The Art of Selling Online Courses

The Woman Who Built a $2.5M Course Business in 2 Years

• John Ainsworth

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Charlotte Chaze went from making $28K working 60-hour weeks in a windowless basement lab to building a multi-seven figure online course business. She's made over $2.6 million helping thousands of people leave dead-end jobs for $76K+ data analyst careers.
Here's what makes her story different: While most TikTok creators with massive followings struggle to monetize, Charlotte cracked the code with 460,000 followers and an "anti-capitalist" business philosophy that actually increased her profits.

In this episode, we dive into how she transitioned from biomedical research to data analytics in under 4 years, why she prices her courses at $249 while competitors charge $1000+, and her TikTok strategy that actually converts when most creators make pennies. We also explore why focusing on product quality over profit maximization made her more money and her ambitious new $1.5 million crypto payment infrastructure startup.

Charlotte's target audience consists of bartenders, servers, teachers, healthcare workers - people who "hate their jobs and don't get paid enough." She's helping them land entry-level data analyst jobs averaging $76K, which is life-changing for people making $20/hour.

The biggest takeaway from Charlotte's story is that you can build a massive course business by genuinely caring about your students' success more than your profit margins. Sometimes the "wrong" way to run a business is actually the right way.Retry

🙋‍♀️ Learn more about Charlotte: https://breakintotech.com/about

🤝  Get In Touch
If you'd like to talk more about how you can grow your course business, email me at john@datadrivenmarketing.

Speaker 1:

I was getting paid $28,000 a year. I was working 60-hour weeks and I realized at some point that I hated it. Data analytics just kept popping up. It was everywhere on the job boards and I saw how much it paid and I just decided I'm gonna teach myself these skills and try to get hired as a data analyst and it worked. In less than four years I was able to climb the ladder up to over 150K. I just started posting on TikTok telling people hey, this was actually not that hard to do and I genuinely believe anyone can do it. That's life changing for people that are making $20 an hour.

Speaker 1:

The target audience for me are people who hate their jobs and also don't get paid enough. I have like 460,000 TikTok followers and I make maybe like $12 a month from TikTok just on accident, because they pay you. Sometimes All the money I'm really making is starting at TikTok, but people are going to my website from there. What I'm trying to do differently is actually have the best product and constantly put work into making it better and better, and I think when you do that, you end up making more profit than you would have, because people want the product that's actually good and that actually does what it says it's going to do.

Speaker 2:

Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We are here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth and today's guest is Charlotte Chase. Now Charlotte is the founder and CEO of Break into Tech, so they're a multi-seven figure online education company and what they do is they've helped thousands of people to leave bad jobs and launch into entry-level tech careers. She has made over $2.6 million in sales so far. I'm going to talk today about how Charlotte got started with this business, how she's grown. Her audience gone viral on TikTok, got featured in CNBC, BuzzFeed and Business Insider. We're also going to discuss why she thinks prioritizing profit is the wrong way to run a business, and we might discuss her new, unbelievably ambitious venture that has nothing to do with online courses at all, because it sounds fascinating. Charlotte, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much, John. I'm really excited to be here. I love diving into this stuff. I love helping people and empowering people, so anything I can say that will potentially help someone else do what I did. I'm on board Nice.

Speaker 2:

So give everyone an idea, like I kind of covered it very briefly. But who do you help with your courses? What kind of problem are you solving for them?

Speaker 1:

So the target audience for me are people who hate their jobs and also don't get paid enough. So it's a lot of people who just don't know that there are other options. So people that are working in fields that we traditionally see as unskilled, so things like bartenders, servers, even teachers, which is a skilled job but that it leans heavy on the not paid enough side, my mom was a teacher.

Speaker 2:

I know, yeah, people do it for passion much more than money.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, and eventually you get sick of it. It's just not enough. We get a lot of healthcare workers too in all pieces of the healthcare sector and it's just people that have never had someone in their corner telling them hey, you actually can do something that can make you more money if you want to. It does take work, but I believe in you and I believe you can do it and here's how. So that's kind of the whole essence of Break into Tech.

Speaker 2:

And what kind of jobs are you helping them to get?

Speaker 1:

That's kind of the whole essence of break into tech, and what kind of jobs are you helping them to get? So we entirely focus on data analyst jobs because it is. It's a tech job, so it pays really well, but the barrier to entry is lower than anything else because the skills that you need for it are very easy to learn. It's something that well, I should say it's not easy, but it's something that anyone can do. So that's what we focus on. So the entry level data analyst salary average in the US is 76k right now and that's life changing for people that are making $20 an hour. And it's just a first step. So it's the first entry level career aspect of data analytics. So you get in around 76k and then you have a whole career trajectory ahead of you where you can get up to multiple six figures if you stay in that field.

Speaker 2:

What is data analytics? I? Mean it's analyzing data but give me something more than that, you know.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, for sure, for sure. So it's basically if you're a data analyst, you're the person that's translating endless numbers into something that people can actually understand and communicate around the business or to their customers. So we have endless data. Every company now you kind of think every company is a data company now, because they have so much data and don't know what to do with it. So the data analyst is the person that figures out what to do with it. And what does all this data mean? And are there other ways we can look at it to either increase customer satisfaction, increase people joining into our, finding our website, increase sales, anything that a company might be looking to do. A data analyst discovers where the misses are and where you can increase any number you want.

Speaker 2:

Is that what you used to do? Is that how you got started teaching people how to do this?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So I was working in academia. I always wanted to be a scientist. I was working as a scientist. I was a research assistant doing biomedical engineering research in a basement lab with no windows. I was getting paid $28,000 a year. I was working 60-hour weeks and I realized at some point that I hated it. But I always had in my head but I'll climb the ladder and eventually maybe have my own lab and get paid more work, less hours. But I looked at my advisor, who was my boss, and he was actually working longer hours than me and I think he was making like 90k, which is really good. But then when you calculate it out against the number of hours that he had to work, I kind of realized that's actually not that good.

Speaker 1:

So I was looking at different job boards trying to figure out what could I possibly do other than this, and data analytics just kept popping up. It was everywhere on the job boards and I saw how much it paid and I just decided I'm going to teach myself these skills and try to get hired as a data analyst. And it worked. I got my first data analyst job paying 70k. In less than four years I was able to climb the ladder up to over 150k and then I just started posting on TikTok telling people, hey, this was actually not that hard to do and I genuinely believe anyone can do it. And people were asking me where can I learn this stuff? I was telling them the free resources they use, but everyone wants one thing where they can just sign up for one thing, do it all the way through and be ready. So I couldn't find anything that I genuinely believed was one place that gave you everything you needed, so I just built it.

Speaker 2:

Hmm, how long ago was that? When did you create the course?

Speaker 1:

I started building it in January 2022. And I launched the initial basic version in late February 2022. I limited it to only 20 people so they could go through and give me feedback, and ever since then, I've just been making it better and better Nice.

Speaker 2:

So what kind of size audience did you got on TikTok at that point who was like asking you for this? Has you already like got built up a big audience, or was this kind of relatively small at the?

Speaker 1:

time. I did get a big audience very fast because I was the first person at least that I know of talking about stuff like this on TikTok in an empowering way that wasn't just like I'm just trying to sell you something. You know, I was working on having something to sell, but I also was giving away so much information for free. So I think that's what attracted an audience really fast. I think at the point when I launched my course, I probably had about 20,000 TikTok followers.

Speaker 2:

Now nearly everybody I know in the course space is like who's built up an audience on TikTok? It's like I'm not making any money from them and yet you seem to. This is really interesting because you seem to be like that sounds like your main source of leads. Is that fair, because I know you've also got audiences on Instagram and LinkedIn and whatever else. Is TikTok like the main traffic source and what's your biggest audience?

Speaker 1:

Absolutely so. Everything I do is for TikTok. If I'm posting videos anywhere else, it's a repost from my TikTok. I sometimes go on LinkedIn and post a text post that's you know, doesn't have a video, but that's just kind of playing around.

Speaker 2:

Honestly, my LinkedIn audience got big because of my TikTok.

Speaker 1:

I had my LinkedIn in my LinkedIn bio or whatever in TikTok for a while, so people were following me on LinkedIn from TikTok.

Speaker 2:

Interesting. I wonder why it is that it's such a good fit with you and what you're selling, whereas I know loads of people like so. Uh, my friend lucy used to be a client of ours. She's got like 10 million subscribers on youtube and a million last time I checked on tiktok. So it's like a big audience, right. But when she looked at the amount of money, it's not like it's 10 to 1 between youtube and tiktok. It's like tiny, like 0.3 percent of the revenues from t, from TikTok, despite having a really big audience on this. Super curious about that, I'm going to kind of dive into that a little bit more. Are you got any ideas? Go on, yeah, I mean so.

Speaker 1:

I don't know how true this is, but the biggest thing I suspect is that people get sucked into um the the app monetization um, and so they're tailoring their videos to work specifically for youtube so that youtube will pay them. But when you do that, you're not prioritizing the audience. You're prioritizing what youtube or tiktok wants you to prioritize, and that means you're just not authentically connecting with the audience as much as you would.

Speaker 1:

Just to put it in perspective, I have like 460,000 TikTok followers and I make maybe like $12 a month from TikTok just on accident because they pay you sometimes, but all the money I'm really making is starting at TikTok, but people are going to my website from there and that's where I'm getting money.

Speaker 2:

So I think, if you focus on that. How's that working for you? So do you get? Do you drive people to sign up to like free resources on your website, or you point them straight away to your course, like what's your kind of focus?

Speaker 1:

So I kind of do both. People really hate it when you say you're selling something on TikTok, so I always start by just telling them I have a free course guide, which is my list of all the free resources that I think they should do to learn everything they need for free. Plus, I throw in a free resume template, some LinkedIn hacks, just so, if you want to do it for free, here's everything you need, but then, course, within that, there's an upsell that tells you I do have this all in one place for you. I do believe mine is the best one on the internet. That's why I made it um, check out all my reviews. They're all real um. And then that gets a lot of people in too. And then sometimes on tiktok, in the comments, someone ask like, where should I go to learn this? And I'll say, oh, I have a free course. I also have a paid course, and just I think the people that want the paid course will find it. I think it's not something that you really have to focus on in your videos.

Speaker 2:

Got it Interesting. So how often are you doing promotions to that? I know that what you've got, I think it's like a 5% off or something if they buy in the first five days. Is it something like that?

Speaker 1:

It's like $20 off because the course is already priced extremely low for what it is it's $249. So the discount is small at first.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and then how often are you promoting to your audience?

Speaker 1:

It's hard to say.

Speaker 2:

So to your email list. I mean when I say audience there.

Speaker 1:

Oh, to my email list. So when they first enroll in the free course, I think they get like five to seven emails. I think it's five emails over the first five days. And those first five days are when they have the chance to get the $20 off. And then after that they get another email that says hey, if you miss the sale, here's the coupon code. I can't remember how much that one is, I think it's like $15 off. And then there is a newsletter funnel that they go through after that that sends maybe one email week for six or eight weeks.

Speaker 2:

Is that it yeah?

Speaker 1:

I think that's it.

Speaker 2:

You never promote to them again after that.

Speaker 1:

I don't think so. Am I missing something?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. You can make loads of money from promoting to the audience again after that.

Speaker 1:

Interesting, okay, I mean so every now and then I guess I miss a part For holidays. Sometimes I'll do like a broadcast and have a bigger sale For holidays. I'll do sometimes like $50 off, or you know.

Speaker 2:

How often do you do that?

Speaker 1:

Randomly. Honestly, I don't have, I don't go with a plan.

Speaker 2:

Okay, yeah, so cause you've got two courses right. You've got the, the learning, data analytics and then getting a job in data analytics. Okay.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

And I guess the get a job in it is only useful to the ones who've actually taken the course in in it first, or I suppose not. They could have gone through the free stuff, I suppose.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, they could have gone through the free stuff. I also get a lot of people coming to me after taking a competitor's data analytics course and saying I didn't get any hands on practice, I didn't do any projects, I have no idea what I'm doing, and then those people will go through my data analytics course and then the how to land the job course and some people will feel confident that they probably can land a job with whatever other course and so they just go through the how to land the job course. But not everyone needs both. Some people already know how to get a job, like through the interview process and everything, and just need to learn data analytics.

Speaker 2:

So kind of just whatever you specifically feel like you need so what we found is that you can re-promote the same course to the same email list about every three to six months, like, without burning out the audience too much. You the the crucial thing with that is if you do like different angles with it. So instead of so, I don know. I don't know your audience well enough to say what the right pain points are, but like if you look through what are the problems they've got, whether it's you know they want to work remotely, maybe, and they hate that they currently have to go in somewhere, and another one is they're not paid enough. And another one is they have to work in a basement or whatever. It is right, you know they have to work in a basement or whatever.

Speaker 1:

It is right, you know burnout's a big one.

Speaker 2:

So each of those can be like a different email campaign, because you discuss the different problem and then you talk about how your offering helps solve that problem.

Speaker 2:

And so when you do it in those different ways, then it's you're kind of appealing to different segments of the audience.

Speaker 2:

The other thing that we found that really helps with it is if in your emails you put an opt out from the promotional emails. So instead of somebody having to say, right, either I'm going to stay on this list and get these emails when I'm not interested in buying right now, or I opt out from the email list, you have a third option, which is I'm just going to opt out from this promotion. So if you're like, if you don't want to'm, this week I'm going to be talking more about my course if you don't want to hear about that at the moment, just click this link and I won't email you anything else until next week when you'll go back to like regular useful emails, this kind of thing. And that really helps it as well. And we found like generally about so about 80 of the revenue normally in a course business, the potential revenue is in the email list, and so by having regular email promotions like that, you normally are able to maximize the revenue that you're getting from the courses.

Speaker 1:

That's interesting. Do you think that has anything to do with price point, because I do see a lot of online courses priced what I think is very high.

Speaker 2:

How do you mean? What are yours at Like $200, $300 or something?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, $249 for the data analytics course and $99 for the how to land the job course, and I feel like I see courses a lot that are $1,000. And I think maybe at a higher price point like that you do get more sales through emails because you have to build that trust and for me, most of my sales don't come through the emails.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I don't know, know it's just a thought no, so we're nearly all of our, nearly all of our clients and everybody we work with is selling courses about the kind of price point you're selling them out like we've got a couple who are more like we're working with this guy.

Speaker 2:

he's a vet dentist and so if you're a vet and you want to learn how to do vet dentistry, he's your guy, and so his courses are like very niche for people who are making a lot of money. They're like I don't know $2,000 or something like that, right, I'm not sure, relatively expensive. But nearly everybody else that we're working with is that their courses are like between $79 and, I don't know, $300, $400, that kind of price range.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, I would be surprised if there wasn't a lot of like latent potential in your, in your email list, with like really good email promotions um, you know, I've never had really good email promotions because I do all the copy and I don't spend a lot of time on it no, you're too busy with your exciting new uh crypto venture.

Speaker 1:

Let's carry on honestly honestly, it's just not an aspect that I enjoy.

Speaker 2:

Um got it yeah so I just don't put a lot of time into it yeah, nearly everybody that we work with is the same, right, so people tend to be the kind of people we work with tend to be like creators first. So it's like, right, I really like this topic and I'm really good at teaching this on youtube or instagram or whatever. And I built an audience and everybody asked me can you make a course? And I was like, oh, cool, sure. And then they make a course and they're like doing that because they're still creating and recording videos, whatever. And then at some point they're like shit, I need to actually do marketing and sell this thing. And it's like oh, I don't like that. And's like so that's kind of why I set this business up, cause I'm like oh, there's all these people who just aren't getting paid as much money as they should be making because they don't. There's this step in between that they don't really like doing, so that's kind of that's kind of what we do.

Speaker 1:

That makes sense. I love that. So what is it?

Speaker 2:

what is a typical promotion for you when you do do one Like really done consistently is Black Friday.

Speaker 1:

That's when I do the biggest sale. I think it's like $50 off and that'll be an email a day for a week leading up to Black Friday and then maybe an email a couple of days later. Black Friday sale extended to Cyber Monday or whatever.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and what kind of things are you including in the in the emails? Um man, it's been a while black friday's a long time ago around again.

Speaker 1:

I'm like wait, it's almost here again. Um, I think just the typical stuff I always send. I I'm pretty sure I just copy and paste like a typical email, like like here's some testimonials. Um, if you're sick of you know this job that you hate not making enough money, this is your chance. Like lowest price of the year, um, and that is usually the most sales that I get is black Friday.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so there's a type of email promotion that we've developed we called it a nurture promo that, uh, we found works really really well and also doesn't burn out the audience, because it's trying to provide a lot of value at the same time. That's why we're talking about it as a nurture promo rather than just an email promo, and I'll send you through details of it afterwards. But the basic idea of it is you start out with something called pain agitation solution emails in which you're not selling anything, you're just. But you, you know, earlier I was talking about those different pain points your audience is facing, like the burnout or not earning enough, or working, wanting to work remotely, or whatever it is, and you start with three emails where you address that pain point. You bring it to life more in the agitate email and then you give a small solution that they can do, something they can do straight away to kind of move in the right direction. And then you say and if you want to know more about this, well, next week I'm going to be talking about my course where I can like help you address this thing, and so you're kind of starting to help them, first around that specific thing. And then you transition and then so your email promotion will be about how your course is going to address that particular pain point and make their life better. And then the email promotion itself has got. So it's when you open cart, it's like six emails, I think, in five days and you you talk about the kind of the benefits of the course and all the features and everything that's included in the guarantee and the bonus and all that kind of thing, and you do something called future casting. And this is an email. This is one we learned about from I forget the name of the copywriter, but he was doing a training for deadline funnels and my copywriter had gone on the training and we implemented this and it used to be. We'd get the spike at the beginning of a promotion and a spike right at the end of it when the discount's coming to an end. And when we had this one in, it gave another spike in the middle, which was amazing.

Speaker 2:

So future casting is where you talk about. Here's how your life will be different, because you know the future. They don't know this future right, but you know it because you've gone through it and you've helped all these other people to go through it, and so it's hard for people to kind of imagine it. And you talk about the benefits and how it's going to be, but what we do in this one is we talk about like an average day in your life, in a day after you start your new job, a week, a month, three months, six months, all the stuff.

Speaker 2:

That's going to be different for that person, even if they just kind of do the minimum required, because people always worried oh what if I don't do absolutely everything? It's like, okay, if you just do a basic level here. You don't get the best job in data analytics, but you get one and it's remote and now you get to spend time with your daughter or whatever it is that you're kind of focusing on. You know, I was watching some of your testimonials before and that was what one of the women was talking about, you know yeah and I was like that's powerful, that's an angle.

Speaker 2:

I spend time with your kids and it's like that's pretty, that's pretty dope, right. So true, that's like one of the type of emails I won't go into the whole thing because I've done uh, um, yeah, it's like a whole episode in and of itself, but like I'll send you through details about this afterwards but like I think if you had an email promo like that that really like really connected with your audience and talked about a specific angle, then you could make a whole bunch more sales and I think you could do it more often than you currently are and it can increase. I know it's not focus at the moment, but I think this is something that is like totally doable.

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, I mean I'd I'd love to do something like that. It's genius. Um, I just need to decide one day to focus my time on that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So talk to me, what is the, what is the new focus? Cause I know actually. No, I tell you what I wanted to ask you something else. First, you said prioritizing profit is the wrong way to run a business. The goal of a business isn't to make money, it's to provide a product or service. Talk to me about that. Where's that philosophy come from, and how does that affect the way you run the business?

Speaker 1:

I think it's kind of an anti-capitalism viewpoint.

Speaker 1:

I'm very democratic, socialist focused, and I just see so much wrong with the way that society currently functions, especially in the us, where corporations just have all the money and wealth disparity is increasing, and I think the downfall is that every business is just focusing on profit and the bottom line.

Speaker 1:

Um, we've all seen how products have just gotten worse and worse over the years, and that's because they don't care about the product anymore, they care about the bottom line, and so everybody's just kind of like, well, I'm going to get the cheapest thing then, because none of them are good, and so what I'm trying to do differently is actually have the best product and constantly put work into making it better and better. And I think when you do that, you end up making more profit than you would have, because people want the product that's actually good and that actually does what it says it's going to do. And because I have that, I have really great testimonials. I've gotten people to record video testimonials just from asking them, because they were so excited about having a 35K salary increase. You know they message me that I changed their life and they did all the work. They paid me.

Speaker 1:

But they're so happy with the product that it benefits me and helps me make more sales. So I think when you have happier customers it just benefits everyone in the long run. Everyone's happier and the company does better so what's that look like?

Speaker 2:

because, so you mentioned, you made the course in like january 2022 and then you started getting feedback from people there and you've been iterating since then, like what's that look like on a on a weekly or monthly basis? Like how often are you going in and changing a module or redoing something or adding a resource, or what does it actually look like?

Speaker 1:

at first it was frequently so my course comes with a discord community um. One of the reasons is that students can help each other get through it and motivate each other. But another big thing is that I get feedback from the people that are actually taking the course. If I see somebody asking a question and multiple other people eventually ask the same question, I know, okay, this piece of information wasn't explained well enough in the course. I should go in and add to it. Or this lecture was confusing, I should add more practice problems along the way, stuff like that. So that was probably daily at first.

Speaker 1:

When I had my first like 20 students, I limited it to just 20 people at first and was getting constant feedback. Then it probably went to weekly, then monthly, because I was just updating it as needed. Eventually, this woman reached out to me on LinkedIn saying hey, I took your course. I have a PhD in curriculum design. I have some ideas. I promise I'm not trying to get a job, but I'd love to talk to you. I ended up doing a call with her and gave her a job because she had so many great ideas.

Speaker 1:

So she did like huge overhauls of the course where she'd go through an entire module and totally change the lectures, add more information, add more practice problems. So it's really changed over the years, but I think it's the way I looked at it is just always being open to feedback and never taking anything personally, which is hard to do. Sometimes I take something personally for five minutes and then I realize you know, well, this is good feedback and I should implement it and now everyone's happier.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, it is hard, isn't it Sometimes, not to be like I put so much work into that. How dare you. But it's like, ok, let's let that go and just like, okay, what can I do about this? So this was sarah harris. Was the the lady who'd done the instructional design? Yeah, we recommend. So there's a lady, mariana pena. I'm going to actually give everybody the link to the episode and then let's give everyone sarah harris's details as well.

Speaker 1:

So if oh yeah, oh my gosh, I'm sure she would love to come on here.

Speaker 2:

She's amazing yeah, oh great, I'd love an intro, yeah highly recommend her all right.

Speaker 2:

So episode 113, december 7th 2023 course designers increase course retention and grow your vision with mariana pena, and she came on and explained all about uh, basically how curriculum designers can help you. Instructional designers can help you to improve the quality of your course. She also did a free training for people in my audience, but it was just in one of my WhatsApp groups, so if anybody wants to get a hold of that, drop me an email, john at datadrivenmarketingco, and I'll send you through the link. It's not on the website. It's not anywhere else at the moment, but drop me an email, john at data driven marketingco, and I'll send you through the link. It's not on the website. It's not anywhere else at the moment, but drop me an email, I'll send you a link. And then, sarah harris where could we? Does she have like a website or anything? People?

Speaker 1:

um, so she has an email through my uh business, but it's our old domain. Um, it's sarah harris phd. Well, she has her own email too. So sarah harrisPhD at gmailcom is probably the best one.

Speaker 2:

That's her personal one, wicked SarahHarrisPhD at gmailcom. So if you're interested in an instructional designer, mariana Pena, if anybody wants Mariana's email, you might need to drop me an email and ask me for it.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to see if I can find it.

Speaker 2:

I found it. Okay, hello at my premium course dot com and. But check out that. Yeah, hello at my premium course dot com. So if you want an instructional designer, check out one of those two people. So, sarah, what did? What kind of changes did she make?

Speaker 1:

What was she doing to improve your your course? One huge focus was accessibility, so she just overhauled everything so that every lecture works on screen readers. Now, so that was what size font? And then, on the other side, the actual information that's presented to. A lot of what she did was just breaking things down so much further than I ever thought you would have to, but it really does help. The people that catch on quick can scroll past the basics, and the people that do need that extra layer of help really appreciate that it's there.

Speaker 2:

Nice, beautiful. So one of the things that you've done, now that you've got this course business running so well, is you're starting up a whole new venture, and it's nothing to do with courses. So if anybody's and like, no, this isn't my thing. I think this is absolutely fascinating, so I'm going to ask charlotte about it. Um, tell everybody what it is that you're.

Speaker 1:

You're now working on building so I'm at the very beginning of this, but my idea is to create a payment infrastructure that's as easy as stripe on the user side but on the back end runs through crypto so that it's private, and so the way this would work is you as the user, when you want to buy something online, the checkout looks how it always looks you press, pay $20. And then on the back end it's going through a crypto on ramp so it converts that $5 to $5 worth of crypto dollars to five dollars worth of crypto, and then it goes through a crypto off ramp where it converts it from five dollars or twenty dollars whatever number I was saying from dollars, some amount of dollars from crypto back into dollars, so the business gets the dollars that you sent.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

But because it's crypto, on the back end it's private.

Speaker 1:

The only way to figure out who paid what to who would be, literally, it would have to be subpoenaed by a court, and my business and the on-ramp and off-ramp would all have to work together to get that information.

Speaker 1:

Otherwise, the three of us don't know who paid what to who, and so the audience for this would be at first, we want to do business to business, so businesses that don't want their clients to feel like somebody knows that they're working with them necessarily. So mental health, medical bills, lawyers that put down a retainer for, maybe, immigration cases or any kind of sensitive legal issue that you don't want people to necessarily know about, sensitive legal issue that you don't want people to necessarily know about. And the big thing that would set us apart is the other companies that are doing things adjacent to this are all very sketchy and they're for gray area markets that you know they're kind of selling stuff that's semi-illegal. So we want this to be a legitimate business for when you just don't want people to have your data, you don't want the government to know what you're buying. You don't want third parties who just buy data from everyone to know what you're buying, so that's the idea.

Speaker 2:

Nice, okay, where are you at with it so far?

Speaker 1:

So so far I have potentially a CTO on board, I have the technical architecture drawn up, the product specs drawn up and a pitch deck, and so I'm meeting with a business advisor actually later today, and another one in a couple of weeks, because this is going to be so much different from my course business, which I didn't need any funding to start up I used my own money and this business I would need $1.5 million to start up, and so I'm going to have to go through a pre-seed funding round and ask people for money and I think it's going to be mostly people who believe in crypto and see the use case of. Nobody wants to use crypto because it feels sketchy and it's a little scary and we don't know how it works. But we want to get people using crypto and this would be the way to do it.

Speaker 2:

Nice, cool, and how much of your time is going into that now, then Is that like nearly all of your time on that and very little on courses.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so honestly, it's so new. For the past two weeks it's been all my time on that, so very, very beginning of this. But I'm really excited about it because the more that I research it, the more that I see that it is needed and it would work.

Speaker 2:

Nice Cool, that's exciting, I love that you kind of got the freedom to make a big move like that, you know, without being like am I going to be all right, can I pay the bills? Because I'm like just putting everything into this, what if it doesn't work out? What have you? It's like, okay, you've got your basics kind of covered with your course business, and then this was like okay, let's go do something exciting and see if it, you know if you can make it work.

Speaker 1:

Exactly Because of the course business is the only reason I'm able to take this risk. I have emergency savings because of the course business and that's kind of how I see. You know people who want to retire early or just not subscribe to the work your entire life to make someone else rich. Ideal. The first step is just getting a good salary job, and that's what I help people do with my course business. I think the next step after that is start your own business and then the next step after that is start a second business.

Speaker 2:

This is it, charlotte's Guide to Life Nice.

Speaker 1:

I think, yeah, if you want to subscribe to the Church of Charlotte, you know.

Speaker 2:

That's funny, all right, cool. So I'm going to try and like recap a little bit, try and see what's the stuff here that people can kind of learn from. So one of the things is first of all, go viral on tiktok after having changed your career. No, but seriously, like talk to me about, like about tiktok. What's some of the stuff that works differently on TikTok to elsewhere? Like, what's some of the kind of approaches that you use there? Do you think?

Speaker 1:

Well, I don't know what works elsewhere because I really don't go anywhere else. Everything that's somewhere else is just a repost because I feel like I guess I should be posting it elsewhere. But I think what works with TikTok is being truly authentic and not trying to sell your wares but letting people know that it's an option. So I think, just lean really hard on giving value.

Speaker 1:

I think a lot of people are scared to give value because then what? What are they selling? They're giving all their value away for free, but realistically they're not all their value away for free. But realistically they're not gonna get everything from TikTok. You'd have to post every single TikTok in chronological order, exactly with your course, and somehow like explain the hands-on stuff in a way that they can follow along. It's just impossible to give the same amount of value as in your course. So I think the more value you give, even if it feels like you're giving too much away that's what drives people to trust you and want to buy whatever you're selling, because they know they're going to get more from that.

Speaker 1:

So if they already feel like they're getting so much for free. They trust you and realize that you know what you're talking about. So that's really. What I lean into is just authenticity saying what I believe and giving away as much value as I can.

Speaker 2:

Nice, Nice. Well, I'm excited to see how it goes with the new venture and I'll send you through details. We can chat more about the emails. Email promotion approach.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm really interested.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, cool, well, good, uh, I'll help you out with that. I want to just tell everybody who's listening, if you like. Well, tell me more about those emails, the specific podcast episodes I've done before that you can go listen to, which are going to show you exactly um the approach to take. So there was one with monica, april 4th 2024, episode 131, and it's called how to send more emails without sounding too salesy with monica. And then we had a really good one with joe recently, let me find that called this new email marketing strategy doubled my revenue, and I was interviewing joe armstrong from 98, korean, who had used our approach and then had doubled his revenue with that, and that was from may 8th 2025. So go check out those two emails. I'm trying to see if there's any others that would be like a really good one to have a look at. That might be the ones to start with. Yeah, I think those two podcast episodes would be really good. And then, if people want, if you want anything more, go to datadrivenmarketingcoresources and there's a couple of downloads there about emails. There's one called two secret high performing email templates you can get for free, and actually that's probably the best one about this, the high performing email templates. If you check all of those out, you'll have a much better idea about it.

Speaker 2:

Charlotte, thanks so much for coming on. This was awesome. I really love your story. This is fantastic.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, I'm so happy to be here. I love talking about this stuff and you gave me a lot of great tips.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much for listening. Really really appreciate you and see you next time.