My Evergreen Online Business Made $37,544: March 2026 Income Report

Last Updated on April 29, 2026

March 2026: $37,544 in revenue at a 64% profit margin, my lowest revenue week on record happened inside it, and I came home from the New Media Summit with a clearer picture of what this business actually is than I’ve had in years. 

Welcome back to one of the few places on the internet where someone actually tells you what they made, what they spent, and what they were doing while it happened.

If you’re new: I’m Kate Kordsmeier, and I run Success with Soul, an online education and media company I’ve built without social media since 2021.

Email. Evergreen funnels. AI + Automation. Sustainable Visibility off social media. That’s the whole strategy.

This is installment #16 of my $1K/Day Experiment income reports; the full archive lives here.

February was the grief month — $31,341, a 45.7% margin, me barely functional after losing my 16-year-old cat Boo.

March was something different, though not necessarily less chaotic. 

The New Media Summit at the start of the month validated what I’d already been moving toward: bringing together my decade of journalism, blogging, and writing chops into one cohesive coaching-education-media company. The newsletter as a real revenue channel. Brand partnerships layered on top of what already works.

Meanwhile the systems kept doing what they’re built to do. $37,544.61 at a 64% profit margin, while I was at conferences and on a mastermind retreat and running a webinar experiment that had my lowest revenue week of the year inside it.

Here’s how all of it shook out.

The Numbers: What an Evergreen Online Business Actually Earns

An evergreen online business — one built on SEO, automated funnels, and an email list rather than constant live launching or social media — earns money in a specific pattern.

Steady baseline. Occasional spikes when you layer something intentional on top.

March was a useful case study because I was doing approximately four incompatible things at once, and the daily revenue graph still looked, as I described it in my $1K/Day Experiment diaries, “kind of boring. And that’s the point.”

12-Month Rolling Picture (April 2025–March 2026)

March 2026 Snapshot

• March 2026 Total Revenue: $37,544.61 (23.8% recurring)
• March 2026 Adjusted Expenses: $11,604.59
  • Contractors: $6,504
  • Paid Ads: $3,713.11
  • Charitable contributions: $112.50 (donated to my friend Ruth’s marathon charity — she’s running actual miles with her actual body and I respect it immensely)
  • Affiliate payouts: $601.45 (paying out my affiliates — want me to pay you too? Sign up here, it’s free)
  • Software: $336.34 (like Claude, Fathom, Airtable, ClickUp, and Kartra)
  • Training and education: $678 (currently enrolled in Mixer & Mind and Successful Ads Club — both ads-focused, because this is the year I actually figure out paid traffic)
  • Accounting services: $300
  • Website costs, podcast, misc.: ~$458
• March 2026 Net Profit: $24,040.48
• Profit Margin (pre-tax): 64.0%

As always: I don’t count W-2 payroll or owner distributions as expenses in these reports. S-corp, salary paid separately. Taxes run about 20% of revenue and aren’t included in the margin.

March 2026 Revenue Breakdown

Revenue Stream	Amount	% of Total
Mindful Business Academy	$19,838.96	52.8%
Recurring Memberships	$8,925.50	23.8%
Affiliate Income	$3,688.25	9.8%
Coaching	$3,534.90	9.4%
Pocket Products	$1,557.00	4.1%
Sponsored Content	$0	—
Total	$37,544.61	100%

Recurring breakdown: The Room $6,399.50 · $1K/Day Experiment $1,923 · Launch Lab $603

Coaching breakdown: Revenue share 1:1 $2,826.76 · 1:1 calls $397 · Inbox Insights $311.14

What My Evergreen Online Business Earns Without Launching

March is the most honest kind of month to show you, because I was categorically not focused on revenue.

Week one: New Media Summit.
Week two: deep in a Claude migration that consumed every discretionary hour I had.
Week three: Weird Hermits in-person mastermind retreat, off and out from Wednesday through Saturday.
Week four: five working days before spring break.

The $1K/Day daily revenue curve for March was, in the technical sense, boring. Flat. Consistent. Ticking upward without any dramatic spike.

I kept writing the same thing in the diaries: $1K/Day is the evergreen floor, not the ceiling.

What that means in practice: the baseline holds even when I’m not in the business. The funnels run, the welcome sequence fires, the SEO traffic lands people on an Everything Page full of things they can buy at 2am while I’m asleep at a mastermind.

The $37,544 averaged out to $1,211/day across March. On a month I spent maybe 60 working hours in the business, half of which was rebuilding infrastructure that won’t show up in any P&L for another six months.

Boring is the new flex. I said it first. Well, I said it in my diaries and now I’m saying it here.

The Conference That Clarified Everything

The New Media Summit happened in the first week of March, and I came home from it more clear than I’d been in years.

The conference wasn’t about coaching or courses. It was about media businesses — news outlets, newsletters — where the newsletter is the product, not just a funnel.

People were monetizing their email lists directly through sponsorships and brand partnerships, not just using email to sell courses.

What landed for me wasn’t a new direction. It was permission for the direction I was already moving in.

I’ve been a journalist, a blogger, a writer for over a decade. And somewhere along the way I built a coaching and education business on top of all of that and started treating the writing as the marketing instead of the product.

The conference cracked that open. What if Success with Soul is actually a hybrid education and media company? What if the Whole Soul List is a real revenue stream, with sponsorships and brand partnerships layered on top of everything that already works?

The $14,763 in sponsored content over the trailing 12 months suggests there’s something real here. A media kit, a $100k/year sponsorship goal, brand partnerships built around the existing audience — those aren’t a pivot. They’re an expansion.

None of this is upending the business. It’s making it more itself.

What Happened With the Ads

March had two completely different ad experiments running simultaneously. Worth separating them.

The JV Webinar (The Quiet Win)

The JV webinar with Nat Gingrich in early March produced five MBA sales — roughly $7,500 in revenue, give or take, depending on how the payment plans complete.

Someone else’s warm audience, someone else’s promotion, my offer.

JV partnerships are wildly underused leverage in this industry. I’m scheduling more of them in Q2.

The Live Webinar (The Loud Lesson)

The paid-ads live webinar on March 24 is a different story, and I’m going to tell it honestly.

496 people registered. I spent $845 total. $1.70 CPL, which is genuinely strong (industry benchmarks for cold-traffic webinar registrations run $3–8). My landing page converted at 55%.

By the ad metrics, the campaign did exactly what it was supposed to do.

40 people showed up live. That’s an 8.3% attendance rate, versus the 15–25% industry average for cold traffic. Of those, 18–20 stayed for 60+ minutes, and 15–17 made it through the full pitch and Q&A.

The first sale came Wednesday, on a payment plan. I’d technically made back the ad spend. Barely.

The week of the webinar was my lowest revenue week on record. $4,136.

What the Creative Told Me

The ad creative that worked, for what it’s worth: the “Show me the receipts” copy angle drove 219 of my 496 leads at $1.45 CPL — 44% of all leads from one hook.

Proof and transparency framing, which tracks exactly with what this brand is built on.

The contrarian angle (“UNPOPULAR OPINION: 2026 isn’t harder”) came second. The dream-state angle (“there’s a version of your business where daily sales happen automatically”) worked but cost more per lead.

Why I’m Already Done

Here’s the honest part I wrote in the WITL diary: “I spent weeks building something I hated from the first day I started building it.”

There was a low-grade “I hate this” running in the background from day one, and I kept dismissing it because I hadn’t tried it yet. But there’s a difference between discomfort and misalignment, and I’ve learned — slowly, expensively — to tell them apart.

The operational reality of running a live webinar every month is genuinely incompatible with how I work.

Every single time: clone the email sequence, rewrite it, set up new ads, turn them on, run the webinar, turn them off, archive. It’s never just running in the background.

And I sell evergreen. I sell systems that work while you sleep. The incongruence was loud.

I’m Not Pivoting. I’m Returning.

I’m switching to an evergreen webinar funnel. Except when I went to write that down, I caught myself.

I’m not pivoting. I’m returning.

In March 2025, exactly a year ago, I already built and briefly ran a cold-traffic evergreen webinar for MBA. It didn’t convert, but I also used a years-old recording, never tweaked it, and killed it after a few weeks because the challenge ads were popping off.

That’s not a test. That’s a cursory glance.

This time I’m building it properly: registrants pick a time to watch (not just land on a replay page), and the entire email sequence gets written from scratch for someone who doesn’t know me yet.

My biggest revenue year came from an evergreen webinar funnel. I’m returning to what I know works.

How I Grow My Email List Without Social Media

One important thing I want to call out here:

This is industry-wide: open rates are dropping across the board as Gmail, Apple Mail, and others roll out AI inbox categorization features that route promotional emails differently and change how open tracking registers.

A 40–50% open rate is still roughly double the industry average of ~21%. But it is 5 to 10% lower than my normal open rates without anything else changing.

But the trend matters. I’m rewriting the welcome sequence (it has been on my list since January, which is genuinely embarrassing), and I’m in the middle of evaluating whether to migrate to Beehiiv or Kit as the media side of the business takes shape.

The number I actually care about: $3.27 in real monthly revenue per active subscriber. That’s the lever.

Key Takeaways From a Quiet Evergreen Business

What’s Working: Passive Income

Building an evergreen online business without social media means having the right systems running underneath everything else, so revenue doesn’t stop when you do.

Here’s what’s actually driving the numbers — and notice that none of these are individual offers. They’re strategies.

• The Mindful Business Academy as the bundle play. Every course, GPT, template, and digital product I sell, in one place at a fraction of the individual prices. It converts because it’s structurally easy to say yes to and structurally easy for affiliates and JV partners to promote. The $19,838 in March mostly came from MBA upsells stacked across every other checkout funnel — that strategy compounds month over month, especially with payment plans.
• Recurring revenue as the floor, not the ceiling. $8,925.50 in March from The Room, the $1K/Day Experiment, and Launch Lab combined. Knowing what month one’s worst-case scenario looks like before it starts changes how every other decision gets made.
• The evergreen funnel ecosystem. Tripwires, bumps, and upsells built into every free offer. Welcome sequences that present aligned offers automatically. SEO content that ranks and converts in the background. This is the architecture that makes “$1,211/day average while at a mastermind retreat” not actively working possible.
• Affiliate income as compounding passive revenue. $3,688 in March from recommending tools I genuinely use, with zero active promotion required. I teach this strategy inside MBA — it’s one of the most underrated income streams for service-based businesses.
• AI-powered systems as leverage multipliers. March was the month I migrated essentially my entire business workflow into Claude. Email triage, content drafting, debrief automation, data analysis, financial reporting. None of it shows up in March’s P&L. All of it shows up across the next 12 months in recovered contractor hours and faster output. Scale with AI is included in MBA.

April 2026 Goals

• Build the evergreen webinar funnel properly — registrants pick a time to watch, email sequence written from scratch for cold traffic
• Actually finish the welcome sequence rewrite (three months, Kate)
• Make the Beehiiv vs. Kit decision and start the migration
• Net-positive subscriber growth — flip the -418
• Pitch 10+ brands for the newsletter sponsorship program
• Get ads running consistently (they’ve been on my to-do list for 18 months — one dedicated hour is apparently all it takes)

What This Means for You

If You Want to Watch This in Real Time

If March landed somewhere — the idea that you could run a failed webinar experiment, have your lowest revenue week on record, and still close the month at $37,544 — 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 (including the parts that don’t work), the monthly income reports with the real numbers, live Office Hours, and a front-row seat to what it actually looks like to build toward $1k/day in profit without social media.

Not the curated version. The version where I catch myself mid-pivot and realize I’m returning to something I abandoned a year ago.

The Bottom Line

March 2026 was $37,544 in revenue on a 64% profit margin.

My lowest revenue week of the year happened inside it — the week I ran a webinar for 496 cold leads and made almost nothing from it. The month didn’t care.

The trailing 12 months landed at $406,509 with a 60.1% adjusted profit margin. The $500K annual goal requires $41,667/month; March was $37,544 and February was $31,341.

The math is closing.

I spent March at a conference that made my business more clear instead of less, deep in an infrastructure overhaul that won’t show up in any P&L for six months, and running an experiment I hated building from day one. The evergreen systems didn’t care about any of it.

They just kept making money while I figured out I was returning, not pivoting.

There’s a difference. Knowing it is probably worth something.

January’s resting heart rate report · February’s grief issue

Are you building an evergreen online business? Drop a comment with what’s working — or what keeps showing up unchecked on your to-do list. I read every one.

FAQs: Evergreen Online Business