From $0 to $3 Million the Slow Way
What a millionaire in a London foyer taught me 16 years ago, plus the 8-step audience playbook I'd run if I was starting from zero today.
“I was homeless sleeping in a graveyard”, the good looking, extremely well dressed and coiffured young man on the stage in the front of me exclaimed.
‘I was at the bottom of the rubbish heap, until one day my fairy Godfather opened his magic laptop, and with just a few light strokes of the magical keyboard turned me into the multi millionaire I am today’.
Ok I’m being a tad facetious, but this was pretty much the summary of the story I was listening to at a ‘social media summit’ in London before I truly knew what ‘internet marketing’ was.
It was all the rage back then, the whole ‘rags to riches’, and as someone new to this world I was hooked!
“Wowee this amazing magical world behind the screen of a keyboard can make me a millionaire with just the press of a few buttons?” I mused.
After the talk, I sought out the young man in the foyer. Excitedly I asked him:
‘How fast could I reach a million bucks?’.
He shot back ‘how much money have you got?’.
His name was Mark Anastasi.
He knew the game. I didn’t.
There’s Really Only One Way to Build a Business Online
There’s a lot of noise about how to make money on the internet.
Build a Substack.
Start a YouTube channel.
Run Facebook ads.
Sell a course.
Launch a newsletter.
Become an influencer.
Open an Etsy shop.
Affiliate marketing.
Drop-shipping.
Dog-walking.
(Alright, the last one’s offline - but it’s a legitimate biz opp!)
It can feel like there are a thousand ways to do this, and that you’re getting the wrong one wrong.
But after 16 years since that fateful foyer meeting, and multiple 6 fig launches, a 7-figure ecom business and at least a dozen things that haven’t worked, in my experience, the business model is irrelevant. They all work, you just need to pick the one that suits you.
But every single one has one thing in common.
No matter what model you choose you need people to sell to. Boom. That’s it.
The whole game of building any business (online or offline) is to build an audience of people who want to buy from you.
And you can do that one of two ways:
With money. Or without.
Most of us start without.
What Mark was saying is that the speed at which you build an audience and therefore sales, depends on how much money you can throw at it.
If you’ve got cash for ads, a team, sponsored placements, paid collaborations and a marketing budget, you can buy your way to an audience fast.
If you don’t, you’ll build it slowly - by being useful, showing up consistently, and earning trust one reader at a time.
Either route works. They just run at different speeds.
It took us 5 years to reach that magic million bucks (and even then, that was income, not profit). And I did it the slow way.
From $0 - $3 Million
Not long after that conference, my husband and I upped sticks and headed to Cyprus to chase our fortunes.
After many false starts, I finally landed on Facebook and worked tirelessly for months learning all about FB pages and teaching others how to use them to build a list. I made videos. I jumped on calls. I chatted in forums.
Along the way I launched memberships, sold coaching, created digital products, sold PDFs, ran cohorts and more.
Some products flew out the gate, others were a slower trickle, but it was 5 years of grind. Enjoyable grind. But grind all the same.
Somewhere around year 2 or 3, I started to get noticed by other creators in the space.
Affiliate offers came in. Joint ventures became possible. I was being invited to appear on podcasts, contribute guest posts & co host webinars.
People wanted to collaborate, promote each other’s work, & run launches together.
I was no longer just building for myself, I was being lifted by others who’d built their own audiences too. The work compounded & my email subscribers & audience numbers accelerated.
As cashflow grew, I also started running paid ads to grow faster. Facebook ads to promote webinars, sponsored posts to reach further. Money I’d earned was now buying me speed.
By year five, I had 55,000 people on my email list, several six-figure launches behind me, and was running a ‘watch over our shoulder’ coaching programme that sold close to a million dollars’ worth of access, teaching the audience I’d built how to do exactly what my husband and I were doing in our brand new Amazon business.
And the Amazon business we grew was the perfect example of what Mark was talking about in the foyer all those years ago.
We had money to invest in stock. We leveraged Amazon’s marketplace (their audience, their buyers, their distribution) and rebranded a product people were already buying. We built a team in the Philippines to help us grow.
Money begat money. We were generating $3 million+ by year 3.
Money Buys Speed, Brand Builds Trust
My question to Mark in the London foyer that day was ‘how fast can I reach a million bucks’.
His response was only half the answer though.
Money can certainly buy speed, but it’s our brand that builds the trust.
You could send 10,000 people to an advert on Facebook, but if they don’t trust the person or the brand behind it, you’ve just wasted thousands of dollars.
Which is why the most important move you can make to grow an online business is to build an audience who knows, likes & trusts you.
But it is the stage where most people stumble.
Why Most People Never Build the Audience (or the Business)
The short answer is, it’s bloody hard work, and takes time or money, and in many cases both.
The longer answer is:
They Quit Too Soon. Growth doesn’t happen fast enough. They publish posts into the void with no validation, the email list crawls, engagement is thin, and at some point hope, confidence and momentum all run out at once. So they walk away, usually right before the compounding kicks in. It took me 5 years to grow my email list to 55,000 subscribers. Most of the people who started when I did had quit by year 2.
They Build on Borrowed Land. Some spend years growing a Facebook page, a rapidly growing TikTok account, a YouTube channel or even a Google-ranked blog, without ever capturing a single email. They rack up likes, followers, comments and engagement. But then the algorithm shifts, the account gets banned, or the platform throttles reach, and the audience built over years disappears overnight. (All three of those have happened to me, by the way.)
They Try to Be Everywhere at Once. Substack and YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and a podcast and LinkedIn. All started at the same time. The work spreads thin across six channels at once, burnout follows within months, and most of it gets quietly abandoned before any single channel has had a chance to grow.
They Don’t Really Understand Why They’re Posting They post because it feels like the thing to do, and it’s what everyone else is doing. But ask why and the answer is fuzzy. Reach? Engagement? Vibes?
The Effort Stops Paying Off. A slower version of #1. The money doesn’t come fast enough. The work keeps mounting. The numbers move, but not in proportion to the effort going in. Eventually the maths stops adding up, and even people who genuinely care about what they’re building decide they can’t justify it anymore.
So what’s the answer?
I wish I was a magical fairy godmother who with a wave of my wand and a few keystrokes could show you how your laptop could make you millions with a couple of taps.
But the honest answer is far less glamorous.
Because there’s no shortcut or growth hack. There’s just consistent, well-built audience-building, done in the right order, over a long enough timeframe.
However, if you follow the steps and truly understand why and how to build that trusted audience, everything becomes clearer.
You stop copying tactics from people on a completely different journey from yours, (which by the way, is one of the biggest energy drains in the entire creator world.)
You stop chasing every new platform, every shiny tactic, every algorithm hack.
You just keep doing the slow, compounding work of becoming someone your audience genuinely wants to hear from, and eventually, buy from.
So if I were starting again today, which, in a sense, I am, here’s the playbook I’d run.
The order of operations. The assets that truly compound, the mistakes that cost most people years, and the small set of things that really matter.
It’s everything I wish someone had laid out plainly when I started.
