Maria Wendt generates over half a million dollars every month selling digital courses for $27.
Three people run the entire operation: Maria, her sister Rose, and one assistant.
Post on Instagram. Automate the DM. Watch people buy. It looks simple. But when most creators try this exact system, they sell nothing.
The difference isn’t the platform or the audience size. It’s what she’s actually selling.
When someone buys “My Exact ManyChat Flows You Can Clone in 10 Minutes,” they’re not buying knowledge. They’re buying 40 hours of saved work. The value isn’t learning the system—it’s getting the finished system ready to use today.
Her entire model pivots on that shift: teaching versus doing. That’s why her $27 offers convert faster than most $2,000 courses.
From Hospital Room to Hands-Off: The 6-Month Rebuild
Maria didn’t always run a low-ticket model. For years, she sold high-ticket coaching and custom client work.
It made money. But it required her in every sale, every delivery and every customer conversation.
When her first child arrived, that became impossible. She knew thatthe business had to run whether she was awake or asleep. Sales had to happen while she was offline. No exceptions.
So she eliminated every high-ticket offer and everything that needed her presence or required her time.
Her network thought she was destroying her business. High-ticket was supposed to be the goal, not something you walked away from but she didn’t care.
She launched her first automated product from the hospital – newborn on her chest, laptop balanced on her knees, refresh button on Stripe open in another tab.
The product: a $27 Instagram monetization guide sold through comment-to-DM automation.
Fifty-three sales in 24 hours. Zero conversations.
Six months later: 12 products, all under $300, all automated. The business ran with three people instead of depending on her for every transaction.
Her strategy wasn’t to sell cheap courses and undercut the market. She was looking to provide something truly practical for business owners to use—not just a bag full of information.
Someone buying her ManyChat automation course doesn’t get videos explaining how automation works. They get her actual flows, ready to clone. The DM script pack? Her exact messages, formatted for copy-paste.
You’re paying $27 to skip the work, not to learn about it.
But handing someone a finished product only works if they can actually use it right away. That meant rethinking how people even discover the offer in the first place.
How Instagram Comments Became a $650K Sales Machine
Most creators treat Instagram like a broadcasting platform. They post content, hope it reaches people, and pray someone eventually buys something. Maria decided to run it in reverse.
Every piece of content she posts has a single purpose: get people to type a specific keyword in the comments. That’s the only job it has.
Without that singular focus, she’d still be stuck answering hundreds of DMs manually like she used to. With it, 2,500 sales happen every month whether she’s online or not.
Here’s how it works. Someone comments “GUIDE” or “TEMPLATE” on one of her posts. The moment they hit send, automation kicks in. ManyChat fires off an instant DM that says something like: “Sending you the exact system I use – click here to grab it for $27.”
That’s it. Comment to DM to checkout. The whole thing takes about sixty seconds.
There’s no time for buyers to talk themselves out of it, which is exactly the point. No friction between seeing something they want and actually getting it. They raise their hand by commenting, the offer shows up in their DM, and they make the decision right there in that moment.
The psychology behind this works because each individual step feels completely natural. Commenting on an Instagram post? That’s zero stakes – people do it all day long.
Opening a DM from someone whose post you just engaged with? That doesn’t feel invasive at all. Clicking a link in that DM to see what they’re offering? That’s just curiosity, not commitment.
By the time someone lands on the checkout page, they’ve already said yes three times in progressively bigger ways.
Each of those small commitments makes the next decision easier.
That first comment costs nothing. The second step—opening the DM—feels like a natural continuation.
The third step—clicking the link—is just satisfying your curiosity about what you already expressed interest in.
By the time you hit that fourth yes on the checkout page, the decision barely registers as a decision at all.
And at $27, that final click is impulse-buyable. It’s less than you’d spend on lunch. The psychological barrier to buying is so low it practically doesn’t exist.
The real magic happens after that first purchase, though. Someone who buys one of her $27 starter products has somewhere between a 40-60% chance of buying something else from her within the next 60 days.
The reason is simple enough: the template they bought actually worked. They implemented it, they saw results, and now they trust that everything else she sells will deliver the same way.
This is where Maria’s model diverges from what most creators do. She’s not building an audience of people who might buy someday. She’s building a list of people who have already bought once and are deciding what to buy next.
That’s worth 10 times what an email subscriber who has never bought is worth.
Buyers behave completely differently than leads. They don’t need to be warmed up over weeks or months. They don’t need three months of free content building trust before they’re ready to pull out their credit card.
They’ve already crossed that threshold. The only question in their mind is which product solves their next problem.
But this kind of velocity only works if the underlying economics can actually scale without breaking. Most low-ticket models look great on paper until you try to run them, and then they collapse under their own weight. The volume creates so much operational overhead that the margins disappear.
The Volume Model That Runs on Three People
Maria’s business does 2,500 sales every month. The average order value sits around $100. That generates somewhere between $600,000 and $650,000 monthly. The entire operation runs on three people. And she’s keeping sixty percent of that as profit.
At this kind of volume, most course creators would need a team of at least 15-20 people just to keep things running. Customer support alone would eat up five full-time employees handling questions, refund requests, and technical issues.
Maria runs the whole thing with three people: herself, her sister Rose handling ads and marketing, and one assistant.
Compare that to what the traditional course model looks like. You sell 50 spots in a $2,000 course once per quarter. IF the launch works, IF you hit your numbers, IF the market cooperates, that’s $100,000 every 90 days.
One bad launch and you’re scrambling because your entire revenue model depends on that quarterly event going well.
Maria’s approach flips that on its head. Instead of selling 50 people on a $2,000 transformation, she’s selling 2,500 people on a $27 starting point.
The revenue becomes way more predictable because it’s not tied to launch events. The sales cycle is shorter – people don’t need weeks to decide on a $27 purchase. And the whole system compounds on itself because those buyers keep coming back.
The repeat purchase behavior is what makes this financially viable. Her average customer buys 3.2 products over a six-month period.
Someone typically starts with one of those $27 kits. Within 30 days, they usually buy the $97 automation course.
Within 90 days, many of them buy the $247 flagship product. She’s not trying to convert cold traffic that’s never heard of her. She’s converting buyers into repeat buyers, which is a completely different game.
Because everything from the Instagram posts to the checkout page runs automatically, her cost to deliver each sale is basically the same whether she sells one course or a thousand.
She’s operating with software economics while selling information products. At 60% net margins with minimal overhead, she’s keeping more than half of every dollar that comes in. No sales commissions. No expensive paid acquisition outside of some strategic ad spend. No team bloat eating into profitability.
For context, a coaching business generating the same revenue would need somewhere between 8-12 times more people to deliver the service. A service agency would need 20-30 people. The operational leverage in Maria’s model is what allows it to scale without breaking.
But the part that trips most people up is that this only scales if you can generate consistent sales without needing a massive following.
That’s where most people get stuck—they assume you need hundreds of thousands of followers to make this work.
You Don’t Need 586,000 Followers to Make This Work
When most people look at Maria’s business, they see her 586,000 Instagram followers and assume that’s the price of entry. It’s not.
She launched her first product when she had 847 followers. That first week generated $1,421 in revenue. You can run this exact system with 1,000 followers if you understand what’s actually driving people to buy.
Maria tested this specific sequence 11 times before she got it right.
The first eight attempts generated exactly zero sales. Attempts nine and ten each got three sales—enough to know she was onto something, but not enough to call it working.
The eleventh attempt used a different keyword but kept the same basic structure, and that one produced 53 sales in 24 hours.
How to Test Your First Offer This Weekend
Pick the smallest, most specific problem you’ve solved repeatedly in your work. Something you could teach someone to implement in 30 minutes or less.
Maria’s first template was a three-page PDF. Five DM scripts, guidance on when to send each one, and what responses to look for. Creation time: 90 minutes. Times sold: 2,847 at $27. That’s $76,869 from 90 minutes of work.
Document your solution as a template, checklist, or script. Write it exactly the way you’d give it to a paying client—specific enough that they can copy-paste and deploy it without thinking.
Price it at $27. At that price, buyers don’t debate with themselves. At $97, they pause. At $297, they research competitors. Price creates velocity.
Create one Instagram post explaining the problem this solves. End with: “Comment [KEYWORD] and I’ll send it to you.” Set up ManyChat to respond automatically. Launch it this week.
If you get three sales in two weeks, you’ve validated demand (read last week’s article about George Ten’s $50 test if you need help with this). If you get zero, the problem isn’t painful enough or your positioning needs work. Both are fixable.
Once that first offer converts, build deeper into the same problem. The person who bought your DM templates probably needs your full automation framework next. Price it at $97. Offer it as an upsell.
The tools cost almost nothing: ManyChat free tier, ConvertKit at $29/month, Gumroad or Stan Store for checkout. You can test this entire system for under $50.
Maria started with one template priced at $27. Six months later, the system was generating $200,000 monthly. Now she runs 12+ products with three people and zero sales calls.
The system you build this weekend might still be running six years from now—growing, compounding, selling while you sleep.
That’s what happens when you stop trying to convince people and start removing friction instead.