In 2015, Abbey Ashley was pregnant and living paycheck to paycheck in a basement apartment, working off a used laptop she’d bought on Craigslist.
She needed money, and she needed to stay home.
Today her company teaches other mothers how to make money from home, and in its best year it brought in $3.8 million.
She found that path doing virtual assistant work for other people’s businesses.
Within six months, the work was paying her $10,000 a month.
But the first sixteen people who paid her, for a course she hadn’t recorded yet, sent her into a panic attack, and the fear behind it still shapes every program she sells.
Nap-Time Clients and a $497 Course That Didn’t Exist Yet
Abbey Ashley’s husband had just taken a big pay cut, and the family needed more money before the baby arrived.
Daycare was out of reach, and she had no interest in going back to a job just to pay for it.
So when a friend suggested virtual assistant work, Abbey used her three months of maternity leave to see if she could make it pay.
She told everyone she knew she was starting a business, and she went to one or two networking events every week.
Before long she was fully booked, doing data entry, blog posts and customer service emails in the gaps between naps.
Within four months she was earning what her full-time job had paid, and she decided she would never go back.
Once the work started to outgrow the 20 hours a week she had available, she hired old college friends to handle the overflow.
“I realized that my income wasn’t capped by my own time anymore,” she said later.
Then she spent a full week writing a single pitch to a blogger she admired, Bryan Harris of Growth Tools.
He hired her as his copywriter, and she called it the best-paid internship she ever had.
From inside his business, she watched him sell online courses that brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single week.
So she decided to start an email list herself, long before she had anything to sell on it.
It took the best part of a year to reach 1,000 people, blogging about everything she was learning as a VA.
Then she asked them what they wanted to learn, and most pointed to how she had replaced her salary.
So she wrote an outline and a sales page for a $497 course and promised to deliver it over 12 weeks.
Within seven days, buyers had sent her about $8,000, close to a month of her earnings at the time.
Then the panic hit.
She found herself questioning her abilities – “What if I can’t deliver? What if people don’t like the content I create?”
She pushed on anyway, finishing each lesson just before her buyers needed it.
Once the course was done, she closed her VA business and kept a single copywriting client for another year in case teaching didn’t pay.
A Facebook Group, a Free Checklist And $100,000 a Month
In 2019, three years after that first $8,000 week, Abbey’s business had its first $1 million year.
The next year it passed $2 million, peaked at $3.8 million, and come 2024 continued to bring in more than $2 million a year.
Most of her leads start out in a Facebook group for people who want to become virtual assistants.
In 2022, Abbey said the group was sending her about 150 new leads a day, close to 55,000 a year, with YouTube as her second-largest source.
Like Sam Vander Wielen, who points everything she publishes toward a free workshop, Abbey sends every post, video and podcast episode to the same download – a free VA checklist and starter kit.
The checklist leads into a free, hour-long video webinar called “Become a Booked Out Virtual Assistant,” which ends with a pitch.
The recorded, evergreen version runs all year, and each viewer gets a personal deadline to buy.
In 2021, that recorded training alone brought in more than $100,000 a month, over $1.2 million a year.
Twice a year, the team also runs the training live, opening the doors for about ten days, which can bring in over $750,000.
Today, the pitch offers two versions of her core course.
A Self-Study version gives buyers the video lessons to complete in their own time.
The Accelerator provides an additional 90 days of weekly coaching, proposal reviews and job leads, and its stated goal is a student’s first paying client.
It lists at $1,497, but her funnels only ever sell it at $997, and launch emails lead with “Save $500.”
Anyone who watches and doesn’t buy gets seven follow-up emails, then moves onto a Tuesday newsletter called VA Weekly, which also comes with job openings.
Abbey says most buyers purchase within two years of finding her, so those emails keep her in front of them until they’re ready.
By 2024 that email list had passed 193,000 people, and her team uses its size to forecast what each launch will bring in.
Students who end up landing a client can move up to SavvySociety, a $97-a-month membership with weekly group coaching and live “Ask Abbey” calls.
The newest step is a five-week AI certification, which sold its founding group at $2,000 apiece and reopens in January 2027 at $3,000 or more.
Students and other creators who send her buyers can also earn 30% of each sale through her referral program.
And on the other side of the market, business owners can post a job to her VA list for free, or pay $1,997 for her team to hand them a screened shortlist.
The Course She Split Based On Student Wins
In 2026, a student who buys Abbey’s Accelerator and then stays in SavvySociety for a year pays her about $1,944.
Up until the end of 2025, Abbey had been selling her core course for a single fee of $1,347.
The course at the time came with lifetime access and taught everything from finding a first client to running a full VA business.
From 2026, she split the course itself in two: the Accelerator, which stops at a student’s first paying client, and SavvySociety, at $947 a year, for everything after.
That let her sell the core program for $350 less than the old course.
Before that first client, a student is still buying proof that she can earn from home at all.
But once she lands a client, she has income, real client problems, and a reason to keep paying for help.
The guarantee follows the same line.
The old course offered a 30-day refund.
The Accelerator offers no refund, but a student who does the work and still has no client after 90 days can ask for another 90 days of coaching, twice, up to nine months in all.
Abbey even went back to every past student of the old course who never landed a client, and gave them the Accelerator’s weekly coaching for free.
Tiffany Uman faced the same gap between payment and result, because a promotion can take months to arrive.
Uman filled the wait with small wins inside the first 30 days, then rolled clients into the climb toward their next promotion.
Abbey keeps coaching until the first paycheck lands, and then sells what comes next.
Each of those first paychecks pays the business back.
A student with a client becomes a testimonial, a likely referral, and a buyer for the membership.
The free job board exists to put more of those first clients in front of her students.
And the AI certification is there to keep their paychecks coming as AI changes the work.
Four Moves Behind the First Paycheck
Four of Abbey’s decisions hold lessons that work in almost any field.
1. Pre-sell the course, then build it as you deliver.
A lot of people will create a course without knowing (or asking) whether their audience really wants it in the first place.
I love the fact that Abbey built an audience first, then asked that audience what they wanted to learn, and then pre-sold them a course on it.
Yes, she panicked after the money came in, but she built the course week on week, staying just ahead of her buyers so it never became one huge task she had to deliver on.
It’s a really manageable way to make a product that people actually want, and you get the added bonus of being paid to make it before you even start.
2. Guarantee the result people came for.
We all know about money-back guarantees, but money back only covers part of what a buyer risks.
These days, time is valuable, and people recognise that.
When people buy your product, they’re not always weighing up the dollar value.
They’re weighing up how much time they have to invest to get a result, and how much time they’ll waste if it doesn’t work.
Abbey keeps coaching students who do the work, for up to nine months, until they land the client they paid to find.
That way everyone wins, because students get the result and Abbey keeps the cash.
3. Set your pricing tiers against the revenue your clients can make.
Abbey’s ladder climbs from a $997 course that gets a student her first client to a $3,000 AI certification that teaches her to sell monthly retainers.
Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush also price each of their products by how much money it can help the buyer make, from $350 to package a small digital product, right up to $6,800 to build something buyers can sell for up to $10,000.
If what you teach at one level could help someone 10x their revenue, split that level into its own product and price it against what it can earn them.
4. Bring both sides of the market together.
Abbey’s students could learn everything and still end up waiting for work to arrive.
So Abbey went out and found the business owners who have jobs to give.
Those owners post jobs to her list for free, or pay her team $1,997 to shortlist candidates for them.
Her students get work, the owners get help, and Abbey earns from both sides.
Work out who pays your buyers, then find one way to put those people in front of them, even a single job post shared with your list.
Ten years since the birth of her business, Abbey’s husband now works alongside her full-time, after quitting his own job to join.
Most of the team around them are working mothers on four-day weeks, all of them working from home.
She still runs two launches a year because she finds them fun, and when she travels, she emails the subscribers who live nearby and invites them to meet her for coffee.
AI is now changing the work her students do, and she plans to lead them through it.
“I’m not sitting it out,” she says.
The woman who once needed one client to get out of a basement apartment now spends her days making sure other mothers find theirs.