257 Stop Chasing Trends. Build What You Believe In

Send us Fan MailEddie van Dongen spent years doing what most musicians dream of. Touring Europe, playing 200-show theater runs, recording, performing. And then COVID hit, and overnight there was nothing. No gigs, no income, no plan.That moment forced him to ask a question he'd never had to ask before: what would it look like to actually build a business, not just be a freelancer hoping the phone rings?Eddie is a professional drummer from Rotterdam, endorsed by major brands and featured on Dutch national TV. But what makes his story genuinely interesting is how he got from that COVID wake-up call to running Eddie's Drum Academy, an online platform built around a completely different way of teaching drums. Not fill packs, not lick libraries, but a creative framework that teaches drummers how to think.In this conversation, Eddie and I got into a lot. His burnout at music college and how studying meditation changed not just his playing but his whole approach to business. Why he believes you have to be okay with being ignored if you're building something real. His Meta ads funnel selling a 37-euro ebook with a 2.5 to 3.5 ROAS. How his order bumps are converting around 40%. And what he's working toward next.He's honest, thoughtful, and clearly someone who built this from scratch with no marketing background. I think you'll really enjoy this one.Check out Eddie's work:🌐 https://eddiesdrumacademy.com/📸  https://www.instagram.com/eddievandongendrums/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@eddievandongendrums⁩  

Send us Fan MailGillian Perkins runs a multi-six-figure online business, has over 700,000 YouTube subscribers, and works fewer than 20 hours a week. She's also a homeschool mum of six. If you've ever wondered whether that kind of setup is actually possible, this episode is a pretty good answer.John sat down with Gillian to talk through how she structures her courses and cohorts, why she's stopped running tripwire funnels with her organic audience, and why she actually leads with her most expensive product first. That last one goes against most funnel advice you'll hear, and her reasoning for it is worth listening to carefully.They also get into webinars, which Gillian is pretty blunt about. She says 10% conversion is her standard, and anything under that feels like a flop to her. She breaks down exactly which price points make sense for webinars and which ones don't, which is genuinely useful if you're trying to figure out where they fit in your own business.There's also a great section on how she found and hired her integrator, how she thinks about building a small team without losing her lifestyle, and why shrinking her team actually made the business more enjoyable and sometimes more profitable.Gillian has been making videos about online business since 2017 and has clearly thought carefully about how to build something sustainable. A lot of what she shares here is quietly counterintuitive. I think you'll get a lot out of this one.Check out Gillian's work:🌐 https://gillianperkins.com🌐 https://creatorfasttrack.com🌐 https://startupsociety.com 📸 https://instagram.com/gillianperkinsonline/▶️ https://youtube.com/gillianperkinsonline/

Send us Fan MailKim Foster spent 20 years as a family doctor before walking away to build a global platform around identity transformation. She now has over 250,000 YouTube subscribers, a TEDx talk under her belt, and a book coming out in 2026. But what made this conversation really interesting wasn't the credentials — it was how honest she was about what's working, what isn't, and where she's still figuring things out.We got into her YouTube content strategy, specifically this idea of bringing people in with what they think they want, but giving them what they actually need. She talked about how she found her real niche through trial and error, not planning, and what the analytics told her that she never would have guessed on her own.Then things got practical. John pulled up Kim's funnel live on screen and they walked through her opt-in rates, her confirmation page, her tripwire offers, and where the gaps are. It's a rare moment where you get to watch a real funnel audit happen in real time, with someone who's genuinely open about where she's leaving money on the table.They also talked about her push into in-person speaking, the challenge of getting booked when you're known as a YouTuber, and why she's on the hunt for an integrator to help rein in her visionary side.Warm, specific, and genuinely useful. I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Kim's work:🌐 https://drkimfoster.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/drkimfoster/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/KimFosterMD

Send us Fan MailGrow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmapMost course creators build a course, put it online, and hope people stick around. Adam Morgan did something completely different.Adam is a UK-based architect with over a decade of real practice experience, and the founder of Arcademia, a platform that's grown to over 4,500 members globally. Dominik sat down with him to find out how he got there, and honestly, the story is not what you'd expect.It started with a small set of screen-recorded training videos made for new staff at his architecture practice. No grand plan, just a way to stop repeating himself. Then Brexit hit, the practice started struggling, and Adam picked the project back up with a lot more intention. He renamed it, rebranded it, and started building something much bigger.When a provider quoted him £120,000 to build a custom platform, he learned Claude Code and built it himself over three to four months. What he ended up with is not just a course library. It's got gamification, a leaderboard, AI-generated contracts, portfolio hosting, CV builders, project trackers, and an AI assistant. All built by an architect who had never coded before.He also talks about why his most valuable members never cancel, how he grew to over 150,000 Instagram followers starting with £10–15 boosts per post, and what he tells course creators whose revenue has flatlined.Adam is a genuinely straight-talking guy and this one had a lot of good stuff in it. Check out Adam's work:🌐 https://www.archademia.com📸 https://www.instagram.com/archademia_/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/c/archademia

Send us Fan MailWant to 2-10x your email list size quickly? Download our FREE Lead Magnet Guide and increase your email list size by 2-10x, simply by following our proven step-by-step guide 👉🏼 https://funnels.datadrivenmarketing.co/the-complete-lead-magnet-guide David Duffy is an Irish musician and bassist who co-founded Secrets of Solo, the biggest online school for solo swing dancing, with his wife Ksenia, a dance artist with over 200 million views online. One of their videos alone has 14 million views on YouTube. And yet, when those viral moments happen, the sales spike they expect... doesn't really come.That's where this conversation gets really interesting.John sat down with David to dig into the gap between attention and revenue, something a lot of creators feel but rarely talk about this honestly. David runs the marketing and business side of the school while Ksenia teaches, and he's refreshingly open about what's working, what isn't, and where they've been getting in their own way.They get into the tension between being an artist and running a business, why Ksenia only wants one sale a year and what that's costing them, the €12 choreography challenge that brought in 70 new members at Christmas, and how to use analytics to figure out which part of your funnel actually needs fixing.John also walks David through how to think about conversion benchmarks, monthly promotions, and why urgency works even when it doesn't feel like "you."If you've ever felt like you're creating great content but not seeing it turn into consistent revenue, this one will resonate.Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.Check out David's work:🌐 https://kseniaparkhatskaya.com/🌐 https://secretsofsolo.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/ksenia_parkhatskaya/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@secretsofsolo⁩  

Send us Fan MailJayne Havens never planned to build a business. She just wanted to help her kids sleep.But after one year of running a sleep consulting practice and feeling maxed out, she made a decision that changed everything. She stopped taking more clients and started teaching other people to do what she did. That was 2019. Today, roughly 75% of her income comes from a single $2,700 certification course, and she's still running it all from her kitchen table.Dominik sat down with Jayne to dig into exactly how she built this, and honestly, it's one of the more refreshing conversations we've had on the show. No complicated funnels, no big ad spend, no content machine. Just Jayne showing up in Facebook groups, having real conversations, and being, as she puts it, the most helpful person in the room.She also talks about how she uses her podcast not to attract new leads, but to close them. How she keeps a personal list of warm prospects on her phone. Why her affiliate partners outperform paid ads by a wide margin. And why she thinks copying someone else's funnel is a trap most course creators fall into.If you're building something in a specific niche and wondering whether you really need ads or a massive audience to make it work, Jayne's answer is pretty clear.I think you'll find this one genuinely useful.Check out Jayne's work:🌐 https://thecpsm.com/📸 https://www.instagram.com/snoozefestbyjaynehavens/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@Becomingasleepconsultant

Send us Fan Mail2-10x your email list size in just 3 steps 📩 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/guideBethany McBride started her business because she needed to make a thousand dollars to cover some bills. That was it. No grand plan, no marketing strategy, just a Facebook group and a love for teaching worship music. A few months later, she and her husband had replaced his income entirely.This week I sat down with Bethany, the creator behind Simplified Piano, an online piano education community helping beginners, mostly people in their 60s and beyond, learn to play worship songs using a simple chord-based method. She built the whole thing around four chords: C, F, G, and A minor. That's genuinely it.What I loved about this conversation is how much of Bethany's business was shaped by constraints. Health challenges that made a 9-to-5 impossible. A toxic mold situation that forced her family into her parents' basement. Five kids. And yet she and her husband built something with 450,000 monthly YouTube views, around 160,000 email subscribers, and a model that's mostly evergreen and automated.We talked about how she gets 4,300 new email subscribers a month from a lead magnet so simple it's almost obvious in hindsight, why she switched a one-time offer to a recurring membership almost overnight and barely noticed a dip, and what she wishes she'd known earlier about getting in front of real students and listening to them properly.Bethany is warm, honest, and genuinely funny. I think you'll like this one.Check out Bethany's work:🌐 https://www.simplifiedpiano.com▶️  https://www.youtube.com/c/simplifiedpiano

Send us Fan MailNeed better results from your email campaigns? Get our FREE templates and see the difference with two proven email strategies! 👉🏼 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/templatesNicole Hullihen runs a full-time VP role in pharmaceuticals, leads a family, and still finds 25 hours a week to build a course business on the side. I honestly wasn't sure how that was possible, but listening to her talk about it, it starts to make sense.Nicole is the founder of Execute The Vision, where she teaches Excel and business operations skills through courses, done-for-you templates, and a work management software she built herself from scratch after deciding to learn to code a couple of years ago. She's got around 365,000 followers on TikTok and has sold to roughly 800 course customers in just over a year, all while keeping her prices deliberately low because, as she puts it, she just wants to get the information out there.We talked about how she drives traffic from TikTok and YouTube to her site, the frustrations of linking off social platforms, why templates have actually outsold her courses, what shifted in organic reach after the TikTok ban situation in the US, and her thinking on content format and hooks for educational video.There's something refreshing about someone who isn't trying to squeeze every dollar out of their audience and is just genuinely passionate about helping people work smarter. She's got a clear point of view and a lot of hard-won experience to back it up.Hope you enjoy this one.Check out Nicole's work:🌐 https://xecutethevision.com/home📸 https://www.instagram.com/xecutethevision/▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@XecuteTheVision

Send us Fan MailLeah Bolden built a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers and nearly 200 million views by teaching one thing really well: how to fix your home. And she did it by speaking to people exactly like a friend would, not like a tradesperson trying to impress anyone.Dominik sat down with Leah to talk about how See Jane Drill went from a classroom suggestion to a full course business, and the conversation ended up being one of the more grounded and honest ones we've had on this show.Leah talks about how a video on tape measures quietly racked up 18 million views and got Good Morning America calling. She explains why her audience turned out to be 78% men when she expected mostly women. And she gets into the real engine behind her course sales, which is soft mentions in YouTube videos and a newsletter, not complicated funnels or big launches.What really stood out was her take on community. She meets with her course students once a month on Zoom, takes their questions, and says that single hour is probably the most valuable thing she offers. She also gets honest about what she would do differently if she started over, and her answer on the membership model is worth the listen on its own.There is a book coming, some thoughts on AI that she is genuinely uncertain about, and a clear through-line across the whole conversation: authority and trust come before anything else.I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Leah's work:🌐  https://seejanedrill.com▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@UCraGaDLfWec67xl9FEPndtw

Send us Fan MailPete Matthew runs one of the UK's most trusted personal finance brands, a podcast with over 8 million downloads, a YouTube channel approaching 150,000 subscribers, and an online academy that did £140,000 in a single Black Friday weekend. And he still considers it a side project.I sat down with Pete to talk about how Meaningful Money actually works as a business, the honest gaps he knows exist, and the philosophy that's kept him going for 15 years without burning the trust of his audience.We got into the structure of his three-course academy, how a software reseller deal quietly generates £50–60K a year in near-passive recurring revenue, and why his email list of 18,500 people opens his weekly digest at 60% but almost never gets asked to buy anything. Pete knows he's leaving money on the table. He's remarkably candid about it.And Pete built all of this without a plan to monetise at all. He picked up a video camera in 2009, started answering basic finance questions in the Cornish countryside, and after 150 videos got his first client completely out of nowhere. That foundation of just genuinely trying to help people is, I think, a big part of why his audience defends him when anyone questions his sales emails.Pete is thoughtful, funny, and completely honest about the gaps between where his business is and where it could be. I think you'll enjoy this one.Check out Pete's work:🌐 meaningfulmoney.tv🌐 meaningfulacademy.com🌐 jacksons.life📸 https://www.instagram.com/meaningfulmoney.tv▶️ https://youtube.com/@UC39PLqUmy-AKK5HGYYfwFYw