Replay of live training 4/17/26 The old way is over-tilled soil. Substack is the fertile ground. Here’s the six-figure system I’d build if my whole business burned down tomorrow. Okay, my friend. Pull up a chair. I need to talk to you about something I cannot stop thinking about, cannot stop talking about, cannot stop teaching — and quite frankly, I don’t want to. I’m psycho for Substack. I joke about it because it’s true. But here’s who I’m actually psycho for: you. My clients. The woman reading this who is knee-deep in her coaching business — or trying to launch one — and is exhausted. Exhausted by the tech, the tactics, the tools, the algorithms, the “post every day,” the funnels, the lead magnets, the email systems, the course hosting, the webinar software, the landing page builders, the scheduling tools, the graphics, the editing, the private podcast software, the VA you can’t quite afford but can’t live without. You are not imagining it. The online business space has become madness. And I’m here to tell you: there is a new way. There is fertile soil. And we are going to plant your business there. A Quick Story About Me Feeling Stupid I spent 25 years at IBM. I was a global VP of marketing and sales. I had my MBA. I had spent thirty years either studying business or actually executing on business strategy at the highest level. I left corporate eight years ago, walked into the online business space, and I felt this big. Because everything was complicated. Everything was overbuilt. Everything required another tool, another tech stack, another funnel, another course on how to build the funnel that was going to sell the course on how to build the funnel. I went from feeling like a confident executive to feeling like I knew nothing. The model was broken. All the bros (no offense, bros) built an industry that looked a whole lot like the tech industry I came from — layered, complicated, tool-heavy, and completely disconnected from the thing we actually started our businesses for: serving our people. The Survey That Told Me Everything Back in January, we ran a survey inside a big free masterclass. Thousands of women, and a few good men. All of them starting, restarting, launching, or trying to grow coaching, consulting, advisory, mentoring, guiding, healing businesses. 87% of them wanted the same thing. They wanted a multiple six-figure business. Not an empire. Highly profitable — 50–65% margins. Very small team. Maybe a VA. Maybe one or two support people. Something meaningful. Something manageable. Something that created freedom, fulfillment and financially sound. Only 13% wanted the empire. The seven figures and up. The big team. All the things. Eighty-seven percent of you don’t want what the online coaching industry has been selling you for the last fifteen years. You want the simple six-figure business. You want consistent income without chaos. You want your life back. And almost no one is speaking to that woman. So I am. Loudly. Every day. On Substack. The Old Way (Are You Ready for This?) I made a visual with ChatGPT the other day because I wanted to show what most of you are currently drowning in. Picture a page covered in boxes. Each box is another piece of tech: Email system. Course hosting. Community platform. Webinar software. Landing pages. Sales funnels. Checkout capability. Scheduling. Graphics. Video editing. Audio editing. Public podcast hosting. Private podcast hosting (different software). Lead magnets. Social content — across Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more, none of which talk to each other. Website. Analytics. VA support because it is literally impossible to manage all of this alone. Who can relate? Who is nodding so hard right now that their neck hurts? And even if you got all that working, the buyer is savvy right now and wants nothing to do with being marketed and sold to that way. She knows she’s in a funnel. She recognizes the webinar formula before the first slide loads. She sees the countdown timer reset when she reloads the page. The buyer got smart. The emperor has no clothes. And every box on that left side of the page requires skill, time, energy, and money — none of which you have infinite amounts of. The gold rush is over, my friend. From roughly 2014 to 2022, you could build a coaching business with a ring light, a Facebook ad, and a ClickFunnels account. That era had a beginning, a middle, and now an end. Every emerging market in the history of markets has the same arc: emergence, gold rush, maturation, reset, reinvention. We are in the reset. And the reset is calling new leaders forward. Over-Tilled Soil vs. Fertile Ground Here’s the metaphor I keep thinking about. What does a farmer do when her soil is over-tilled? When the minerals are depleted, when she’s pulled every nutrient out of the ground, when nothing will grow there no matter how hard she works? She moves her crops to fertile ground. Social media — Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok — is over-tilled soil. Best buyers are leaving those platforms because of the AI junk. It’s only going to get worse with AI-generated video flooding every feed. You cannot out-content the AI industrial content revolution. You cannot compete with machines that are creating content while you sleep. So don’t. Substack is the fertile ground. I don’t know how long the soil will be fertile — I hope forever, I’m praying it’s forever, I’m obsessed with how simple it is — but right now, today, it is the place your dream client is actually reading. Actually listening. Actually paying. Actually staying. Everything on the Left Can Be Done on the Right Substack is an all in one. For free. I want this to sink in because it is the single biggest mistake I see people making about Substack: they think it’s a newsletter platform. It is not a newsletter platform. Maybe it started as one. That is not what it is now. Let me walk you through what Substack actually is. Ready? Your email system. Built in. Automated. Your course hosting. You can gate content, build tiers, deliver modules. Your community platform. Chats. Threads. Paid-member-only spaces. Done. Your webinar capability. Live video is native. You hit one button. Your podcast. Public tier. Private (paid-only) tier. Auto-distributed. Your landing pages. Your about page, your pricing page, your sales page — all on your Substack. Your checkout. Built in. Subscribers upgrade with one tap. Your video hosting. Your live auto-posts to YouTube. (I paid $5,000 in 2021 to a YouTube expert and gave up because it was too complicated. Now? One button. I don’t even think about it. Hell yeah.) Your LinkedIn repurposing. Automatic. Your articles go. Your clips go. You don’t lift a finger. Your website. Custom domain. Done. (I made julieciardi.com my Substack. That’s how all-in I am. That’s me walking the walk.) And here’s the thing that makes me lose my mind every time I think about it: most of this is free until you’re making money. Substack doesn’t take a cent until your paid tier starts generating revenue. And when it does, they take around 10%. That’s it. No $400/month software stack. No annual renewals. No VA hired specifically to duct-tape your tools together. One platform. One learning curve. One login. One brain. The Six-Figure Substack System Now let’s talk about how you actually make money. Because yes, I want you to have a feel-good business. But I also want you to have a profitable business. You’re here for both. I call this the Six Figure Substack System. You have three jobs: 1. Marketing 2. Sales 3. Delivery That’s the whole job description. Every single one of those can happen on Substack. Stage 1: Your Free Soapbox This is your public content. Free articles, free notes (Substack’s version of short-form), free lives, free podcasts. This is where you show up, give value, and let people find out who you are. No algorithm roulette. No dancing. No trending audio. Just your voice and your depth and your people finding you. And — this is the part I love — every single surface on Substack has an upgrade button built in. Every article. Every note. Every live. Every podcast. Zero friction. Zero salesy. Zero traditional-funnel energy. Because here’s the culture of Substack: nobody thinks you’re salesy for having a paid tier. It’s expected. It’s normal. It’s why they came. Compare that to Instagram, where everyone is hiding the sell until minute 42 of a webinar. Stage 2: Your Paid Tier Recurring revenue. Warm audience. Trust built before they ever hop on a call with you. Your paid tier can be anything you want. Low ticket — $7/month, $79/year, whatever. Or higher ticket if your stuff is niched and nuanced and your people need exactly what you have. There’s a 20-something in New York City running a paid Substack for the FiDi financial district water cooler — Feed Me by Emily Sundberg — and she’s at nearly a million dollars a year on a $79/year paid tier. You could model your entire business around just the paid tier if you wanted to. You do not need a high-ticket offer to build a multiple six-figure business on Substack. But most of you will have one, so let’s talk about it. Stage 3: Your Higher-Ticket Offers One-on-one coaching. Group masterminds. Retreats. Signature programs. Consults (we call them magic sales calls around here). Here is what has been impossible for most of you: selling high-ticket offers on Instagram. Because it is almost harder to sell a low-ticket thing on Instagram than a high-ticket thing. Because selling on any social platform is brutal right now. I have been in business for eight years and I will tell you: I have never closed a single dollar organically on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Not one. I have sold masterclasses. But the organic-to-sale path? Nope, not once. Now compare that to Substack. Your reader finds your free article.
