I use ChatGPT an embarrassing amount. Like... an amount I probably shouldn’t publicly admit.

And before you picture me sitting at my computer all day asking it to “give me 30 viral hooks for Instagram,” that is actually one of the most generic ways to use it, so I’m not doing that.

At this point, ChatGPT knows a weird amount about what’s happening in my business. It knows what I’m selling, what I’ve sold before, the different Instagram accounts I’m working on, the articles I’ve written, the ideas I’m considering and when I’m thinking about pivoting for the 47th time.

But it also helps me figure out what to pack my kindergartener for lunch. It has helped me shop for mattresses for my kids, figure out what light bulb I need from a picture, troubleshoot why a room in my house smells musty and decide what to buy a five-year-old for her birthday when she seemingly already owns everything.

Basically, I have accidentally turned ChatGPT into an extra brain.

And THAT is where I think most people are still underusing it.

A lot of people are either treating ChatGPT like Google with a personality, ask question, get answer, leave, or they’re using it to generate things from scratch. “Give me 30 days of content ideas for women who want to make money online.” “Write an Instagram caption about passive income.” “Give me ten hooks for this Reel.”

Then they wonder why the output sounds like it could have been written for literally anyone.

The most useful way I’ve found to use ChatGPT isn’t having it think for me. It’s giving it enough context that it can think with me.

There is a huge difference between those two things.

So these are ten of the slightly unhinged ways I’m actually using it right now. Some are business. Some are motherhood. Some are things I could absolutely figure out myself but simply do not want to use one more ounce of brainpower figuring out.

1. I give it completely ordinary moments from my life and make it find the story hiding inside them.

This might be my favorite one because I think one of the biggest misconceptions about creating content is that something interesting needs to happen before you have something interesting to say.

It doesn’t.

Your kid says something weird. You find a fly in your bedroom. You’re standing in Target debating between two things. You burn dinner. You realize you’ve been paying for a subscription for eleven months that you haven’t used once.

Most of those things aren’t “content.” But there is almost always a bigger idea hiding inside an ordinary moment if you know how to look for it.

So instead of opening ChatGPT and saying, “Give me a Reel about entrepreneurship,” I’ll tell it what actually happened. I’ll explain what I’ve been talking about lately, what I’m selling if I’m selling something, and what my audience cares about. Then I’ll ask it to show me the possible stories, lessons or connections hiding inside that completely random thing.

Sometimes the connection is terrible. Sometimes it tries WAY too hard to turn something into a profound life lesson and I’m like, absolutely not. 😂

But sometimes it finds the idea I couldn’t see.

That is one of the biggest differences I’ve noticed between content that sounds like AI and using AI to make your own content better. I’m not asking it to manufacture a personality for me. I’m giving it my life, my thoughts and my business and asking it to help me notice what I might have missed.

The raw material is still mine.

2. I make it argue with me before I make a business decision.

This has probably saved me more time than asking ChatGPT for ideas ever has, because I have a LOT of ideas. It’s actually my yellow flag, lol just kidding.

And when I get excited about one, I can convince myself it is the greatest business idea anyone has had since Jeff Bezos sold his first book.

So now, instead of only asking ChatGPT to help me build the idea, I’ll give it the entire plan first. The offer, price, audience, how I’d sell it, why I think it’ll work, what else I’m currently working on and what outcome I’m hoping for.

Then I’ll tell it not to hype me up.

I want to know why this might be a bad idea. I want it to pretend it’s the exact person I’m trying to sell to and tell me why it wouldn’t buy. I want to know what I’m not considering because I’m emotionally attached to the idea.

RUDE? Sometimes.

Useful? Very. 😂

It doesn’t mean I automatically listen to it. I’ve disagreed with ChatGPT plenty of times. And that’s a valuable skill you need to learn in the time we’re living in with AI. People take AI wayyyyy too seriously sometimes and think that AI just gave them the most genius and valuable information… but really it’s biased and just reinforcing the vibes you subconsciously gave it. Anyways, the value is forcing myself to look at an idea from somewhere other than inside my own excitement.

AI will happily become your yes-man if that’s what you ask it to be. I don’t need another yes-man. I need something to occasionally point out that the $97 PDF I’m planning to spend three weeks creating might not be the highest-value use of my time.

And sometimes I still make the PDF.

At least now I’ve argued both sides first.

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Before I had kids, I had a pretty clear idea of what my life was going to look like.

For a long time, I assumed I would always be a dental hygienist. I had gone to school for it, I had a career, I made good money, and it felt like the responsible, obvious path. Then before I ever had kids, I started making money online because, quite literally, I was broke and wanted to pay for our wedding in cash. What started as extra money eventually grew to about four times what I had been making each month in dental hygiene, and I quit my job before I ever became a mom.

So technically, motherhood wasn’t what made me leave a traditional career. I was already working for myself from home by the time I had kids. What motherhood changed was how I felt about being home, how much I valued having control over my time, and how complicated it would eventually feel to be both deeply grateful that I could stay home with my kids and still need work, goals and something that was mine.

I also had a pretty clear picture of the kind of mom I would be, although I’m not sure what qualifications I had used to come up with it.

I think there was probably a lot of playing on the floor involved. Crafts. Activities. Maybe some sort of sensory bin situation happening on a Tuesday morning. I would be patient and present and really good at playing pretend for an amount of time that current me finds absolutely hilarious.

I never thought I’d homeschool. I trusted doctors without thinking particularly hard about it. I wasn’t especially worried about screen time. There were just a lot of things I assumed I knew because I hadn’t had any reason yet to question them.

Then I actually had kids.

I’ve been a mom for almost seven years now, and one of the strangest parts of it has been realizing how many things I was completely sure about until I was the one responsible for three actual human beings.

Some of my opinions have completely flipped. Some have gotten stronger. Some have landed in a really inconvenient middle where I can see both sides now and I’m actually less certain than I was before.

This isn’t a list of things I think every mom should believe. If anything, motherhood has made me much less interested in telling another woman what her family should look like.

These are just the things I was sure about before I had kids, and what I think now that I’m actually living it.

I thought I would always want a career outside the home. Then I had kids and couldn’t imagine not being home with them.

Before I had kids, I never pictured myself as a stay-at-home mom. Even after I left dental hygiene, I was still very much working. I had already built an online income, I was working for myself, and I liked that part of me. I liked making money. I liked building something. I liked having goals.

Then I had kids, and almost immediately I couldn’t imagine not being home with them.

I was incredibly grateful that I had already built a way to work from home before I ever became a mom, because once my babies were actually here, the thought of structuring my life around being somewhere else all day felt completely different than it had when motherhood was still hypothetical.

For a while, I think there was another assumption hiding underneath that gratitude. If being home with my kids was what I wanted so badly, surely I would be naturally amazing at the actual staying-home-with-kids part.

This is where motherhood has humbled me perhaps more than anywhere else.

I am not the Pinterest mom I thought I would be.

I love my kids more than anything on earth. I also do not want to play pretend for three hours. I am not waking up every morning excited to create an educational craft out of pipe cleaners and construction paper. I can play with my kids, obviously, but I am not naturally the mom who can sit on the floor and be assigned the role of a Paw Patrol character for the next 90 minutes and think, this is exactly where I thrive.

As my kids have gotten older, staying home has actually gotten harder for me in some ways, not easier. They talk more. They need different things. There’s more stimulation, more noise, more schedules, more personalities, more questions, more of everything.

At the same time, I still don’t want to go back to a traditional job. I don’t regret building work that lets me be home; if anything, motherhood has made me value that freedom more.

What I’ve realized is that wanting to be home with my kids and needing something outside of motherhood were never opposites.

I like working. I like making money. I like having a goal that has nothing to do with whether anyone ate their lunch or put their shoes away. I like building something and seeing what I’m capable of. I like having a part of my brain engaged in something that is entirely mine.

And I still have really big goals.

For a while, I think I felt like those things somehow made me less suited to staying home. Maybe if I were more content, more naturally maternal, more whatever, I wouldn’t need that.

I don’t believe that anymore.

My work is one of the things that makes being home work for me.

Money matters to me more now, not less.

I think there’s this idea that becoming a mom is supposed to make you care less about money and ambition because suddenly you realize what really matters.

I had almost the opposite experience.

Obviously, my kids matter more to me than any amount of money ever could. But having them made me understand what money can actually do for a family.

I’m not interested in making money just so I can look at a bigger number in a bank account. I want the kind of money that creates choices.

I want to be able to decide how much I work.

I want my husband and me to be able to spend time with our kids.

I want to take the trip.

I want to be able to pay for the thing that makes our lives easier without having to run the numbers seventeen times first.

I want to be able to help my kids someday.

I want an emergency to be an inconvenience instead of a catastrophe.

I want to be able to look at our life and make decisions based on what we actually want instead of what we can barely afford.

Before kids, I think money represented stuff to me more than it does now. Now it represents freedom.

That has made me more ambitious, not less.

The difference is that I’m much pickier about what I’m willing to trade for it.

I don’t want to make a lot of money if making it requires me to miss the entire life I wanted the money for in the first place. That math doesn’t make sense to me anymore.

I love my husband. I also sometimes don’t want anyone to speak to me after 8 p.m.

This might be one of the things I feel most guilty admitting because I know what I believe about marriage.

My husband is my person. He should be a priority. Eventually these kids are going to grow up, move out and build lives of their own, and it will be the two of us again.

And honestly, I am so excited for that season.

Not because I want to rush through this one. I don’t. But I can picture us older, our kids coming home with their own families, and the two of us sitting there thinking, Holy crap, we did it.

I want us to still really love each other when we get there.

The problem is that right now there are days when I get everyone to bed and I genuinely do not want another human being to say a single word to me.

I have never related more to those memes where the husband and wife are sitting next to each other on the couch at the end of the night looking like they just returned from war.

That’s us sometimes.

My kids talk all day long. All. Day. Long.

Someone is asking me a question while someone else is telling me a story while someone else needs help with something, and inevitably somebody is touching me during all of it. I am an introvert living in a house with three people who apparently have a daily word quota they are personally committed to exceeding.

By bedtime, I am spent.

And then comes the cruel little joke of this season of marriage: the time when the house is finally quiet and my husband and I can actually be together is also the exact moment my brain has decided it would like to be placed in airplane mode.

I don’t think that means my marriage isn’t important to me. If anything, recognizing it has made me realize that a good marriage doesn’t maintain itself simply because you both love each other and have the same long-term plan.

This is something I have to work on.

I have to remember that he hasn’t been talking to me for eleven consecutive hours just because three smaller versions of us have.

I have to remember that someday the house really will be quiet, and I don’t want us to arrive there as strangers.

I haven’t found some beautiful solution to this one. Sometimes I’m still the woman staring blankly from the other side of the couch who would like to communicate exclusively through facial expressions.

I’m just much more aware now that the long game is being built during these exhausting years too.

I didn’t become more relaxed about screens. I became more careful.

I don’t remember being particularly anti-screen before I had kids. I think I assumed screens were fine. Kids watch TV. We watched TV. Everyone survived.

Then I had my own kids and got to watch the before and after in real time.

I can see a difference in my kids when they’ve had too much screen time. I can see it in their moods, their behavior and their ability to entertain themselves without it.

So screens are pretty limited in our house.

Do we use them? Of course.

Have there been days when I have needed twenty minutes to get something done and Toy Story has stepped in as an unpaid member of our household staff? Absolutely.

I am not trying to win an award here.

But I also feel guilty when I know I’ve let it go too far because I’ve seen what happens afterward. This is one of those things where actual motherhood made me more restrictive than hypothetical motherhood ever was.

And that has happened to me in a lot of areas.

There are things I thought I would care deeply about before kids that I barely think about now, and there are things I never thought twice about that I suddenly pay very close attention to because I’ve watched how they affect my children.

That distinction matters to me more than following whatever parenting philosophy I’m supposedly supposed to belong to.

I used to trust first and ask questions second. Now I ask questions about almost everything.

This is probably one of the biggest changes in me since becoming a mom.

I used to have a lot more inherent trust in institutions and experts. If a doctor said something, I generally assumed that was the answer. If something was sold at the store, I didn’t spend much time wondering what was in it. I certainly wasn’t standing in an aisle reading every ingredient on the back of a snack.

Motherhood made me skeptical.

Not in the sense that I believe I know more than every doctor, scientist or person who has spent their career studying something. I don’t, or, sometimes I might 😏.

But I also don’t automatically assume that because something is common, recommended or sitting on a shelf at Target, it is necessarily the choice I want to make for my family.

I ask more questions now.

I read ingredients. I’m picky about the snacks we keep around. We avoid artificial dyes. I’ve changed a lot of the cleaning products we use in our home. I pay attention to what goes on my kids’ bodies and what goes into them.

What motherhood changed in me was the willingness to question the default.

When I became responsible for three little people, “because that’s what everyone does” stopped feeling like enough of an answer for me.

Sometimes I research something and end up exactly where I started. Sometimes I change my mind. Sometimes I end up somewhere in the middle.

I’m actually comfortable with that now.

I never thought I would homeschool. Now I can’t stop thinking about it.

If you had told me years ago that I would seriously consider homeschooling my kids, I probably would have laughed.

And to be completely honest, I still have conflicting feelings about it.

There are things I really like about traditional school for my kids. There are experiences, friendships, teachers and opportunities that I think can be wonderful. I don’t believe sending your child to school means you’ve somehow handed over your job as their parent like social media wants you do believe.

At the same time, I have an increasing conviction about homeschooling that I never expected to have.

Part of it is simply time.

When I look at how many hours children spend in school over the course of their childhood and then think about how much of that time is actually necessary for learning, I struggle with it. There is so much I want my kids to learn about life that doesn’t fit neatly into the traditional school day.

And some of this probably comes from looking back at my own childhood.

I don’t remember having conversations about entrepreneurship. I wasn’t being taught that there were a hundred different ways to make a living or build a life. I don’t remember anyone encouraging me to think about starting a business.

The path I understood was pretty simple: grow up, get a job, preferably one with good benefits, and be responsible.

So that’s what I did.

There was nothing wrong with becoming a dental hygienist. It gave me a career and an income and taught me plenty.

But I sometimes wonder how differently I would have thought about my future if somebody had shown me earlier that there were more options.

I want my kids to understand money. I want them to understand business. I want them to know how to create something, sell something, solve a problem and take an idea seriously. I want them to understand that a paycheck from an employer is one way to make money, not the way.

And beyond money, I want our home to be the place where the biggest conversations happen.

There are things they are going to encounter at school and in the world that I may agree with, disagree with or simply want them to think more deeply about. I want conversations about relationships, gender, money, work, values, what kind of people we want to be and what we believe to start here.

I don’t think I have to homeschool them to do that.

That’s actually something I’ve changed my mind about too.

I can send my kids to school and still be their primary influence. I can pay attention. I can ask questions. I can have conversations at the dinner table. I can teach them the things I think school misses.

Maybe we eventually homeschool. I honestly think there’s a good chance we will.

Maybe we don’t.

I’m giving myself permission not to know yet.

I thought being a good mom would look a lot more impressive.

I really did think I’d be better at some of this.

Not loving them. That part has always been easy.

I mean the actual performance of motherhood.

I thought there would be more activities. More patience. More playing. Better lunches. More holiday decorations as my kids come down the stairs in the morning. More consistency. Fewer moments where I realize I’ve answered “in a minute” four times and still haven’t done whatever I was supposed to do.

There are moms who genuinely love the parts of motherhood that drain me, and for a long time I think I interpreted that as evidence that they were better at it.

Now I think we’re just different people.

I don’t need to turn myself into the mom who loves imaginative play for my kids to have a great childhood.

I can be the mom who brings them into the kitchen while I’m doing something I actually enjoy. The mom who takes them places. The mom who talks to them like real people. The mom who teaches them things about business and money that I didn’t learn when I was little. The mom who builds a life where Dad is around, where we can travel, where we have space, where home feels like home.

And yes, sometimes I can sit on the floor and play too.

I just probably don’t want to be Skye from Paw Patrol again.

I’ve changed my mind about what “having it all” means.

I used to picture the different parts of life as if eventually you could get all of them right at the same time.

Great marriage. Great mom. Successful business. Clean house. Healthy meals. Good friend. Present daughter. Fit body. Well-rested. Patient. Organized. Financially successful. Somehow also reading books before bed and drinking enough water.

Then you have kids and realize most days you’re just moving the slider bars around.

There are seasons where work gets more of me.

There are seasons where my kids need more.

There are weeks when my house is immaculate and weeks when I have accepted that apparently every horizontal surface we own is now a storage facility.

There are nights when my husband and I talk for hours and nights when we’re both staring at our phones because neither of us has enough functioning brain cells left to form a meaningful sentence.

I don’t think having it all means doing all of it perfectly anymore.

I think it means having enough control over my life that I can keep adjusting those sliders.

That’s a huge reason I care so much about money and the way I make it.

I want margin.

I want choices.

I want to be able to notice that something isn’t working and change it.

Maybe that’s hiring help. Maybe it’s working less. Maybe it’s working more for a season because we’re building toward something. Maybe it’s homeschooling. Maybe it’s deciding traditional school is exactly what our family needs. Maybe it’s ordering pizza because nobody needs me proving a point with homemade chicken tonight.

I care a lot less about whether my life looks like the version I imagined before kids.

I care whether it actually works for the five people living it.

Motherhood didn’t make me less ambitious. It changed what I’m ambitious for.

I used to think motherhood would eventually make me choose.

Career or kids.

Ambition or contentment.

Working or staying home.

Being really present or wanting really big things.

I’ve spent almost six years discovering that my life does not fit very neatly on either side of those choices.

I wanted to be home with my kids, and then discovered that being home didn’t erase the part of me that still needed to work, build and have goals of my own.

I want to be present with my kids, and sometimes I desperately need to be alone.

I believe my marriage is one of the most important relationships in my life, and sometimes by the time my husband gets me at night, the children have used every available word I had.

I care deeply about what goes into my kids’ bodies, and sometimes convenience wins.

I can see the value in school while simultaneously wondering whether I want to keep sending my kids there.

I want more money while being less willing than ever to sacrifice my entire life to make it.

None of that fits particularly well into a Pinterest quote.

But it feels much more honest than the version of motherhood I imagined before I became one.

Motherhood didn’t turn me into the woman I thought it would.

It made me question her.

It made me much less interested in doing something because it’s what a good mom, a successful woman, a responsible adult or everyone else is supposedly doing.

I’m more skeptical. More ambitious in some ways. Softer in others. More protective of my time. More aware of how quickly these years are going. Much more comfortable admitting that two seemingly opposite things can be true at the same time.

I can want to be home with my kids and want work that is mine.

I can be incredibly grateful for my life and still want to make it better.

I can want freedom and be willing to work really hard to create it.

I can love this season and occasionally want everyone in this house to stop talking to me.

And maybe that’s the biggest thing I’ve changed my mind about since becoming a mom.

I don’t think I’m supposed to eventually figure out the exact right way to do all of this.

I think I’m supposed to keep paying attention to the people in front of me, keep changing my mind when the evidence in my own life tells me to, and keep building a version of our life that actually works for us.

Even when it looks absolutely nothing like the one I was so sure I wanted before I knew any better.

Ashley <3

If you want the business side of my brain next:

I Made $1,000,000 Online in 3.5 Years. Here’s the Exact Framework & Why You’re Going to Do It Faster Than I Did

How I Run My 7-Figure Business in 10 Hours a Week

What’s Working RIGHT NOW to Grow Fast on Instagram (& Facebook) in 2026

P.s. if you’re new here, I’m Ashley, 3.5 years ago I learned a new way to make money online, and since then I’ve made over 1M, moved to our dream home on 80 acres, get to stay home with my three kids instead of going back to my dental hygiene job. We’ve been able to save, invest, pay off debt and travel + most importantly not stress about gas and groceries. (DISCLAIMER: Results are not guaranteed. I’m just sharing what worked for me and thousands of others, this is real work).

I breakdown exactly what I do here:

—> I Made $1,000,000 Online In 3.5 Years. Here’s The Exact Framework & Why You’re Going To Do It Faster Than I Did

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But “the work” is doing something way sneakier than you think it’s doing, and I know because I’m actively failing at the version I’m about to describe as I write this.

Here’s what’s happening with my TikTok Shop right now, live, unedited. I get in these moods where I’m ready to go all in. Like fully in. I’ll post five to ten videos a day, three days straight, feeling like a machine, feeling like this is finally the thing that’s about to click. And then the weekend hits. And I get thrown off. Kids, chaos, whatever it is that weekend, and I just... stop. For three days. Sometimes longer. And then I look at the fifteen or thirty videos I posted that one hot streak and go, why didn’t that make me anything.

I know. I know exactly why. I just said it. Because fifteen videos in three days and then nothing for three days isn’t consistency. It’s a burst. And bursts don’t work the same way consistency works, even when the burst itself was genuinely a lot of effort.

This is the part nobody tells you, or maybe they do tell you and it just doesn’t land until you catch yourself doing it. “Doing the work” doesn’t mean doing a ton of it for a few days. It means not stopping. Those are such different things and I conflate them constantly, even now, even having built an entire business, even knowing better.

I think part of it, if I’m being honest with myself, is that I get really fired up in bursts. Someone tells me I can’t do something, or I decide something’s not working fast enough, and I go all in for a few days like I’m trying to prove a point to nobody in particular. And then life happens, the weekend happens, and the fire goes out just as fast as it came on, and I have zero system for the in-between days where I’m not feeling it.

So does the work actually work. Yes. But not the version where you go hard for three days and coast for three days and wonder why the algorithm or the universe or whatever isn’t rewarding your effort. It works when the days you don’t feel like it look basically the same as the days you do. Boring, unremarkable, showing up anyway.

I want to be really clear about something before I go further, because I don’t want this to come across wrong. I’ve cracked the code on my actual business. I know exactly what makes me money and I know how to keep making it. This isn’t a “I haven’t figured any of this out” story.

Here’s what it actually is. Right now, my main income is good. I’m living on it, more than comfortably, and it works. Which means when it comes to something extra, like TikTok Shop, something that’s not the thing keeping the lights on, it becomes really easy to just let it slide when the weekend gets chaotic. There’s no desperation attached to it. Nothing bad happens if I skip three days. So I skip three days.

And here’s the part I actually want you to sit with, because I think it applies to way more of you than just me and my TikTok Shop videos. If you’re working a nine to five right now, it’s probably getting you by. Not thriving, not drowning, just getting by. And because you’ve never actually felt what an extra five or ten thousand dollars a month feels like, it’s not real to you yet, not in your body, not the way a bill you can’t pay is real. So the second building something new gets hard or inconvenient, it’s so easy to just fall back into the comfort pattern you already know, the getting by that isn’t great but also isn’t scary enough to force you through it.

That’s the actual thing keeping most people stuck, mine included right now with TikTok Shop. It’s not that the work doesn’t work. It’s that comfort quietly removes the urgency that would have kept you doing it.

Here’s the thing I keep noticing though, watching myself do this and watching other people do the exact same version of it. Quitting is sitting on the table the entire time, quietly, in the back of the mind, even when nobody’s said the word out loud. And the second it’s an option, every hard week turns into a referendum on whether this is even worth it, instead of just being a hard week inside something you’ve actually decided you’re doing. I don’t think I’ve fully taken it off the table with TikTok Shop yet, if I’m honest. It’s still sitting there as an option some weekends, exactly because I’m comfortable enough right now that letting it go doesn’t cost me anything. But what I’ve learned over and over again, is procrastinating on something is costing my future self something… and THAT’S what you need to keep in mind.

And the other thing, the one that gets me every time. My first real TikTok Shop sale should have felt like proof. Instead it felt like nothing, because it wasn’t the number I actually wanted yet. That’s such a backwards way to treat a small win, and I know it’s backwards while I’m doing it, and I still do it. A first sale, a first fifty views, a first anything, that’s not supposed to feel disappointing. That’s supposed to feel like the exact evidence you needed that the thing works at all. Most of us just blow right past that evidence because we’re already looking for the next number.

What I do know is this. The next time I catch myself in the three days on, three days off pattern, the actual work isn’t going harder on the on days. It’s figuring out what the smallest version of showing up looks like on the off days, so there stops being an off version at all. One video instead of ten. Something instead of nothing. That’s it. That’s the whole fix, and it’s annoyingly simple, and I still have to go make myself do it.

So if you’re doing the work and it’s not working yet, ask yourself honestly, is it actually not working, or is it working in bursts with gaps in between that are quietly cancelling it out. Those are two very different problems, and only one of them means you should give up on it.

I haven’t given up on TikTok Shop, and I’m not confused about how to make it work. I just don’t have the desperation attached to it right now that would force me through the boring, inconsistent middle, and I think a lot of you reading this are in the exact same spot with whatever you’re building, comfortable enough to let it slide, not desperate enough yet to make it non-negotiable. If you want to see what actual consistency looks like for me right now, ten hours a week, three kids, no perfect schedule, I broke the whole thing down here:

—> The Full Breakdown: How I Run My 7-Figure Business in 10 Hours A Week

Ashley <3

Okay so you did your homework. You have your number. Good. Genuinely, go you, most people never get past “I want to make more money” into an actual digit, so if you have one written down somewhere, you’re already ahead of a frankly embarrassing percentage of the internet.

If you didn’t get your number yet, go back and read —> What’s Your Magic Number

Maybe it’s $2,000. Maybe it’s $8,000. Maybe it’s $10,000, which is the number I’m going to use through this whole thing purely because it’s a nice round number and my brain needs nice round numbers to function. Swap in your own. The math scales exactly the same whether you’re aiming for two grand or twenty.

Here’s the thing nobody warns you about when you’re sitting there staring at your number like it’s going to rearrange itself into a plan. The number tells you nothing about how to get there. Zero information. I have watched two women both write down “$10,000 a month” on the same day and need to build completely different businesses to actually touch it, because the real question was never the number. It’s what you’re actually good at, and honestly, what you can tolerate doing on a Tuesday when you don’t feel like it, because you will absolutely have Tuesdays where you don’t feel like it.

So let’s actually go through four real paths. No favorites, I promise, though I’ll be honest about which ones I’d personally choose and which ones I have personally hated, because pretending I don’t have opinions here would be a lie and you came here for the opposite of that.

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I want to ask you something before you keep scrolling, and I need you to actually answer it instead of skimming past it.

What’s the minimum amount of money, landing in your account every single month, that would actually make you feel free?

I ask because I remember mine with embarrassing clarity.

When I first started building income online, my big scary goal was $1,000 a month. One extra grand, on top of what I was already making, just enough for a little breathing room. I hit it, and then, shockingly, the number moved, the way it always does, the way nobody warns you it’s going to. Suddenly $10,000 a month felt like the real number, the one that would finally mean something had changed. I hit that too, eventually. Now my number sits around $40,000 a month, not because bigger is inherently better, not because I’m trying to win some invisible contest, but because that’s genuinely the base I want to be able to count on, every single month, no matter what. I have big goals, ok 🤪

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Here’s the thing that gets lost on basically all of us, because we’re all marinating in everyone else’s highlight reel constantly. My number isn’t your number. Not close. And comparing them is a useless exercise, like comparing your grocery list to a stranger’s.

What actually matters isn’t the size of the number. It’s what freedom means to you, specifically, in real concrete terms, not a warm fuzzy feeling you can’t actually measure.

Here’s what freedom looks like for me right now, because I had to get uncomfortably specific about it to even know if I’d hit it. It’s the first of the month. If I needed to take that entire month completely off, no new customers, nobody new signing up, nothing new created, I would still be making $40,000 that month, based purely on what already exists. Not $40,000 starting from zero and sprinting to reach it again like it’s some kind of monthly Hunger Games. $40,000 already sitting there, already secured, before I’ve lifted a single new finger that month.

That’s freedom to me. A specific, repeatable, already-built number. Not a hustle. A floor.

So here’s your actual assignment, and I mean it, do this before you keep reading, not after, because if you skip it you’re going to read the rest of this article and it’s going to mean nothing.

Go back to the question. Not rich. Not impressive at a dinner party. Free. Free enough to take a sick day without spiraling. Free enough to tell a client no. Free enough to actually enjoy a Saturday instead of mentally drafting your next launch the entire time you’re supposedly relaxing, which, if you’re anything like me a few years ago, you were absolutely doing.

For some of you that’s $2,000. For some it’s $8,000. For some of you, apparently, it’s $40,000 and rising, and no, that’s not greedy, that’s just where my particular floor sits right now. There’s no correct answer here except the honest one. Have you actually ever asked yourself this, out loud, in real numbers, or have you just been wanting “more” this entire time like more is a specific, achievable target, which, spoiler, it isn’t.

Once you’ve got the number, here’s the next question, and it’s the one that actually matters more than which business model you eventually pick. Is what you’re currently doing actually built to hit that number, sustainably, doing work that fits your actual personality, month after month? Or does hitting it right now depend entirely on a lucky launch, a viral fluke, one incredible week you can’t realistically repeat on command just because you need it to happen again?

That distinction is the whole game. Repeat income might be exactly your thing. It might also be completely wrong for someone else who thrives on something faster, more active, more chaotic, and honestly more fun for their specific brain. Neither path makes you more free than the other on principle. What makes you free is actually knowing your number, and being honest about whether your current plan can hit it without you burning out or getting lucky on a loop forever, because “getting lucky forever” is not, in fact, a business model, however much some corners of the internet want to sell it to you as one.

I spent three and a half years chasing income that reset to zero every single month, and it took losing two massive social accounts overnight for me to finally sit down and figure out what actually fit me for the long haul. I don’t want you to have to lose something huge to learn that same lesson. Learn it from my very expensive one instead, free of charge, which is honestly the least I owe you after making you read this far.

So, homework, before you touch anything else I write. Write your number down. Not mine, obviously. Yours. The real one that means something to your actual bills, your actual life, your actual, specific version of enough.

Because once you know it, the question you’re asking gets so much sharper. Not the vague, exhausting “how do I make more money” that never actually resolves into anything. But “what does it specifically, concretely take to build this exact number in a way that fits who I actually am.”

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That’s exactly what’s coming next, reverse engineering real numbers across digital products, Substack, TikTok Shop, and UGC, showing you what each one genuinely requires to hit a real freedom number. Not because one’s secretly better. Because the right one depends entirely on you, and I want you looking at all four honestly before you pick. —> Reverse Engineering Your Magic Number

But first. Go write your number down.

You cannot reverse engineer a target you’ve never bothered to name.

Ashley <3

Let me get right into this. Would you rather start every single month at zero and work your way back up to $5k, $10k, $30k, over and over, forever? Or would you rather start every month with $5k, $10k, $30k already secured, and everything else you earn that month simply builds on top of that base?

For me, it’s the latter. Obviously.

For three and a half years now, I’ve been sharing affiliate offers, courses, digital products, all of it. Starting every single month from zero. Granted, it’s been mostly reliable. But there’s been one piece I’ve missed from network marketing, from when I first came into this online space. And that was the repeat income I’d built there.

That, in my opinion, is the biggest flaw when it comes to digital products and most affiliate marketing offers. The lack of residual income. And that ugly flaw showed itself so blatantly when I lost my 262k Instagram account and my 26k Facebook account, on my kids’ last day of school this year.

My income was only ever as good as the leads I was consistently bringing in. There are so many ways to make money online, and digital products are an incredible one, same with affiliate marketing. But your conversion is only as good as the leads you’re bringing in. Your leads stop, your conversion stops. It really is that simple, and that unforgiving.

Social media is a great free platform. But it’s not yours. To be so confident in its ability to generate you income forever, without ever owning a piece of it, is a poor business decision. I know that now in a way I didn’t fully know it before.

Back in 2021, when I was thinking about my great escape from network marketing, I actually tried this once already. I was going to start a blog, I even had a name for it, The Ashley Actual. I got a Wix account, a Bluehost account, all sorts of things I’m still not sure I said right at the time. It was so confusing. I had no idea how bloggers were even getting paid, I just knew I could write about so much. I thought it was my next big move, until I realized how long it was going to take to build an established blog as a beginner who had no idea what she was doing. I didn’t have the time, so I cancelled everything I’d started. I think about that a lot now. If I’d known what Substack was back then, maybe things would’ve been different. Or maybe I had zero marketing experience at the time and it wouldn’t have gone anywhere regardless. I’ll never fully know.

Let’s bring it back to now. It’s the first day of summer. My accounts are gone. I have three kids home, five and under, for the entire summer, and I have to pivot. Substack gets presented to me days later, completely by accident. Substack is like social media and a blog had a baby, and I am obsessed.

Here’s what I actually want to hand you in this article, not just the story, the real math on what a digital product actually pays versus what a Substack actually pays, what I’d build if I lost everything again tomorrow, and the exact prompts to start building your own version, whether you’re starting from zero or already have a business behind you.

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I remember the date specifically because I’d circled it as the start of a slower summer. More pool days. Fewer alarms. Instead it became the day I opened Instagram and found nothing there. 262K followers... Years of it... Gone, on the exact morning I’d planned to finally just relax and take most of the summer easy, work wise, so I could be with my kids. My Facebook went with it too, another 26K people, both platforms I’d spent years building, both gone within the same stretch of days. And if we wanna throw even more of a pity party, my other Facebook with 193K followers, also no longer recommendable, from months prior.

I want to tell you what that actually did to my income, not just my feelings, because the feelings part everyone assumes. Nobody warns you about the detrimental math part.

Before I get into it, I need to say something so this doesn’t come across wrong. I’ve made over a million dollars online. This isn’t a story about failing. It’s a story about a specific, expensive gap in something that otherwise worked really well, the kind of gap you can only actually see once it costs you something real.

Here’s the actual math, not a rough guess. I was making around thirty thousand dollars a month before I lost those accounts. June, July, and now August, my income dropped hard every single one of those months, because the two platforms bringing in almost all of it were suddenly gone. Add up three months of that drop and it comes out to roughly $90K I didn’t make, that I would have made if nothing had changed.

Ninety thousand dollars. Because of one morning.

I thought my email list was the safe part. I’ve preached it for years. “Build and en email list so you can own your audience”. Fifty five thousand people, built over years, sitting there completely outside of Instagram’s control. And it is safe, in the sense that nobody can take it from me. But here’s what I didn’t fully understand until I lost the account that had been feeding it. My list doesn’t pay me on its own. It pays me when I send the right email to the right offer at the right moment, and it only keeps paying me if new people keep joining it, because the same fifty five thousand people don’t buy the same offer twice a month, every month, forever. I needed fresh people coming in constantly just to keep the number where it needed to be. And the account that used to bring those fresh people in was suddenly gone.

That’s the moment repeat income stopped being a phrase I used loosely and became the only thing I actually cared about for the rest of the summer.

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It’s 6:52am. The toddler is on my hip, patting my face with a sticky hand like he's checking if I'm still real. My coffee is already cold, sitting exactly where I set it down twelve minutes ago and forgot about. Someone is yelling from the bathroom that they need help but also do not want help, which is somehow both true at once. Someone is asking for a screen for the fourth time this morning like the first three no's were a rough draft. And instead of thinking about breakfast, I am doing math.

Not money math though, time math.

I do this every single week now, usually Sunday night or right here at 6:52am with a toddler patting my face, before the day has even officially started. Ten. That’s the number. That’s how many hours I actually have this week to work on my business. Not ten hours a day. Ten hours total.

Some weeks it’s less, if someone’s sick or summer decides to summer harder than usual. I used to think I was hiding something when I told people that number, like it wasn’t a real enough answer, like real business owners worked forty hours and I should round up to sound more legitimate. I don’t do that anymore. Ten hours is the truth, and the truth turned out to be the more useful story, because here’s what having that little time forced me to figure out.

When you have all day, you can afford to lie to yourself about what actually matters. You can research one more thing. Take one more course. Scroll one more app looking for whatever secret you’ve convinced yourself you’re missing. When you have ten hours, none of that is available to you anymore. You cannot afford it. And that constraint, the thing that sounds like a disadvantage, is honestly the reason I’ve built more in the last year with three kids home than I ever built when I had more time and fewer kids.

So I want to walk you through exactly what fills those ten hours, why, and just as important, what I have completely stopped letting myself do with them, because I think most people’s problem was never actually a time problem to begin with.

The mistake almost everyone makes, and I mean almost everyone, including me at different points

I watch this happen constantly, in my DMs, in comments, in friends who message me convinced they just need one more piece of the puzzle. It’s never actually a time problem. It’s a switching problem.

Every new idea gives you the same little dopamine hit. New course. New niche. New planner. New business model. New platform. New AI tool. New strategy. It feels like momentum. It feels like you’re finally doing something about it.

Most of the time, it’s just avoidance wearing productivity’s clothes.

Switching strategies every few weeks is like replanting the same seed in six different pots hoping one of them will finally grow. The pot was never the problem. You just kept pulling it up before the roots had time to do anything.

People learn too much and implement too little. They’ll buy course after course, convinced the next one is the one that finally hands them the missing piece, when the real issue is they haven’t even fully used the last three they bought. They try to perfect something before they’ve given it enough time to know if it’s even working, tweaking their offer, their content, their whole approach every couple weeks instead of letting anything run long enough to produce real data. There’s no consistency with content, so the algorithm never actually learns who they are, and neither does their audience, because you cannot build recognition out of inconsistency. There’s a huge amount of scrolling that gets quietly relabeled as research, which is really just comparison wearing a work outfit, sitting there feeling productive while accomplishing nothing. And underneath all of it there’s this constant switching. New idea, new platform, new strategy, always evaluating, always hunting for the secret ingredient they think everyone else has found and they haven’t.

Let’s actually do the math on that switching for a second, because I think it hits differently once you see it in numbers. Say you spend three of your ten hours a week “researching” a new platform or strategy instead of executing the one you already picked. That’s 156 hours a year, almost four full working weeks, spent evaluating instead of building. Four weeks is enough time to actually make a $27 digital product profitable if you’d just left it alone that whole time instead of starting over in March because something newer looked shinier.

Here’s the sentence I need you to actually sit with, not skim past. The secret isn’t hiding somewhere waiting to be found. There is no secret. There’s just doing one thing long enough for it to actually work, instead of doing five things a little bit each and calling that effort.

Most people are not failing because they’re doing the wrong things. They’re failing because they never do any one thing for long enough to find out if it was the right thing.

When I lost my Instagram account in May, I remember sitting there, staring at a screen that used to be years of my life, thinking, okay, if this is gone, what actually survives? Not what felt productive. Not what got me the most likes that week. What actually pays the bills when the thing you built your identity around disappears overnight. That question changed everything about how I spend my ten hours now, and it’s a big part of why Substack is on the list you’re about to read, not as one more platform, but as the one thing on that list that can’t be taken from me the way Instagram was.

P.s. also make sure you read I Made $1,000,000 Online in 3.5 Years. Here’s The Exact Framework and How You’re Going To Do It Faster

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Okay so I need to say something and I need you to actually hear it, not just nod along and keep doing the thing anyway.

I get a large iced latte with an extra shot of espresso from Caribou multiple times a week. It is $7.76 every single time. If I leave my house, I am getting one, that is just the rule now (& yes, I make the rules lol). And I have a beautiful espresso machine at home too, I make a hot latte there most mornings, but summer with three kids means I need an actual reason to leave the house sometimes, and an iced latte in my hand is basically my mental health permission slip.

I do not care what it costs. If it makes me feel like a human being for an hour, I am paying for it every time.

And I know exactly what some of you are thinking right now. That is almost eight dollars a day, multiple times a week, that adds up, you could be saving that. And to that I say, with my whole chest, absolutely not, we are not doing that here.

I used to be a budget cutter. Been there, done that.

I used to track every dollar, cut every little thing, tell myself no to the small stuff constantly because I was trying to save money or stick to some plan I read about. And here is exactly what happened every single time. I would get my tax return, or a birthday check, or some chunk of money would land in my lap, and I would blow it. Immediately. Because I had spent months depriving myself of the little things, and the second I had a real amount of money sitting there, I lost my mind a little and spent it all, because I finally felt like I had money.

Except I did not actually have money. I had a temporary chunk of cash and zero real skills that would ever create more of it. So the cycle just repeated. Deprive, blow it, be broke, wait for the next chunk, repeat.

That is not a money problem. That is a math problem. And I want to teach you the actual math that fixed it for me.

I call it smart girl math, and here is the whole philosophy in one sentence. Instead of cutting the thing you want, go make more money so you never have to think about cutting it in the first place.

That is it. That is the entire mindset shift.

Scrape to get by math says, cut the latte, skip the shoes, say no to the small joys, and maybe in a year you will have saved a few hundred dollars you barely noticed accumulating. Smart girl math says, go build a skill, start a side income, learn something that pays you, and buy the latte AND the shoes without blinking, because you built the capacity to afford both instead of shrinking your life down to fit a budget that was never going to make you rich anyway.

Do the actual math with me for a second. If I cut my iced latte completely, every single day, all year, I would save maybe two thousand dollars over twelve months. Two thousand dollars is not nothing, but it is also not going to change my life. It is not a down payment on anything. It is not financial freedom. It is just less coffee and the exact same problems I had before, just slightly less caffeinated.

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Here is what changed everything for me, and it was not a budgeting app or a spreadsheet or cutting anything at all.

I decided I was done scraping and started asking a completely different question. Not, what can I cut, but, what can I learn that pays me. That single question sent me down the path of building actual skills, first in network marketing, then in digital products and affiliate marketing, and eventually into a business that has made me over a million dollars (read more about that here). None of that came from cutting my coffee. All of it came from deciding my time was better spent building capacity than shrinking my life.

You cannot save your way to wealthy. I need you to actually sit with that sentence, because it is the whole point of this entire article. Saving eight dollars a day will never build you a seven figure business. Learning a skill that generates income, even a small one at first, absolutely can, and it will keep paying you long after the initial effort is done, which coffee money sitting in a savings account will never do.

Here is the actual comparison worth making. Two thousand dollars saved over a year from skipping coffee, versus one simple digital product priced at $27, sold just ten times a week, which is $270 a week, over $14,000 a year, from something you built once. That is not even an aggressive number. That is a beginner number. And it did not require you to give up a single latte to get there.

This is why I get so worked up about the budgeting advice that gets handed to women constantly. Cut this, skip that, make your own coffee at home, bring lunch instead of buying it, and after all of that sacrifice you have saved maybe a couple thousand dollars a year while your actual earning potential never grew even slightly. Meanwhile the same amount of energy poured into learning one skill, one system, one income stream, could have permanently changed your ceiling instead of just shaving a little off your floor.

I am not telling you to spend recklessly with no plan at all. I am telling you that the plan should never be shrink yourself smaller. The plan should be build yourself bigger. Grow your income until the latte is not even a decision anymore, it is just Tuesday.

So here is what I actually want you to do instead of opening a budgeting app tonight.

Ask yourself what skill you could start learning this week that has actual income potential attached to it. Not a hobby, an actual skill, content creation, copywriting, email marketing, sales, something that companies and customers pay real money for. Then go spend one hour learning it instead of one hour agonizing over your grocery receipt. Do that consistently for ninety days and compare where you are to where you would have been just cutting coffee for the same three months.

I promise you, the version of you who built a skill wins every single time against the version of you who just said no to a latte.

Buy the coffee. Buy the shoes. Go build the income that makes neither of those things a decision you have to think twice about ever again.

Check out: I Made $1,000,000 Online In 3.5 Years. Here’s the Exact Framework & Why You’re Going to Do It Faster Than I Did

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That is smart girl math. Welcome to it.

Ashley <3

I am going to pay off our house using TikTok Shop.

Not eventually, not maybe, not if it works out. I am saying it now, at the very beginning, as a complete beginner, because I have learned something about myself over the years. When I attach a real number and a real goal to a new skill, I actually go get it.

When I started network marketing years ago, my goal was to pay for our wedding in cash. I did it. When I moved into affiliate marketing and digital products, my goal was to hit $10,000 a month. My highest month ended up being $74,000. & in 3.5 years 1M earned! The goal is never just motivation for me, it is almost like a compass. It gives the skill somewhere to go.

So here is the new one. I am learning TikTok Shop completely from scratch, and my goal is to use it to pay off our almost million dollar house within the next couple of years (we don’t owe that, but the remainder, I want GONE).

I want you to watch me do it, and I want to actually teach you everything I am learning as I go, so if you want to start this alongside me, you are not starting from zero the way I did.

And, no, I’m not abandoning all my other income streams. Just adding this one on. Call it a side hustle to my side hustle :)

Here is where I actually am right now, because the beginning matters just as much as wherever this ends up.

Last month I made somewhere around $56. I ordered products I thought looked cool, posted them without much strategy, and did not pay attention to a single thing that actually mattered. This month I am doing it completely differently, and I want to walk you through exactly what TikTok Shop actually is, how it works, and everything real I have learned so far as a true beginner.

Everything from here, what TikTok Shop actually is and how the whole system works, what GMV means and why I think it controls almost everything else, the cart psychology I am testing right now, the three second rule, the quarterly buyer psychology shift most beginners never think about, and exactly what I would do if I were starting a brand new account today, is on the other side.

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We are sitting at that little coffee shop, the one with the cutest patio, string lights overhead, the kind of place where a good idea always seems to be brewing right alongside the espresso.

You have got your favorite drink in hand, whatever that is for you, mine, during the summer at least, is a large iced latte with an extra shot, because let’s be honest, I need it most days. And we have been talking for a while now about your next move, about becoming your own boss, about what freedom could actually look like for you if you just went and built it yourself instead of waiting for someone to hand it to you.

You are sitting there feeling so inspired. So full of hope. Because somewhere in the middle of me telling you my story, you started imagining your own.

So let me actually tell you what I’ve been telling you.

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In December 2022 I walked away from five and a half years in network marketing. I had made $550,000 doing it, so clearly it worked in some sense, but it owned every part of me. Any free second I had was spent working, and there was never really a moment where I felt like I was done for the day. Then I had two babies in one year (yea, I was naive and thought having a second baby two months PP was a good idea), and something in me just refused to keep living that way.

So I started over, and I mean really over. I had spent years building an audience and an income in one industry, and now I was walking into a completely new one where none of that mattered yet. I had to figure out how to create content that actually made people stop scrolling, how to build an email list that could sell for me while I slept, how to put together a digital product from a completely blank page, and how to make real money online in a way that gave me my life back instead of quietly taking more of it every single day. I learned almost all of it the slow way, through a lot of trial and error that honestly took way longer than it needed to.

Three and a half years later I had made over a million dollars online. We live on 80 acres now with our three kids. We had another baby because we could actually afford it comfortably this time. We can book a flight in the morning and be gone that same afternoon if we feel like it. And every bit of that came from a system that I am still teaching, piece by piece, every single week, because I genuinely believe it can work for you the same way it worked for me.

Here is the part that excites me even more than the story I just told you though. I am not done building. If we were really sitting at this coffee shop together right now, I would be telling you about the next thing I am figuring out, which is TikTok Shop, completely from scratch, testing what actually works in real time and documenting every bit of it as I go. You would get to watch me build my next million happen in real time instead of only hearing the polished version of it years later.

That is genuinely what this whole thing is. Me, telling you everything, exactly as I am living it.

Now, since I promised you some actual value here and not just a story, let’s talk about the four things every single income stream I just mentioned is built on top of. This is the what. The how of each one is where my paid deep dives come in, but I want you to walk away from this knowing exactly what the foundation looks like.

The first piece is content. This is simply how people find you in the first place. It does not need to be complicated, it just needs to be consistent, and it needs to make someone feel curious enough to want to know more about you.

The second piece is a freebie connected to an email list. Something small and genuinely useful that you give away for free in exchange for someone’s email address. This is the single most underrated part of the entire process because your email list is where trust actually gets built and where sales actually happen, not on social media itself.

The third piece is your offer, whether that is a digital product you made once and sell over and over, or affiliate products you already use and recommend to people who trust you. This is where the income actually starts to show up.

And the fourth piece is consistency over time. None of this works as a one time thing. It works because you keep showing up, keep building trust, and keep improving the system a little more each week.

And this is exactly what we’re going to build together here.

I’m not interested in giving you another 30,000-foot-view version of “make money online.” Every week, I’m taking one piece of this system and pulling it apart, what I’m doing, the tools I’m using, what I’d do if I were starting from zero, what’s making money, what’s wasting my time, and what I’m changing as I go.

Think of this article as the map.

The paid subscription is where I’m giving you the turn-by-turn directions.

Here is where you can go get the real depth behind all of this, because I have already written out full breakdowns on some of the biggest pieces of my story so far.

If you have no idea where to even start or what your niche should be, I wrote a full guide on finding your not-so-niche in fifteen minutes or less, even if you feel completely lost right now —> How to Find Your Money-Making "Not-So-Niche" in 15 Minutes

If you want the entire story of how I actually built a million dollar online business, every system, every tool, the exact order I did everything in, I laid it all out here —> I Made $1,000,000 Online In 3.5 Years. Here's the Exact Framework & Why You're Going to Do It Faster Than I Did

If you want to know exactly how I have grown my content and my accounts, including the framework I used to grow a brand new Instagram after losing my main account with 262k, from zero to 10k in just over a month, that is all in here —> What's Working RIGHT NOW to Grow Fast on Instagram (& Facebook) in 2026

And if you want to understand why email marketing has genuinely been the engine behind most of my income, and exactly how I write emails that convert, I go deep on all of it here —> How I Built A 48-50% Open Rate Email System That Drives $20K-$74K Every Month and The AI Tool That Makes It Embarrassingly Easy.

That coffee shop conversation I described earlier, that is truly what it feels like inside my paid subscription. Every week you are sitting in my inner circle hearing exactly how my brain works, what I am building, what is failing, what is working, before any of it is polished or finished. Not the highlight reel. The real thing, happening in real time, in my real life.

For $12 a month you get every single deep dive, past and future, for as long as you are subscribed. It is one of the smallest amounts of money you will ever spend for this level of honesty about what actually works.

If you want to keep sitting at this table with me every week, come hang out :).

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Much more to come,

Ashley Lochen

I had just walked away from five and a half years in network marketing, and I mean walked away from all of it. Following strangers from a private account hoping they would follow back. Adding random people on Facebook and sliding into their DMs. A daily task list that never ended and a business that moved backwards the second I stopped pushing it forward. Basically, this:

I had made $550,000 doing it that way, so clearly it worked. But it owned every single part of me. Any free second I had, I was working, and there was never a moment where I actually felt done for the day.

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Then I had kids, and something in me just could not keep doing it anymore.

So I walked away from an $8,000 a month income and started completely over with basically nothing to my name in this new direction. I had to figure out everything myself, and I mean everything. What to post, how to actually write an email that gets someone to buy, how to build a funnel when I did not even fully understand what that word meant yet, how to create a digital product from a blank page. I learned it the hard way, through a lot of wasted time and a lot of trial and error that I really wish I could have skipped.

The digital product that eventually made me $57,000 from a $67 offer, the one that basically sold itself from my bio without me even talking about it much, took me weeks to actually put together. Weeks of staring at a blank document trying to organize my thoughts, figure out the structure, make it look decent, figure out what to even charge.

If I had the tools that exist right now back then, that same product would have taken me a day.

A day.

Three and a half years after that December, I had made one million dollars online. I live on 80 acres with my three kids and my husband. We bought an extra 30 acres because we could (our first purchase was only 50, but we bought an adjacent 30 so no new neighbors, obviously, LOL IYKYK). We had another baby because we could actually afford it this time. We do not think twice about gas or groceries anymore. We book a flight in the morning and leave that same afternoon.

And I built every single bit of that without the tools that exist today. No AI that can draft an entire digital product for you in an afternoon. No automation you can set up in a couple of hours instead of a couple of weeks. None of the shortcuts that are just sitting there right now waiting for you to use them.

So here is what I keep coming back to.

You are starting from a place that took me years to reach. And that should either make you a little annoyed that nobody told you this sooner, or completely lit up about what is actually possible for you starting today.

Because the system that made me a million dollars still works exactly the same way it did back then. Content, a funnel, a digital product, affiliate marketing, all four pieces feeding into each other, all working without you once it is set up. That part has not changed and it works in literally any niche you can think of.

What has changed is how fast you can actually build it.

Here is the four step system, at a glance.

One, content. Show up daily. Content is not for selling, it is for getting people to raise their hand and want more from you.

Two, a freebie and a funnel. Something valuable given away for free that captures an email, followed by an automated sequence that builds trust and sells for you.

Three, a digital product. Something you create once that solves one specific problem and sells on repeat.

Four, affiliate marketing. Layered on top of everything else, making you money from links you would be sharing anyway.

That is the whole system at a glance. And it works in any niche you can think of.

But here is the thing. Knowing the four steps and knowing exactly how to execute each one are two very different things. That is where the real value is.

I sat down and wrote out the entire thing. Every piece of the system. Not a summary, not the highlight reel version. The real step by step blueprint, including the exact tools I use every single day, the exact prompts I type into AI to build a full digital product in a weekend instead of weeks, the actual math behind high ticket affiliate marketing that almost nobody walks through honestly, and the exact order I would do everything in if I had to start completely over tomorrow with nothing.

It is the article I wish someone had handed me back in December 2022.

I put it behind my paid subscription because it is genuinely one of the most valuable things I have ever written and I wanted it living somewhere I could keep adding to over time. But I did not want you to miss it, so think of this as your personal invite.

If you have been sitting on an idea and keep putting it off because you are not sure where to even begin, this is where you begin. Every step, every tool, every AI prompt, laid out completely for you to just copy.

[Read the full deep dive here]

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The only thing standing between you and that first sale notification on your phone, the one that makes you stare at your screen thinking wait is that actually real, is that actually for me, is starting.

So stop thinking about it. Go read it. And then go build it.

Ashley Lochen

P.s. if you want to see a full video training breakdown, we do trainings live every Wednesdays at 8pm CST, you can save your seat here —> www.ashleylochen.com

Have you ever had that feeling, “it’s just a matter of time” when it comes to something. That something for me was my social media accounts. I’ve watched many people get their accounts disabled and I always thought, boy, that sucks, I truly hope that never happens to me. But I always knew it was a possibility. I always knew that someday it would probably happen. And when it did I just kind of thought, well, there it is. I was right. The time came. It happened.

262,000 followers on Instagram gone in a second. 26,000 followers on Facebook gone in a second.

I honestly didn’t feel that worried and the reason why is because I still had the skills. I always knew that if someone else could do something, so could I. And so knowing that I had already done it once before, I could do it again.

But then I tried to start a new account and it got suspended right away before I even got going. So I had to wait to get it back and I was just so trigger shy after that. Because it happened multiple times, on multiple accounts I tried to create or had created in the past. Then I panicked… because what if I wasn’t able to start ANY social media again. That would REALLY suck. But thankfully, my account came back and I baby’d it. I was extremely afraid to start posting, afraid to start growing, afraid to lose it again. I’m still a little afraid of that if I’m being completely honest with you.

But here is what I kept coming back to every time that fear crept in. I can generate leads without 262,000 followers. I have done this before. I know how to do this. And it only takes one video to get the momentum rolling.

So on June 10th I started fresh. A new account with zero followers, however, I still had everything I had learned from years of building still sitting right there in my brain ready to go.

40 days later I have over 5,600 followers.

(ETA: 67 days later, over 22.2k followers)

That is what happens when momentum and mindset collide. And I want to tell you exactly how because I think the way most people approach growing on Instagram is making it so much harder than it needs to be.

The thing nobody really talks about when it comes to growing an Instagram account from scratch is that it’s really mentally hard. The strategy is easy, but mentally, watching your work get crickets, day after day after day, is a tough pill to swallow, especially when you’re belief in the process is still growing. And if you cannot be mentally stronger than the feeling of defeat, you will quit before the system ever has a chance to work.

But here’s what I want you to know, the follower count is not the income.

And the other thing nobody talks about is this… you cannot just post content that you think sounds good to you and hope it works. You’re wasting your mental energy when you could be doing this so much smarter and faster. I audit accounts all the time and I see people posting things that are just not going to stop the scroll. Like, I look at it and I think… that hook is not going to make anyone pause. That text on screen is not compelling enough. Nobody knows what you’re talking about.

So before we talk about anything else I want you to know that the mental game and the content quality are just as important as any framework I am about to share with you. Maybe more important.

Okay. Now let’s get into it.

But before we do, I wish I could tell you this was going to be some huge massive complicated process. I really do. Because then it would feel like there was a good reason why more people are not doing it.

But it is not. It is actually so simple that when I explain it people almost do not believe me. I think that is the real problem, not that it is hard, but that most people are so busy overcomplicating it that they never actually start.

So let me just show you exactly what I do. Because once you see it you are going to wonder why you were not doing it sooner.

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Your content is not where the money is made.

I know. I know how that sounds coming from someone who talks about content constantly. But I mean it and I’m not backing down from it. Content is where the attention happens. Email is where the conversion happens. And if you are pouring every single ounce of your energy into creating Reels and TikToks and not building and nurturing a real email list behind all of it, you are working twice as hard for half the result every single day and it’s literally insane to me.

When I say I’m over here trying to make the most amount of money in the easiest, hands-off way, I mean it, and emails help contribute to that.

I have a 48 to 50% open rate on my emails. The industry average is 20 to 25%. Which means nearly twice as many people open my emails as the average creator’s. And my income reflects that. My worst months are around $20,000. My best month was $74,000. And I’m not even kidding when I say that my email list is the reason behind every single one of those numbers.

I’m going to show you exactly how I built this system. The sequences. The prompts. The AI tool that changed everything about how I write emails and why I was able to stop using a copywriter. All of it.

I study successful creators. Like genuinely study them. I get on their email lists. I opt in for their freebies. I watch what they do because I am always learning and always paying attention to what works and what doesn’t. And what I see more often than not, from people with hundreds of thousands of followers, from people whose content goes viral regularly, from people whose names you would recognize, is this.

They send the freebie. Clean, professional, here it is. Maybe a couple of welcome emails follow. And then you never hear from them again. Weeks go by. Months go by. And then out of nowhere an email lands in my inbox promoting something. No context. No warmup. No story. No connection. Just a pitch from someone who feels like a complete stranger because they have been totally silent for three months.

And I think, no freakin way. Do you have any idea how much money you are not making right now?

I have also watched people try to skip the email list entirely and sell directly from content to a sales page. No freebie. No list. No follow up sequence. Just, here’s my thing, go buy it, link in bio. And I’ll be honest with you, I have been tempted by that model. I have looked at it and thought maybe I’m overcomplicating this. Maybe I should just do it that way. Maybe I’d make more sales.

Every single time I feel it in my gut that it’s wrong.

Because here is what both of those approaches miss. They only capture the people who are ready to buy right now in this exact moment. And that is a tiny fraction of your audience. Most people need to hear from you seven, eight, ten times before they trust you enough to spend money. They need to feel like they know you. They need to be nurtured through their hesitations and their “I’ll do it later” moments and their “is this actually going to work for me” doubts.

Email does all of that. Automatically. Without you being there. Without you posting another piece of content. Without you doing anything except setting it up once and letting it run.

And here is the thing that I think about every single time I see a creator with a massive following and a dead email list.

I lost an Instagram account with 262,000 followers. BUT because I have an email list, who regularly hears from me, the money hasn’t stopped flowing.

In 2026 building an audience you don’t own is one of the riskiest things you can do in online business. And yet most people are still putting all of their energy into platforms that can take everything away from them without warning. It’s genuinely insane to me.

If you want to know exactly how I turn a complete stranger into a paying customer on autopilot, the sequences, the skeleton of every email, and the secret I've never shared anywhere else and truthfully been a little reluctant to share because it's so good, that's all on the other side.

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When I made my first $1,000 online it was December 2022. I had just started a brand new Instagram account from absolute zero. I was figuring everything out by myself, what to post, how to write emails, how to build a funnel, how to create a digital product, how to write captions that actually converted. Every single piece of it I had to figure out from scratch. Alone. Through trial and error and a lot of wasted time.

And here’s what I want you to understand about that.

The $57,000 I made from a $67 digital product, the one I almost didn’t create, the one that sold itself from my bio without me barely talking about it, took me weeks to figure out. Months of trying to organize my thoughts, write the content, structure it properly, make it look good, price it right, and get it out into the world.

If I had AI when I built that product it would have taken me a weekend.

A weekend.

That is your unfair advantage. You are starting at a place that took me years to get to. The tools available to you right now, specifically the right AI tools used the right way, can compress years of figuring it out into weeks. And I am going to show you exactly how.

But first let me show you the system itself. Because AI is only as powerful as the strategy behind it. And the strategy is what made me a million dollars.

Here’s the honest truth about how I got there.

I spent five and a half years in network marketing before I found this. Five and a half years of following strangers on a private account hoping they’d follow me back. Adding random people on Facebook and sliding into their DMs. A daily task list that never ended. A business that moved backwards the second I stopped pushing it forward. I made $550,000 doing it that way, so it worked. But it owned me completely. Every free second I had I was working and there was never a moment where I felt done.

When I finally walked away and found digital products and affiliate marketing, everything changed. Don’t me wrong, it wasn’t overnight or without work... but fundamentally, structurally, permanently… everything changed. Because for the first time I was building something that could run without me. Something that made money while I was making dinner. While my kids were napping. While I was sleeping.

Three and a half years later I have made one million dollars. I live on 80 acres with my three kids and my husband in a 5,300 square foot home we always dreamed of. We bought an extra 30 acres because we could. We had another baby because we could afford it. We don’t stress about gas or groceries. We book flights in the morning and leave in the afternoon. We invest (stay tuned for a deep dive on this in the future 🤫). We save (and this 🙊). We live.

And I did it with a system that I am about to hand you completely.

The full system, every step, every tool, every template, and exactly how AI makes the whole thing faster, is waiting for you on the other side. This is the article I wish someone had handed me in December 2022. Everything I know. Everything I’ve built. All in one place.

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You do not need a perfect niche to start.

You might not even need a niche at all. I said it. Because here’s what I’ve watched happen over and over again, someone spends six months trying to figure out the perfect angle, the perfect audience, the perfect name for their page, the perfect aesthetic, and they haven’t posted a single piece of content yet. They’ve built nothing. They’ve grown nothing. And they’re still sitting in the same place they were six months ago wondering why it isn’t working.

The biggest mistake I see isn’t that people don’t work hard. It’s that they spend all their energy on the wrong things before they ever start. Or they never start at all because they’re waiting to have it all figured out first.

So here’s what we’re going to do instead. We’re going to spend 15 minutes getting you clear enough to actually begin. Not perfect. Not fully formed. Just clear enough to open an account and start posting today. Because that’s the only thing that actually moves the needle.

Sometimes what you really need isn’t a niche, it’s content pillars. A few topics you can show up and talk about consistently that feel natural and real and like you. And the beautiful thing about content pillars is that they evolve. Your audience will actually help shape them over time if you let them. But none of that happens until you start.

So let’s figure out what yours might look like.

Answer these questions honestly and don’t overthink them.

Your first answer is almost always the right one. Grab a notes app, a journal, the back of an envelope, whatever. Just write it down as you go.

What do people already ask you for help with?

What could you talk about for an hour without preparing?

What have you spent the most time or money learning?

What problem have you personally solved that other people are still struggling with?

What are you constantly researching or watching videos about even when nobody’s paying you to?

What do you love talking about that other people think you’re a little obsessed with?

If someone handed you a camera today, what could you make 30 videos about without running out of ideas?

If money wasn’t part of the equation at all, what kind of content would you genuinely enjoy making?

Now look back at everything you just wrote.

What keeps showing up? What themes are hiding in multiple answers? Write down your top two or three topics, the ones that feel the most natural, the most exciting, or the most like something you could actually sustain talking about for the next year.

Those are your content pillars. That’s your starting point.

And if you’re still not totally sure, this is where I want you to use AI to help you think it through. I put together a specific prompt below that you can copy and paste directly into ChatGPT with your answers filled in. I wrote it the way I would actually coach you if we were sitting across from each other at coffee, no generic advice, no fitting you into someone else’s mold, just a real look at YOUR answers and what makes the most sense for YOUR life.

Copy and paste this into ChatGPT/Claude/Poppy Ai and fill in your answers where it says to:

Here are my answers to some questions about myself and what I’m interested in: [paste your answers here]. I want you to know that I am completely flexible in what I do — making money online is really important to me and I am open to whatever path makes the most sense for my life and my strengths. I’m not attached to one specific idea. I just want to find the right one for me.

Now act like an online business strategist who specializes in helping people build income online through content creation, email list building, digital products, and affiliate marketing. You believe that not everyone should be in the same business model, your job is to find what fits THIS person specifically.

Here is exactly how you think:
Every person needs to be building an email list from day one. That is non negotiable. The best offer is almost always something the audience is already asking for, not something invented in a vacuum. Content should always lead somewhere, a freebie, an opt in, a reason to get on an email list. Digital products and affiliate marketing can and should work together, the affiliate links live inside the digital product so every sale double dips. You do not recommend blogs, Etsy shops, or ad revenue as a starting point, those are slow and the person needs to build an owned audience first. Instagram/Facebook and TikTok with cross posting is the starting point for content, short form video builds fastest. ManyChat comment automation is how the freebie gets delivered and the email list gets built. The simpler the digital product the better — a PDF, a guide, a system. It does not need to be a course.

Based on all of this, tell me specifically:
1. What niche or content pillars make the most sense for me and why, be specific to MY answers, not generic
2. Who my ideal audience is
3. Three content pillars
4. Ten specific content ideas I could film or write this week
5. What my freebie should be… be specific
6. What my first digital product could be… be specific, include a price point
7. What affiliate products or categories I should be looking for to double dip inside my digital product
8. The best monetization path for MY situation
9. The first three things I should do this week to actually start… be specific, not vague

Let it think with you. Use it as a sounding board. Take what resonates and leave what doesn’t because at the end of the day you know yourself better than any algorithm does. But I promise you that prompt is going to give you something real to work with. Not generic and vague, something actually useful.

Now here’s the part I really want you to hear before you close this tab and go back to your day.

There isn’t one right answer. Not everyone should be creating a course. Not everyone should be doing affiliate marketing. Not everyone should be building a digital product right now. The path that works is the one that actually fits your life, your strengths, and what your audience ends up asking you for.

What I will tell you is this, the answer almost always reveals itself when you start showing up. When you post consistently around your content pillars people will start asking you things. They’ll DM you. They’ll comment. They’ll tell you exactly what they need from you if you pay attention. And that is where your offer comes from. Not from you guessing in a vacuum before you’ve ever posted anything.

I made $57,000 from a $67 product I almost didn’t create, because people kept asking me the same question over and over again until I finally packaged the answer. I wasn’t trying to sell anything. The demand was already there. I just had to be present enough to see it.

Your audience will do the same thing for you. But only if you show up first.

So the most important thing you can do right now, more important than figuring out your product, more important than building your funnel, more important than any of it, is open an account and start posting. Today. Not when you feel ready. Not when you have a better camera or a clearer plan or more followers.

Today.

Your niche will evolve. Your confidence will grow. Your content will get better. Your audience will show up. But none of that happens until you hit post for the very first time.

So go do that.

And when you’re ready to learn exactly how I grow social media accounts on repeat, the content strategy, the viral framework, the hooks, the captions, the full system that I have used to build big audiences from scratch more than once, that is what is coming next.

My paid deep dive on this drops July 29th and it is the one I get asked about more than almost anything else. I’m showing you exactly how I continue to grow big social media accounts on repeat (and how I’ve helped hundreds of others do the same) and turn that growth into real income. If you never want to miss a drop like that, make sure you’re subscribed.

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See you on the inside.

Ashley Lochen

It is somewhere between 5 and 6am. My 1.5 year old has already been up at least once overnight, sometimes for a couple of hours. My older kids have a red light green light system, which in theory means they stay in their rooms until 7am. In theory.

In reality they come out approximately seven times before 7am. And they are not quiet about it. They are never quiet about it. There is nothing quiet about my children.

So on a good morning, a really good morning, everyone actually sleeps. The baby stays down. The big kids respect the green light. And I get from 5 to 7am with my coffee, my thoughts, and my laptop. Two hours of silence where I can actually think and create and scale.

That morning exists maybe once or twice a week if I’m lucky.

The other mornings? I’m up because the baby is up. Or I’m half asleep knowing I should just get up before my kids need 200 things from me simultaneously. Yes we turn on a movie first thing sometimes. No I don’t feel bad about it. It is survival and also it buys me enough time to make coffee and open my laptop and pretend I am a person.

By 7am it is full chaos. Coffee in hand, kids fighting about something, someone is hungry, someone can’t find something, someone is being dramatically loud for no reason that I can identify. And right now it’s summer. So they are always home. Always. There is no break in the middle of the day where the house gets quiet, unless miraculously everyone naps at the exact same time. It is just, all of them, all day, all the time.

This is my life. And I want you to actually feel like you’re in it with me because I think a lot of people look at what I’ve built and assume the life looks different than this. It doesn’t. It looks exactly like this.

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Like… attached. To my bedroom. I walk past it every single day. I see it when I wake up. I see it when I go to sleep. It just sits there. Waiting. Judging me a little, honestly.

And still. I don’t go.

I want to be really clear about something before we go any further. I’m not writing this from the other side. I’m not about to tell you what finally worked for me or give you my 5-step morning routine that changed everything. I don’t have that for you today.

What I have is this, a confession from someone who has figured out a lot of things, and this is just not one of them yet.

I’ve had many day ones.

A few day twos.

And then more day ones again.

If you know, you know.

Here’s what my days actually look like. I wake up, usually earlier than I want to because my kids have decided that sleeping in is not something our family does. And in that small window before the chaos starts, before the kids need things and the business needs things and everyone needs things, I choose to work.

Every time.

Not because I don’t know better. I know better. But because there’s always something. A message to respond to. An idea I don’t want to lose. Something that feels urgent even when it probably isn’t.

And then the kids are up and it’s all kids until it’s not. And by the time it’s not, I’m done. Like genuinely done. The kind of tired where the couch is not optional.

So the gym doesn’t happen.

And then I feel guilty about it. Because it’s not just a casual goal. It’s a big one. It’s been a big one for a long time. And the guilt makes it heavier somehow, like the longer it doesn’t happen the harder it gets to start.

So I pick a new day one.

And the cycle just keeps going.

I think about the version of me who has this figured out. She exists somewhere. She’s probably getting up at 4am, which, by the way, I’ve thought about. I’ve genuinely considered the 4am workout. And then I’ve genuinely laughed at myself for considering it because my 1.5 year old still wakes up overnight, so waking up at 4am would mean sleeping approximately never.

So that’s not the answer either.

Here’s what I know though, and this is the only thing I’ll say that sounds remotely like advice:

It’s always been the thing that slips. And I think for a lot of us, there’s always a thing that slips.

You can be incredibly disciplined in one area of your life and completely fall apart in another. That’s not a character flaw. That’s just being a human person with limited time and energy who is doing a lot of things at once.

I built a 7-figure business. I part-time homeschool, just because. I’m building a home. I show up for my kids. I create content. I manage a lot.

And I don’t go to the gym that is attached to my bedroom.

Both of those things are true at the same time.

If you want to hear how I actually think about energy as a mom running a 7-figure business, what I protect even when everything else slips, that's in this week's paid post."

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I’m not going to wrap this up with a bow because I don’t have one. I’m not going to tell you I figured it out because I haven’t. What I will tell you is that I’m done pretending this isn’t a thing for me just because everything else looks put together from the outside.

It is a thing.

The gym is right there.

And one day, probably not 4am, I’m going to walk into it and not walk back out after two days.

But today I just wanted you to know that wherever you’re falling short on yourself right now, whatever YOUR gym attached to the bedroom is…

You’re not the only one.

And we’re going to figure it out.

Just maybe not today 🙃

Ashley Lochen

And if you want the honest version of how I think about energy, sustainability, and what I actually do to keep my business running even when I'm running on empty… I wrote that for my paid subscribers this week.

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Both came to me wanting to make money online. Both started the same way almost everyone does, trying to sell digital products in the make money online space. Done for you courses, business systems, the whole thing.

Neither of them was getting traction.

And when I actually sat down and talked to them… it was obvious why. Like, immediately obvious. They weren’t connected to what they were doing. At all. They were chasing a method someone else told them worked, going through the motions, posting content that looked right but felt hollow, and you can feel that through a screen. People always can. You cannot fake genuine enthusiasm and you definitely cannot build an audience on it.

So I did what I always do. I stopped talking about strategy and started asking questions.

What do you actually like to do? What are your hobbies? What kind of content do you find yourself watching at 11pm when you should be sleeping? What do people ask you for help with in real life, like actual people in your actual life, not your target audience?

And that’s when things got interesting.

One of them lit up the second I asked about her life. Midwest girl through and through, the aesthetic, the lifestyle, the realness of it, the way people in that world actually live versus how the internet portrays it. She had opinions. She had stories. She had a whole perspective that was completely her own.

But here’s the thing, she didn’t sit down one day and say I’m going to build a Midwest lifestyle brand. That’s not how it happened.

She just started making content. No grand strategy, no niche research, no “is this profitable” spreadsheet. She just started showing up as herself and talking about the things she actually cared about and telling jokes.

And it started taking off.

The audience found her. The brand revealed itself. The deals followed. Now she’s Midwest Meg, massive following, consistent brand deals, building something that actually feels like her because it is her.

She didn’t build the brand and then find the audience. She just showed up, and the brand built itself around her.

That’s the part nobody tells you.

Another one couldn’t stop talking about national parks. Like genuinely could not stop. She knew everything, the hidden spots, the best times to go, the stuff the tourist guides don’t tell you. Guess what she sells now.

Another one was deep in the process of building her own barndominium and had been documenting every single decision, every mistake, every thing she wished someone had told her. Now she helps other people do the same thing and has an audience of people who are obsessed with her because she’s living the exact thing they want to do.

None of them found success by copying someone else’s path.

They found it by finally, finally, going down their own.

Want help figuring out your actual path? That's exactly what we dig into inside.

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Here’s what I actually believe about making money online that most people in this space won’t tell you:

The method matters way less than the match.

Read that again.

Everyone is out here selling you their system. Their funnel, their course, their done for you program, their “I went from zero to six figures in 90 days” framework. And look, I’m not going to sit here and tell you those things have zero value. Some of them are genuinely good. Some of those people really did figure something out.

But here’s what they’re not telling you: they’re selling you what worked for them. In their niche, with their personality, with their specific audience, at that specific moment in time, with their specific set of skills and life experiences and frankly their specific level of comfort being on camera or writing or selling.

That is not a transferable formula. That’s a snapshot of one person’s path.

And the reason you’ve probably bought something, or almost bought something, that promised to be the answer, and then it wasn’t, isn’t because you did it wrong. It’s because you were trying to wear someone else’s shoes. Doesn’t matter how nice the shoes are. If they’re not your size they’re going to hurt.

The people I’ve watched actually build something, not just make a little money and burn out, not just have one good month and then disappear, but actually build something sustainable that they’re proud of and that keeps growing, they all started with themselves first.

Their life. Their experience. Their strengths. Their actual interests. Their actual personality.

Because here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: you can learn any method. Funnels, content strategy, email marketing, SEO, TikTok Shop, affiliate marketing, all of it is learnable. There are tutorials for everything. Information is not the problem.

But you cannot learn genuine connection to what you’re doing. You cannot study your way into actually caring. And genuine connection, the kind where someone watches your video or reads your post and thinks this person gets it, this person is actually living this, that is what makes people follow you. Trust you. Come back. Buy from you. Tell their friends about you.

That’s not a strategy. That’s just being real. And it’s the one thing that can’t be templated.

So before you buy another course, copy another strategy, or spend another three hours trying to figure out what niche is most profitable right now, I want you to sit with a few questions.

And I mean actually sit with them. Not skim them and move on. Actually think.

What do you genuinely like to do or talk about? Not what sounds good. Not what you think would make a good business. What do you actually enjoy?

What are you good at really good at? Not impressive-on-a-resume good. Actually good. The stuff people come to you for. The stuff you do without thinking that other people find hard.

What content do you consume obsessively? Because what you watch when nobody’s looking tells you more about your actual interests than anything you’d put on a vision board.

How do you actually want to show up? Do you want to be on camera or behind the scenes? Do you love writing or does it feel like homework? Are you a one-on-one person or do you come alive in front of an audience? Do you want to teach, entertain, inspire, or just document your life?

These aren’t soft questions. These are the most strategic questions you can ask yourself because the answers tell you everything. They tell you whether TikTok Shop is a fit or a nightmare for you. Whether UGC work plays to your strengths or drains you. Whether a digital product makes sense or whether you’d be better building an audience first and monetizing through brand deals. Whether you should be writing or talking or showing or teaching.

There are so many legitimate paths to making real money online right now. More than ever before. But the right one for you, the one that’s actually going to work, the one you’re actually going to stick with when it gets hard, starts with you. Not with what’s trending. Not with what someone else is selling. With you.

And here’s the grace part, because I know some of you are reading this thinking but I genuinely don’t know what my thing is.

That’s okay. That’s actually really normal.

Sometimes you don’t know until you start posting and see what connects. Sometimes you think you know and then something unexpected takes off and you follow that instead. Sometimes your thing finds you before you find it.

You don’t have to have it all figured out before you start. You just have to start with something real. Something that’s actually connected to who you are, even if it’s just a thread of a thing right now.

Because here’s the difference between the people who build something and the people who stay stuck:

The stuck ones are waiting for the perfect niche, the perfect strategy, the perfect moment when everything is clear and the risk feels smaller.

The ones who build something just started. Imperfectly. With what they had. With who they actually were.

You can build a following chasing a trend. Plenty of people do. But you cannot build a life doing something that has nothing to do with who you are. Eventually the gap between what you’re performing and who you actually are gets too wide and the whole thing collapses or you just quietly stop because it never felt like yours anyway.

Start with something real.

Everything else, the strategy, the tools, the monetization, all of it, that’s just the how. And the how is the easy part once you know the what.

Figure out your what first.

I’ll help you with the rest.

Ashley Lochen

If you're ready to stop guessing and actually figure out your thing, come inside.

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That was my first thought when I found out my Instagram was gone.

I wasn't even shocked. It was just… this was bound to happen eventually.

262,000 followers. Gone. My Facebook with 26k, same thing. Deleted overnight. No warning, no explanation. Just gone.

And honestly? The fact that my first reaction was “figures” told me more than anything else could. Because when you lose something and your gut reaction is of course, you already knew deep down it was never really yours.

Hi, I’m Ashley. And I’m probably not what you’re expecting.

I’m not running my business from a villa in Maui. I’m running it from my kitchen, surviving on coffee, with three kids loud in the background and a to-do list that never fully gets done.

I’m just normal. Like genuinely, actually normal. I’m not super outgoing, I’m not performing a lifestyle, I’m not pretending to be anything I’m not. I’m a mom who knew deep down there was so much more out there and decided to go find it.

The thing people don’t see from the outside is that I’m also quietly relentless. Tell me I can’t do something and I’ll do it ten times better without making a big deal about it. Making money is genuinely my hobby. Helping other people figure out how to do it is the part that actually lights me up.

Over the last few years I’ve helped friends build real things online. Not by selling them a course. Just by talking to them, literally in Messenger, like normal people, and helping them figure out their actual thing. One of them is now Midwest Meg, getting brand deals constantly. Another sells national park guides. One is helping people build their own barndominiums. Another is crushing it in the non-toxic space.

None of them copied my path. They found their own. I just helped them see it.

That’s what I do. And that’s what this is.

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But back to that morning.

I woke up and everything I’d spent years building on Instagram was just… gone. And I sat there with my coffee and my three kids running around and I thought about all the time I’d poured into that account. Real time. Time I don’t get back.

And then I thought, this can happen to anyone.

It will happen to people who are building right now and have no idea it’s coming. Maybe not exactly like this. Maybe it’s a reach drop that tanks your views overnight. A platform that slowly dies. An algorithm shift that makes everything you built suddenly invisible.

It’s all the same thing. You built something on land you don’t own, and the ground shifted.

The only real protection is building things that actually belong to you. An email list. A community. Income streams that pay you whether a platform likes you that day or not.

Social media is an incredible tool. But it was never supposed to be the foundation.

The other thing I keep coming back to, the thing I’ve watched matter more than anything else with every person I’ve helped, is this…

The people who actually build something real build around something that genuinely means something to them. Not a niche they picked because it converts. Not a version of themselves they thought would perform better. Something real. Something theirs.

The more you try to be what you think people want, the less magnetic you are. The more you just show up as specifically, unapologetically yourself, the more the right people find you and never leave.

I’m rebuilding. New Instagram already at 2k. TikTok with 77k. And this.

I don’t have the comeback story yet. I’m still in it. But I know what I’m building differently this time, things I own, income that doesn’t depend on an algorithm, and a brand that’s just actually me.

Not a performance. Just me.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re watching everyone else figure out the online money thing while you’re still trying to find your lane, you’re in exactly the right place.

Every week I’m getting into all of it. Content strategy, AI, automation, how to actually monetize, money mindset, the realities of doing this with kids and a real life. Not surface level stuff, the actual how. The messy middle. The things that are working right now and the things that aren’t.

And yeah, we’ll talk about which paths exist and what they actually look like, UGC, TikTok Shop, digital products, brand deals, all of it. But that’s just one piece of it.

This is the whole thing. Business, money, mindset, motherhood, and everything in between.

Welcome. You’re going to feel very at home here.

Ashley Lochen

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