Back to Business Basics on Substack
Ditch everything you know about online marketing & sales and Substack will be a growth engine for your mission & business
Prefer to listen to this? I recorded an episode on the Substack by Design podcast
Tomorrow I am teaching my Substack Soapbox members (my paid tier on Substack) how we went from 5 paid subscribers on January 1st to 374 by March 19th (11 weeks on the platform).
I am also going to share our process for white glove service & upgrading paid Substack members to our other offers.
It is only $79 for the year and you immediately unlock incredible Substack trainings (and my simple Human Design report & Julie Bot to get deeper clarity in your brand & message on Substack)
Here is a back story about what I will be teaching tomorrow…
I’ve been in business since I was 18 years old.
I’m 51 now. That’s a long time.
I studied business in undergrad. Got my MBA. Spent years climbing inside one of the most recognized companies in the world — IBM — eventually leading large divisions, managing serious revenue, and understanding what true business is all about.
When I left at 42 to build my own thing, I thought I knew business.
What I did not know was the online space.
I felt like visiting a foreign land. Because the online space had convinced an entire generation of entrepreneurs that business was different online. And the perpetuation of 2 narratives have kept most entrepreneurs from true success.
Two Lies To Let Go Of
There are two things that created the chaos in the online entrepreneurial world, and they fed each other perfectly.
The first was the passive income myth. The promise that you could build a funnel, float in a pool, and wake up to sales.
Some version of “make money while you sleep” was sold to good, hardworking people who actually weren’t afraid to put in the work, but were convinced that you aren’t supposed to work hard in this online space!
And it was a lie.
Even when it worked for someone, it required enormous investment — time, money, energy — on the front end. The dream was never really what the gurus were promising.
The second lie involved all the ways to make that first lie happen.
The “go viral in 10 seconds” email. The “10K in 10 days” webinar. The endless parade of hacks designed to exploit a false narrative that people were already desperate to believe.
Those two things together created a perfect storm — the most profitable era in history to run a business, made nearly unreachable for the people who most needed it to work.
I see women come to us at the end of their rope every single week.
Tired. Spent. Having poured money and time and faith into strategies that produced nothing. And the painful part? It’s getting worse.
Organic reach on every platform continues to shrink. The algorithm wants your money, not your message.
I lived this myself. In 2018 and 2019, my marriage was on the rocks. I had left IBM. My business was making no money. We were living on my husband’s police officer salary with three kids, and I was chasing an online business based on lies.
That’s when I met Kelly Roach.
Why Kelly and I Clicked Immediately
Kelly came from the same world I did. Fortune 500 executive. Real business education. Real results inside massive organizations. And then she stepped into the online space and had the same reaction I did — what is happening here?
The difference between us in those early years is that Kelly’s Human Design allowed her to build her business while still working full time as an executive.
Mine didn’t. I had to leave first, then build — which meant I felt the pressure in a way she didn’t. But she had her own version of it. The frustration of knowing she was capable, doing everything “right,” and still not seeing the results she knew were possible.
So she went back to basics.
And when I found Kelly and started working with her, I went back to basics too.
In 2020, I closed $400K in revenue. In 2021, I hit a million.
Then I got distracted. People with seven and eight figure businesses came to me in 2022 and said — you’re working too hard. Let us set up the funnels. Let us automate this.
So I paid for the funnels. I paid for the automations. And my revenue went from a million in 2021 to $700K, then $500K — with a team I now had to support.
I knew something had to change.
2024 and 2025 were the turning point. Human Design came into my business and I rewired everything. And I started working with Kelly again. Back to basics. No more chasing the same damn lies.
The growth we had in 2025 was explosive. And it came from doing the unsexy, timeless things that actually work.
The Room Where It All Clicked
Last week I was at Kelly Roach’s mastermind — her Legacy Leaders program for seven and eight figure business owners. She was debuting her new book, The Miracle Hour, coming out at the end of April.
She was teaching the room about what’s shifting in the market. About where things are going. And I sat there nodding at nearly everything, because we see this so similarly it’s almost eerie.
When she started talking about The Miracle Hour — the system she’s been using and teaching for over a decade, the same system she used in corporate to become a Fortune 500 executive, and then used again to build her business while still working full time — I stood up. I had the mic. And I said:
Kelly, I just want to acknowledge you. This is the moment for The Miracle Hour.
Not because it’s new. It’s two decades old. She’s been talking about it for ten years. She used it for ten years before that.
I said: the timing of its relevancy right now is what we’d call Kairos time. Not chronological time. Kairos — divine time. The moment a thing was made for.
There has never been a moment in the online entrepreneurial space where The Miracle Hour was needed more than right now. In 2026.
Why Right Now Is Different
Social media is becoming one of the worst places to try to grow a transformational business.
It is full of AI-generated content. AI bots. Outrage. Entertainment. Products. It will continue to work for consumer brands, for entertainment, for style and shopping. But for the woman who teaches, coaches, leads, transforms? It is getting harder by the month.
Kelly said something in that room that landed like a brick: she is building her arc to leave social media. Like Noah’s Ark. The day she said it, I had literally just recorded a podcast episode making the same point in different words.
Our best buyers are spending less time on Instagram and Facebook. Read that again.
Whether you’re trying to grow organically or you’re running paid ads, this is a real problem. If the people most likely to invest in your work are leaving those platforms, you need a different approach to reach them.
The Miracle Hour is one of those approaches. It is not some new crazy system, it is back to basics business discipline.
One focused, protected, intentional hour a day. The kind of hour that most online business advice has trained you to believe you don’t need, because the funnel is supposed to do it for you.
The funnel didn’t do it for you. The Miracle Hour will.
Come Learn It With Us
Kelly is coming into the IGNITE Her® LAB on Monday, March 23rd to teach The Miracle Hour live.
I will talk more about this in my live session tomorrow - be sure to join the Substack Soapbox to learn more!
She’s going to walk through what it is, why it works, and how to implement it inside your specific business — without relying on social media to do the heavy lifting.
I believe this session alone could be the quantum leap you’ve been looking for.
This is the thing we have been skipping in pursuit of something shinier, and it’s been the missing piece the entire time.
The IGNITE Her® LAB is $499 for the full year. When you join, you get the Kelly session on Monday plus everything else we have coming — the Human Design Eras series, the Authority of One™ Intensive on April 9th, the training vault, the Daily Frequency private podcast, and a global community of women doing this work alongside you.
If you have questions, reply here or email us at team@julieciardi.com.
I hope to see you tomorrow and in that room with Kelly Roach Monday!
xo, Julie
P.S. — Over 100,000 downloads of the Daily Frequency and counting. People tell me the $499 is worth the podcast alone. But I want you there for Kelly Roach. Come on in.
Someday, someone will write an article like this about YOU, @Julie Ciardi-50 Not Finished📕 .
Julie, did you record your new podcast here and it was delivered to Spotify and Apple via rss? Right now, (when I do record my pod 🤪) I upload it to Spotify for Podcasters.