162: From Domain Name Purchase to Over $100K in Revenue and 16K Email Subscribers (in less than two years)
In this episode, I'll dive into my personal journey of turning a domain name purchase (literally on a whim!) into a thriving digital product business with over 16,000 email subscribers and $100,000 in revenue in less than two years.
I'll walk you through the strategies that worked for me, the lessons learned, and the key takeaways that can help you build a successful digital product business. If you're intrigued by the idea of generating consistent revenue from digital products without being tied to the desk, constantly live launching, or worrying about social media algorithms, then you don't want to miss this episode.
Mentioned In This Episode:
Freedom Formula: In this private podcast series, learn that it's possible to generate consistent revenue from a digital product business without the need to be glued to your desk, constantly live launching, or worrying about social media algorithms. Sign up here.
How Destini Copp Grew a Digital Product Business to 16K Subscribers & $100K in Less Than Two Years
In this podcast episode, Dr. Destini Copp, a college marketing professor turned online entrepreneur, offers invaluable insights into her journey of turning a domain name that was purchased on a whim into a thriving digital product business. Her brand, HobbyScool, has amassed over 16,000 email subscribers and generated more than $100,000 in revenue in less than two years. Dr. Copp shares her strategies, successes, and challenges that led to the rapid growth of her digital product business, offering valuable lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs and digital product creators.
From Whim to Thriving Business: The Birth of HobbyScool
Destini recounts the purchase of the domain name, hobbyscool.com, during a Spring break vacation in April 2021. Although initially unsure about the business model, her decision to venture into paid bundles and subsequently virtual summits for HobbyScool exemplifies her approach to testing and evolving her strategies based on audience response and data analytics.
Lessons Learned: Strategies That Led to Success
1. The Power of Collaborations: Destini acknowledges the pivotal role of collaborations, particularly with speakers who not only promoted HobbyScool's events but also reaped the benefits of lead generation and affiliate commissions.
2. Listening to Your Audience and Pivoting Fast: By attentively tracking audience behavior and promptly adjusting strategies based on data, she effectively fine-tuned HobbyScool's offerings to resonate with her target market's interests.
3. Email List Growth and Consistency in Marketing: Destini emphasizes the significance of building and nurturing an email list while maintaining consistency in marketing efforts to stay at the top of customers' minds.
4. Community Building: HobbyScool's thriving community, evidenced by active participation in events and the Facebook group, underscores the impact of community-centric branding and customer loyalty.
Monetization and Future Plans
Destini narrows down her 2024 strategic initiatives, including Shopify store expansion, a focus on Pinterest and SEO for organic reach, affiliate programs, and exploring additional monetization opportunities through sponsorships.
Actionable Tips for Growing a Digital Product Business
Destini offers several actionable tips for digital product business owners:
- Emphasize Email List Growth: Prioritize building a robust email list through visibility initiatives like speaking in events, guest podcasting, and participating in bundles.
- Data-Driven Decision-Making: Continuously analyze data to tweak strategies and offerings to resonate with your audience's preferences and purchasing behavior.
- Nurture Community: Foster a thriving community around your brand through engaging events, active participation, and community-centric initiatives to drive customer loyalty and brand advocacy.
Takeaway and Invitation to Explore Further
Destini’s journey with HobbyScool serves as an inspirational message for digital product entrepreneurs, demonstrating the potential for exponential growth and revenue in a relatively short timeframe. Listeners are encouraged to delve deeper into her strategies and insights by signing up for her private podcast feed, the Freedom Formula, for a more comprehensive understanding of setting up flexible and successful digital product businesses where you’re not glued to your desk, constantly live launching, or worried about the social media algorithm.
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Transcript:
Dr. Destini Copp [00:00:02]:
Hey there. Destiny here. And in this podcast episode, I want to walk you through how I purchased a domain name on a whim and turned it into a thriving digital product business in less than 2 years with over 16,000 email subscribers and over a 100,000 in revenue. So I wanna take this opportunity and walk you through the strategies that worked for me, and I'm also gonna talk about some that didn't work so you know the exact steps I took to grow this brand. Now for those of you who don't know me or maybe you're new to turning in to this podcast, my name is doctor Destiny Kopp, and I'm a college marketing professor turned online entrepreneur. And you know I'm the host of the Creators MBA podcast because you're listening to it now. And my superpower is helping business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desk, constantly live launching, or worrying about social media. Now I have 3 different digital product brands that I own and manage.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:01:20]:
And one of them is our hello content dot shop, and that is my Shopify store where we have low cost digital products that online business owners can use in their marketing. They can use them in their online courses, in their memberships. I have my personal brand, which is destinykop.com, where I offer 1 on 1 coaching services to digital product business owners like you. And then I have my HobbyScool brand, and that's the brand that I'm gonna be talking about today in a little bit more detail. Now today, I'm gonna be talking about my story and the journey that I have gone through in building this HobbyScool brand. But before I get into all of that, I have a question for you. Now when you hear the term passive income or the promise of making money while you sleep, I want you to think about what does that mean to you. And I think that many people, they take these phrases at face value or they buy into the hype without fully understanding what it requires to build these type of businesses.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:02:39]:
I know that I did. Right? I didn't understand how much would be involved into taking one of these digital product brands and growing them. So what happens is people dive in to creating these digital products like online courses. They think it's going to be easy. Right? They're gonna create it once, and they're gonna sell it over and over and over again because that's what they were told. Right? That's what I was told. That's what I thought was gonna happen. But when you really dig into it and you kinda pull back the layers, you find out that there's a very different reality out there.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:03:19]:
And I have noticed that people really fall into one of 2 categories. And the first category is they might struggle to gain traction selling their digital products. And there's they sit back and they wonder, you know, what am I missing? While others seem to thrive doing this. Right? They seem to be making a lot of money doing this. Or they follow to this category where they are constantly doing live launches to keep that revenue flowing. So their days are packed with Zoom calls. They might be managing memberships. They might be managing group coaching programs with online courses, or they might be dealing with the demands of a huge Facebook group.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:04:04]:
And it really becomes that endless cycle of marketing, posting on social media, worrying about the algorithm, and turns in what they thought was gonna be a passion project and something that they love into a demanding 60 or more hour work week, even maybe even working weekends. So in both of these situation, their dream of that flexible, fulfilling business goes away, and they start thinking in my mind. Right? They start thinking, you know what? That 9 to 5 traditional job is starting to look better every single day. Well, in this episode, I want to tell you about a different story, and I want to show you that it's possible to build a flexible, successful digital product business without any of these headaches that I just described. And I can tell you that I am nothing special. In fact, I'm probably older than most of you who are listening to this. I definitely have active kids at home. I have one in middle school, one in high school and they both play travel baseball all year round so we are super super busy as a family.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:05:24]:
So I want to go in and tell you about my journey in growing this brand called HobbyScool. And I will tell you that I literally purchased this domain name on a whim. So what happened was and I'll tell you exactly where I was sitting and exactly where I was. We were on vacation in Watercolor,Florida. This was in April of 2021. So we were actually on spring break in April of 2021. And my family, they were still sleeping. I had gotten my coffee.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:06:00]:
I was sitting at the breakfast table with the rental that we had. And I was just, you know, going around kinda searching on websites. And at that point in time, this is way back before chat gbt or any of that was out there. I was on a domain name generator website or a business name generator website called Namelix. So name lix.com. I think it it might even still be out there. And I was just playing around with it. And I was like, you know what? I'm interested in hobbies, and I'm wondering if there's any cool names out there related to that that I could do something with.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:06:35]:
So I came up, and it gave me this name, HobbyScool and school without an h. So hobbiesc0ol.com, and it was a dot com. And I thought, you know, that's perfect. That's exactly what I'm looking for. I think I can do something with this. So I purchased it then. I went ahead and purchased it. So I had the domain name.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:06:55]:
I didn't do anything with it in the beginning because I kinda sat on it. I was like, I'm not sure what business model I wanna do for this. I had some things in my mind that I was thinking about. I was thinking about my audience. I'm like, you know, a lot of them have courses or memberships. Maybe I could do some type of marketplace or something like that where, you know, I have their courses in this marketplace and I help sell them. So I was kinda playing around. I'm like, maybe I could do something like that.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:07:24]:
But then I decided, you know what? I'm gonna try launching this brand with a paid bundle. So I put together the website. I went on the way back machine so I could tell you exactly what I had on this website. And one of the, in the hero section of this website, I had the best digital resources bundled into one learning box so you can master your next big thing. So that was my thought process at that point in time. We're gonna do paid bundles. We were gonna sell them. That was gonna be our revenue stream.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:07:55]:
We're also gonna use that to grow our list. So when people, you know, purchase the paid bundle, that will, you know, like I said, will grow our e our audience in our email list. And it did fine. We had some really great contributors for this paid bundle, but it really wasn't giving me the type of revenue growth and the audience growth that I was looking for at that point in time. We ended up doing 2 paid bundles and kinda tested it out because, you know, in marketing and if you've been around me for a while, you know, in marketing, I always say try something, see if it works for you. I'm not against paid bundles. It just wasn't giving me the kind of results that I want at that point in time. And then I thought, you know what? I'm going to look at doing a virtual summit for HobbyScool.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:08:45]:
Because I had ran virtual summits in my personal brand, the destiny copot dotcom brand. I had run several of them by that time. So I knew how to run an awesome virtual summit. I said, you know what? I think this would be a good business model for HobbyScool And that's when we ran our first online virtual summit. We called it the HobbyScool Summit Home Garden and Cooking Edition, and we did that in July of 20 22, and it was a huge hit. We've actually ran that summit, 2 other times since then. We're actually gonna be running it again next week.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:09:23]:
We've changed the name of it. It's called the Harvest to Table Summit. But it has been, you know, one of our our big hit summits that we've been doing for this brand. And it really gave me the kinda results or gave us the kinda results that we were looking for. So not only were we able to monetize and get you know, bring in revenue from the VIP past sales, I don't even think at that point in time we had any order bumps. Maybe we did. I don't remember exactly. But, you know, now we have order bumps and we have upsells that are in that funnel so we can, you know, maximize the revenue coming in.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:09:59]:
But, at that point in time, it gave you know, we had the revenue coming in from the VIP past sales and any, you know, anything else that was in that funnel, but it also gave us the audience growth. So we started growing our list. So in the rest of 2022 and in 2023, we continue to test what our audience was interested in. Now some of our events were big hits, others not so much. So we did one that was in, like, the parenting type niche. It was around in August when people were going back to school. So we did, like, a back to school event. We had some homeschooling stuff in there.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:10:40]:
And it, you know, it it did fine, but it just wasn't one of our big hits. An example of one of our big hits was our art of Expression Summit, where we, you know, brought in experts that were teaching about art journaling or calligraphy or bullet journaling or may even like painting and and stuff like that. So that was one of our our big, big hits, and we've done some others like that. We had a Art of Handmade Summits where people came in and, you know, taught people how to do handmade items. That was another one of our our big hits there. So we continue to test and refine that. And then in January of 2024, so less than 2 years than when we ran our first bundle, we have over 16,000 email subscribers, and we've had over a 100,000 in revenue. I think it's been about 110 in revenue.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:11:37]:
So that has been our journey there. So I wanna talk a little bit about the lessons that I have learned over the past 2 years in, you know, basically taking a domain name that I purchased on a whim and turn it into this digital product brand. And the first thing I would say is that there is power in collaborations. This would not have been possible without our partners, mainly our speakers. They have been absolutely fantastic in promoting our events, and, of course, we've rewarded them. Right? They're getting a lot of leads by speaking at our events, and we also pay on 50% affiliate commission. The other thing I would say is listen to your audience and be willing to pivot fast. We look at all of our data.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:12:25]:
So paying attention to that data, knowing what's working, what's not working, listening to your audience. We look at our data after every single event. We look and see, you know, what did the registration page convert at? What did the VIP pass convert at? What did the order bump convert at? How about the upsells? You know, how did our speakers promote? How did our affiliates promote? How much money did they make? You know, we get feedback from the attendees. So we do surveys there. We get, feedback and do surveys with the speakers to see if it was worthwhile for them to participate in the event. We do a lot of promotion of our speakers in these events to make sure that the you know, participating in that event is worthwhile to them. So pay attention to all of that data. The other thing I've learned is that email list growth is so very important, but also consistency in your marketing.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:13:19]:
So making sure that you're staying on top of mind with your, you know, your email subscribers once they're on your list. And, also, community is a huge part of building a brand that your customers love. We have people in our HobbyScool Summits who attend every single event that we have, and they purchase our VIP pass for every single event. And I never thought that would happen. I'm like, oh, you know, some people are gonna be interested in this event and then they're not gonna be interested in this event. Well, we have people that that are interested in all of that. And we have definitely built a community, and we have a Facebook group for HobbyScool that is a very active Facebook group and, you know, people feel part of that community. In terms of monetization and future plans for HobbyScool, we have a lot of things that we're working on.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:14:12]:
I I really only feel that I have touched the tip of the iceberg, if you would, for monetization on this brand. So right now, like I said, we're monetizing the VIP passes and the funnels. We do offer summit sponsorships, so that's another way that we bring in money. We have email sponsorships. So we've had some of our past speakers come to us and say, you know, will you email your list and, you know, promote our workshop that we have coming up? So that's another way that we bring in money. The other thing that we did, and I probably should have mentioned this earlier, the other thing we did at the end of 2023 was we launched a Shopify store for HobbyScool. So as we have, you know, grown these summits and offered these summits, that's one of the things that we are selling on that store are our VIP passes without the premium speaker bonuses, so just access to the workshops from the, you know, from the summit. So that's one thing we sell there.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:15:14]:
And we just have digital products like our coloring books are one of our best sellers on this Shopify store. Who would have figured? The other thing that we're doing and will continue to do in the future are affiliate programs. So we know that our audience, they love events. In particular, they love events related to hobbies. So if we ever find an event that doesn't conflict with one of the events that we are promoting, we definitely will look into doing that. So I would say in 20 24, some of the things that I'm focusing on for HobbyScool one of them is Pinterest and connecting that to our Shopify store, adding additional products to the store, and really building up that organic traffic going into the Shopify stores. That's something we're gonna be working on and adding additional, you know, products to that. Still continue to look at other affiliate programs that we can promote and really expanding and promoting our VIP spots for the summit and our email sponsorships.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:16:23]:
So we definitely have some things that we're working on and additional ways that we can monetize that brand. So I would say if you're thinking, Destini, what are your biggest biggest tips if you were gonna be growing something like this from scratch and you really wanted to focus on growing your email list, which I think all digital product creators need to be focused on that constantly. It should be one of the main things that you have to focus on in terms of marketing in your business. And I would say focus on visibility. This might be speaking in events. So not necessarily hosting your own summit, but maybe speaking in events like what we have in HobbyScool. You can do this in live events or virtual events. Guest podcasting.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:17:12]:
I do a lot of guest podcasting and have done a lot over the years. Don't do as much now. But when I have the opportunity, I definitely do that. And participating in bundles. So that's another thing that we're considering that we might test out in HobbyScool is participating in a bundles. Now I prefer the free ones for list growth, But when you get a big email list like what we have in HobbyScool, it might be time for me to go back in and test out those paid bundles again that we actually started with at the beginning of this. But if you're really focused on list growth, I would look at participating in a free bundle. And if you do participate in a bundle or in a summit, do your part in promoting that event because you wanna make sure that, you know, you are doing what you need to do to get the get the word out there because that will definitely help you.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:18:06]:
But, also, that host and the other speakers, you know, they've put a lot of work into this particular event, and you wanna make sure that you are promoting it. And then once people get on your list, make sure you're nurturing them and, you know, continually emailing them, nurture them, and selling to them. Don't forget to sell to them because you you know, that's what you're in business for. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I really just wanted to take you on that journey that I or kinda walk you through that journey that I have been on for the past 2 years and what I did in HobbyScool to get to where I am today. If you have any questions whatsoever, feel free to DM me on Instagram, say that you've listened to this episode, or you can contact me on Voxer. I'm on Voxer @destinicopp I'll be more than happy to, answer any questions that you have and just just say hi.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:19:03]:
Now one of the things I just wanna mention, if you want to delve a little bit deeper into my strategies and what I have done to set up these flexible, successful digital product businesses even without the need to be glued to your desk or constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms, I want you to sign up for my private podcast feed which is which I call my freedom formula. It's destinicopp.com/freedom. Sign up for it. I really want to, kind of expand on how we have set up these virtual summits. So these virtual summits that I talked about in HobbyScool, they're not live launching. I have everything set up so that it's prerecorded. Everything in terms of the emails and everything that we're doing. I don't have to worry about being at a webinar at 8:8 PM at night while I need to be at a baseball game with my kids.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:20:07]:
So I want to just go into a little bit more detail about how you can generate that consistent revenue it from these digital product businesses without the need to be glued to your desk, constantly live launching, or worrying about social media. Again, reach out if you have any questions. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and bye for now.