236: $1M Experiment I’m Running in Public

Foreign welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast your go to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks, constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today. Hi there Destiny here. Welcome back to the Creators MBA Podcast. And this podcast is all about helping you as a digital product creator or coach or maybe even a service provider, scale your business using rents and and repeat systems, AI and strategies that create predictable, consistent revenue. And today I'm going to be pulling back the curtain on something just a little different. Now this isn't a framework or even a polished case study. What I'm going to be talking about today is a live experiment that I am doing and I'm calling it the one million Hobby School Experiment where I am going behind the scenes and the question that I am exploring is very simple. What does it take to scale hobby school to $1 million brand that I can sell? And instead of just telling you the story when it's all done, I am inviting you to come along for the journey in real time. And the place that I'm going to be doing the majority of this on is a paid newsletter in Substack. And you may be asking Destiny, why Substack? So I want to explain a little bit more about why I decided to do this experiment on Substack. I would say the past year or so I have been paying attention to how creators are using substack and mostly the reason why I started digging into this is I started getting questions from my members in the newsletter Profit Club. And when I really started digging into Substack, I felt like it was something different. And from my perspective looking in, I felt like it was part social media, part newsletter. It has this type of built in discovery which means new readers can actually find you without you having to battle those algorithms that you might have to battle if you are on like Instagram or TikTok. And so first I was just a little bit curious and I thought, you know what, I'm going to test it out, see what the platform is like and then bring my findings back to all of the members in the news inside of the newsletter Profit Club. And that's what the Profit Club is about, right? So making newsletters profitable. And really I want to make sure that I'm helping people keep ahead of of what's working now. But the more I sat with it and started Tinkering with things, the more I realized that Substack was actually the perfect place to run my experiment. So I'm really doing two experiments here. I'm doing an experiment and testing out Substack, but I'm also doing my hobby school experiment and using the paid newsletter feature in Substack to deliver it. And I really wanted to go down this path because I felt like this was a really good place to test this out on and really document all of this and what I'm doing in hobby school in real time. And that was exactly what the this project needed. So let me tell you a little bit more about this 1 million hobby school vision that I have. So you may be asking like, what exactly is the experiment? What's included in this experiment? Hobby school is my brand that is dedicated in helping people turn their creative passions, like their hobbies, into life changing journeys. So it's a mix of online learning summits and events that we do. We also have a membership there and we have digital products too that are designed for that creative community. And I've had this kind of bigger vision in mind for some time now in that I wanted to set hobby school up to scale into this million dollar business that I could sell at some point in the future. I really wanted to put a number in a stake in the ground for me and I wanted to make it large enough to really challenge myself to think bigger. Also, I felt like this number represented enough impact, enough reach, and really trying to get hobby school enough traction so that it was touching thousands of people across the world. So instead of hiding the journey and only sharing bits and pieces, or maybe even the shiny winds at the end, I wanted to document it in real time. Because that's what this 1 million hobby school experiment is all about is part growth lab, part diary where I take you behind the scenes and part transparency project. And really it's an experiment too for me to make myself accountable, right? To make sure that I am doing what I need to be doing. And when you grow something in public, you're forced to keep going. You're forced to make those big decisions. And that's what I wanted for myself. So let me tell you or walk you through what you can expect bet inside of this substack newsletter. So every week I'm going to share a couple of things, right? We have a free portion of the Substack newsletter, but there's also a paid portion of it. So I'm going to be sharing some of the strategies that we are testing to grow hobby school and Some of these strategies I've actually never done before. So that is going to be a huge experiment for me. I'm going to share what's working and what's flopping. I'm going to also cover where I'm doubling down and where I'm pivoting. Because there's definitely things that I haven't done before that I'm going to go and test and I'm going to be giving you the real behind the scenes details that most people never see see. And I do want to stress that this is not a polished version. It is not going to be a step by step framework or here's the final framework or how you do something like this. It is raw, it's just a work in progress and it's messy. And I think that's really the point here because here's what I know. When you only see the highlight reels, it can be discouraging. It looks like everybody else is winning and you are only one that's in the trenches trying to figure things out. But when you get to see what I'm going to call like this messy middle, which is the experiments, the mistakes, the pivots, you realize that actually what business growth looks like and that's the ups and the downs and the hills and the valleys. And I think that's why this experiment is so very powerful. And I want you to feel like an insider, like you're part of this founding circle watching hobby school scale in real time. And I also want to bring the lessons that I have learned so that you can apply it to your own business along the way. So let me talk you through what this means for you as a Creators MBA Podcast listener. If you are not on my Creators MBA newsletter, definitely get on that. I share tons of valuable resources about anything related to growing your digital product business AI strategies. I take you, I also take you behind the scenes of a lot of things there also. But if you subscribe to the paid substacks, you are essentially getting access to a living case study. You are going to see the play byplay of how I'm applying these growth systems that I'm teaching you in the Creators MBA podcast and newsletters. All the AI tools that I use in these rinse and repeat strategies to scale hobby school. And then here on the podcast, I'm going to help you connect the dots, I'm going to zoom out, I'm going to share insights and I'm going to translate what those experiments mean for your business. And of course, all of my memberships play into this too. In the newsletter Profit Club, I'm going to bring those tactical key takeaways and how these experiments translate into strategies for monetizing your newsletter. In the Creators MBA Lab, I bring you a lot behind the scenes in terms of what we cover there and what's working and what's not working. So the sub stack isn't replacing anything. It's more kind of this secret lab, if you would, where I'm running this experiment and I'm going to feed those lessons back into everything that I'm teaching elsewhere. So here's my invitation to you. If you ever wanted to see a business scale in real time, if you've ever wanted to keep peek behind the curtain and watch not just the winds but the pivots, the what we were thinking type moments, which I have a lot of those and also the breakthroughs, here's your chance. I want you to join me inside the 1 million hobby school experiment behind the scenes on Substack. You are going to get the uncut, unfilter play by play of what it actually really looks like to scale hobby school towards 1 million. Like I said, I don't know exactly how this is going to play out, but that's the experiment. I also know that's what makes it worth following. So I'm going to put the links for my Substack newsletter and platform in the podcast Show Notes. I'm going to give you the links for the free and the paid version and I would love for you to come along and be a part of the journey. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Creators MBA Podcast and I hope I'll see you inside of the 1 million hobby school experiment. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.