Your Problems Are Your Most Profitable Product
PLEASE NOTE:
In this episode I mention making thousands of dollars a month on Etsy starting in 2015 (over 10 years ago). Etsy has changed a lot since then and I stopped selling there a while ago. If you're just starting out, I'd recommend driving traffic to your own website rather than trying to “get good at Etsy.”
And honestly, more importantly than the platform question — don't try to build a full-time income around planners alone. My teaching is that planners should act as a launching pad for you and a gateway for your customers.
I use them as a tool in a larger business ecosystem, not as the whole business itself. The real money, and the real fulfillment, comes from going all in on your zone of genius — the thing that makes you undeniably you. Your fullest self-expression. The journey only you can share. That's what people actually buy into.
If you want to go deeper on this, I'll be teaching a class on my Zone of Genius approach inside the Easy Peasy Product Kit in March 2026.
There's a question I get all the time, dressed up in different ways, that really boils down to this: do I have to pay my dues before I get to work less and make more? Maybe you're wondering if your ideas are too similar to what's already out there. Maybe you're starting from scratch financially and don't know where to begin. Or maybe you've been grinding for years and still can't see the path to something lighter.
The short answer is no. But the real answer is the one worth sitting with.
Start With Your Own Problems, Not the Market
Back in 2012, I was cleaning houses and babysitting for a living. I had made myself a planner — I called it the Ultimate Life Binder — because I realized I had lived the same mediocre year twice and I needed something to change. I wasn't thinking about selling a product. I wasn't researching trends. I was just trying to take 100% responsibility for my own life.
Other women started noticing. They asked what I was doing, wanted to make their own. That turned into in-person meetings, then a blog, then people around the world asking me to please just sell it to them. So I made the whole thing in Google Docs, put it on Etsy for $21, and it started making thousands of dollars a month.
Here's what made it work:
I had already changed my life with it before it made me a single penny.
I had a real story from my own lived experience.
I wasn't just selling a product. I was sharing a transformation.
The thing I made solved a problem that was uniquely, intimately mine - which ironically is exactly why it resonated with others because they were able to say “me too”.
People weren't buying the planner. They were buying the energy of a woman who had genuinely used it to turn her life around — and that is something no competitor can ever copy from you.
Please note:
The lesson from this part of the story is NOT “Make thousands of dollars just from selling planners”. The lesson is to solve your own problems and turn the solutions into products other people can buy. This is an approach that still works for me today. Every product I sell started as a solution to a problem or desire I personally had.
The "It's All Been Done" Conundrum
If you're looking at the market, asking what's trending, what are people buying, what can I make that will sell — yes, you will feel like you're just adding to the noise. That's because you are.
But if you identify a problem that is genuinely yours, and you solve it — without worrying whether it takes a week or a year — what comes out of that process has never existed before. Because there is only one you, and your specific problem requires your specific solution. The combination of those things is completely original.
This is the difference between noise and signal:
Noise: creating what you think will sell, copying the business decisions of other creators, making something because it's trending.
Signal: coming home to yourself, solving your own actual problems, saying yes to your own desires, telling the true story behind what you made.
The difference isn't the product. It's the person backing it up.
Every single product I've ever sold has a whole journey behind it — something dark I was working through that eventually became something light and useful. Even if I never tell that story in full, people can feel it. And that feeling is what sells.
The $300 Call That Changed Everything
In 2015, I was at a fork in the road. I was getting requests for graphic design work — on the surface, it looked like business growth. But something felt off. I hired a coach named Yogi Cameron for one hour at $300, money I didn't really have.
What he said changed my entire business trajectory: "You don't want clients, you want customers."
That’s the push that led me to finally put my Life Binder up for sale. I immediately started making $2,000 a month from a $21 PDF I had made in Google Docs. I quit cleaning houses. I quit babysitting. I said no to all the potential graphic design clients and just kept one.
There were two paths in front of me:
Path A — Work less, receive more: honor your well-being, trust your intuition, build passive income.
Path B — Work harder, prove yourself: take on draining clients, do what feels real and urgent, earn “freedom” through suffering.
I almost chose Path B — not because it was smarter, but because it felt more familiar. Survival mode will always show you the 2x path. Healing is what lets you finally see the 10x one.
The Money Journey: Start Before You're Ready
I share everything I learned in my financial literacy journey inside The Abundance Adventure which you can get inside Say Yes to Desire.
Two years ago I had $0 invested. Today I have over $100,000 invested, with nearly $30,000 in returns I didn't have to work for. But the shift wasn't just financial — it was an identity shift. I had to stop operating from the paradigm of "I make money" and switch to "I make my money make money."
Here's what helped me turn it around:
Read The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins. It's the clearest, most practical place to start.
Start investing in index funds (I use VTSAX) — you're spreading across the top companies instead of betting on one.
Open a taxable brokerage account alongside any retirement accounts — that's money you can access anytime without penalties.
Don't wait until you make more money. Investing is about time, not amount. Starting today with a little beats starting later with a lot.
Do the money trauma work alongside the practical steps. Financial literacy alone isn't enough if the underlying beliefs haven't shifted.
When you stay in avoidance and put off facing your personal issues until you “have more money”, all you’re really doing is making your problems more expensive.
Working Way Less Was Always Available — I Just Couldn't See It Yet
Working way less allowed my true inner artist to awaken again.
I used to think that working less was something you earned over time — a reward for putting in the years of labor. Looking back at every season of my business now, I can see the path of work less, make more at every single turning point. But in the moment, I couldn't see it.
Not because the path wasn't there. Because of unhealed trauma. A dysregulated nervous system. Survival mode. These things don't just make you tired — they make the 10x path literally invisible to you. They force your brain to only see the work hard, prove yourself, earn it first option.
So it's not about paying your dues. It's about doing the inner work to realize the infinite reality of your own self-worth so you can finally see the options that were always in front of you:
Healing the belief that your value is in how hard you work.
Releasing the identity of worker bee and stepping into true entrepreneur.
Building systems that work for you, so you're not always the one working.
Letting yourself be enough — not as a productivity machine, but as a person with a voice and a perspective.
The path of working less wasn't waiting for me at some finish line. It was available at every turn — I just had to do the work on myself to finally be able to see it.
Where to Start Today
You don't need to have everything figured out. You don't need a big business first, or more money first, or more time first. The version of you who works less and makes more doesn't arrive after you suffer enough — she's the one who decides to stop tolerating dysfunction, lack of systems, and putting herself last.
If any of this resonated, here's where to begin:
Identify one real problem in your own life. That's your next product idea.
Pick up The Simple Path to Wealth and open a brokerage account this week.
Notice where you're choosing the familiar-but-harder path when an easier one is right there.
If you want a system that supports all of this, Sacred Systems was built exactly for that.
The magic was never in working harder. It was in you — and it's been there the whole time.
