeling guilty about where I “should” be. 

I also learned that I have a traffic issue and I’d like to shift my activities in April to focus on visibility and getting in front of more eyeballs. The most authentic way for me to do that right now is through collaborations with other business owners. I’ve always been a connector and someone who enjoys meeting others and setting up mutually beneficial opportunities so I’d like to leverage that skill in my own business. 

Lastly,  I’d also like to personally connect with my audience and do some outreach to see how I can help people. I believe that sales is all about personal connection and conversations. So, next month I want to engage in as many conversations as possible with my audience!

Kate’s Takeaways

Holy bananas, Batman. Rachel is on fire! You’ve truly embodied the spirit of taking “imperfect action” and it’s nothing short of inspiring. Your ability to make decisions quickly and get shit done without a lot of drama is exactly what we preach in the Mindful Business Academy. It’s proof that you don’t need to be perfect to make serious progress. A few highlights for me:

• Jump In and Make Waves: Rachel didn’t wait around for the stars to align. She jumped right into the tech setup, launched her first product, and started pitching like a boss. This just goes to show, perfect timing is a myth. Grab opportunities as they come, and remember, done is better than perfect!
• Baby Steps to Giant Leaps: Rachel is showing us all how it’s done. Every little step she’s taking, from waking up her email list to nailing down collaborations, is stacking up to big, juicy wins. It’s all about the compound effect of those tiny, consistent efforts.
• Spend Money to Make Money (and Learn Loads): That initial sting of a financial loss? Yeah, it hurts. But think about it—every dollar down is a lesson learned and look at how much you learned about yourself and what you and your business need from that experience of joining a cookie-cutter program. Worth it!
• Work-Life Balance Is Achievable: Rachel’s ability to push her business forward while dedicating only 5-10 hours a week proves that you can manage a growing business without sacrificing yourself or your life. It’s all about working smarter, not longer.
• Re-engage to Reconnect: Jumpstarting old connections or projects isn’t just smart; it’s efficient. And reactivating old contacts can be as fruitful as new leads. She didn’t have to start from scratch, she worked with what she had and she also wound up getting lots of responses to her emails from that re-engagement campaign.
• Celebrate All Wins: Every sale, no matter the size, validates your business efforts and should be celebrated as evidence of your impact and reach.
• Increase Visibility Through Collaboration: Rachel used collaborations effectively get in front of more people and it’s WORKING (I can’t wait to share with you her results from April!). This strategy not only extends your reach but also strengthens your network, potentially leading to new industry friends.

Rachel’s progress is a testament to the effectiveness of coaching and the impact of just moving forward even when you don’t have all the answers. I’m excited!

Reader Questions

Each month, I feature one question about online business from a reader. Submit your question in the comments and I’ll answer one next month!