DebriefJanuary 19, 2026 · 21 min read

Price increase experiment (Jan–Apr 2026), with the shop pare-down that led to it

Part 1 — Paring down the shop (February 2025)

Paring Down the Shop - February 2025

So, something interesting has been happening as I’ve been analyzing the data happening in my shop. And it’s important because the feeling I had about what was working was VERY different from what was actually happening.

Basically, I thought that ALL of my low-ticket offers were helping to funnel people into my higher-ticket core offers, like MBA, The Room + $1K/Day. But when I actually look at the data from last year and what sold, I see a very different picture. One that says that less than 5 of my a la carte offers sold more than 15 units TOTAL last year.

Meaning, they’re mostly just a big fat distraction that takes up marketing space, brainspace and overwhelms and confuses my buyers with decision fatigue and “I don’t know where to start”.

I don’t think I was “meeting people where they’re at” as much as I thought I was, at least not for the last 6-9 months.

The “just gimme the spreadsheet” buyer is NOT my ICA. At least, not in any volume that matters.

I sold 10x more units of my 3 core offers than anything else, despite the fact that they’re more expensive.

What Is Selling?

Big-picture strategies (SEO, funnels, evergreen, $1k/Day)
High-touch support + community (The Room, MBA)
Complete systems or experiences (Anti-Social SEO, Launch Lab)

These are NOT self-directed “grab-and-go” tools. So, while yes, low-ticket can be a good lead-in if it’s:

In a funnel
Positioned with urgency
Connected clearly to a higher-ticket pathway

But my current micro-offers don’t seem to be doing that effectively or at scale.

So I think I’m going to pare down the shop even more, and just keep a few standout performers that really speak to my mission and how I help people. Focus all of my marketing efforts on those funnels and then getting people into the 3 core offers. And archive the rest, though I will highlight them on MBA’s sales page as only available inside MBA. I do think these courses are super valuable and some of them are even the most popular inside MBA, they just don’t sell a la carte.

I already did this last month during our Price Increase Sale when I retired 25 products. I think I’m going to now take the shop down 30 offers to 15 total offers, including 8 courses (+MBA), 5 coaching offers and 2 memberships.

Then I can use some of these as bump offers, for limited time bundles like during Black Friday maybe, and bonuses to create urgency on my other promos, plus in bundles and summits. But they won’t be cluttering up my shop, confusing people on what’s right for them.

So I think I’ll do this:

Fold Into: Scale Smart and rename and reposition as “Scale with AI + Automations”

AI Your Inbox
Back Office Bot Squad
Brand iOS
Optimize Your Tech Stack

Retire all Voxer coaching except 20-minute unstuck sessions. Put all beginner offers inside MBA only. Lazy Launch Method will get combined with Instant Income. And then I’ll only sell these courses a la carte:

Email List Love: The Sustainable Email Marketing Method for Social-Free Daily Sales
Beyond the Scroll 9-Grid: The Never-Post-Again Instagram Strategy That Grows Your List + Sales (With Templates!)
Scale Smart: Automate, Systematize + Simplify to Work Less + Earn More
Painless Publicity: Sustainable Visibility to Grow Your Email List Without Social Media
Clockwork Queen: Feminist Planning + Productivity to Find More Time + Get Sh*t Done
Instant Income: Sleaze-Free Sales Strategies to Make Money Today
Anti-Social SEO: The No-Scroll, AI-Ready System for Sustainable Traffic, Leads + Sales
Evergreen Ecosystem: Make Daily Sales with Sustainable Funnel Automations That Work When You Don’t

And then update MBA, Instant Income and Scale Smart sales page copy to reflect the changes.

I am struggling a bit on retiring Clockword Queen, so sharing some thoughtwork I’m doing around some of this, too:

❌ Archive as a standalone offer

BUT:

✅ Reuse Clockwork Queen as:

A bonus identity module in Scale Smart (“Become the CEO who builds a business that runs like clockwork.”)
A nurture sequence name (“The Clockwork Queen Challenge” → leading into MBA or Room)
A private workshop for VIP clients or Room members
A personal archetype you refer to in brand storytelling (people remember names like this)

Don’t throw it away. Fold it in. Rename something. Make it iconic inside a program people are actually buying.

I’m also having the thought that people are buying smaller more specific solutions rather than big overarching courses that include so much information, so I shouldn’t retire them. MBA is so big, it can be hard to sell because it covers so much ground. So I’m doing some CTFAR:

C: I offer both small specific products and a flagship course (MBA).

T: People are buying smaller, more specific solutions instead of big overarching courses.

F: Uncertain / second-guessing

A: Create more small offers, clutter the shop, dilute the brand, delay pushing MBA hard

R: Confused business strategy and low conversions on the one offer that changes lives (MBA)

Interestingly, the data does not support this thought. Based on my numbers, people are NOT buying smaller, specific offers. They're buying:

Mid-ticket courses with clear, juicy results
Containers with coaching + consistency
And all-access MBA

Reframe: Big courses are too overwhelming.

🔁 Turnaround:

“Cluttered offers are overwhelming. Clear transformation is a relief.”
“It’s not the size of the course. It’s the size of the clarity.”
“A well-designed path is the most valuable thing I can offer someone stuck in the weeds.”

MBA: More Than a Course Library Now

The biggest quiet shift in the product line is what MBA has become.

It started as "every course and digital product I sell, in one place, for less than buying them separately." That's still accurate. But I've been building something on top of the course library that changes the value proposition: custom Claude skills and AI tools trained on the full SWS methodology.

The short version is: instead of taking a course, watching hours of video, and then having to figure out how to implement it yourself, you get an AI system that already knows the framework and can install it directly into your business. It doesn't just explain how to write a welcome sequence. It writes the welcome sequence for you, in your voice, based on your offer.

The Welcome Series Generator we built for the April Get It Done Week is a live example of this. It's a multi-step intake form that asks you everything about your business and offer, then generates all seven emails in your welcome sequence — personalized, ready to edit and send. That tool is now inside Email List Love (Lesson 4) as a permanent feature.

This is the direction MBA is moving: less "here are 50 courses to watch," more "here are the systems and AI tools that implement the social-free methodology for you." That framing is also honest about how most people actually use course libraries. They don't watch everything. They use what they need when they need it. The AI tools make the "using it" part faster.

MBA upsell pricing also changed: it's now $97/month for 12 months, or $1,000 pay in full. The previous payment plan was lower and we found it wasn't meaningfully reducing purchase friction — it was just reducing our revenue. The new structure is still genuinely accessible and better reflects the value.

And Rachel is coming to town the first week of May, and we are going to spend three concentrated days in real life creating all of the AI tools and completely revamping the MBA curriculum. Then we will update our webinar for Evergreen so that it sells based on this new framework, and we'll start running ads to that.

Around that time, or between now and October (which is when we'll do the MBA anniversary sale that we do every year), we're likely going to raise the price of MBA pay in full from $2,000 to $3,000. We may potentially look at making it for a year's worth of access rather than lifetime, but I'm not sure about that piece yet. I think I need to get further into the upgrade to make those decisions.

Part 2 — Raising my prices across the board (2026)

What I’m doing : Raising my prices across the board

Before I just go to my backend and change the pricing, I’m doing a price increase flash sale on almost everything in my shop. Originally this was just going to be a quick 2-day sale, but once I sat down to plan it, I figured why not make it a bigger, more exciting thing as I’m actually making even more changes to my offer suite than I originally thought.

Thursday-Tuesday will be the official sale, though we’ve been teasing it in some emails and on Skool.
It’s basically just going to be an email Flash Sale over 6 days letting people know now is the last chance to buy things before they’re either retired or price gets raised.

Why I’m doing the thing (hypothesis)

My hypothesis is that I can meaningfully increase my daily profit without increasing my workload by pulling one of the most underused levers in my business: pricing.

Specifically, I believe that:

I can raise prices across my shop
Maintain roughly the same conversion rates
Increase AOV
And therefore increase daily gross revenue and profit
Without adding new offers, more launches, more content, or more time spent working

The flash sale itself is not the main goal. It’s a transition mechanism:

It rewards existing subscribers for being early
Clears out fence-sitters
Sets a clean “before and after” line in the data

The real test happens after the sale ends. So, the purpose of this experiment is not “a good flash sale.”

The purpose is to answer this question:

Can I raise my daily profit by raising prices—rather than doing more—while protecting my energy, time, and nervous system?

This is a long-game experiment. The flash sale revenue is a bonus. The real win is whether I exit this with:

Higher baseline daily revenue
Cleaner pricing architecture
Fewer discounts as a crutch
And proof that my business can grow through leverage, not intensity

How I’ll know if it’s successful:

This experiment is successful if most of the following are true over the year:

Daily gross revenue baseline increases
AOV increases meaningfully
Conversion rates do not crater
I do not add more work, launches, or obligations
Sales continue after the flash sale at higher prices
My nervous system feels calmer, not more activated

If this works, price becomes a primary growth lever for me in 2026—alongside ads and ecosystem optimization—not more output.

Let’s look at the math:

The math (high-level)

Here’s where I’m starting from:

2025 AOV: $62
Average sales per day: 14
Daily gross revenue: ~$833/day

Top-of-funnel context (VERY high level, rough numbers):

~10,000 email subscribers
- 0.14% of my list buying per day
~419,000 annual pageviews
- current site-wide conversion rate is ~1.2%

My 2026 target is $1,000/day in PROFIT, which means roughly $1,767/day in gross revenue given my current expense structure, which is around $10k/month in fixed costs (before I pay myself, taxes, profit share bonuses and any ad spend…which puts my expenses closer to $30k/month).

What that could look like

If I raise AOV from $62 → $90
- 14 sales/day = $1,260/day
- 20 sales/day = $1,800/day
- So we need both higher AOV AND higher volume**
  
  **
If I raise AOV to $125
- 14 sales/day = $1,750/day**
  
  **
If sales dip slightly (say 12/day) but AOV hits $150
- 12 sales/day = $1,800/day**
  
  **
If AOV stays, but volume increases to 29 sales/day
- AOC: $62 = $1,798
- This would require 2x conversions or 2x traffic, which is maybe possible if we get our ads scaling. But that’s really two levers being pulled instead of 1

What this means

To make this work in 2026, at least one of these must be true (ideally two):

My average order value needs to live between $125–$150
My traffic and conversions need to live between 1-3%
I can’t rely on such heavy discounts to move people
I have to tolerate slightly fewer daily orders without panicking

Mildred (ChatGPT) says that if this experiment fails, it won’t be because I raised my prices but because I didn’t raise them ENOUGH.

What I expect: Hmm, well re: the flash sale piece, I’d like this to be a nice cash influx as January is off to a fairly slow start. We’ve averaged about $1k/Day in gross revenue so far this month but given my goal of $1k/Day in profit, I really need that number to be closer to $1800/day in gross revenue.

So if I’m making $1k/Day on evergreen, that means I need to add $800/day during this flash sale, which is 6 days long = $4,800.
The average price of what I’m selling during this flash sale is $100
GOALS:
- Good: $5,000 = 50 sales
- Better: $10,000 = 100 sales
- Best: $15,000 = 150 sales

How I’m doing the thing (+ how I’ll know if it’s successful)

I decided to remove all the tripwire pop-up discounts during this time so that people are paying the actual price it is now before it goes up and not getting an additional discount. This feels more true to the spirit of raising my prices. But the new tripwires will come back after the flash sale is over.
We’re going to email everyone who has KKcredit and let them know it’s a great time to spend it.
I’m going to incentivize people to buy more than 1 thing so brainstorming some ideas of what would be compelling:
1. Black Friday debrief (this is already done so nothing new required from me to deliver)
2. Invite to the 2025 Debrief for anyone who buys more than 2+ courses (I’m hosting this on Tuesday the 27th for the $1k/Day launch)
3. Maybe something with the Room, like get your first month free if you buy at least 2 things (only for brand new people, not people who have already been in the room before)

Thoughts/Feelings that are coming up as I’m doing the thing

Streamlining Our Offers: Retiring and Restructuring for Clarity and Impact - Watch Video

I used to be really into pricing things like angel numbers ($44, $111, $222)...I don’t know, something about that is feeling cheesy to me now and I’ve been slowly (and unintentionally) changing my pricing to be rounder numbers that end in $7 (maybe also a bit gimmicky but I think it works). So as I’m changing all the pricing in the shop, some things aren’t necessarily going up, but they’re being changed from $222 to $197 for example.
On the one hand, this feels risky because, of course, what if it doesn’t work. On the other hand, I can always change it back or adjust again. I can always run promos on courses that aren’t selling at higher prices. And it’s just not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. It’s just data, so the risk actually feels quite low. Especially because we will still have tripwires on our courses moving forward, even if they’re slightly higher than what they used to be. And that strategy works so well!
One thing I wanted to see if what my top selling products were by units sold in 2025 and here’s what I found:
- Launch Lab
- MBA
- 9-Grid
- The Room
- SEO Course
- $1K/Day Experiment
- Tripwire Toolkit
- Sponsorships
- Magnetic Messaging Map
- Inbox Insights
- Instant Income
- Brand iOS
- Website in a Week
- Evergreen Ecosystem
- Back Office Bot Squad

This was really affirming for me to see in the data and have Mildred help me analyze what it means. She said:

Right now, your pricing reflects:

Past-you
Audience-building-you
Trust-earning-you

But your buyers are responding like:

“We already trust you”
“We’ll pay to stop overthinking”
“We want systems, not more choices”

That’s a different stage of business.

YES! That’s the exact people I want to be calling in with this change, too. It’s not just about making more money.

I also found another insight when I looked at the data. Above just shows most sold by units. But when I looked at what offers earned the most revenue it was:

MBA
The Room
Coaching
$1k/Day Experiment
Anti-Social SEO

So that tells me that my mid-tier is doing less revenue than it should. These are popular by units, but relatively light by revenue compared to the trust they carry. Which all kind of proves my point and the why behind why I want to raise my prices:

Low-ticket offers are not the problem — but they are not the solution.

$9–$44 products are not dragging me down, but they are incapable of pulling me up. Even combined, they barely register compared to MBA and the Room. Which is by design, and according to Mildred, Your revenue already tells you:

“The business grows when Kate sells containers, not components.”

The Results of The Flash Sale:

We sold 128 products over the week of the flash sale, plus 44 rebills
$9,692 in total revenue earned, including from rebills, and just $5,862 in new sales only
- AOV = $45.80, plus recurring revenue from rebills of the subscriptions people purchased
12.6% conversion rate from visitors to sales (not rebills)
23 customers bought 2+ products during the sale
Here’s what I sold:
- Launch Lab 23 NEW MEMBERS
- Website in a Week 8
- Instant Income 6
- The Lazy Launch Method 4
- Evergreen Ecosystem 3
- Expert Eyes: Personalized Feedback 3
- Tripwire Toolkit 2
- Freelance Writing Pitches 2
- Anti-Social SEO 1
- SEO Blog Planner Spreadsheet 1
- Inbox Insights 1
- Sponsored Content Pitches 1
- Optimize Your Tech Stack 1
- Email List Love 1
- Mindful Business Academy 5*

*We did make one MBA sale during the promo even though I wasn’t promoting it at full price, $2k (but it’s a payment plan so we only collected $217 so far)

We also made 4 MBA upsells from people who purchased during the sale. So that’s an additional $2,112 accrued.

Thoughts:

One thing that was good evidence of this flash sale was that I had the tripwires turned off and people still bought at full price, which tells me that my pricing is still very affordable and not a barrier to entry for people. Offers validated!
Also, turning off tripwires did not tank sales. People still bought at full price with urgency framed around price increases and retirement, not discounts. I think that shows my offers and trust carrying the weight, not coupons. Which is validating to me that my people are not fragile bargain hunters. They are “systems and certainty” buyers.
This also proved to me that while low-ticket is fine for volume and list-warming, the real engine is mid-high ticket containers (MBA, The Room, $1K/Day), not one-off sales. So, components are lead-in, trust-builder, or “entry dose,” not the engine.
Short-term AOV vs long-term AOV: During the sale, AOV dropped (lots of low-ticket, plus a promo), so on that metric the sale itself is actually a step away from the $125–$150 AOV target. But that was expected: this was the “last chance” before the post-sale pricing changes, which is where I’ll measure that.

As a reminder, my goals for this flash sale were:

Good: $5,000 = 50 sales
Better: $10,000 = 100 sales
Best: $15,000 = 150 sales

So, short version: I hit the “good” goal cleanly, brushed up against “better,” and, more importantly, got the strategic validation I was actually testing for.

The real experiment wasn’t “have a massive flash sale,” though. It was: Can I increase baseline profit by raising prices, without doing more, while keeping my nervous system calm?

Good news is, I’ve already got early “yes-ish” indicators:

I hit strong sales numbers without tripwires or adding more output.
I saw that pricing is not yet a friction point (people still bought at full price).
I got data that mid-tier/system-level offers are the true revenue drivers.

The long-game verdict (daily profit, calm nervous system, higher baseline, etc.) will only emerge over the next few months post-sale. For now I’m celebrating:

Full price still converts.
I can raise prices and keep selling.
I can retire or re-bundle lower-leverage stuff without imploding

What I’ll do differently next time

Will I repeat it? Yes, modified.

I don’t anticipate doing more price increase flash sales until March, when the Room price doubles. But this re-inforced the idea that I should lean harder into my 3 core offers and use future flash events to move people into MBA, The Room, and $1K/Day, not just across a bunch of smaller courses.

Tighten the mid-tier and kill or re-home what’s not strategic.**
**Offers that sell units but don’t meaningfully move revenue should either:
- Be folded into containers as bonuses.
- Become tightly-scoped tripwires that prime for a specific container.
- Be retired if they don’t clearly point to your main growth paths.
Make “no heavy discounts” an actual rule, not a vibe.**
**You’ve seen they will buy at full price. So:
- Use urgency based on changes, retirements, bonuses, and access, not steep price cuts.
- Keep tripwires, but make them modest nudges, not margin-eaters.

I also might continue to pare down the shop even more. There are few courses still available that I may either retire altogether into MBA or bundle together with something else to reduce decision fatigue further and make sure my messaging is super clean:

Anti-social growth with automations, AI and ads. All the A’s! Although I have no desire to teach ads beyond this past GIDW so maybe just the first 3 A’s.

April 2026 Results Check-In

I realized it had been a few months since I checked in on the data from her price increase sale, and I was curious what it would show. So, here's what the data actually shows, as of April 15, 2026:

Note that this is just pulling from my daily sales tracker, which does not always include sponsored content income, and affiliate income is not included in this, so this is not my total income, just what I am making from sales of my own products.

The Before Picture

My 2025 baseline going into this experiment: ~$833/day in gross revenue, AOV of $62, roughly 14 orders per day.

My profitability target: $1,767/day in gross revenue (to net $1k/day in profit after ~$10k/month in fixed costs, plus taxes, profit distributions, and ad spend).

Gap at baseline: I was covering roughly 47% of what I needed. Not terrible. Also not where I wanted to be, but this was a brand new goal and I wasn’t expecting to hit it right away.

What the Data Actually Shows

Here's where things landed, month by month:

February averaged $946/day. March averaged $899/day. April so far (through the 14th) is averaging $1,089/day.

Average order value climbed from $62 to roughly $81–83 in February and March — a 30%+ increase. That's real. That's exactly what I was hoping to see.

In April it's running a little lower (~$77), likely because of some higher-volume, lower-AOV days diluting the average.

The honest interpretation: The price increase worked directionally. AOV moved meaningfully. Daily revenue improved. People did not stop buying because prices went up. The experiment validated the core hypothesis.

But. I have not hit my target. I'm running at roughly 50–60% of the daily gross I need for $1k/day in profit, not accounting for all expenses. The gap between $946/day and $1,767/day is still significant, and raising prices alone was never going to close it fully — I said that in January, but it's worth naming plainly now that we have data to look at.

What's actually driving the good days

I pulled the transaction data on every day that broke $1,000 this quarter, and the pattern is more interesting than I expected. It's not events or promos. It's specific mechanics firing.

MBA PIF sales from JV partnerships. February 26 hit $3,838 because three $1,500 MBA pay-in-full sales came through from the Natalie Gingrich JV. The $2k MBA PIF on March 11 is a separate instance — likely just the evergreen funnel converting organically, though attribution isn't certain. MBA payment plan installments stacking is also a real thing and adds up a lot on certain days.

The Room price increase creating real urgency. March 19 produced four $497 annual Room plans in a single day — $1,988 in one afternoon — because I announced the price was doubling the next day. Deadline-based urgency converts reliably when the offer is right and the trust is already there.

The ads funnel starting to work. I relaunched ads on March 30 with a tripwire → bump → upsell sequence. Two $1k MBA pay-in-full sales have come through since then — one on April 2 and one on April 14 — both on day one of someone entering the funnel. That's a fast conversion window and a strong early signal that the tripwire funnel is doing its job.

The WITL promo driving $1k/Day annual passes. The free Week in the Life promo brought in two $197 annual $1k/Day Experiment subscriptions on April 2. Small in dollar terms, but meaningful for the membership.

Partnership Program being quiet infrastructure. I currently have three partnership clients, two of whom pay $1k/month plus revenue share. That revenue shows up on the tracker with no launch, no email, no effort. It's not scalable in the traditional sense, but it's genuinely high-margin and it makes otherwise unremarkable days look much better.

What this means for the rest of 2026

The price lever worked, but it's not a solo act. My working thesis now is that $1k/day in profit requires all three levers pulling simultaneously:

Higher AOV (done, partially — still want to push this to $100–125 average)

more consistent traffic and funnel conversion (this is where ads and the newsletter come in)
fewer "dead" days where the business is just quietly collecting rebills and nothing else.

The answer to closing this gap isn't another flash sale. It's building a machine that makes $1,500–2,000/day on an average Tuesday with no launch happening.

That's what I'm working on now.

More soon.

experiment