In 2024, Julia Taylor’s business made $867,000 and was going backwards.
GeekPack had been running six years. There were 180,000 followers across social, a 25,000-person newsletter, a flagship course, and a recurring membership.
And yet the business kept losing money.
In 2025, that changed. Revenue dropped to $600,000, but suddenly the business turned profitable for the first time in three years.
Surprisingly, the change in fortune came down to a single element that would redefine how she would run her business from that day forward.
An Intelligence Analyst, a Year and a Half in an RV, and a Hundred Students
In 2008, after spending years building toward intelligence work, Julia Taylor found herself working for one of the three-letter agencies in the US.
It was the dream job in DC: briefings with military generals, deployments around the world.
On her first deployment to Afghanistan, she met a British Special Forces operator. She left the intelligence community and moved to the UK to be with him.
Her career took a nosedive. The high-stakes work she had trained for didn’t travel.
In 2014, she found herself googling what she could do from anywhere.
The answer that came back was coding.
She taught herself, as she’s put it many times since, “using nothing but Google and YouTube.”
She built websites, fell in love with WordPress, and started her own web design agency.
She spent the next few years running the agency from wherever she happened to be.
Then her husband retired from the Special Forces, and they spent a year and a half in an RV, driving across the United States, looking for somewhere to settle.
She posted about the lifestyle online, working from anywhere, building websites between national parks.
Other women started asking how she did it. She told them, and that’s how GeekPack started.
GeekPack went live in October 2018. Two people on the team. A hundred students. A flagship course called WP Rockstar.
Six Years of Courses, Two Years of Losses, and a Verizon Employee in the Audience
For the next six years, GeekPack expanded.
Julia added WP Rockstar Pro, a recurring membership for students who wanted ongoing access.
She then launched a second flagship called Resilience Lab.
The team grew to twelve, most of them former students.
A Udemy partnership came in and fellowships started landing: Cartier Women’s Initiative, Tory Burch Foundation.
If you were watching from the outside, it looked exactly like the trajectory you’d want.
The accounts told a different story though.
By 2024, the business was on its second straight year of negative margins.
Despite the financial shakes, Julia decided to get louder.
She had a number she tracked: ten times a week, publicly state the vision. It was her north star.
Reach one million women by 2030: on podcasts, on stages, in keynotes, in pitches.
The worse the accounts looked, the more relentlessly she said it.
Verizon had a program called Small Business Digital Ready, and it had been trying to reach military-connected and rural women founders for years, but it just wasn’t connecting.
So when a Verizon employee heard Julia’s call to the mission, something clicked.
Julia had built her audience out of military spouses self-teaching code from kitchen tables and RVs.
The fit was so good it was almost embarrassing.
A few months later, Verizon was paying Julia to run free six-week training cohorts for women in the program.
That was the template.
TikTok came next.
Then Bill, Make, Relay, JP Morgan.
Each partnership ran the same way: a corporation with budget that needed to reach women small business owners, an audience that wanted training from someone they trusted, and Julia in the middle, getting paid by the company to deliver the training for free.
Each one got embedded inside her existing offers.
Relay slotted into the business-banking module of one of her courses.
Make sponsored an AI agent workshop where her audience built tools live on a call.
Every partner showed up across her app, newsletter, social channels, and events for months at a stretch, woven through everything she was already running.
The mix shifted fast.
In 2024, partnerships like these made up 5% of GeekPack’s revenue.
By 2025, they made up 70%.
Course revenue had shrunk by nearly 80%, but sponsor revenue had grown roughly tenfold.
The team had been cut to four full-time plus contractors, and for the first time in three years, the business was profitable.
What Verizon, JP Morgan, and the rest were paying for sat underneath the courses, underneath the membership, underneath everything Julia had spent six years building.
What Verizon Was Actually Buying
What Julia built is something that sits between corporations with money and an audience they can’t reach.
She takes payment from one, delivers value to the other, and pockets the difference. Classic arbitrage.
Corporations have budgets set aside for reaching women small business owners, but they can’t just walk up to them directly.
They need someone the audience trusts, and Julia has spent six years becoming exactly that.
The Back End covered this same setup in Vivian Tu’s $3M business.
Tu’s customers are corporations too, but the mechanics differ.
Tu sells access to herself. Julia sells access to her audience.
Tu is the asset. Julia’s audience is the asset.
Two ways to run the same trade.
Julia’s version rests on four pieces underneath, each serving a specific function.
The mission is the message.
Repeated relentlessly, it gives every corporate buyer a number they can take to their boss.
The boss has two questions every time: what does success look like, and how big is the win?
Julia’s mission answers both before anyone asks.
The fellowships are the marketing.
Cartier qualified her for Tory Burch. Tory Burch qualified her for Verizon. Verizon qualified her for JP Morgan.
Each one was a marketing channel she didn’t pay for.
The nonprofits are the audience pipeline.
More than a hundred women’s business centers, chambers of commerce, and entrepreneurial resource hubs send fresh audience to her without her having to pay for it.
The audience itself is the evidence.
Students have to participate, complete, transform.
Sponsors pay for completion data, testimonials, and impact reports they can take back to leadership.
They’re paying for proof the course is delivering, and Julia turns those results into the case studies that close the next sponsor.
All four pieces feed each other.
The mission attracts the fellowships. The fellowships put her in front of the next corporate buyer. The corporate money funds the free programming. The audience completes the programming. The completion data sells the next sponsor and strengthens the next fellowship application.
Take any of the four away and the cycle stops.
The Room Your Competitors Aren’t Looking In
There’s a pool of money most creators never think to reach for.
It belongs to the corporate world, and Julia found her way into it almost by accident.
The transferable part of her story is where she looked.
You built your audience by speaking to people in your situation, so those people became your market.
It feels natural.
It also drops you into the most crowded, most price-sensitive room there is, selling to people who are trying to make their own bills.
The corporate world runs on different math.
Corporations have budgets allocated every year that someone inside the building has to spend.
Diversity programs, small business initiatives, financial literacy, professional development.
The money is assigned, it recurs, and the person holding it is under pressure to spend it well.
Julia found that pool because her competitors were all looking at each other.
Fit your work to what a corporation already funds.
Spend a week reading before you pitch anyone.
Find out which corporations sponsor programs in your space, what categories they fund, what language shows up in their impact reports.
Then ask whether your work could be delivered as something that fits one of those budget lines.
If it can, the fellowships and awards in your industry are the cheapest way into the room.
It’s the same door Julia walked through.
A regional or national award in your field puts you in front of corporate buyers at a fraction of the audience size.
Broadcast a mission bigger than your bills.
The Verizon employee heard Julia because of the mission she kept repeating.
Standing on that same stage talking about covering her mortgage and taking Fridays off, she gets no approach.
The size of the goal you say out loud sets the ceiling on what can find you.
It works as a mindset filter too.
A goal that size pulls your attention toward corporate budgets, fellowships, and ten-year thinking, instead of the next invoice.
Pick the bigger number.
Say it in public until the people with budgets hear it and don’t lose sight of the change you want to make.