A Week In The Life Of Kate September 15, 2025

Wake up and realize my alarm is going off but silently, for the last half hour. Roll my eyes for the umpteenth time at the iPhone and feel gratitude that my MIL is in town and is already up and gotten the kids ready so we’re not actually late. Decide to stay in bed for a bit and scroll tattoos (I’m getting another one tomorrow!) for a bit, using ChatGPT to help me design some ideas. End up falling back to sleep for a bit.

Oof, that went longer than I planned. Jump out of bed to get the laundry started as our house manager is here today after being out of town last week and our laundry pile is INSANE. Pathetic what I don’t do when she’s away. If this is your first time reading one of these, know that I fully recognize the immense privilege I have to hire help. It’s something I’ve discussed in previous diaries, so I won’t belabor the point, but I’d be remiss to not at least #priviledgedpost this.

Get changed and take Ferg for a nice walk through the woods this morning while listening to this book (while I haven’t found a good replacement for reading physical books on the Kindle, I do listen to all my audiobooks exclusively on Libro.fm to support my local bookstore, though I just learned that my Spotify membership also includes some books, so that’s where I’m listening to this one). Of course he immediately stepped into his own shit so when we get home I throw him straight into our bathtub and thank Goddess Matt is working from home today to help me wrangle him.

Cleaned up and making myself a fancy decaf cold brewat home (I recently bought this pistachio syrup and some salted caramel cold foam and it’s so delicious with a splash of milk). Sitting down at my desk and getting this doc all caught up and ready to start work for the day.

I’ve been using the Dia browser for the past month and am absolutely obsessed with the AI capabilities. It’s been a total game changer and I was so nervous to leave Chrome because of all the extensions I use but they all work with Dia too so I’ve only upgraded my setup, without losing anything.

Alright so doing my morning start-up ritual. Checking ads, email, Skool, ClickUp. Did my Profit First distribution. Turned off the IG-only ads I launched last week as the CPL was >$5 and I only got 1 sale. Made a few tweaks and turned it on again, will test for another 3-7 days to see if I can get the purchase conversion up and CPL down.

Oof. Went down a few rabbit holes– one of which was learning more about GEO and how to ensure I can get found by AI tools. Need to focus now

Need to make a quick to do list for the week:

• URGENT!! Record Her AI Era Summit presentation - DUE TODAY!

• Schedule ROUNDTABLE promo email for Tuesday

• Clean out inbox and Clickup

• Ads optimization

  • Retargeting ads set up

• Inbox Insights

• Host the Room call

• Write the WSL

• Start writing birthday sale promo emails

• Write August Income Report post

• Blog Post: Publish AI gender gap post

• Ads ROAS tracking system

• Paypal issue - respond to lawyer and Paypal directly

Alright, I need to take a quick lunch break and then complete my summit presentation to turn in today. I meant to do it last week but didn’t want to record while I was sick. Now it’s down to the wire.

Took a lunch outside on my porch with Fergie so I could truly rejuvenate myself on a quick break. No phone, nothing for my mind to do but eat, enjoy and stare at nature.

Back at my desk. Brainstorming with Mildred to write the outline for my presentation. Of course I’m using AI to help me get this presentation together!

Just finished recording the presentation. I still need to edit it, but it’s done. And now I’m hopping onto a mastermind call with my Mixermind group, we got new pods for the quarter and I’m excited to meet my new group.

Off my peer group call, which I took from my front porch because it’s so gorgeous out today and I needed a change of scenery, and now going to finish editing the summit presentation so it’s ready to be submitted.

Done! Took a 5-minute snack break.

Oops ended up going down a Meta ads rabbit hole after my mixermind talked about how to quickly scale ads that are profitable. Also got the idea to test running ads straight to the offer instead of freebie to tripwire and am curious to set that up. I feel like I need to take a whole day to set up a bunch of different ads I’ve been wanting to try and just get them running. Annoyed at myself that this is something that directly moves the needle in my business and it always gets bumped to the bottom of my to do list because it’s not technically urgent. I just booked 4 calls with my ads membership that I pay for and always forget to use also. And I really want to start attending their weekly calls, which I always forget about. Gotta take advantage of this support and really double down on ads!

Going to finish the day by getting my roundtable email scheduled for tomorrow so it goes out on time.

DONE! And done with work for the day. Kids are on their way home and time to switch into family mode.

Cook dinner while Matt takes the kids to the park, then we chat about everyone’s day, what Jackson wants for his birthday (which is on Thursday) and then do a family round of Mario Kart. It’s Mattie’s turn tonight to put the kids to bed, so I go sit out on the porch and look at Pinterest for tattoo inspo. When he’s done we settle on the couch and talk about renting a place in Santa Fe for the summer next year, and whether or not we want to stay where we are in Atlanta (I vote yes!) for the foreseeable future. Then we turn on Soprano’s (watching the whole series for the first time ever and of course I love all the therapy sessions!).

Upstairs, get ready for bed and read Wally Lamb until I fall alseep.

Wake up with Gemma Bean curled up next to me. Smother her with kisses. Is there anything better than snuggles with small children? “Oh please don't go - we'll eat you up - we love you so!”

Get the kids ready for school and at 7:30 they’re out the door. Get out my yoga mat and decide that since I’m still on my period (Day 5) and moving slow, but feeling stiff all over, I’m going to do some light yoga, stretching and mobility. Do a few guided videos and then just turn on piano music and spend the next half hour in a meditative state, sometimes just laying on my mat with my eyes closed, occasionally changing positions and twisting my body around. It feels good. Unstructured time and movement, nowhere else to be but here. I get out my books (Courage to Change, 365 Tao**, Wabi Sabi) and read a few pages of each. Realize I left my phone upstairs and thank my former self.

Ferg is ready for a walk, so I pop my earbuds in and keep listening to my book while we stroll the hood. Beautiful morning. Feels like Fall in Atlanta and I realize how happy I feel, how content with my life I truly am. It’s not often I pause to notice this, so I’m noting it here alongside my ambitious desires to always have and do more. Both are true.

Back inside, making a pistachio latte and egg bites for breakfast, my mom calls and we chat for 20 minutes while I eat. Get out my laptop and send my friend a few design ideas for her new house, check my personal email and respond to a few messages about the kids.

Go upstairs to take a shower and get ready for the day. Planning to head out after the Room call to work at a coffee shop on Buford Highway before my tattoo appointment at 3:30. I’m so excited!

Sitting down at my desk to start work for the day. Catching up in this doc. And now looking at priorities for the day.

Respond to Inbox Insights clients. Only one person wrote in this week, which is shocking. But what we just figured out was the lesson so many of us (including me!) need to hear. My client has been in creation mode always thinking she needs to create more and new when her biz feels like it’s not working fast enough. But she just sent me some stats. I want to share here so you can see what I wrote back to her:

You're doing a lot of the right things right now, and I just want to acknowledge your consistency and how much you’ve built. 188 visitors → 88 subscribers → 8 tripwire sales at $9 is a fantastic conversion rate (47% opt-in rate? Amazing). This tells me your message is working—and now it’s time to get it in front of more people.

So let’s make this your mantra for the rest of the month: More traffic.

Here's what that could look like.

Your tripwire is converting at 9% with 88 opt-ins taking you up on the tripwire offer. If you could get 500 visitors to the site, that means you'd sell 45 tripwires (and at $9 a pop, that's $405). If you could get 5000 visitors, you'd sell 450 tripwires and make $4050. Now imagine if we increased your conversion rate to 13%. Now those 5000 visitors just made you $5,850!!!

I share that so you can see the power of traffic. Not creating anything new, but getting more people to what you already have!

Going to look at a few things for my ads membership and make a little to do list for myself.

Just looked at all my ads data for the last year to get ready for some calls with my ads mentor.

A few notes:

• So, as a whole, for the entire year I have nearly broken even on my ad spend, and this is counting what people go on to do after Day 1 of the funnel. So I think I can safely say that some of those 3500 leads went on to buy something else and probably pushed my ad spend into profitable territory. And I’m now profitable on Day 1 with ad spend since July. So it’s all gravy from here.

• AOV nearly doubled mid-year (thanks to me changing the price of my tripwire from $7 to $17), which is a major driver of the ROAS lift.

• I’ve made 12 MBA sales so far from these ads, which I added as the upsell in July and is major factor in my positive ROAS. So happy I tested that experiment and it has proven very successful!

  • My bump offer conversion rate is around 13%, which is good but definitely has some room for improvement. I may test out a different offer there instead. Right now it’s a membership and I think that might deter people, though it can also result in recurring revenue. I wonder if I did the SEO course at $37 (normally $22) if we could increase that conversion rate to 25%+. If we kept the same traffic and had 175 people buy the tripwire and then convert at 25% on a $37 offer, we’d add $1618 in revenue, compared to 13% at $39 bringing in $897 in revenue, which now seems like a no brainer. I’m not sure we’re getting $600+ in recurring revenue from the membership offer.

• Another contributing factor was improving the conversion rate of my landing page, which I tweaked in August and really paid off, jumping to over 50% for cold traffic, which is awesome!

• Interestingly, CTR is trending down, while CPM is rising; yet ROAS still improved due to stronger mid-funnel/offer economics. This tells me a few things:

  • My funnel is converting fewer, costlier clicks into significantly more revenue per click.
  • I should probably launch 3–5 fresh creatives per week until CTR recovers to ≥2.0%, but I’m always scared to do that because I feel like this one in particular gets such good engagement…. Mildred says “Don’t chase CTR as a vanity metric. Your buyers likely skew toward lower-volume, higher-intent clicks. Keep creatives that filter for intent (clear promise, price anchoring, specificity), even if they pull a smaller audience.”
  • I could also test some new audiences with this same creative. Right now I’m really just letting Meta’s advantage+ targeting do the heavy lifting.

• 1 pm: Hosted the Room call and did a slightly different co-working style this time where we started silent and people could come off mute when they had questions. I really liked it and think people were more productive this way.

• 2 pm: Off the call, sliced up an apple and got in the car to head up to my tattoo appointment. But first, boba tea. Stopped in at Sweet Hut and worked for half an hour with a honey jasmine milk tea and a lemongrass bao bun. So good!

• 3:30 pm: At the tattoo studio, she’s working on the designs more now (I hate that no artist will get it finalized before you get there, my OCD does not like this uncertainty, but I feel pretty confident she’ll get it right after my experience with her last time). I get on my laptop and clean out my inbox and ClickUp. Finally! That had been piling up after almost a month of deferring most of my responses except the most urgent. But that’s why I love my Inbox Zerosystem. I was able to get through everything in half an hour and maintain a clear inbox every day in between.

• 5 pm: Whew, she’s finally done designing and prepping the stencils and all the things and we’re getting started. There’s nothing quite like the “pain” of getting a tattoo, it hurts so good!

• 8:30 pm: OMG I’m just now leaving. That took a looooong time. I did get 2 and they were super detailed and larger than I normally do but dang! I’m sooo happy with them though. There is something so incredibly special about meaningful body art that represents something to you and expressing yourself this way. It’s such a high and makes me feel so connected to myself.

• 9:00 pm: Back home, Jackson came running down from his room (where he was supposed to be sleeping) so excited to see my new art! It was so cute and then we got to talk for a while while I ate dinner. It’s so fun being able to have real conversations with him now. I enjoy him so much.

• 9:30 pm: Kids are back in bed, I’m fed and Mattie and I settle in for some Soprano’s. Stayed up too late and didn’t get up to bed until 11:30. Read my book until I fell asleep, which only took like 4 minutes.

“Mom, it’s time to go to school.” WTF is wrong with my alarm?! Seriously, it didn’t even go off silently this morning, just nothing even though it’s set. I swear Apple always breaks its existing phones right before they’re about to release a new one so you’re forced to upgrade. This is getting ridiculous though.

It’s Jackson’s 7th birthday today though so I try to stay calm so he doesn’t feel stressed on his special morning. I left him a present on the counter so he’d see it when he wakes up because he is an early bird and is always up before everyone else. He casually strolls into my bedroom after Gemma woke me up and we’re getting ready holding his new truck and is like “Oh hey mom, thanks for the truck.” I run over and give him big hugs and kisses and ask him if he knows it can do this thing (it’s some kind of transformer thing) and his eyes go wide, “WOW! I did not see that coming!” LOL. I love hearing kids say adult phrases, it always cracks me up.

Anyway, we’re running about 15 minutes late for school but everyone is so calm and casual, it almost makes me wonder if we should always be late haha.

Get them dropped off and head to Dunkin Donuts to get a few dozens donuts to bring to his class to celebrate this afternoon. Call my mom, whose birthday is also today, and chat with her on my way home. Once I’m back, I unpack all of the boxes of presents we’ve ordered and set up a present table for him to find when he gets home from school. He wanted to wait on everything until his Daddy was home from his trip. Said he wants to have “special time with his family”. He’s such a little love.

Check in on some of the comments being left of my Facebook ad. OMG it’s hilarious how angry people are that I’m not on social media. Some are just outraged in general (“I actually like posting every day,” they say… okay? You do you, why can’t I do me?), some are royally pissed that I say I’m not on social media but am running ads on social media (Advertising on a billboard by the highway doesn’t mean you’re driving on that highway. You’re not stuck in traffic, honking, or waving at other drivers—you’re simply using the road as a channel to reach people passing by. Advertising on social media is the same), and others are defending me and trying to explain to those who can’t read or think critically why advertising is different from organic posting. I love it all, honestly–it’s great engagement for the algo!

Catching up in this doc and checking in with my daily start up ritual to see how ads are performing, daily sales, membership churn, etc. Sent my friend Dama a few questions about the hubs of hers that I’m using and we’ve been talking about doing a trade because she only teaches how to use her hubs with Thrivecart, but I make them work for Kartra.

Gotta go brush my hair and put a little mascara on as I’ve got two ads calls coming up this morning.

Starting to prep for my ads meetings and pulling data and links to share. Met with my friend Kara Charron and she gave me some great tips for how to scale my current ad that’s working:

• Scale back main campaign

  • Decrease spend by 20% (from $175/day down closer to $125/day) until 2x ROAS return, which signals to Facebook to reset if performance has dipped.

• Clone winning ad

  • Keep original untouched.
  • Duplicate into new campaign at $25/day/ad.
  • Break out individual ad sets (instead of CBO) so Facebook can’t choose spend.

• Test new audiences with proven winner creative

  • Use black-and-white text ad (top performer).
  • Test different interest buckets and keep Advantage+ separate as its own test.

I did all of that and then met with my SAC ads mentor at 11 and talked about my evergreen webinar funnel, which wasn’t converting as well. After looking at the data and comparing to my challenge funnel, he recommended I forget the webinar funnel and test some new things with my challenge funnel, many of which Kara also suggested. So this afternoon I’m going to do the following:

• Create new bump offer ✅

  • A/B test the SEO Course + GPT as the bump offer instead of a membership
  • Test at $37, and if conversions are weak, try $19.
  • Add follow-up sequence to upsell the rest of the course.

• Revamp 1-click upsell ✅

  • Add a short VSL at the top of the page (splice existing video w/ custom intro about “special limited offer”).
  • Test $497-$500 full-pay offer first.
  • Add a $44/mo x 12 downsell if they decline.

• Set up upsell email follow-up ✅

  • Send an extra reminder before the 30-minute timer expires.

• Set up retargeting ads for email list leads who don’t purchase MBA.

  • Budget: $5–10/day.
  • Rotate creative: discounts, bonuses, testimonials, shop offers.
  • Goal: keep touchpoints alive and scoop people back into funnel.

• Strengthen follow-up sequences

  • Put challengers into the $1500 MBA funnel after the challenge is over.
  • Add more retargeting ads and email follow ups about MBA.

• Run direct-to-tripwire ad test

  • Send cold traffic straight to $17 tripwire page (bypassing freebie).
  • Track conversion rate and compare to opt-in → tripwire funnel.

Taking a break to bring donuts to school for Jackson’s birthday.

Back from Jackson’s school and had the best time. OMG those kids are all so stinking cute and soooo sweet. I got soo many hugs, including from strange kids I’ve never met before. The best!

Mattie just got home so catching up with him for a few before I get back to work.

Rachel voxed me about some refund requests we’ve been getting from our $44 MBA promo and it’s perfect timing because I was wanting to A/B test the 1-time payment of $500 instead so this is one more reason to test it. These leads seem to not understand it’s an installment plan and not a subscription they can cancel at any time… I’m not sure how to make that clearer on the sales page:

Checking in on a few DCA stats and then starting to work on the promo emails for my 38th birthday sale. I’m kinda thinking I’m going to keep these emails really short and sweet, just to the point: here’s the deal, here’s why you need it. I’ve got so many to write and I don’t want to overwhelm myself or my list. Uploading ideas into both my customGPT and Claude and combining the best of the best into an edited version. I templatized the format since I have 5 announcement emails and 5 deal ending emails to send. Thankfully it won’t be more than 1 email per day and of course, I’ll include an opt-out link for anyone who doesn’t want to get the bday promo emails but does want to stay on my list.

Taking a quick lunch break to chat with my friend who just called while visiting her daughter in college. Then Rachel text me this hilarious videoand I went down the rabbit hole for… oh yup, it’s now officially been an hour when I was supposed to break for 15. Oops!

And now Jackson is home early from school so we can celebrate his bday so I’m off for the night.

Plus $1256.50 from DCA sales = $1842.50