Kim Vopni’s customers have a problem most of them would prefer to ignore.
The ones who do raise it with a doctor are often told it’s just part of being a woman.
For 16 years, Vopni struggled to get cut through selling pelvic health products to women who had trouble with bladder leaks, particularly after childbirth.
But the business stayed small.
Then in her third decade of trying, something clicked, and her monthly revenue grew twenty times over in a single year.
In 2024 her company reported $430,000 in a single month.
Her customers are still as private about the problem now as they were two decades ago.
But sales keep pouring in, and the reason traces back to the first woman Vopni ever watched live with this problem.
Her mother.
A Birth Device Nobody in Canada Had Heard Of
Kim Vopni grew up watching her mother live with the aftermath of childbirth.
Episiotomies, bladder surgery in her fifties, chronic back pain, and a body she was never happy with.
By the time Vopni was an adult, she was afraid of giving birth.
She became a personal trainer in 1996 and was determined, in her own words, “to have a different story than her (mother).”
So when her own pregnancy came in 2004, she prepared for it with a German birth-training device called the EPI-NO.
The birth went well, but she couldn’t understand why nobody in Canada had heard of the device, so she emailed the manufacturer and asked to distribute it.
They agreed, and suddenly Vopni had a business.
She’d expected a side hustle, “some extra cash here and there.”
She ran it from home on her husband’s pilot income and put every sale back into the business.
By 2009, the side hustle had become the job, so she quit her corporate role and incorporated Pelvienne Wellness.
From there, the business grew along two tracks.
The first track was products.
The EPI-NO distribution, an online store selling pelvic health goods, and from 2011 a second company, Bellies Inc., manufacturing a postpartum recovery garment with money borrowed from family.
The second track was teaching.
Workshops from 2009, built to spread awareness of a product nobody knew.
Then courses, and from 2013, certifications training fitness professionals to teach pelvic health to their own clients.
For years she ran it all together, until one day it finally became too much.
She’d say later it “was tough and not serving me – or my customers – fully.”
So over three years, she shed the products piece by piece.
In 2018 she closed Pelvienne’s online store. The teaching was carrying that company by then, all under a name nobody forgot once they’d heard it: The Vagina Coach.
In 2019, new Health Canada device rules made the EPI-NO unavailable, killing the founding product she’d distributed for 15 years.
Bellies Inc. had sold on through its own channels the whole time, but in 2020 she bought out her partners, taking full ownership so she could sell the company clean, to a buyer she trusted with the mission.
Fourteen years of building, and by 2020, only the teaching was left.
The $17 Course and the 92-Year-Old Member
In March 2021, Penguin Random House published her book Your Pelvic Floor.
Nine months later she answered member requests for something easier to use than her online courses – something they could open every day.
So she launched the Buff Muff App, and the business changed shape.
Twelve months after the app found its footing, monthly revenue had gone from $20,000 to $430,000.
Those figures are self-reported through her app platform’s podcast, so treat the precision loosely, but the direction is hard to argue with.
Everything she had taught in rooms for a decade now lived on a phone.
Customers find her mostly through Instagram and paid Meta ads.
Meta rejects intimate health ads at rates most advertisers never deal with, so she runs the account on two workarounds.
Her ad language sells pelvic health and confidence rather than symptoms, which keeps the creative approvable.
And her cheap entry offer means even expensive, restricted traffic pays for itself: her ads return $2.50 for every dollar spent.
Alongside the paid model are the free distribution channels.
Three books, a weekly podcast, YouTube, and thirty international speaking events all feed the same funnel.
That funnel has two ways in, and both open into the same room.
The first is a one-off course called the Buff Muff Method, costing $17 and giving users lifetime access.
One session with a pelvic floor physiotherapist runs $100 to $200. Vopni’s entire starting product costs less than a fifth of that, and nobody has to book an appointment to get it.
At checkout, a menopause workshop is offered as an add-on.
She has named that pairing as her core growth strategy: send buyers to the $17 offer, and the add-on raises what each of them spends on the way through.
The second way in is a 7-day free trial of her paid membership, which runs at $27 a month up to $197 a year.
The membership carries daily workouts, symptom tracking, 28-day challenges, and two live group calls a week.
Programs for specific situations, prolapse, surgery recovery, hysterectomy, are folded in rather than sold separately.
At the top sit live retreats priced from $1,900 to nearly $5,000 and every room tier is sold out.
Additional training runs alongside the core offering, and it sells to a different buyer entirely.
Fitness professionals buy her certifications because specialised training in this area has never been offered by their industry.
Her flagship program runs $997 and comes with six months of mentorship.
Graduates get listed on her public directory, where women searching for in-person help find them.
Those trainers teach her method, so their clients tend to become her customers too.
Vopni now has six thousand paying customers. A team of two: Vopni and one other person.
A Business Built for Women Who Don’t Want To Talk About It
Every business Vopni built before the app asked her customer to do something hard: talk about an embarrassing problem out loud.
Buy a birth device from a stranger, stand in a workshop, tell a trainer why you’re there.
Shame is the force that rules this category, and Vopni knows that.
Shame is why her buyer hasn’t seen a physiotherapist.
It’s why the doctor’s “just do more Kegels” was the end of the conversation for so many women.
The app keeps the entire exchange private and the buyer gets to avoid the shame they would otherwise feel.
A woman finds Vopni at midnight, searching a symptom she has never said out loud, and can fix the problem without speaking to a single person.
She skips the appointment, the waiting room, and the front desk, and only has to commit to ten minutes a day on a phone in her bedroom.
The same shame that stops her buyer talking also keeps competitors out.
Mainstream fitness brands avoid the category because the topic embarrasses them too, and Meta routinely rejects ads for intimate health products, so the space stays empty of serious money.
To cement her positioning, Vopni has embraced the things that everyone else has avoided.
She named herself The Vagina Coach, planting the barrier word in her own masthead, because the word that gets her ads rejected is the word nobody forgets.
Shame walls the category off from the outside, but avoiding the shame is also the biggest driver of the business.
Her closest competitor shows how differently the same market can be read.
Lauren Ohayon’s Restore Your Core sells one-time programs at $247 to $747, earning most of the money up front.
Vopni prices entry at almost nothing and earns hers over years.
She can afford the $17 door because the problem is typically ongoing.
Pelvic health demands daily practice, and the same body walks into pregnancy, then postpartum, then menopause, each stage bringing the problem back in a new form.
Vopni’s oldest member is 92.
When Shame Is Stronger Than Attention
Five moves built Vopni’s model, and each one works without her twenty years or her category.
If the problem is ongoing, sell the relationship instead of the one-off.
Recurring business models are always more valuable.
If you’re solving a problem that needs ongoing attention and can’t be fixed in one hit, charging a small amount on an ongoing basis lifts the lifetime value of every customer you win.
Vopni’s problem returns with every life stage, so her modest subscription outearns any single sale across decades of the same customer.
Ask whether your buyer’s problem closes after purchase or comes back.
If it comes back, price for the return.
Own the product from beginning to end.
Vopni spent 14 years on physical products, and neither model gave her control.
The device she distributed belonged to a German manufacturer, and when Health Canada changed its rules, that business went out from under her overnight.
Distribute someone else’s product and you’re always exposed to decisions you have no say in: their pricing, their supply, or a regulator you never saw coming.
The garment she did own came with its own weight: borrowed money for production runs, manufacturing costs, and partners to answer to.
A digital product costs nothing to deliver, never runs out of units, lets you control quality from beginning to end, and nobody can ever take it away from you.
For you, this may be stating the obvious, but her sixteen years of physical products against her three years of digital ones make the case better than any argument could.
Sell to the people your buyers are already in front of.
Vopni’s customers see personal trainers every week, so she sold her material to the trainers, who then reached customers she might never have had access to herself.
It runs almost like an affiliate model, except the affiliates pay her for the privilege, and it’s a good value add at every link in the chain.
List the professionals your buyer already sits in front of.
A version of your product built for them could turn their client list into your client list.
Let buyers discover and solve the problem in private.
Vopni’s buyer would rather not have a conversation about this problem, and in other models, selling products of this kind requires exactly that kind of conversation.
A digital product discovered at home, learned at home, and solved at home is the perfect placement.
She’s filled that gap well, and any market carrying some level of avoidance may have the same gap available.
Position your offer in the plain language your market actually uses.
“The Vagina Coach” is a great scroll-stopping title.
It’s not called Core Activation. It speaks to the market where it’s at, calling out what doesn’t get mentioned, and by being front and center with it she gets to own the space.
The right buyer knows instantly it’s for her, and no man turns up wanting core training only to find it’s something else.
Your market may not have a taboo word, but it has plain language your competitors dress up in jargon.
Name your offer the way your buyer describes the problem to themselves, and the right people stop while the wrong ones scroll past.
Vopni named the thing nobody wanted to say, and the women who wanted to say it but couldn’t, recognized her instantly.
Today, six thousand of them are paying her for the conversation they never had to have.