In 2016, Liz Wilcox built her first online business while sitting in parking lots.
She’d work from the library, the laundromat, the lot outside the local Lowe’s, anywhere her laptop could pick up WiFi while her toddler slept.
She’d left her teaching job when her daughter was born, and now her mother’s rent depended on what she could earn.
It would take two businesses before she landed on the one that worked.
Today she earns about half a million dollars a year from a single membership that costs $9 a month, selling to people who were in the exact same position she was.
The price hasn’t moved since the day she launched it (she says it never will), and managing the membership takes her about two hours a week.
This year she bought Smart Passive Income from Pat Flynn, the riskiest thing she said she’s ever done.
Every one of those choices, from the pricing to the purchase, goes back to a one-bedroom trailer where she grew up as a teenager.
A $10 Book About RV Sewage And a Waitlist Where Everyone Bought
In high school, Liz shared a trailer with six other people.
“I grew up super poor,” she says.
She earned a degree in education, then a master’s in educational leadership, and went to work as a teacher.
By 2016, she was living full-time in an RV with her toddler, and she was the family’s breadwinner.
She needed money she could earn from the road, and the life she knew best was the one she was living inside that RV.
So she started writing about it, on a travel blog called The Virtual Campground (she was so new to business that she had to Google the word “entrepreneur”).
To grow the blog, she listened to other bloggers explain how they grew their audiences.
They were running ads, sidebars, social media and webinars all at once, every one of them meant to push readers onto an email list.
Liz picked one, and bet the blog on email.
Readers who found the blog joined her list, and by the time it had hit around 300, she had something to sell them.
It was a $10 book of funny RV sewage stories.
Over the next few months it brought in a few thousand dollars, and proved that the people on her list would pay her.
One company even paid her $7 for every new subscriber she sent to its own email list.
She kept selling to the list, with printables, bundles, and then tickets to an online summit for RV owners.
Then she opened a waitlist for her first course.
At the time, the email marketers she was learning from told her that a 1 to 2 percent conversion rate was good.
At that rate, a waitlist of 141 people should have produced two or three sales.
But when the cart opened on a Monday and closed that Friday, all 141 had bought.
The course had made $17,000 in a single week.
“Maybe there’s something to this email thing,” she thought.
Then in 2019 she sold the blog and went all in on email, taking on client work while her list grew.
The list filled up with beginners who wanted her to teach them email marketing given the success she had had with her own blog.
Clients paid her for her time, but she realised she only had so many hours to sell, which put a ceiling on what she could earn.
She knew that it was possible for the beginners on her list to all learn the same lesson at once, so she gave herself a couple of years to move away from teaching one on one, to teaching to a group.
Before she built anything, she asked the people on her list what they thought of the idea.
Then in February 2021, with about 800 subscribers, she launched the Email Marketing Membership: a fresh newsletter template every week that a beginner could fill in and send.
The price came from her own past.
She set it at the most she could have spent herself when she was starting out, “about the max I could spend without tucking my tail between my legs.”
Thirty people joined on the first day, and she gave herself two years to reach a thousand.
Four Hundred Podcasts And a $108 Pass
As it turned out, she passed a thousand members inside her first year, and today about 4,400 people are members.
Almost none of them found her on social media.
Why?
To put it plainly – she hustles.
She has been a guest on close to 400 podcasts and virtual stages, and between those shows and her affiliates, that’s where nearly every member comes from.
On each show she talks email with someone else’s audience, then sends listeners to the free templates on her website.
Anyone who grabs them lands on her email list, which now sits at about 15,000 people, and the first four emails they receive each have a job.
The first delivers the templates and introduces Liz.
The second sends her best free content.
The third tells them how often she’ll write and what she’ll sell, which she calls the most important email of the four.
The fourth tells them why she does any of this, and invites them into the membership.
Inside, members get a new template every week, a library of more than 100 older ones, a live Q&A with Liz each month and a guest expert each quarter.
Affiliates bring people in by a shorter route.
Many of the hosts who interview her sign up as affiliates and put their own link in the show notes, and Liz pays them $4.50 a month for every member they bring in, for as long as that member stays.
Between 100 and 400 affiliates get paid every month, and their listeners often skip the free list and join the membership straight away.
Between the two routes, another 100 to 150 people join every month.
Then a few times a year, for just a few days, she opens the Annual Pass.
The Annual Pass costs $108, exactly twelve months at the monthly price, and for that price she throws in every workshop and product she sells, which would otherwise cost between $12 and $150 each.
Two-thirds of her members now hold an Annual Pass.
Last Black Friday, renewals alone brought in more than $80,000, about a sixth of what the business makes in a year.
ThriveCart runs the checkout, pays the affiliates, reminds annual members 30 days before they renew, and chases failed payments with an email titled “Failed” and a melting-face emoji.
Her admin, Patricia, handles the inbox.
In terms of a product suite, there’s nothing above the Annual Pass, and nobody can book a call with her.
In a nutshell, she sells three things: the membership at $9 a month, the same membership at $108 a year, and a shelf of workshops and template packs priced from $12 to $150, which come free with the yearly plan.
Every podcast, affiliate link and free template exists to get people into the membership.
Since launch, the membership has brought in $1,949,266.
She still wants 10,000 members, and says she’s desperate to get there.
That goal is why she now owns Smart Passive Income, the creator brand Pat Flynn ran for 18 years.
She’d been a guest on his podcast several times, and when Pat and his partner Matt Gartland sold the business, they passed on bigger offers they had received from investment firms because Pat believed she was the right person to run it.
SPI brings more than 100,000 subscribers, over six times the size of her own list, and she hasn’t sent them a single offer for her own membership.
Why 4,000 Members Let Her Leave for Survivor
Jay Clouse, who interviewed Liz about the SPI deal in September, has a rule about pricing: if something costs less than $10, don’t charge for it at all.
His own membership, The Lab, which we covered in an earlier piece, sits at the far end of the scale.
Around 200 creators pay between $699 and $3,999 a year to be in it, and to join the main tier they need 10,000 followers or $10,000 a month in revenue.
By late 2024, that was bringing in roughly $400,000 a year.
That means Liz brings in more than The Lab does, from members paying a fraction of Jay’s lowest price.
But it also means she needs more than twenty times as many of them.
When Jay pushed her on it, she told him he was looking at the math wrong, because there are 8 billion people on the planet.
“I just need 4,000,” she said.
And the $9 price is what puts 4,000 within reach.
At that price, the decision is too small to need a webinar, a sales call or a launch, all of which she calls “very active income,” so she’s built nothing that depends on that kind of work.
It’s also a price point that a podcast host can recommend without risking anything, which is why her growth is built on other people’s audiences.
And because nobody paying $9 expects to get her on the phone, the business stays small enough for her to do what she set out to do from the start: “I want to be able to turn my computer off.”
She put that to the test in 2023, when she was cast on Survivor and had to step away for about 100 days.
Before she left, she wrote her emails months in advance, built every sales page in ThriveCart, and connected her email software to the checkout so sales and renewals would run on their own.
Patricia took over the inbox and tech questions, and her sister came on full-time.
The business averaged $1,000 a day the whole time she was gone.
On the other end of the scale, Jay built a space for creators who have already made it, where members pay for weekly live sessions, masterminds and a yearly retreat (all of which need him in the room).
Liz built hers for the woman she used to be, at the most that woman could have paid.
That’s the price Jay’s rule says isn’t worth charging for, but it’s carried Liz all the way to owning Smart Passive Income, the company that bought Jay’s first community in 2020.
Three Lessons From a $9 Business
Liz’s business is simple enough to describe in a sentence, but three of the decisions behind it can work for almost any offer.
1. Make the low price the whole business.
It’s easy to look at a $9 product and think it’s beneath you, or to use it as a one-off purchase that leads to something higher, hoping to snag the $1,000, $2,000 or $10,000 client.
Liz has stayed true to her price point for six years and made it the business.
What makes that work is the value she keeps putting into it: a new template every week, which is a lot of templates for $9.
It’s an impulse buy, at a price point a lot of people wouldn’t even consider.
Look at the cheapest thing you sell, and ask what you’d need to deliver every week for someone to buy it without a second thought.
If that’s something you could keep up, that product may be able to carry far more of your business than you’ve let it.
2. A low price still needs hustle.
Liz isn’t resting on her laurels.
She gets out there and gets in front of people, and over the past six years she has averaged more than one podcast or stage a week.
At $9 there’s a very low barrier to entry, but a low barrier only pays off when you have volume.
Make a list of the shows your buyer already listens to, or the newsletters they read, and pitch one this week.
Then pitch another one next week.
3. Ask your list before you build anything.
Every product Liz has launched went to people who had already put their hand up.
Before the membership existed, she asked her subscribers what they thought of the idea.
Her first course went to a waitlist, and every person on it bought.
The Annual Pass still runs on a waitlist today.
Before you build your next offer, describe it in one email and ask your list whether they’d buy it.
If enough of them say yes, open a waitlist and count the names before you make a thing.
Ten years after she started working out of parking lots, Liz’s business now supports three households.
She takes her summers off, and from her window she can see the water.
Now she’s taking on the brand Pat Flynn built, with a plan to help a new generation of creators put the “income” in Smart Passive Income.
“Passive income was never supposed to mean doing nothing,” she says.
The woman who once worked off the WiFi in a Lowe’s parking lot now runs one of the best-known brands in the creator world, and she still charges the price that woman could have paid.