279: I Bought a Domain on Vacation and Built a Second Company

Most people know me as the Creator's MBA person. A lot of them have no idea I run a whole second company in a niche I have zero personal interest in.

In this episode Kate Kordsmeier interviews me about HobbyScool, the B2C brand I started after finding a domain name on a generator while I was on vacation. We get into why I picked a market I am not a customer of, what the first summit actually earned, how the funnel is built, and why I knew from day one that I would sell this business.

In This Episode

• Why I built a craft business without being remotely crafty
• The two business models I tried before summits worked
• What a free virtual summit actually is, and how the VIP pass monetizes it
• What speakers get out of it when nobody is paying them to show up
• Why I made sure the business was never about me

Resources mentioned

• The B2C brand we spend the episode on: HobbyScool
• Kate Kordsmeier's business: Success with Soul
• Find your weakest flywheel stage: The Creator Growth Scorecard

If you listened to this and you are not sure which part of your own business is the one holding everything else back, the scorecard will tell you in about five minutes.

Take the scorecard →

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Episode Transcript

00:00Thank you so much for joining me. I am excited to have this conversation today. I have Kate here, who is a dear friend of mine. She is going to be chatting with me about HobbyScool, the origin, how it got started, all of that good stuff. But before we get into it, Kate, can you tell the audience who you are and how you help people?

Yes. I am Kate Kordsmeier. I am a great friend of Destini's, and I am so lucky to call her a friend. I am the founder of Success with Soul, a brand designed to help people grow their businesses without social media, without burning out, and without a huge team. I am excited to talk about this because most people know you as the Creator's MBA person, and a lot of them have no idea that you actually run a whole second company. So tell us, Destini, what is HobbyScool? Who is it for?

01:00HobbyScool is my B2C brand, and it is a totally separate company. Totally separate email list, totally separate website, totally separate LLC. As of this morning I set up a new LLC for it. In HobbyScool we do online learning virtual summits every single month in all types of hobbies. Just this past week I did our 2027 schedule.

It is August. We are recording this in August of 2026, and I have everything planned out until December of 2027. We have all types of events coming up in all types of hobbies. One of the new ones for 2027 is Memory Keepers, which is all about scrapbooking and everything along those lines. Just a wide variety.

02:00What is really interesting about this is that you started this B2C brand, and when I first met you I was like, oh wow, so you are super crafty. And you were like, no, not at all. So this is something people might not even think about, because we are all trying to monetize a passion and turn what we love into a business. There is not necessarily anything wrong with that, but you took the opposite approach here. Can you tell us about that?

It is funny that you ask, because you are right. I am not crafty. I do not do any of these hobbies we are talking about. I have played tennis in the past and I like pickleball, but in terms of all these crafty things, I do not do any of it. I am a marketer. I am a business person. How I came across this brand is that we were down on vacation in WaterColor and I was on one of those domain name generators.

03:00This was a few years ago, before AI. I was on one of those websites that come up with business names, and I came across this really cool name, HobbyScool, without the h. Sometimes people in that brand ask, did you spell it right? I say yes, I spelled it right. It is HobbyScool without the h.

I thought, I really think I can turn this into something. I think I can monetize this. So I bought the domain name and I did not do anything with it immediately. I was thinking about how to monetize it. What should I do here? I thought about different things, like a marketplace where people could upload their hobby workshops, we would sell them and both take a commission. I decided I did not want to do that.

04:00I started with paid bundles, because that was a business model I had seen another business doing. I did two of those. We made revenue from them, but they were not growing my audience and my email list the way I wanted. Then I thought, maybe I will do virtual summits. I had done online learning virtual summits in my B2B brand and they had been successful, so I knew how to do this. Let me test it out. One of the first ones was in the home gardening niche, and it did well.

05:00I thought, okay, I am onto something. Then I did more. I did the Art of Expression and the Art of Handmade. I also did one in the homeschooling, or more back to school, niche that did not do as well. I tested different ones and I realized that my particular audience really does love these crafting things. That was a hot niche, and I decided to capitalize on it. That is how we got started. And now, bringing you to August of 2026 and moving into 2027, we do one every single month.

I want to get to that, because running an event every single month is no joke. But I want to back up for a minute first. I am personally curious, what made you even consider the crafting and hobby world given that you were not personally interested in it?

I stumbled upon it, quite frankly. I stumbled upon it from the perspective that this was a hot niche. People were interested in it. People had money to invest in it. People had time to invest in it. It was really something I stumbled upon, Kate. I did not do any market research. I literally went out there and started launching events to test what worked.

06:00I think it was that action that helped me stumble upon something hot.

Which is, again, something so many people get wrong. They think they have to have all this clarity before they take action. They have to know all the answers and have guarantees and certainty, and that is just not how any of this works. You have to go out there and throw spaghetti at the wall and test and experiment and play and figure out what works. I love that you did that. So take us back to the very first summit. How did you actually pull it off? Did anybody show up? Did you make any money off the first one?

07:00We did make money, and that was my aha that this business model works for me. It grew our email list, which was important, because I had a brand new Kit account and email list and I knew I wanted to grow it. We all know how important it is to have an email list. So I knew I wanted to grow that list, and this event also allowed me to make money at the same time. It was those two things I was focused on, the email list growth and the monetization. Once I did that one event and a few more after it, I knew this event model was something I could scale, which is what I was looking for.

08:00And so now HobbyScool runs pretty exclusively on free virtual summits. For someone who has never run one, can you explain what a virtual summit even is?

A free virtual summit is where we come together for three days in a month and do what I am going to call live workshops. They are not actually live, but they become live for somebody who is registered. So somebody registers for the event and it runs Tuesday through Thursday. We will generally have ten workshops every single day that they can watch for free, and they can watch them for free for 24 hours. On day one, Tuesday, the day one workshops go live and they can watch them for free. Then day two and day three.

How we monetize this is through the VIP pass. In the VIP pass people get lifetime access to those workshops, so they can watch at any time, and we also include premium speaker bonuses. The speakers donate those premium bonuses, which gives them additional ways to grow their email list and monetize on the back end.

09:00That is what is included in the VIP pass, and we have a full funnel set up. As I have worked on this over the years I have built a pretty strong funnel for these events. We have an order bump, generally around $7 to $9. We have an upsell, which is generally the workshops from the previous year's event if we ran it. And then we have our Craft and Create Club, which is our membership, so we have the annual offer there at $70. If somebody says no to that, we have a downsell to the monthly. That is how our funnel is set up.

10:00It is so smart, and you have it down to a science now. One thought for anybody listening who is still struggling to connect the dots. Your free summit is basically your lead magnet, and the VIP pass is like the tripwire on that lead magnet. Then you have a funnel on the end of it. So it is not actually that different a strategy from what most people are used to. It is just that the summit is the lead magnet, and that is much more than delivering a PDF to somebody. I think it converts a lot better than delivering a PDF, too.

It converts very well. Generally our registration pages, especially the organic one where we are driving traffic or the speakers are driving traffic, convert over 60%. When you compare that to other types of lead magnets, you can see that is a very powerful lead magnet.

11:00Definitely. What is the role of speakers? Why do other creators keep saying yes to being part of your summits? Are you paying them, or what is in it for them?

That is a good question. We have speakers who come back to multiple events every year. I will mention the Art of Handmade Summit, because we have that one coming up. They say, every single year I want to participate in that. We have had speakers who have been speaking at that one for four years, because we have been running it for a good amount of time. They get 50% commission on the VIP pass, the order bump, and the first upsell. They get 30% on the membership, and membership can be recurring, so they get 30% on that and 50% on everything else.

12:00The other thing we do is place a really strong emphasis on them growing their email list. In the event we had in July, somebody who is also in one of my paid programs in Creator's MBA participated. She told me she had never had such growth in her email list as she had in that event. She said she had been doing summits and bundles for several years and she could not believe it. They also upgraded to her tripwire. She said it was an amazing time. That is what we do. We put a lot of emphasis on people growing their email list and helping them convert.

13:00So what is in it for them. They are not necessarily getting paid to speak at the summit, but they are getting free email leads onto their list, sometimes hundreds of free leads that they would otherwise have had to grow slowly and organically on their own, or pay Meta to run ads for. I think it is a no-brainer for a lot of people.

And we do have affiliates who can make two grand from an event, so they can earn a lot. Our products convert very well. A lot of it depends on their audience and how they have trained their audience.

Right. If I am a speaker at one of your events and I send my email list to your free event and they upgrade to the VIP pass, or the membership and those things on the back end, I am getting a commission on all of that too.

That is right. It is a great collaboration opportunity.

14:00You answered this a little already, but I am curious if you want to say more about how this model fits into your Creator Growth Flywheel.

In HobbyScool, the Creator Growth Flywheel. For those of you listening who are not familiar with it, it is my signature framework for how I set up and grow these digital product businesses. We have the attract stage, the engage stage, the nurture stage, retain, and advocacy. I will walk through all of them quickly. The attract stage is people coming into the event for HobbyScool. There are different ways they can do that. We promote to our own email list, the speakers and affiliates promote to their audiences, and we run paid ads.

That is the attract stage. The engage stage is when they sign up for the event, and then we have the tripwire, the VIP pass offer, on the back end of that. The nurture stage is our weekly newsletter and the content we publish.

15:00Retain is our membership. We also have a Shopify store where people go in during these events and purchase. I do not do a lot of promotion there and we still get sales. And then we have the advocacy stage, which is people promoting our event. A lot of times people who attend will promote, the affiliates will promote, and we gather a lot of testimonials. In the last event we had in July, we got probably 30 plus testimonials from attendees. That is pretty normal for us, so we are getting tons of testimonials we can use going forward.

For a lot of people who host these kinds of events, getting the attention is the easy part, because you have all your affiliates and speakers sending their sometimes really large email lists to you. But then it can leak right back out.

16:00So say a little more about how the flywheel keeps people in, instead of letting them fall out the bottom like a traditional funnel might.

We keep them in because we are doing these events every single month. At the end of the event we say, here is what is coming up, here is what you do not want to miss. That keeps them in our world, so they are not thinking, well, she is not doing another event for four months. We start promoting almost immediately. Our promo schedule starts three weeks before the event. You are going to start getting content that promotes the event coming up. Every single week we are promoting that event, then we have the event, and then we might be promoting what we are doing in our Craft and Create Club, but we are also starting to promote what is coming up in the next event. So we are keeping people in our world constantly.

17:00I have two follow-up questions before we wrap up. One is, this sounds like a lot of work. How did you systematize this? I know this could be a whole multi-hour conversation, but give us the high level of how you turned it into such a scientific system that you can repeat it so easily.

It is a good question, and it is the question everybody always asks me. Wow, you do this every single month? Well, yes we do, but we have a very systemized process. We have a systemized process for finding speakers, for onboarding speakers, for all of our marketing, and for putting together all of the information for our speakers and affiliates. All of that is systemized. And we use AI where we can and where it makes sense. Everything is a rinse and repeat process.

18:00And you have a team that basically runs all of these for you. I know we are going to be talking about that in a future episode, about how you have been able not only to systematize this, but to step out of it and let your team run it.

I generally only spend around five hours a week in HobbyScool. I definitely have it systematized. I have somebody who works on recruiting speakers. I have somebody who works on the customer support side. And I have somebody who works on onboarding speakers and all the marketing information and content. What I really try to focus on is the more strategic side, here is where we are going. For instance, putting together the 2027 event schedule.

19:00And looking at what I need to do to get this business ready to sell, which is something I have also been working on. Even from the beginning, I knew with HobbyScool that I was going to sell it one day. That was something I knew from the start. So I need to make sure that I am not a central feature here. I need to make everything about the speakers and the audience. That is another reason we put so much emphasis on the speakers, because this is really about them and what they are bringing to the table and to the attendees.

It is such a brilliant business model. I know there are lots of people who are into the idea of faceless marketing, and that is not what this is, but it solves that same problem for people who say, I do not want to be the center of attention, I do not want to be the face of this business, I do not want to have to show up for everything. It is a really cool model.

20:00And you started to answer my second question from before, which was, this sounds like a lot of work. Why build a second company at all? You already had Creator's MBA. What does HobbyScool give you that it does not?

I really just did it to challenge myself, if that makes sense.

That is Destini in a nutshell, y'all. Destini is like, I do not need to do any of these things, but I am smart and I need to use my brain.

It sounds awful, right? It sounds like, why in the world would you do this? But I just needed a challenge. I needed the intellectual stimulation, and I thought, I think I can do this.

It does not sound awful at all. It is very inspiring, and it goes to show how smart you are, and that this has all been such a strategic thing from the very beginning.

21:00How different is the HobbyScool audience from Creator's MBA? They are two completely different audiences, right?

Now, I will say that a lot of the speakers in HobbyScool have come over to be clients of mine in Creator's MBA. I think that is a natural transition for them, because they are interested in how I have built HobbyScool and they want to do something similar with their own business. But in terms of the end user for HobbyScool, it is not the same.

All right, I think we are coming up on the end here. If someone listening teaches one thing and wants to build a real audience around it, what is the first move you would tell them to make?

Number one, start your email list. Get that up and running. Get that lead magnet up and running. And then go start demonstrating your expertise. I think virtual summits are a great way to do that, because people see you, especially if you are in the crafty field.

22:00They can actually see what you are demonstrating. They can get to know you. They can see if they like your teaching style, and that is one of the fastest ways to grow your audience, especially in these crafting niches. You want people to see you and get a feel for how you teach, and you can do that by teaching at a virtual summit.

Definitely. For everyone listening, you will have to start pestering Destini the way I do to start teaching her virtual summit model to those of us in the Creator's MBA audience, because she really does have it down to a science, and so many people could benefit from getting your system installed in their business.

Well, thank you, Kate. I am happy to. I am an open book, so any questions anybody has. I will put all the links in the show notes for HobbyScool and how it all runs. I have written a lot of articles and behind the scenes pieces, so everybody can go check those out, and I will put those links in the show notes.

All right. Thanks, Destini.

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