How I Scaled to 6 Figures Organically in 6 Months

The six figure dollar question. “How did you do this without ads?” The honest answer is that I didn’t even think about it. Shocker! When I started my first business, Restoring Eve, I really wasn’t trying to build an empire — I genuinely thought it would be a side project (lolll). I was working a biotech job, in a serious relationship, talking about marriage and kids, and I figured this would be something I did for fun on the side. That plan lasted about five minutes. So did the relationship, but that’s a story for a different time.

The business took off faster than I expected, because within six months it replaced my entire income. My ENTIRE income. My life was changing before my eyes and it felt truly unreal. Looking back, this success wasn’t the result of a complicated funnel or a big marketing strategy. Just accidentally doing the one thing that works better than ads ever will, in my experience.

I had an opinion.

At the time I didn’t realize how rare that was, to have an opinion. Now, as a business coach, I see this rarity every single week. Women come to me with businesses that are not working at all; no consistent leads, no momentum, no sales. And somehow they are spending thousands of dollars on ads trying to fix it. Yikes. This is my hot take: ads are not the problem, your lack of differentiation is. Most people do not need ads to scale or grow…they just need a point of view.

My business grew by saying things publicly that made people uncomfortable. I started talking about birth control, fertility, nutrition and meat consumption — those topics alone got eyes on my page. A lot of eyes. I did not have an aesthetic feed, polished content or a posting strategy. It was just me and my opinion and it was working. However, some people truly hated to hear it, because these were not normal conversations to have online. I got tons of backlash as a result, was labeled and almost cancelled, BUT, I also got attention, trust, and clients. No regrets here. ;)

And I know having a strong opinion feels risky, especially as women. We are so conditioned to be agreeable and nice and complacent. To sit in the shadows waiting for someone else to save us. But what I’ve learned is that safe content does not scale. Safe content doesn’t necessarily help anyone, either. Shared experience, lived experience, YOUR experience is medicine. The posts that went viral for me wasn’t something clever or strategic, it was honest and it was something I believed deeply. And it was something most people were scared to say out loud — this was the key difference.

As we move deeper into the age of AI I am learning that this matters more than ever. If I go to ChatGPT right now and ask for advice on almost any topic, I will get a clean and neutral answer. The answers are helpful, but pretty generic and boring. Sometimes I want to slap Chat GPT and tell it to give it to me straight. But it won’t and that is exactly what most people are posting online: generic, vanilla and boring missionary-style information we now all have access to. Information is no longer valuable on its own — it’s truly wild. Three tips this, five steps that, how to clear your skin, how to grow your business, etc. All of that used to work, but it does not work anymore, not with this new paradigm. What cuts through the noise now is perspective - YOUR perspective. AI can’t replace that sh*t. Not yet, anyway. These are wild times we are living in…

“But I don’t have any controversial opinions…” Since doing this work, I’ve noticed that a lot of people think this way. That’s usually because they are surrounded by people who think exactly like they do. Your beliefs feel normal to you and your community and the little bubble you live in online, but that does not mean they are normal to the market. Trust me on this one.

So here’s a simple exercise I give my clients:

Ask AI what it would recommend for your ideal client, then look at your own beliefs. If your answer is different, congratulations! You already have a point of view and your content lives within that gap. You’re more controversial than you thought. Hehe.

As more founders try to work less and lean on automation and AI, their businesses start blending in even more. When everything sounds the same, ads feel like the only way to buy attention, but it’s not the only way. That is why ads feel like a money pit for so many people and a waste of time and resources. You are pouring money into something that is not distinctive — it’s robotic and quite frankly, REALLY boring. The creators and founders who will win moving forward are the ones willing to stand out, willing to be different. The ones who don’t care if they’re disliked. The ones who care more about being respected than being agreeable. The ones with authenticity with little bite — a little grit. For me, the secret formula was my point of view content; content rooted in belief and content that made it clear what I stood for and what I did not and that did more for my business than any ad ever could.

If I could do it again I would go even harder with more opinions and more conviction. More content centered around what I actually believe instead of what feels safe to post. I do not really believe in failure, but if there is a lesson here, it is this:

Stop trying to out educate the internet - you cannot. That ship has sailed. Start offering something different: say the thing people are thinking but are scared to say. Back it up with your experience and don’t be afraid to stand out.