2025 Debrief: the whole year, cracked open

01:16 Kate Kordsmeier: What's happening? Welcome, welcome, everybody. Welcome to the 2025 1K a day debrief call. We're so happy to see some of our room members here who just hopped off the room call and hopped on over. And we're excited to see everybody else that's joining us for the next hour. I will go ahead and turn it over to you, Kate. Okay, great. Love it. Welcome, y'all. I'm excited to be here today. I have one hour to go through all the 2025 goodness and embarrassing mistakes and flops and all the things. So I'm excited to get started today. Okay, I'm just going to go ahead and share my screen. So let me make sure it is sharing the correct part of my screen. Can y'all see? Okay, my slides. Awesome. And I'm in the wrong, I'm on the wrong slide. So pretend you didn't see that one yet. Okay, welcome to the 1K a day 2025 debrief. This is going to be, you know, interactive. As usual. So if you have questions, pop them in the chat. It is sometimes hard for me to follow the chat while I am sharing my screen. So I will rely on Rachel here to interrupt me as needed. And we'll definitely have some time at the end for questions as well. But just put them in the chat as you can. We'll promise I'll get to them by the end. And for now. Oh. The room call. We missed you. No worries. So all right. So we are going to go ahead and get started. So this is how I tripled my revenue. And actually, I quadrupled it. But that just doesn't sound doesn't roll off the tongue quite the same way that tripled it. As I was looking at this, I realized I went from $500 a day on average in January 2025 when I started this to $2,000 a day on average for the entire month of December. So this is the debrief of those experiments, what worked. What didn't and everything in between. Okay, so the goal, if you're new here, the goal of the 1K Day Experiment, I started it in October of 2024. I noticed that I was making about $500 a day on average, and I was like, ooh, that's exciting. I'd never really tracked anything like that before, and daily sales was kind of a new thing in my business that had been going on for, you know, maybe six months at that point, and I was having such fun with it that I was like, you know what, maybe I could do like a behind-the-scenes offer of how I'm going to meet this next goal that I set of $1,000 a day. So that experiment started technically in October 2024, and it took me almost a full year to actually meet and then keep that pace going. So this wasn't just like, I didn't want just one good month where I had like. Like, oh, on average, my sales surpassed it. I wanted to say over the course of a year or at least many months, I'm able to make at least that much on a daily average. And of course, the constraint was I'm not willing to use social media. So the outcome, like I said, it took me a while. By August of 2025, I was at $1,300 a day on average. By September, $1,500. By October, $1,700. And like I mentioned, in December, we got to $2,000 a day for 30 days in a row. So that was really fun and exciting, especially that I was able to keep my profit margin on average for the year at 65%. So if you saw some of my emails, you know that I've been doing this particular business for the last seven years. And I've had years where I've made a lot more money than I'm currently making. So we used to be more in the $800K a year range. And I really intentionally scared. I held back my business. I had a really big team delivering that business model. I completely changed my business model. And that was in 2023 that I did all of this. And I took my six-month sabbatical in 2024 for the first six months. And then, like I said, when I came back was when I started kind of getting into this daily sales rhythm and this experiment came to life. So what's been really fun about this for me is that revenue is vanity. And while it, you know, stroked my ego a little harder for me to be able to say, you know, I'm almost a seven-figure-a-year business, I enjoy my business so much more now. And, of course, Rachel is on the team. Rachel is a part-time contractor. I used to have a lot of W-2 employees. And now it's basically me and Rachel with a couple other VA-type assistants for specific projects. And that feels so much better to run. I couldn't do it without Rachel, for sure. Although the first six months, as you'll see, the first six months of 2025, it was a true one-woman show. I had nobody on the team. I did not have a VA. I didn't have, other than my bookkeeper and my accountant, I was not paying anybody to help me in my business. And so I think that it was Shelly who noticed in the 1K Day Experiment this year, oh, wow, it looks like your revenue really increased a lot when you brought Rachel on. And it was like, yes, that was a big part of being able to delegate certain things off of my plate and move into more revenue-generating activities. So we're going to talk about all of that, but profit for me is sanity and freedom is the entire point. So that's what we're going to be sharing here today, and I'm just going to kind of walk through a high-level overview of what my year looked like, what kind of happened throughout this year, and what were some of the key experiments and things that went on that I think helped me reach this goal. So winter for me is always a... Season of hibernating. I feel like the new year, like New Year's Day for me is not January 1st. It's more like March 1st or maybe even April because I am much more synced up with like nature's rhythm and those sort of cycles in winter. I am very lazy. I am very like, I just want to be warm and cozy. I am not motivated to do a lot of work. I have very low energy. I don't want to go outside. I don't want to do much. And so that was true of this year as well. And one of the big things that I did in January to kind of serve me in this way is that I had been hosting Get It Done Weeks for about six months before January 2025. And I decided to, I was hosting them just as a la carte workshops, basically. So anybody could join. We were selling them anywhere from $0 to $44. And I think maybe we had one that was around $100 or something, but I had. I've been trying some different ways of selling it. And I decided that I wanted 2025 to really focus on recurring revenue. And so I decided to move our Get It Done Weeks to be exclusively into the room membership in an attempt to try to stabilize some cash flow and get more people on recurring revenue plans. And so my revenue was much more passive, but it was lower during this time. And I think it was because I was kind of focused on making some of the behind-the-scenes pivots in winter that would serve me once I was ready to come out of my hibernation mode. So I kind of refer to this as like creating a financial weighted blanket because when I focused on recurring revenue, it kind of ensures that I have baseline expenses covered regardless of some of those daily fluctuations. So that was a big test. I wasn't sure how it would go because the room was $97 a month. But I wanted to try it out and see. And so actually, we ended up having great results from this. And then throughout the rest of 2025, I really doubled down on growing the room as one of the core things I wanted to do in my business. again, during this time, I really recommitted to like systems over hustle. And I relied a lot on my evergreen funnels on my email marketing and my SEO to kind of keep sales coming in during a month that had even in Atlanta, we had lots of snow days, some sick days, I travel in the winter a lot. so I really needed that kind of, just recurring more automated type revenue. Okay, so once I identified what I needed, I also identified what I didn't need anymore. And that was a lot of low ticket sales. So I looked more at my offer suite, and I started kind of just making some either some backend changes like quietly, I wasn't doing like big price increase announcements or anything like that. And also just kind of like mapping out my promo calendar to say, all right, these are the core ways I'm going to make money. It's not going to be from selling $7, $27 offers. Those might be good entry points, but what I'm really going to focus on is selling more of the mid ticket range products. And so for me, that's the room, the one K day experiment and MBA. And I just kind of decided during this winter kind of season of hibernation and analysis that that's what my promo calendar was going to focus on for the rest of the year. And once I was able to kind of identify like where the backbone of my daily sales were going to come from, then I could kind of shift that focus into launching those offers. And then I knew what I wanted to do when I started running ads. And so February, 2020. I started running ads for the first time in my business in years. I think the last time I ran ads was like in 2021. So it had been a long time that I had run ads. I definitely, you can grow a multiple six-figure business without running ads or posting on social media. I proved that year after year after year. And I felt like ads might be something that could amplify what was already working. And I really wanted a way to automate more of my lead gen. In 2024, I relied heavily on bundles and summits, which I loved and was a very effective strategy. But it is also a very active strategy that takes more of your time finding the bundles and summits, filming your presentation, contributing all of the things, filling out the forms. Anybody who's done it knows that it's not super passive. And ads, not that anything is 100% set it and forget it, but it is much more so that. So there's a lot of maybe front-end setup, and then it's a lot of just small tweaking. Over the, you know, over the future. So I set up ads for the first time and I started testing running meta ads again. I also during this time really leaned into AI. So during hibernation seasons, I like to focus a lot on the back end. And so I was building out lots of custom GPTs, both for business and for personal use. I was really streamlining content and thinking about what kind of support I might want in my business in the future. When Rachel and I have actually worked together for many years now, but we took a little time apart during this early part of 2025. And rather than immediately rushing to replace her, I really wanted to try running the business myself and figuring out if I'm going to not just replace a person, but figure out exactly in this business model with this capacity and this stage of life that I'm in, my kids are five and seven right now. What is the best kind of support that I need? And I knew that I needed to do that on my own for a few months before I could hire that out. And so that's a lot of what I spent the winter doing. So let's see. I have a couple other notes here. I also had a couple flops in the winter. So I tried to sell the room annual pass at 30% off discount. And we had a little mini flash sale that was only for our existing members of the room. And we got zero sales. And so that was a big bummer. I was like super excited about this. I thought it was going to be such a no-brainer. And then it totally flopped. And I think the important lesson for me here wasn't necessarily to say, oh, the annual pass doesn't work. Or I need to throw out this offer. Or, you know, it was like this is just data. This is one experiment. This is one data point. And so I... then spent the next few months thinking about what I could do to better incentivize people to upgrade to the annual pass rather than just staying in month to month. And we had a lot of people that were coming in and coming out. We actually surpassed 100 active members in the room, which was my goal when I launched the room during this time period, which I was super excited about. But what we were seeing was that there was a very high churn, and that kind of continued throughout the spring. So I'll talk a little bit more about that as we go. But that was a big flop. But really my key insight here for winter and just that hibernation season in general is that rest is a revenue strategy. I might have made less during this season, which isn't always the case. Sometimes I make more when I'm resting. But this particular season, I happened to make a little bit less. But it allowed that quiet time for that strategic thinking. It allowed me to give myself that space and capacity. capacity to not just be running like a chicken with my head cut off in a million directions, but to really figure out what is it that I want? What is it that I'm trying to do? What is working? What's not? So I really recommend giving yourself several periods of rest throughout the year where you have the space and time to do that. Okay, so I think that's pretty much it. During this time period, I also my revenue. So in January, we did have a very low month. And by the spring ish, we were jumping, we jumped up to about $700 a day in our daily sales average. So that was an exciting thing to see like, okay, we're kind of moving in the right direction here. All right, so then let's go into full spring, which was kind of this Q2, April through June. This was really a season of delegation and consistency and systems again. So I did. Hire Rachel for customer service in April. She came on first for, I can't remember, Rach, do you remember? It was like only a few hours a week. And then like within two weeks, I was like, all right, I need you. I need you back like, you know, full force. Let's go. I think it was like five hours a week. And then, it was a pretty quick conversation to getting more hours. Yes, it was great. And I will say that while it was really helpful and eye-opening for me to manage customer service and our help desk and really have my finger on the pulse of what was going on with our customers, I do. So I do think it was a helpful thing for me to do. It was also not the best use of my time. And really, I felt like if I were to keep going like this and not delegate this out, I think I will always stay in maintenance mode. I can completely maintain what we have going right now doing this myself, but I can't grow it. And so it just became really clear to me that if I want to actually hit this 1K, a goal and grow my revenue. I'm going to have to delegate some things out. And that was the first thing that made the most sense. It was taking up a lot of my time. It didn't feel like it was the best use of my time zone of genius or skill set. Rachel is much better at it than I am. And so it was also like a very clear thing to delegate out. I also had a lot of things going on in my personal life in the spring. We had some heavy diagnoses with my son and our family. As many of you know, I have chronic health issues. And so I was going through some stuff too. And I really kind of focused on minimum viable work days, again, leaning heavily on our automated funnels so that those could sustain the business while I could prioritize my mental and physical health and my family's as well. And so May, I feel like was my like systems as self care month. Not only did we hit 365 days of daily sales. So that was like a really exciting. milestone of like, oh my God, I did it for a whole year. I had never done this before. Even when I was making 800 plus a year, I was not making daily sales. There would be sometimes weeks where I wouldn't make any sales. so this was a really exciting kind of snowball effect that was happening. And, I really doubled down in May on Airtable. I built a lot of automated dashboards and things that would help me track daily sales and customer lifetime value and recurring revenue and just seeing like where our money was really coming from and what was working and what wasn't. and so that around that time we were hitting about $660 a day and my profit margin shot up to 76%. So that was a very, very good month. And I always say this is a pre-tax profit margin. so I still had to pay taxes after that. okay. So I continued really leaning into AI as well. Well, in my Weird Hermits Mastermind, I was, we were all really like doubling down on AI in our own businesses. And so I decided to dub the upcoming months as like the summer of AI. So I continued creating lots of custom GPTs. I started adding them to a lot of our courses to increase their value and help people get better results faster. And again, I really was focused on Airtable and backend systems and less on content creation during this time. and then in June, this is when Rachel came back, like, I think around 15 hours a week and really freed up a lot of my brain space for more deep work and kind of moving the business forward. Around this time too, in June, I also decided, I think once I started really creating that backend dashboard, I realized that having so many different places that people were purchasing from us, we had old Thrivecart links, we had Shopify store, we had Kartra, It was just so complicated. I really, I wanted to simplify my tech stack more. I wanted to improve our tracking. I wanted to have a unified, a unified sales system and just like be able to really understand the lifetime value of our customers. And so I hired JC, who used to work for me as well, to do this migration project. And so this was just essentially, this was just a tech VA who migrated everything in their Shopify store into Kartra. And that was one of the best decisions I made all year. I feel like that made a huge difference in just how simple it was to figure out what was working and what wasn't and have everything in one place. So . And then the last thing that I did, they had this really fun experiment that started in June. I think it really kicked off at the, like in July, but I decided to add a really juicy upsell from MBA, for MBA to all of our offers. So anytime, anytime, Anybody purchased anything, I would give them, it would take them to a one-click upsell page to get MBA for just $44 a month for 12 months. And when I launched that the next month, we added almost 10K in revenue just from having that upsell funnel, and it was converting at a 33% conversion rate. So that was really exciting and a fun test. At first, I wanted to just try it on a couple offers, and then I was like, you know what, we're redoing the shop, we're redoing all these pages, why not? Redo the upsell across the board. All roads lead to MBA in our business, and so, like, how can I make that path more clear? So that was the experiment that worked really well in the spring leading into summer. Okay, so then summer came around, and this was kind of the season of, like, recalibration. So I had been running my ads for, since February, so however long that had been, four or five months, I guess. But I had just been doing it all on my own. I didn't really know exactly. What I was doing or what to fix. And so I decided to invest in an ads mentorship program and an AI membership. Again, I just really wanted to increase those skills and get more support. So I bought Tara Zerker's Successful Ads Club, and then I also joined Rick Mulready's AI Playbook. So we have some affiliate links that we can drop in the chat if anybody's interested in those. But those both made a huge difference in my business. And it did mean that summer, especially July, was one of my, I think it was my lowest revenue month of 2025. Our revenue did drop down as I spent more time investing in learning and getting some new strategies and skills and less time launching and putting new stuff out there. So I was still kind of keeping this pace of, I was still making over $500 a day like I had been, but I wasn't growing. And now I was starting to get frustrated and a little embarrassed that like, oh my gosh, I have this experiment. People are publicly watching this, and I'm just kind of stuck at this level. So what happened after I joined those things is that I learned some new things that I could test on my ads funnel. And almost immediately after making some of those changes, I scaled my ads and got to a 2x return on investment, return on ad spend, with my freebie to tripwire funnel. And so that made a huge difference in our revenue moving forward. Starting in August is when we started hitting that 1k a day, that 1k a day average. So I think getting some of that support was really helpful in figuring out what are even the things I should be looking at and tweaking and understanding better how ads worked in 2025. Again, I had that MBA upsell now on all of my thank you pages. It was converting really well. And then one of the losses that I had that I just want to share here, because I promised you guys a bit of a blooper reel and, you know, not just all the wins. If you're in the 1K Day Experiment already, then you probably remember this. But during the summer, I remember I was on Cape Cod with my family on a vacation, and I got a report from my accountant, and it was missing a bunch of revenue in our QuickBooks. And we couldn't figure out, wait, I knew I had made a few pay-in-full sales of MBA, and it wasn't showing up. And so I'm like, I don't understand where this money is. Long story short, I realized that Kartra had been still linked to my old PayPal account from the business that I sold in 2021. And so all of those PayPal payments were going to the buyer of my previous business, and she, being the horrible human that she is, kept the money and refused to give it back, refused to engage or respond. And so I just. However, just in that time period alone, I had lost $8,500 that got rerouted and misappropriated to the wrong account, and I lost my . I got so upset. I was so mad at myself for not catching it sooner. It was my mistake, even if she was being totally criminal about it. and I really, I mean, I had a full blown panic attack when I realized that it happened. And I got so I got so upset. And then I got into like, problem solving mode. And what am I going to do to recover this money? And I talked to lawyers, and I talked to mastermind friends, and I was like coming up with all these plans to get this money back. And eventually, I realized that my energy was so bad and scarce during this time. And I'm not saying $8,500 isn't a lot of money, it felt like a lot of money. But eventually, I just made the decision to choose my piece over Alright. And protecting that money and trying to like grasp so tightly to it. And so I chose to just walk away from it instead of trying to sue her or pursuing further, even just trying to get my customers to, I thought about, oh, well, maybe I could ask them to do refunds and then they could buy it again. And I, you know, it all this stuff. And it was like, no, this is just not coming from a good, clean place. And so that was a really big lesson for me too. And just like, what is worth your energy and what is not and protecting your peace and your mental health being the most important asset in your business. And so when I did that, I was able to quickly make $8,500 and actually much more than that when I stopped focusing on recovering the loss and instead just focused on how can I just make more money. And so that was a really good lesson. One of the other experiments I did during this time, again, trying to kind of choose abundance over scarcity was that I switched to a seven day refund. So prior to this, we had a no refunds for any reason at any time policy. And that was something that I kind of just copied from some other friends and business owners that were doing it that way. And like, they liked how just like clean and simple it was, know, selling digital products is a little bit tricky because people can get access and then say, oh, I want a refund and, you know, whatever. And so I just did that. And it never really felt quite right to me. It didn't feel like I was treating my customers, you know, how I wanted to be treated. And so I decided to treat my customers like humans and change it to a seven-day refund policy. And what was really cool is that our revenue and profit margin rebounded. Our average order value went up 28% and business energy improved all around. And so I think that it also helped more people who were maybe on the fence and weren't sure if they wanted this thing feel safe to buy because they knew that if they got in and it wasn't the right thing, they could get a. So I think we got more buyers and thankfully our refunds didn't really increase by a meaningful amount, especially over the next six months of having this new setup because our offers are good and most people don't want refunds. And so that was a really cool thing to try to and it feels really good now to know that like we make it make we're creating a safe place for people to purchase. the last thing that I did during this summer is I increased my tripwire prices so I had been having all of my tripwires be $7 and I did a couple little mini experiments where I would I raised the price a little bit to see what happened when I was with Shopify. But once we moved everything to Kartra I wanted to try it again with a little bit of a different strategy, because as I did the math and you can see that's kind of what's showing here in this lever and what the current thing was and what was needed, I just needed so much more traffic and volume to make my financial goals. Thank you. Thanks for $7. And so I again, shifted my focus more into the mid ticket offer range. Now, some of this was like $4.97 for the annual room pass, but some of it was just like a $7 tripwire was now $27, or in some cases, it went up to $77. And what was really cool, again, is that people still converted on those tripwires. And I was able to increase my average order value and start getting closer towards meeting my goals when I wasn't chasing something that needed such high volume. So we've talked about this a lot in the 1K Day Experiment lately. I don't think that means that nobody should ever run $7 tripwires. I am still a big fan of starting with $7 tripwires to increase momentum and energy and quick wins and getting people in and used to buying from you. Like there's so many benefits. I wouldn't change anything of how I did it. I would still do it that way. Just knowing that eventually you're going to graduate into... A higher price point. So that was summer. And then we had our biggest breakthrough in September. This is when the snowball effect really hit its stride. And all of the things that I had been doing over the last nine months started to really work. So I hit my 1k a day goal, and then I exceeded it in September. We started making $1,800 a day. In one of my Week in the Life docs where I was tracking my time, I made $650. an hour. And I was able to add 4,600 new leads to my email list via summits, ads, and a podcast guest appearance. So September is when my podcast appearance on the Jenna Kutcher Gold Digger podcast came out. We ended up making over $10,000 in new revenue just from that podcast appearance. And we got lots of new leads on our list. It was a huge authority builder. So that also showed me once. Again, I had the same experience being on Amy Porterfield's podcast, and even some podcasts that are much smaller than those, those are obviously two of the biggest names in our industry, that podcast guesting is a great way to borrow other people's audiences to grow your own. So in September, that was one of the biggest things that drove traffic and revenue. I also hosted my 38th birthday sale, and I kind of test drove a daily deals format where every day for five days we released a new deal just for 24 hours. And we ended up making over $16,000 in cash collected from that sale. We had more even from what we accrued on payment plans and memberships. But by the end of September, I was 45 days into a streak of averaging about $1,200 a day. And I think, again, this was in large part because I had optimized my ads funnel. So I now had. The free challenge working and giving me a positive, sometimes two to four X return on ad spend on day one. So that was really exciting. And I started also like the main experiment I did other than kind of that flash sale was I started focusing my income reports and my debriefs on rolling 12 month metrics instead of monthly snapshots. And this seems really obvious now in hindsight, but I think the daily sales kind of mindset got me into looking at things in such a small time period, like literally daily. And it was harder for me to see the bigger picture when I was focused so much on the day to day. And so once I was able to, you know, zoom out and say, OK, what's happening over the last 12 months and what are the trends and patterns that I'm seeing from there? I feel like I feel got so much clearer in my business as well. So that was kind of an internal shift that made a big difference. And again, I was still able to keep a 61 percent profit. through this month. So I was still making and keeping most of my money. All right. Through the end of the year was our best. Q4 is generally the best quarter for a lot of businesses. It historically has also been my highest earning quarter. And it continued to do that. And then we were able to far exceed the 1K a day goal. So I would say October was really focused on refinement and retention. So Rachel and I behind the scenes had been working a lot on how we could improve retention for the room. We were adding things like milestones and loyalty rewards. We were creating some automations to follow up with people. We created a nurture sequence. We were just doing lots of different things to try to increase and improve retention. So that started kind of getting into effect. I know by the end of the year, we had over now 40 annual passes sold to the room. So again, if I had made that one flash sale in the beginning of zero sales mean, oh, this offer sucks. Nobody wants it. Scrap everything. I would never have gotten to the place then where we were able to have 40 people paying us $500. It's $497. But . So anyway, all that to say, don't give up too soon. I think that is the thing, one of the common themes that I've been seeing with my clients, but also from like watching my own, you know, diaries and debriefs and everything is like giving up too soon is one of the most common reasons that people end up, you know, closing their business and having it not work. so that was great. We also, one of the improvements we made to the room, but to all of our offers was we migrated our community from Slack to school and we have had at least 20 X the engagement. we have reduced churn. We have people that are, I mean, so many of you I'm looking at even just Nikki, Danielle, and Wendy are on my. My screen right now. And I'm like, the three of you show up there every week amongst many others. And it's just been such an amazing place to continue supporting our clients in between calls and launches and things like that. It's a fun way for me to, I think it's been a really cool way for me to feel like there's sometimes there's things I want to share that like, I don't need to write a whole email about it, but I'm not on social media. So I don't have a quick way to just be like, hey, here's something that's going on or something I'm thinking about. And school has really been able to kind of fill that void for me. And I think people like, you know, people in the community like seeing that. So moving from Slack to school was a huge, a huge experiment and a really good one. And then in October, I had kind of the webinar breakthrough. So I reached a major milestone for my business. I had over 1100 registrations for my live webinar. I had never, I don't think I've ever had more than like two or 300 people. register for anything I've done. So this was really exciting. Yes, I ran ads to it. And then ultimately, I do a live webinar currently once a year. So only one time a year do I host a webinar like this. This was my one time in 2025. We converted at almost 11% on that webinar. Again, we had a lot more traffic and people to sell to. We tried out doing a like group boxer channel for people to ask questions, which I know some of you really liked and are implementing in your own business now. So that's been really fun. That was a cool experiment. Our average order value jumped up to $68. And our recurring revenue really started to stabilize around this time with our churn and the memberships dropping. So that was a really fun period. And then in November, we had Black Friday. So I mentioned that I did sort of like a test run of my Black Friday deal, the daily deals campaign for my birthday sale. And then I looked at what worked and what didn't. And then I basically they read. We created it with new offers for Black Friday, and we ran that again. During that time, I also ran a, sorry, I'm just looking at my notes here, and this is for the MBA webinar, not the Black Friday sales. So the MBA webinar, I should go back to that real quick because I forgot to say this. So the MBA webinar, we did have 34 sales of MBA, which is the most we'd ever had in a single launch period ever. And we had over a 5x return on ad spend for the webinar ads that we ran to that. So this, Wendy, I know we were talking about this this morning. When you're running webinar ads, don't look at the return on ad spend until after the launch is over because the purpose of webinar ads is to get people to register, and then you have to see, are you able to convert those registrants right into sales? Okay, so yes, so then we did Black Friday. We increased our AOV by... 68%. Again, one of the lessons that I kept learning and then trying again was raising the price of what we were offering. So we made $16,000 during my birthday sale, but most of the offers were under $200. So for Black Friday, I made most of the offers between $200 and $500, plus we did a big MBA at full price sale with really amazing bonuses instead of giving discounts. And I think that really led to increasing our average order value and the total revenue in our daily sales average. So that was really great. Again, kind of just like getting rid of the super, super low ticket. And then, let's see. What else do I have here? December, then, I know, December, I know I mentioned, you know, winter hibernation. For me, that always starts right after Thanksgiving. After Thanksgiving, I'm like, I'm done with work. I can't care about anything else anymore. Like, I just got to go rest, recover later. down, be horizontal for pretty much the entire month. So that's what I did in December. And I strategically planned out, we're going to have no live launches in December. We're doing our get it done week early in the month, and then we're taking off. So we actually close our office for the last like two and a half weeks of the year in through the first week of January, and kind of return to that hibernation. And ironically, December, which often is my lowest month of the year, December was our highest month of the year, and the highest month ever in the last three plus years. We closed the year at 350k for our annual revenue. In December, my profit margin was 77%. So it was it was really great. And one of the things that I did do in December that I think helped with this, I mean, a Black Friday was finishing actually in December. So it was like an end of November through like, I think it ended on December 1st or 2nd. So we had Some Black Friday sales that counted in December. We signed on a couple partnership one-on-one clients. So we had some big, that's like the highest level, highest ticket thing that I offer, the most expensive thing. And so we had a couple new clients sign on for that. And I also did this backdoor launch. So our Black Friday deal was about getting MBA at full price with the bonuses of getting 1K a day in the room lifetime access. I never offered lifetime access on any kind of recurring thing in the past. Like MBA obviously is lifetime access. All of our courses are lifetime access, but not something like the room where I'm continuing to show up. So I wanted to try this. And we were like, you know what, this could be a huge mistake. We might be like, we're going to end up losing so much money on this. People now, we're not going to have that recurring revenue from people. But we looked at the numbers. And we looked at what is the average amount that people, a single customer spends with us. And it was less than $2,000. So I figured if we can get people to spend $2,000, we're still increasing the lifetime value. So we did this, it worked really well. And after Friday, we did this backdoor offer to anybody who had purchased MBA in the past, not at full price. We offered them the opportunity to upgrade to this lifetime deal. So they just had to pay the difference between what they had paid and the $2,000. And we offered them payment plans if they needed it. And we were able to make over $32,000 in December just from this. This is like three emails that we sent to a list of less than 300 people. So that was a huge win. And it felt really good because it was not anything like live launch energy or like any kind of big, even our flash sales that are email only. still take a lot of like time and prep for me and figuring out, you know, all the offers and how it's all going to work. And this was like just rinse and repeat. And I just sent three really simple emails that were basically like, do you want to upgrade to Lifetime for these deals? And it worked like gangbusters. So we'll probably do that again at some point. But I like that it was not like a public offer, that it was something that was like reserved just for some of our best clients. so then let me look here. I think that's pretty much it. By the end of the year, we had hit over 535 days of daily sales. I exited 2025 with a profit margin of 65%. And I decided to set my sights on a new goal for 2026, which is 1k a day in profit instead of 1k a day in revenue. So based on my current expenses and everything, I think that looks like actually having my gross revenue be around 17. $1,800 a day. So that's kind of what I'm looking at moving forward. So I've already shared some of these failed experiments. I have a couple more that I just want to highlight here again to show you that the fastest path to success is failure. And learning that nothing is permanent. You can always change your mind. You won't know if something works or not until you try it. We were just having this conversation with somebody in school where they're like, like, chat GPT says this, Claude says this, Gemini says that. And like, who cares what any of the robots say? You have to test it and see for yourself what works and what doesn't. And that is the only way to know. And you can't do that if everything feels so permanent and so important and so heavy because you're too in your head about making like there's one right decision. So I think hopefully some of these failed experiments show you that there is no one right decision. Even some of the things that work for me aren't going to work for you. Some of the things that work. Don't for my mentors, don't work for me, and vice versa. So one, another failed experiment that I had is that I paid $350 to sponsor a friend's newsletter. This was back in February, and it made zero sales. And I learned a lot about like what to promote when you're sponsoring somebody's newsletter. But it was a literal negative ROI and definitely made me question some of my visibility strategies. So that was a nice failure. I also had a very humiliating tech fail where I went to share a link to a sales page in an email, and I accidentally shared the link to my private conversation with ChatGPT. I remember that one. Oh, my God. I was so embarrassed. And again, you know how many people even wrote in to say like this link isn't working? I think we got zero. Nobody noticed. So we always think people are paying such close attention to us. to much. absolutely Thank Thank Thank Nobody is paying that close of attention to you, but it was definitely humiliating when I did that. I definitely had some revenue dips, like July being my lowest month of the year. I was very embarrassed by that. I felt like, oh, my God, I'm documenting this. I'm trying to reach this goal, and I am publicly failing horribly. So I definitely had some, you know, mindset blocks and moments where I was like, oh, gosh. And then what was great is that I started asking people for testimonials for the 1K Day Experiment, and everybody was like, the mess is the feature. Like, I love watching you fail. I love seeing the, you know, what you're trying. Obviously, it's great to see what works, but it's just as important to see what doesn't, and that's why I'm staying here. And so that was a really interesting kind of shift, too, for me to see of like, oh, man, it's not like nobody wants the curated highlight reel anymore, especially with AI, right? Because you can get, information is endlessly at our fingertips. Thank you. So people don't need just more information, more strategies. They want to see like the human doing the thing. So I'm going to interrupt you here, Kate, just to let you know it's 45 after the hour. And I know you have a few more things you want to share and we've got some questions. So I just want to keep us on track as the timekeeper on the team. Thank you so much. I needed that. OK, so I'm going to skip a couple of things, but I definitely had plenty of failures and flops and things that didn't work as I expected in 2025. So that's the lesson there. I will say the silent partner of this year, 2025 for me, I've been playing around with AI for years. Like whatever, ChatGPT launched in 2023. I was definitely an early adopter. But in 2025, I like tripled down on AI and automation. So I just want to share some of my favorite tools here. And I can do some Loom videos inside the 1K a day experiment of how I use these. We won't have time today to go into them. But put in Telegram if you're current. Currently a 1K Day member, put in Telegram or put in school, can you do a loom of how you use Poppy or how you use the Ultra Chat GPT extension? Because that one is one of my most used AI tools, and I will record a loom kind of showing you behind the scenes of how I use some of these. I also have been loving some of the, I redid in early 2025, I took my friend Tara's AI brand photo shoot course, and I used Mag.AI to create all new headshots. And so right now my website is a mix of actual human Kate headshots and like AI clone Kate headshots. I really don't think you can tell the difference between most of them. So this tool is incredible. And it costs me, I think I spent like less than $60 total creating all, I mean, I got hundreds of headshots in different scenarios and outfits and some funny, like me dressed up as Barbie or Ruth Gator Ginsburg or... You know, like all of these just fun, fun things, too, that I never would have been able to do on my own. And then as you've probably seen lately, I've been really into Notebook LM. They created all of the graphics for this slide deck. So and a lot of the graphics I've been sharing in emails and on school. So that's another tool that I'm loving. And it's just cut down on my creation time so much. And I feel like I have some AI team members, too. Like Fathom AI is what we use to note, you know, do note takes and replays and everything for our Zoom calls. I use Descript to edit all of my videos and audios, which I've been using a ton lately, especially as I've been scaling some ads and creating some new things. I use Loom in between to communicate with our clients and, of course, Airtable and Zapier. So AI has definitely been the silent partner. I also just wanted to share, like, the philosophy of Success with Soul and the 1K Day Experiment. I think one of the things that people really see in real time is... How cyclical productivity really works. Whether you're menstruating or not, it doesn't matter. There's lots of ways to be cyclical. Like I said, the four seasons of nature, the phases of the moon, your menstrual cycle, any combination of these works. And I think what people have really seen is that A, I practice what I preach. And also that I am somebody that really works in bursts and kind of like, sometimes it's like fits and starts. But it's like, it's not that I am never hustle. You can never work hard. You can never put in time in your business. It's just never hustle indefinitely. There's always an end point. I am often bookending things like last week, I worked 30 hours, which is a lot for me. I don't normally work that much. But I'm in Santa Fe this week, and I'm taking off most of the week and the week before I was out of town. And so I'm like bookending some sort of like sprint, then rest. And so I do feel like that's been one of the biggest things that people have commented on is like seeing. And that happened in real time, and that revenue kind of happens in these focus bursts. And so and that the rest is creating the ROI that the high conversion and the big sales months often are following months of rest, and where I have like lots of boundaries. So I think this kind of like radical self acceptance of like, you know, I have a lot of chronic health conditions. I even last year, I was diagnosed with POTS and neuropathy. And these are more things that create fatigue. And needs for like horizontal work. And, you know, this kind of horizontal model, I think, has, has been something that's been valuable for people to see as well. And like, I'm not trying to win at traditional entrepreneurship, I'm just like, trying to let the business I built, serve the life that I want to lead. And a lot of this does come down to boundaries. And some of that's just like how I structure and batch my time. Some of it even like Wendy just told me in Voxer yesterday. That like my modeling, I think she called it self and health first, has been really influential to her and given her permission to do the same thing in her business. And that is like, oh my gosh, that you have no idea how good that feels to see. Like, I think as women, it's so hard for us, right. To hold boundaries and to say no, and to protect our time and to like, think that we're worthy of those things. And of course I want to help as many people as I can, as much as I can. But I think it having those boundaries and that creative protection has been, has been really important. So a couple other quick shifts that I want to go through the hybrid model is what I think is working the best for me right now. So we can see that of my revenue, particularly in Q4, 52% of that revenue came from kind of these strategic birth bursts. So these birthday sales, the flash sales, that sort of thing. And then 48% came from my evergreen baseline. So, I think it's not, are you choosing to be a hundred percent? Evergreen, are you only in a live launch model? I really think that it is this kind of hybrid model that your evergreen serves you and creates a really nice baseline foundation. And then your launches can be very simple, very low pressure. And they're not this like, oh my God, this has to work because I don't know how I'm going to make money after this. Right? So you don't need to be on all year. You need systems that are on all year. And then you get to show up just for those key moments. So that's been a really big shift for me. A lot of how I've made that happen is from a lot of the sequences and funnels and things. And these have really helped me stop trying to like convince people to buy and just build the systems that let people buy. And again, that's sort of this abundance versus scarcity and feeling like you have to, convince versus allow. So y'all know my ad funnel by now probably. And this is what we just taught inside. The Room, this I do think also has been huge for me. And then when I do these retargeting campaigns, I have this bigger audience to convert to and to send these ads to. And then our retargeting ROAS has been insane, sometimes upwards of 25X. So that's been really fun too. So I think ultimately what you've hopefully seen from this is like transparency is my strategy here. I, inside the 1K Day Experiment, I am not teaching theory. I am tracking everything and I'm showing you the results live. And so if you want to recreate some of the things in your business, that's great. But the point isn't to copy what I'm doing. It's to kind of learn through osmosis. And I think you'll see that it's like starting with systems, testing and scaling with ads, raising your prices regularly and optimizing for the metrics that matter most to you. So for me, that might be like average order value and profit. Delegating admin and some tech to free up more of your CEO time, you know, focusing on retention, not just acquisition. That has been a huge factor for us as well. Honoring your rest and energy and your capacity and then stacking these simple campaigns on top of Evergreen for exponential growth. So if you are already in the 1K a day experiment, I would love to invite you to join annual or lifetime during this period. If you're not in the 1K a day experiment yet, I would love to invite you to join any of our options here. And so if you're here, that means you either paid $27 to get access to this debrief and you have the next 48 hours to apply that $27 as a credit to the 1K a day experiment if you want to upgrade. So in this instance, if you want to upgrade to monthly, that would be your first month is free. And then after that, you would pay $27 a month. If you want to upgrade to annual, it's $197 a year, which is 40% off, and it's like getting five months free. Plus, during this splash sale, we're going to give anybody who upgrades to annual $50 in KK credit. KK credit can be spent on anything we sell, pretty much. That includes the 1K Day Experiment, the room, MBA, anything in the shop, one-on-one coaching. Pretty much the only thing you can't spend KK credit on right now is sponsor spotlights. And sometimes we have done-for-you services, but we're not currently offering any of those, so that doesn't really apply here. Same thing, if you want to upgrade to lifetime. I do not normally sell lifetime access to anything. But during this week only, we are offering lifetime, a one-time payment of $397, and after two years of paying annual, you will have out-earned. That, you know, you'll be basically getting everything free forever after two years compared to doing the annual plan. So lifetime is definitely the best deal. It is the highest price up front, $397, but we're going to give you $100 in KK credit back when you upgrade to lifetime. So those are your three choices, monthly, annual, or lifetime. Again, the lifetime pass pays for itself in just two years compared to the annual rate. And you can apply your $27 workshop credit to any of these offers. So if you're already in the 1K Day Experiment, there's nothing to apply. You can just choose to either stay on monthly or upgrade to annual or lifetime. And just email us. We're going to send everybody who purchased the workshop a coupon code. If you don't get it, just hit reply to the next email that you get from us, and we'll give you the coupon code so you can apply it. A couple other quick things. This isn't showing, is it? Do you see the graphic on this page? No. Not. . Oh, there. There. Now it is. That's a different one. . Well, that's annoying. Okay. Well, this is supposed to be telling you what is. I wonder why that's not working. Let me see if I add it one more time, if it will start. No. Okay. This is supposed to be a graphic that's telling you what is new in 2026. So I will just share that and pretend that you're looking at something beautiful as I share it. In 2026, I'm definitely not just showing you how to make sales. I'm showing you how I'm restructuring my entire business model, raising prices and cutting some of those low ROI efforts, optimizing profit and taxes to keep more of what I make. And so I think this is a bit the difference really between like a business that looks good on Instagram and a business that builds actual wealth. I think And so in the 1K Day Experiment Now, we used to, in 2025, it was very focused on like what I was doing on a daily basis. So really every day and if, I mean, every week, if not daily, I was coming in and I was kind of time tracking, giving you my to-do list, giving you my done list, sharing the thoughts and the results that came up as I went through those things. We've retired that format now and in 2026, our format is much more focused and I have another screen here. I just can't see it to show you. Okay, so this is the 1K Day Diaries for 2026. So let me move this over actually. Can you guys see those tabs? So we have different diaries now that we're doing for different things. So for example, I'm doing this price increase across the board this month in January. So I've been sharing here, you know, what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, what I expect, how I'll know if it's successful. Here's like what it could look like, what this would mean. I'm sharing some of my like chat GPT conversations. I have a video where I explain my thought process behind what we're going to retire and what we're going to keep. You know, just lots of thoughts and decisions and how I'm making them and how I'm thinking about things inside this diary. And then at the end, for example, here, I'm like, OK, here's the results of the flash sale. So I'm sharing this is what happened last week. This is how much we sold. And then, you know, this is what this is telling me. This is what this means for me. And so now all of the diaries are going to kind of look like that. Here's an example of sort of like the template that I'm using to fill out the diaries. And I have different experiments planned where I have price increases, what I'm doing with my ads. I'm doing a big sponsorship series later in this year. I might be reviving the podcast. So I'm going to be sharing about that. We are doing a big push for JV webinar partnership. So I'll be sharing diaries from that. I might. Have some things about school. So different diaries that are focusing on exact experiments rather than kind of the day-to-day tasks. That doesn't really change that much for me, but we will still have the week in the life diaries that we do as like one week a month where you get everything that I'm doing for the entire week, like down to the minute, and kind of why I'm doing it, what's happening, and all of that. We also have some other tabs here that I've created where we have like some noticing notes, and this is just sort of things that I'm thinking about, patterns I'm noticing. Like sometimes these are just things that are coming up for me, so I have a tab for that in the diaries now. I have a no list, which is like things that I'm not doing in 2026. We have a watch me build where I'm, this is where I'm like doing more of the like behind the scenes, over the shoulder tech walkthroughs as I'm like building something in real time. And then we also have kind of this. Weekly dashboard where every week I've been coming in here and sharing, okay, here's my daily sales tracker for the week. Here's where I'm at. Like my daily sales average was $2,000 for those 30 days. Then the next time it was $1,100. Okay, what does that mean? Let's talk about that. And so I've been doing that every week. I've got metrics I'm no longer tracking. And so, it's just, it's a little bit of a different format, but it's kind of the same idea of these diaries and debriefs, just a little bit more structured than the kind of daily, daily docs. So we've got that. And then let me come back up here and we're going to wrap up in just a minute because I have another call right now. Okay, so I need this to go away. There we go. So I do think that there's, there's some other features and we completely revamped the sales page for 1k a day last week. So I would definitely recommend going to check that out where that's where you'll be able to see exactly what's included in 2026. We've shifted from Voxer office hours every week to Telegram office hours. I've gotten some really good feedback that people are preferring that format. But that's where you get direct access to me to ask your questions. It's kind of like having a private podcast because I just record audio answers. It's the only place you can get audio coaching and thoughts and access to me outside of one-on-one coaching or the room. And so then you can just binge listen when you want to and you can, you know, see what the questions are and which questions you want to hear the answers to and which ones are like, eh, I don't really care about that. So it's very much a like choose what you need. And I feel like what happens inside the 1K Day Experiment is less so about like the features, right, and what you get and this is the format and more so about like who you become as you follow along. So I think there's sort of this before identity of a lot of our clients that come in to the 1K Day Experiment. They're very reactive. They're feeling overwhelmed. They're kind of. Constantly burning things down and starting over again, very much chronic second guessing and just emotional reactivity and confusing that busyness of like, I'm working all the time with actual progress. And then inside the 1K Day Experiment, I feel like there's something that happens of just watching a calm business owner run their high profit, low maintenance business that's focused on like compounding stackable systems that shows you like, this is what it looks like to take good enough and move on to the next thing and not be such a perfectionist with what you're doing and not keep waiting to ship things until they're perfect. And this is how you start recognizing patterns and, you know, like seeing the trends and remaining steady even when things fluctuate. And I think there's just a lot of trust that happens with yourself and like learning how to think and make decisions in your business in a way that is much calmer and more effective than Sort of that reactive, overwhelmed identity that a lot of people come to us with. So this is the last slide for y'all here. This is just kind of our testimonials of what some of our clients are saying about being inside the 1K Day Experiment. I would absolutely love to welcome y'all. I've got really exciting things planned for 26. 2025 was such a fun year. I'm having so much fun in my business right now, which I think is a big shift from many past years where it was just like hustle, hustle, hustle. And just slogging through it and following the rules. And now I feel like I'm really just doing things my way and giving y'all. Sometimes it's just like that permission of like seeing a model that gives you permission to figure out what is your way and how can you make your business work for you. So I'm going to stop sharing there. I've got really negative time left, but if there's questions I didn't get to, I definitely want to make sure I do that. So Rach, what did I miss in the chat? Anything? I think you actually covered most of everything that I saw in the chat, Kate. So a couple, if you have any questions about the 1K Day Experiment, you can always email us at hi at successwithsoul.co and we will answer anything for you. And you can check out the link to the sales page that I popped in the chat and you can read all about it. And I think you got everything, Kate. It was, I loved hearing the high level, even though I was here for it, for most of it, I loved hearing the high level overview of 2025. I know. It was kind of fun to go back and reflect on it too. And there's things where I'm like, oh my God, I forgot that I did that. Or I even forgot that we left Shopify in 2025 until I was looking back over the diaries. And I was like, oh my gosh, that was a big project. And just, it's amazing to see how much can happen in a year and what a difference a year can make. So I hope that was helpful for y'all to see the bloopers, the mistakes, as well as the wins and the, you know, the results that exceed. We needed our expectations. It is always a combination of both. And if you're nosy like me and just like seeing behind the scenes of what people are actually doing and, you know, how it's working for them, I feel like this is the thing that AI can't replicate, right? Like it can give you endless strategies and ideas, but it can't show you how it's working for a real human in real time. And so I think this is why the 1K Day Experiment is my favorite offer. I mean, I love all of the things that I do, of course, but I really love just being so vulnerable and honest and sharing like the real, real. And just it's been so fun. So I hope to welcome some new folks in. I hope to get some folks some cash back that are already in and want some KK credit to spend on something else. And that's it for us today. You'll get the replay to this if you missed it. And then you've got 48 hours to use your $27 credit to apply towards 1K Day Experiment. for us today. So we'll see you next time, guys. Thanks so much for being here. Bye, everybody.