Lessons from Launching My Own Side Hustle

Calling my super “woo” crew

Every round of Side Hustle Support Group has been unique, and this year was even more interesting because I got to launch my new business, Rooted, right there alongside the students.

Rooted is so different from the work I’ve been doing. It’s grounded—it’s witchy—it’s definitely woo!

Did I brush up against some challenges? No doubt about it.

But it’s been an incredible journey—one I couldn’t wait to share so I had to spill all the details in the latest podcast episode. Tune in to learn why I created it, how I overcame obstacles, and what is happening in Rooted now.

.CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!

Show Notes:

Hey, Risers. Welcome to episode 184 of Empathy Rising. This is my last live podcast of the year. I am headed out to take some time off, and that is one thing that Hailey has helped me do is get all my batch recording together. I'm able to talk to you weeks in advance before you hear, and then I get to chill out and it looks as if I'm working in real-time, even though I'm not.

I just wanna say a happy holiday season to everyone listening and a happy New Year. We will be back with more episodes after that New Year. We'll have a couple of weeks' break and then we'll come back in January. 

Today, this episode is for my "woo" crew, so I'm gonna go there. I'm not gonna hold back. I've edited myself a little on the show in episodes past because I didn't wanna freak people out or just go all the way, but I'm going all the way today. 

If you're somebody who has an altar that you sit and meditate at, that you have candles and you have crystals, or maybe you have Oracle cards and tarot cards, if you know your big three in your natal charge and maybe even more depth than that, or if you are witchy in general and just in other ways, today's episode is gonna be perfect for you because I am talking all about my Side Hustle, which is called Rooted. 

I'll be sharing about what it is, why I created it, all that stuff. You may find it interesting, so I'll have a way for you to follow up. If it's something that you're like, 'super woo' and wanna do, there'll be a way for you to get into the Rooted ecosphere. 

Even if you're not woo, and all the things I just listed you were like, "I have no idea what any of that is", that's totally fine because I think there's still gonna be value for you today. I'm gonna be sharing all of the business side of things, what I learned about bringing a brand new program to life with a brand new audience, and basically just being a newbie again and being a beginner again. 

There will still be value. You can just act like I'm talking about something totally different. Act like I'm talking about...what's the example I use? Rose gardening or something like that. I really think that one of the coolest things that happened this year, and I didn't really give this thought. It wasn't like I planned it this way, it just came out and happened this way.

This whole year as I was bringing Rooted to life, I was bringing it to life right along with the Side Hustle students. Now, Rooted has been something that I've been thinking about really since 2020, which is so cliché. 

I was laying in a hammock—and I've told this story before on the podcast on how it influenced Side Hustle—and it was part of the reason that Side Hustle became a nine-month program instead of a six-month, but Rooted was the other side of that. 

I was laying in a hammock. The girls were digging in the dirt outside. This was April, and we were lucky enough to live somewhere where it wasn't freezing cold or there wasn't snow all over the ground, so the girls were able to just be outside, getting muddy.

Josh was sitting next to me on the porch reading a book, and I was just lying in the hammock and I literally sat up (and you can call this a download, you can call it divine intervention, whatever. I sat up) and literally turned to Josh and was like, "why are we here?" It wasn't existentially like, "why are we here? Where do humans come from?" You'll hear if you follow along in this, the spiritual space at all, there are the star seeds and Five D. That's not what Rooted it's about. 

Not that there's anything wrong with that's just not my brand of spirituality, but, it was more like, "why are we here in a part of the country where we don't philosophically agree with most of the people, and we're outside in April because in two weeks it's gonna get so humid that we can't be outside again. Why are we living here?" What it boiled down to was Josh had a contract with the Army, which we know is he's retiring very soon.

His retirement almost came about—getting woo right, I'm gonna go there—his retirement almost came back, came about as like a quantum leap. It was in 2021 during the Lionsgate portal, which is eight-eight, which is a portal astrologically. It was also conjunct with Uranus back then when Uranus is the planet of big surprises.

Big surprise, Josh got a blood clot in his lung and is medically retiring from the army. It shrunk our timeline, it collapsed our timeline by three years. We were supposed to, earlier this year, in June of 2022, we were supposed to be PCSing, which is the Army's way of saying moving to Hawaii and we were gonna have to retire from overseas.

Hawaii would've been cool if it had been this enlistment or this tour. Then we would've moved back stateside and been able to retire from the states. I really didn't wanna retire from overseas. It just wasn't what I wanted. I was really bummed. Then lo and behold, "oh yes, you're not you're not PCSing, you're retiring".

It's turned out that Josh is gonna get a full medical retirement. It'll be about $1,500 less a month than if he did the whole 20, because he'll be in for 18 when he retires. But we just looked at each other and said, we don't care. There are people in situations, in different scenarios where they would stay an extra two years at a desk job or whatever to get that extra $1,500 a month.

Josh and I just talked about our earning potential. He's starting his own business. He actually hired Shana, the graphic designer inside of Side Hustle to build out his whole brand and everything like that. When we talked about our earnings outside of the Army, it just became clear that it wasn't worth staying for $1,500.

But the way that all happened combined with that crazy experience in 2020 it just has all contributed to Rooted. I feel like I've always been a spiritual person. Always, and I didn't even realize they were altars. 

I didn't even realize what I was doing when I was young, but I had altars my entire life and sometimes they had this Ernie Banks's Cubs signed baseball. That was just so special to me that my dad had given me—it was an altar. I didn't even realize that was a piece of what I was doing. Now that I'm older and I know more about my practice, that's what it was. It's not like this is a complete 180 for me.

I even asked Josh, and I was like, "What do you think about me moving into the spiritual space and bringing Rooted to life?" and he said, "it's who you always were. It's just you're bringing that part to the forefront. Instead of it being a side aspect of you, you're just leaning more on that and making it a priority". 

It's not like it's out of the blue where on this show it might feel outta the blue because I haven't talked about it a lot. It's been a piece of me my whole life. Anyways, so all of these dominoes are falling and so Rooted had been a plan for about two years. 

But even last year's Side Hustle, I was talking about it and making plans for it, but it even had a different name back then it was called Legacy, which wasn't right obviously.

Rooted was actually the very first name that I came up with. Then it went from Rooted to Heritage to Legacy, and then it went back to Rooted. Rooted was always the right name. That's a little intuition kind of thing. 

Usually, you know right when you make changes, you end up talking yourself out of it or whatever. Sometimes my students will really fall in love with the name, and then they'll find that it's copyrighted or that it already exists and has an online presence. That's a big bummer. 

I call it the zing. When you're naming your product, you'll get like a zing, that's the right one. When you get that zing, I say immediately go check Instagram. Go check USPTO for a pattern or trademark. Go check all these places and if you're free and clear, then go with it. 

I ended up coming back to my original name, which was Rooted. I started bringing it actually to life this year. When my students were building their funnel, I was building mine. I'll get more on that later. 

But for the most part, I was building my funnel right along with them. I'm just about to launch at the time of recording. I'm almost gonna launch to my waitlist when you guys are listening, I will have just launched to my waitlist. We're a couple of weeks off.

But that is just a couple of weeks after most of the students in the program launched, and there are two or three students who have their hype events in the same week as me. We're going through this all together, and like I said, I didn't plan for that, but it was cool. 

One of the best things about Side Hustle is that I'm always modeling this to you, but in rounds past, I've always been modeling an established offer to an established audience, and this time I modeled a brand new offer to a brand new audience, just like what the students were doing. I think I shared it in an earlier episode, or it's about to come out, I'm a little off track, but I went to launch a workshop to the Rooted audience and it didn't sell.

I followed up and did all of the after-launch emails and analysis and the stuff that I teach my students. Again, I was doing that the same week that my students were doing theirs. It turned out that my audience, I was… I thought it was gonna be price, which a lot of the feedback did come back price.

But the other thing that came back is my audience didn't want a live event. They didn't want to commit to the day and time. They would've rather had the recording, which was fascinating to me because everything I do for you guys and the therapist audience is all live. High touch, high touch.

This new audience was saying, "oh, that's not as valuable to me". I showed them what it was like to have a flop launch and go back through the data and figure out why the launch didn't go well. As much as it was a bummer for me, I was like, "dang, like I've been doing this for eight years and I still had a flop launch".

As much as it was a bummer I sat with it for a week, but I saw the silver lining, which is that if my students had seen me come out the gate with a brand new offer to a brand new audience and sold like 50, 100 workshop seats or whatever, I feel like that would've almost been more the disservice because it would've made it look easier than it is.

The fact that I flopped, or I didn't flop, let me...there catching my language. The fact that the launch flopped I think was a good thing because it showed them a) this is possible. How do we get up from it? How do we re-evaluate? How do we pivot? How do we make steps forward?

Also, just how do we deal with it emotionally? We need to be able to grieve and be bummed, and how do we pick up after that? I think that has been freaking neat to be a newbie again. This really did allow me to join with this round in a different way because in years past it's always "I remember when my audience was new" or "I remember when", and I'm like scrolling back because I keep all my email marketing, I keep all this stuff and I'm scrolling back like a few years to show open rates and things like that. 

With these students, I got to show them, "hey, I sent this email last week to this brand new audience. Here's what my open rates were". I got to be a newbie again. I got to be a beginner, and it really helped me understand their journey. 

There were so many emotions that came up and I'm gonna dive into all of that, but I just thought that this shared experience was cool. I got to not only share the experience with the students as their guide but also as somebody who was doing what they were doing at the same time. 

Honestly, it was my coach Jacqueline, who pointed out the value in that. She was like, "do you realize how valuable that is that they get to see not only you go through all the side hustle stuff, which is incredibly valuable as well but to go through a brand new offer?" That was really neat.

I thought with the rest of the episode, I would just share: What is rooted? You guys have heard me maybe mention it casually, but what is it? I talked a little bit about why I created it, but I wanna go even deeper there, and also how it evolved. I've said that the name changed and shifted so many times, but it also over the two years of conceptualizing it, it has evolved.

Then I just wanna talk about what worked so far. What was a challenge so far? Things I'm nervous about, wins and surprises, and so I'm gonna go down the list. This isn't a formal or structured episode like in the past, but I just made some notes of things that I thought would be helpful.

So, what is Rooted? Rooted is somewhere between a membership site and a group program. It is a 12-month program, and it is for me, a membership-site level commitment, meaning that I show up once a week and two of those weeks are live, and two of those weeks are assets. I'm only showing up for the audience twice a month.

The other two times when I'm showing up, I'm creating something. In those cases, they will be a private podcast that only the Rooted students or members will have access to. Then in the other, that'll be week one and then in the other week, which will be week three, I'm gonna put together a Spotify playlist.

I'm gonna put together a recorded meditation and some journal prompts and all of that stuff. That will require my time, but it's not time facing the audience. It's not holding space-time. It's fun like playing around on Spotify and finding songs time, which I'm excited about. The time commitment for me is going to be incredibly light compared to something like Side Hustle.

What do we know? We know that lower touch means lower price, but I also was not in the mood and not going to do a low-price membership, and there are a couple of reasons for that. Part of it is I've been in the online space for eight years and I want to earn a certain amount per hour when I do the math out.

Part of it was like, I want to be, I don't wanna be in a low-price membership category. The other thing that's different that I'm doing with Rooted that it's different than a membership site is that I am requiring a 12-month commitment. We are seeing this more and more often in the membership space as requiring a time commitment.

Sometimes it's a quarter, sometimes it's a full year. The reason for that is churn. When you have a membership site and people can join at any time and unsubscribe at any time, you're always gonna have this churn or this two steps forward, one step back kind of feeling. I wanted to avoid that in my business model.

I put a 12-month commitment. Now, a 12-month commitment makes sense for Rooted because this is why I say it's more like a group program than a membership, is because I'm not doing your typical membership delivery, which is either a roadmap, a subscription, or a framework. 

In a roadmap, they log in, they have instant access to a course, and they go through that course. Then on a weekly or monthly basis, they have calls or whatever that would be a roadmap membership. A subscription membership is they get new assets every month. For instance, a Canva subscription where you get new Canva templates in your member area each month, but you don't have calls.

Subscriptions tend to be the cheapest membership sites because there's no touch. They're just assets. A framework membership is where it's like a three-part framework or a four-part framework, and then you rotate through that framework. So mind, body, spirit. January would be mind. February would be body, and March would be spirit. Then, April, you'd be picking up with mind again, and so on. 

Now what I'm doing and Rooted is it's a 12-month curriculum. Each month we take a look at what is happening seasonally and cyclically and going 'woo', in terms of Mother Earth, Gaia, earth energy. There's kind of five natural seasons being celestial, the four seasons, and cycles of death and rebirth, like the metamorphosis with the caterpillar.

We can look at different rhythmic and cyclical patterns. The one that I've chosen to go into is the seasons. For instance, in December, December is actually mostly fall and winter doesn't actually start until December 22nd. Modern life has us living completely out of cycle, believing that winter starts in November when it doesn't.

Getting back into a rhythmic cycle with the way the seasons work, and so that's why it will be 12 months anyway. Having a 12-month commitment to the program made sense. I'm not calling it a membership, but I'm not calling it a group program. I'm calling it a 12-month...oh, I don't have the sales page right in front of me. Like a life cycle. I use the word life cycle.

I'm trying to remember how I worded it, but I'm not calling it either of those things because it really is somewhere in the middle. The ultimate price that I'll be gearing up towards is 250 a month and 2,500 for the year, and I'm starting at about half of that. 

Again, in your listening time, the wait list launch has already happened. In my time that's coming up in a couple of weeks, but that is going to be at 125 a month or 1250 for the year.

If they buy the annual, they save $250 when it launches to the public, which is going to start next week when you're listening, it will be $150 a month or $1500 for the year. The waitlist gets an advantage by joining early, they get a waitlist price and also get a special waitlist bonus.

That's the business model of Rooted, but what we'll be doing on a monthly basis is activating our divine feminine power, activating our divine feminine essence through the Rooted process. What my belief is, and so piecing all this together, there was that instance in the hammock where I was like, why are we here? Why are we living this way? 

It really had us questioning a lot of what our current lifestyle looked like, and started... I wouldn't say started, but started another version of my rewilding journey, my deconditioning journey, taking a look at capitalism, taking a look at patriarchy, taking a look at colonialism, and that was my journey in 2020.

Then in 2021, we had the timeline collapse where our basically three years, three years out became like tomorrow, became six months out. In the midst of that, what happened was I found a woman named Lauren Trulin, and she's no longer doing this work, but she was really strong in divine feminine work during 2020 and 2021.

She was having this event and it was a guided meditation journey type of event. One thing that she was saying, (and it was almost like a chant) was  "remember who you are, remember who you are". That unlocked all of these pieces of what Rooted is. In each month, like I said, we'll be analyzing the seasonal patterns and where we should actually be syncing up with these seasonal patterns.

And so week one of the month is going to be a private podcast that we'll be discussing that. Week two of the month is our reconnect week. We'll be coming together live to do a ritual of some sort. Sometimes they'll be literally in spring we'll be like planting things, getting our hands in the soil and in the earth and doing that in a sense of community and in a sense of sisterhood. 

Other rituals will be more guided meditation-based or nature-based, but they'll be easy to do. They're not like these big elaborate hours-long things. They'll use household items and that stuff. What it does is it reconnects us three ways.

It reconnects us to the season and to the magic. It reconnects us to each other working on the sister wound and that kind of stuff, and it reconnects us to ourselves and our soul magic, our soul's essence. That will be reconnecting week. Reflection week will be week three, where we will bring in a divine feminine archetype.

Talking about spring, we'll be looking at things like maiden, create tricks, and Mother, which are very heart-oriented energy spaces. While we're doing these, while we're learning about spring, and while we're doing spring brace rituals, we're also bringing in these archetypes. What they do is allow us to give a persona, a face, and a name to this energy, to this heart and spring, heart-based, earth-based energy.

We can start to build a relationship with that, because sometimes when we just talk about the energy without giving it a face or a name, it's hard to relate to. 

What the archetypes do is allow us to build that relationship. Week three, that's what we'll be doing. We'll be bringing in the archetype through the musical playlists, through the meditations, and through the journal prompts, so you can really start to relate with this energy.

Then week four will be our reclaim week, where we will come together in a share circle and just talk about the month. What was it like, what was the shadow part, of especially things like mother or seductress or witch? These different archetypes have personal connotations for us, but also societal connotations and societal implications.

We'll be looking at those. There's going to be some shadow, some shit that comes up during share, like all that alliteration. But there's also gonna be some great things and some, epiphanies and some realizations that come up. That will happen in share as well. So again, each month we source our power from two places.

We source our power from the... I don't even wanna say source, I wanna say access. Yes, I like this better. We access our power through two places because they function as doorways. These two places are the seasonal shifts, the natural most ancient rhythms there are on the planet these seasonal shifts.

The other doorway is through these archetypes. What that does is helps us embody inside and even just acknowledge the power that's always been living within us, the magic, the medicine that has been long eradicated by the patriarchy and forced underground. That's what we're gonna be doing is reclaiming a lot of that.

Again, if that sounds interesting to you, the challenge for Rooted is starting today as the day you're listening to it, and you can check that out at rootedfeminine.com/challenge. I would love, love, love to have you join us over there. If you are 'woo', and if this is speaking to you and reclaiming your magic and just remembering who you are.

The two biggest things about Rooted is helping you trust yourself and helping you take up space, because those are the two things that, that women were so powerful at before the patriarchy rose and it's something that we're trying to get back to. Again, that is rootedfeminine.com/challenge, where you can find out more about that.

Rooted didn't start out this way. At first, it was more just in the seasonal stuff, and even before it became seasonal, it became like, I started with like slow living. It was always about the rewilding piece, stepping out of the expectations, stepping out of the systems and structures of oppression, and redefining life on your own terms.

It started with me looking at like slow movement, slow eating, slow living. That was a piece of it. But over the two years, it really became more spiritual than that for me. It started - slow living felt surface-level, which was great, but I wasn't interested in bringing a surface-level program to life.

I had enough surface level. I really needed to be going to a soul level. That's when living cyclically, living rhythmically, embodying the earth, embodying the feminine energies. That's when that really came. It came slowly on, and I remember talking with Jacqueline, talking with my good friend Lee, and just going back and forth on "oh, how much do I want to go there?"

Then the answer eventually became, I can't not go there. It just became soul language for me and it was like, I can't not talk about this. I can't not put this work into the world. I've talked about Rooted in terms of it being a mate of my soul, and that's what I mean. It became this point of even if I did this for free, I would still have to do this.

It is still so important for me for women to find their power to take up space and to build an unshakeable sense of trust in themselves. I can't not do that. It's definitely evolved and it's definitely changed, and I think that's why it took me two years to bring it to life. If you've been listening to me for two years and you've been saying, "oh, I wanna do a side hustle, it doesn't feel like the right time".

I get that. If I had brought the original Rooted to Life or the Legacy or Heritage or whatever it was originally called or whatever name I was playing with at that time it would not have been this soul program. I had to do some deep work and some deep exploration to find out what this really was meant to be.

But at this point, it feels like I can't not do it. Hopefully, that's helpful for you guys. I do wanna move into some of the bigger struggles that I faced because just because I have done this before doesn't mean that it wasn't hard at times or it wasn't a challenge. I think the two biggest ones that came up for me were imposter syndrome and time management.

Which is hilarious because those are the two biggest things that my students face. I just had an incredibly deeper level of empathy for my students this round, because I was a beginner again. My imposter syndrome came from... 

It's so funny because this is stuff that you guys feel, and I hear from you all the time, and I even have made podcast episodes about these things, but the reason that empathy rising and Side Hustle was so natural for me is because my undergrad is in business and my master's is in mental health. 

I really felt like it was this culmination. It was like my body of work, almost like all of these pieces over here and then all of these pieces over here were coming together in this joint fashion.

This spiritual side, like I said, has always been a piece of me, but it wasn't even something that I named or acknowledged. I just thought - it's not that I thought that's how everybody was. It was just like, it's how I had always been. I didn't see the value of it. I also had no formal training in it. 

I have since invested in a few different programs to get more formal training in Priestesshood, in leading meditations, and in leading some of these things because even though I've held space for a lot of people, I had never done, I had never led people through an energy workshop or never led people through meditation before. Doing it for yourself is one thing, but doing it for other people is another.

I did invest in a couple of smaller programs. Now, I haven't gone so far as to go and get like a certification or anything, partly because I haven't necessarily found anything that I want to specialize in at that point, but having a couple of programs under my belt and then going out and doing it, going out and leading the meditations, I had a big event on the summer solstice.

I also had a big event on the fall equinox where I led meditations and had a hundred women following along and things like that. I got enough training to feel competent, and then I went out and did the thing, and doing the thing was scary as hell but it was more valuable to me than sitting in more classrooms or studying more.

 I got enough education that I felt like, okay, it's scary, but I can take the step forward, and so I did. The other thing that I feel a bit 'impostery' about is my image, and yes, I'm an enneagram three, so I'm aware of where this is coming from, but I don't wear you really any jewelry. Sometimes I don't even wear my wedding ring, I'm just not a big jewelry person.

I'm not walking around in like flowing purple iridescent robes and stuff. It's like I don't necessarily look the part of a spiritual person. I don't know if I look the part of a spiritual guide or for somebody to help people explore these topics, even though I know without a doubt in my soul and in my bones that this is for me and this is my work. A big part of my work.

I still don't necessarily look the part, even the brand that I'm having built is greens and browns and looks like mud and roots. It's not purplely pink crystally stuff. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I think of Rebecca Campbell, her brand very much looks like that.

She has Oracle decks and all of these things and my brand looks nothing like that. I feel a little bit of an imposter, am I going to be taken seriously because I don't necessarily look like these people? That is a huge thing that I'm having to tease out and just do my work around. Asha Frost is an incredible human being. She's an indigenous woman who leads just these incredible spiritual containers. 

She's one of the ones that I invested with this year. She laughed out loud when I was saying this. I was like, "I don't have the bangles and the robes at this and that" and she's just laughing and she's "do you think your ideal customer and the woman who knows that your work is for her cares about that?" and I said, "absolutely not". She said, "okay". 

I also don't look like a yogi. Like I'm not walking around in like yoga. Often I'm walking around in yoga pants, but not like the yoga pants that the yoga people wear. Or the small tank tops or whatever, I don't look like that either. It's just the stuff that people are used to seeing. 

It's not that I doubt my ability to teach, that's not it. I feel like I've proven that I can teach, so that's not it. It's more the way that I look and the image. Are people going to trust that I know what I'm talking about because I don't match the image that they have in their heads of a spiritual leader?

I'm working through that, but it's definitely come up and it's definitely had me hesitating to put emails out, or apprehensive about promoting this thing or whatever.

I was in the imposter syndrome place. 

What I did the last time I had imposter syndrome around launching Side Hustle was that I did the same thing. I got enough knowledge. In this case, I had degrees in all of this, so that helped. I got prepared enough to go ahead and put something out there, even though it was still scary.

Then I just moved forward, and that's exactly what I did here. I got prepared enough to say, alright, I'm still scared as hell, but I'm gonna do it. I don't know if that's helpful for everybody, and I don't know if that's gonna help everybody overcome their imposter syndrome, but that's what I did.

I wouldn't even say I've overcome it, but I'm exposure therapy-ing myself about it. Every time it becomes a little bit easier and a little bit easier. That's been my approach. The other big struggle has been time management. I now have this full-time job. When I was building Side Hustle, I was building one business.

Now I've been maintaining this full-time business that has to "meet certain financial needs for us" for the next year, two years until we're back in Arizona and established. At that point, I can start to relax or whatever, and wherever the money comes from, the money comes from. 

I have these obligations, they're already locked in and already committed to, and I'm trying to bring something on board. Full-time job, or full-time business, family, trying to be a friend, trying to be a daughter, sister, wife, mom, and building a side hustle. 

I totally got that. The biggest thing I've learned about myself is that I—and I've known this—I'm an anxious avoider, I'm not shy to say that. But I shut down when I'm overwhelmed.

I remember at my practicum site, my supervisor coming in and saying, let's talk about overwhelm because I had 14 case notes that I hadn't done, and they were like jamming me with clients and she could just say sense that I was like pulling out and I was withdrawing and I wasn't talking to people when I came in, and at the meetings, I was just sitting down and then leaving right away and she could see I wasn't myself. 

Some of that started to happen this year as well, where it was like, "Okay,  I just can't get this part done". An example is I built my funnel when the students were building their funnel, but all I got up was the opt-in and the welcome sequence.

I didn't get the trip wire up and I'll share in a minute why that's so I actually, at the time of recording yesterday, sold my first trip wire for Rooted, which was so exciting. I didn't get that until November, until after the students graduated and I had some space to make it. 

Finding extra space has been a challenge and I totally get what it's like for students now. Totally get it. Those have been the biggest challenges, imposter syndrome, and time management. 

Now, some surprises and wins is my audience growth. I started out trying to grow my audience organically, which is what I teach and what I live by and what I really believe in, and then I quickly realized I was not going to be able to put in the time, effort, and energy that I would've wanted to because my goal was to have 2000 people on the email list before launch.

The goal inside Hustle is to have 200-500 and I was shooting for 2000. I think this is part of where I was like, "oh, I've done this before. It should be easy. It should come faster to me because I know what I'm doing" and that wasn't the case. What I decided to do with the help of Haley was to move into ad spend.

I did have the extra money to spend and I had no idea what was gonna happen. It was a complete gamble. I didn't know if the ads would convert or anything. The ads ended up converting extremely well. They're still converting extremely well, so I'm spending for one audience less than a dollar. I'm spending for another audience, like a dollar and some change, and then for the third audience, closer to $2 per lead.

To compare this, when I run ads for you guys as therapists, I spend $3.50 or more per lead. Now the difference is the quality of leads from the therapist audience tends to be much better because I can go into the, (not me, Haley, and her team) can go into the back end of Facebook and say, I'm looking for somebody who has an LCSW who is this age and lives in this location, so we can get narrowed in by license type and all of that stuff.

The ads that I'm running for Rooted are so cheap. What I mean by cheap, I mean from cost and from quality. They're cheap, they're flimsy, they're not quality because I'm saying something like, I don't know exactly how she has it set up, but I'm saying something like "women, 25 to 55 who like tarot cards".

That could be Sally who works at Sonic, who has no desire to invest in a program that's over a thousand dollars. Even though these leads are coming in, It's a double-edged sword because my audience for rooted is now 8,000 people when I had intended for 2,000. So Amazing.

 Yeah. We have 8,000 people who I have no idea if they're qualified to buy for me. 

This is been an accident because I didn't know how these ads were going to convert, and this is why I said it was such a bummer that I didn't have a trip wire up because all of those people who were, I'm doing a quiz, all of those people who were taking my Rooted quiz, out of 8,000 of them if I had a tripwire up, how many of those sales could I have made a $27 sale off the back of my quiz?

I could have been at least offsetting some of these ads that I've spent because I've spent over $2,000 a month on ads. Do I have that money to burn? Yes. But am I pissed that it's gonna be hard for me to recoup it? Absolutely. Because. 8,000 people is a lot of people, but I didn't monetize those 8,000 people and I have set myself up for a lot of work to nurture those people and move them in the right direction toward my offer.

Now, what I've always done in the past and what I teach in Side Hustle, which now being on both ends of this, I still believe is 100% better, is organic growth first, building an audience more slowly of people who are actually gonna pay you. I would go to my grave on that. That is what I would recommend.

It's the way I've always done it, and now doing it the opposite, I still recommend it. That was a big surprise. Not necessarily a good surprise or a bad surprise, just an interesting one. But what has been really cool is the engagement from this audience is higher than my therapist audience. 

My therapist audience, you guys take a quiz. You get introduced to a trip wire and there's a seven-email sequence off the back. That is all true now for Rooted because the trip wire is up. Now my trip wire for therapists converts at 6% so the therapists are buyers.

I've only made one trip wire sale so far on Rooted, so I don't know what that percentage is yet. It's only been up for a couple of days. But I can tell you it's less than 6% right now. This audience is not necessarily a buying audience, but what else is different is in that seven-email sequence to the therapist, I say, hit reply, and tell me what you're thinking. Hardly anyone replies.

In the rooted audience, I get a ton of replies, so it's like they're engaging for free, but they're not putting their money down. Whereas the therapist audience does not engage for free very much, but very much puts their money down. It's fascinating for me how the audiences are different, and one of the big reasons for that is the rooted audience is a B to C audience.

It's a business-to-consumer. I'm helping people with their lives, in this case, their spiritual lives, but I'm not helping them with their businesses necessarily. This is something that I have done as a segment, which is also talking to entrepreneurs about how to make sure they're having more soul in their businesses.

I'm just testing that out because what I feel like that might be is a nice bridge all the way over to B to C. It might give me a little bit of low-hanging fruit since I know how to talk to entrepreneurs already. I might do that even though when I log into mailer light and when I look at the stuff I'm making, I'm duplicating everything and making like the life page, and then I'm swapping it out basically the word life for business and making a business page.

The one that I still gravitate toward most is the life one. I just don't how it's gonna convert. I might just focus on entrepreneurs for a little while knowing that the full-time or the ultimate goal is for full B to C. That's something that I'm looking at. That's what I want you guys to realize, this has been a long pivot for me.

When you guys work with me, you know that I'm about sustainability and longevity. I've been thinking about this program for two years, and it's just now coming to life, and it's not coming to life in its perfect version, if that even exists. I have a lot of things that I have forecasted for, but I also want to leave room for serendipity, for magic. It's a program about magic. 

It should leave room for magic, right? These are my plans, but they're not set in stone and each month of Rooted will get better and better. Each time I get more feedback from the students or the members, whatever I'm gonna call them will get better and better.

I just want you guys to know that the biggest thing that's gotten me through the time management piece and the imposter piece is imperfect action. I got a funnel that was two-thirds of the way done up, but at least it gave me 8,000 leads. I wasn't able to monetize those leads, but it gave me the 8,000 leads.

Imperfect action, right? The imposter syndrome, I can only be so prepared until I've gotta get out there and do it imperfectly and learn from the response, my response, and the student's response or the people watching this response, right? I feel like imperfect action has been the key.

With that, there are a couple things I'm nervous about. In 2023, I'll be running four programs. I've never run four programs before, so that will be... Space Holder will have its monthly calls. Side Hustle will be twice a week, plus Voxer, plus all the support. This is the reason, one of the reasons I decided to cap it at 30 is because I knew I was gonna be running four programs.

Also, I wanted to make sure that the students still got the best of me while I was running four programs, so that's why we capped it. Then the Mastermind for all of the Side Hustle graduates that meets twice a month and then Rooted will now meet twice a month, will still require me at least once a week to build out those other assets that I was talking about.

I'm nervous about that. I'm gonna be the busiest I've been, but I also have the highest income potential I've ever had because I've introduced another revenue stream. Part of my work will be learning to balance that out, learning to find downtime, learning to make sure I'm doing a lot of self-care, and all of that.

I'll be making sure I keep you updated on those things. That's it. That is my experience with my side hustle. I hope it's given you a bit of insight into the business decisions I made and also just a bit of insight into this new direction, this additional direction that I'm going in and that I'm really excited about.

If you've been listening just for the business stuff, love it. Glad you're here to learn. Hopefully, it was valuable, but if you've also been listening for the 'woo' stuff and you're a soul-sister who wants to figure out if Rooted is right for you, I'd love to have you come to the challenge. It starts today and it will run through Friday.

All the replays will be available, so if you miss the lesson from today, that's okay. You can check it out. It's designed to help you build a grounded, trusting, and knowing relationship with your divine feminine power. If that is calling for you or calling out to you, you can join the re-routing journey and you can do that over at rootedfeminine.com/challenge. 

Alright, guys. Happy New Year. Hope you guys are resting and having a lot of space at the end of the year here, and until next time, keep on rising.

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