Jessie Jean launched a $297 program teaching people how to grow on social media through yapping videos. The first $2 million came in within 24 hours, and by the time the launch was over, she’d made roughly $7 million.
Which is a perfectly normal and chill amount of money to make from one launch.
Obviously, the internet reacted exactly how you’d expect. Some people were inspired. Some immediately wanted to reverse engineer the entire thing. Some were pissed that someone could make that much money selling a $297 course. And some decided Jessie had essentially woken up one morning, posted a Reel, accidentally gone viral, and tripped over seven million dollars on her way to Target.
Except that’s not what happened.
So I brought in someone who was literally behind the scenes.
Julie Chenell is a digital marketing expert, business coach, co-founder of Funnel Gorgeous, and the person Jessie hired as her business coach. When the YAP Challenge started absolutely taking the fuck off and Jessie realised she could not simultaneously deliver the program, create content, show up on Stories, live her life AND write a launch email every day, she asked Julie to take over the emails.
And Julie said yes.
Which means she got a front-row seat to the weirdest fucking launch on the internet.
We talked about what she was looking for when she wrote those emails in real time, how she used negative Threads posts to find objections, why good testimonials are useless if you just dump 30 screenshots into an email, and what she would have written if Jessie had ZERO social proof.
And eventually we even got to the question I really wanted to ask: Could anybody actually do what Jessie did?
And Julie’s answer was refreshingly not some internet-business version of anything is possible if you believe in yourself.
Realistically? No.
But there’s a much more useful lesson in what Jessie did than “I too can make $7 million if I yap hard enough.”
And THAT is what I want to talk about.
The Squirrel Brain Questions 🐿️
Before I allowed Julie to teach us how to make millions, obviously I needed the important information first.
If she could gather “nuts” like a squirrel: Chapstick. Yep, I get that.
If she had to get a phrase tattooed on her face: “Start with the problem.”
Which turned out to be extremely relevant to the entire conversation we had for the next 50 minutes.
What would be in the museum gift shop dedicated to her: Tea, books, and Disney paraphernalia.
Her walkout song: Julie was only allowed to listen to Christian worship music and Christian contemporary music as a kid, so apparently we’re walking out to a Jesus jam.
And because I discovered she’s a Disney girly, I added a bonus question:
Disneyland or Disney World? Disney World.
Her favourite characters include Rapunzel, Chip and Dale, and Minnie Mouse.
Mine is Guido from Cars, which Julie correctly identified as a very random choice considering I have spent an unreasonable amount of my public life defending Lightning McQueen.
Now that we’ve covered the important things, we can discuss the $7 million.
Good Copy Isn’t About Making Better Claims. It’s About Proving the Ones You’re Already Making.
When Julie took over Jessie’s launch emails, she had what can only be described as a copywriter’s wet dream: An absolutely stupid amount of social proof.
Jessie had already been collecting screenshots, and as the launch gained momentum, more results were appearing basically by the hour. So every morning, Julie would search Instagram and Threads for mentions of Jessie Jean, the YAP Challenge, and what people were saying about it.
But she wasn’t only looking for people screaming about how incredible it was.
She was looking for the negative shit too.
Someone would say, I don’t want to buy another course because I always buy courses and never finish them.
Julie wasn’t trying to convince that specific person they were wrong. She was thinking about the potential buyer reading that comment who had now inherited the same doubt.
So the email could answer it before they even asked: Maybe the reason you haven’t finished your other courses isn’t because you’re inherently a person who never finishes anything. Maybe those courses weren’t designed to make taking action easy. And here’s what makes this one different.
The same thing happened with testimonials.
Instead of dropping 30 screenshots into an email and saying LOOK!!! PROOF!!!, Julie would choose one result and build the argument around it.
If the objection was I’m too much of a beginner, she could find the person who started with 22 followers and grew to 22,000.
If someone thought, I already have 100,000 followers, this isn’t for me, she could find the person with an established audience who still learned something from the program.
The testimonial became the anchor of the argument, not decoration at the bottom of an email.
And this is where Julie said something that I think a LOT of people need to hear:
You cannot just make a claim and assume people believe you because you’re the expert.
If I tell you having a website makes your business more credible, cool.
If you tell someone growing on social media is the best way to get clients, okay.
You can prove a claim with a testimonial, your own experience, a story, statistics, an example, or a logical argument. But you need to give the person reading it a reason to arrive at the same conclusion you did.
And if you don’t have client testimonials yet, that doesn’t mean you’re completely fucked.
Julie separates proof into two broad categories: transformation and skill.
If you’re selling a transformation—weight loss, relationships, making money—you need evidence of that transformation through your experience or your clients’ experience.
If you’re teaching a skill—branding, upholstery, analysing minerals through hair—you don’t necessarily need a dramatic I was once just like you story. Your training, expertise, client work, and demonstrated ability to perform the skill can establish the authority you need.
You don’t need to manufacture a struggle just so your marketing has an origin story.
You DO need to be able to answer: Why should somebody believe you can help them solve this problem?
Everyone Wants to Reverse Engineer the $7 Million. Nobody Wants to Reverse Engineer the Five Months Before It.
Eventually, I asked Julie the question everybody was thinking: Can anyone do what Jessie did?
And Julie said no.
THANK YOU.
Hypothetically, sure. Realistically, most people are not going to make $7 million selling a $297 program.
Jessie had what Julie described as “lightning in a bottle.”
But if you make the entire lesson of Jessie’s launch she made $7 million, therefore I can make $7 million, you’re missing the much more interesting part.
Because before the YAP Challenge exploded, Jessie spent five months creating content every single day.
And not five-minute talking-head videos she slapped together while waiting for her coffee.
Some of her Reels took HOURS. She was flipping furniture, using power tools, editing, creating, experimenting, and consistently putting herself out there without knowing where any of it was going.
Meanwhile, she’d already spent thousands of dollars learning marketing. She understood funnels. She hired coaches. She paid for the right tools and software. When she needed a sales page, she hired a professional designer.
Then when the program launched? She overdelivered so aggressively that the people inside couldn’t stop talking about it.
And THEN there was the nuclear-reactor fourth piece: she was teaching people how to grow through content, they implemented what she taught, they got results, and then they made more content talking about those results.
The product itself fuelled the marketing of the product.
THAT combination is hard to replicate.
But the thing Julie kept coming back to wasn’t the funnel.
It wasn’t the emails.
It wasn’t even the content.
It was Jessie’s tolerance for uncertainty.
She didn’t spend five months creating because she knew there was $7 million waiting at the end.
She didn’t hire Julie years earlier because she secretly knew it would lead to this launch.
She didn’t overdeliver because she’d calculated that every extra ounce of effort would produce another 300 buyers.
She kept doing the thing without knowing what the thing was going to give her back.
And I think this is where the reverse-engineering conversation gets weird.
Because now someone can look at Jessie’s launch and say, Okay, I’ll post every day for five months, create this exact type of program, build this funnel, hire this person, use this strategy, and then I’ll make $7 million.
But you’ve already changed one of the most important variables.
You’re doing the work specifically because you’ve decided what it should return.
Jessie didn’t know.
She committed to doing something excellently before she knew whether it would work.
And I would argue THAT is the part most people aren’t willing to copy.
Your Strategy Might Not Be Broken. You Might Just Keep Abandoning It Before It Works.
This conversation eventually became about something much bigger than Jessie’s launch.
Because Julie’s work is helping entrepreneurs grow businesses without losing their shit in the process, and when I asked what usually causes people to lose their shit, her answer was basically:
You’re doing too fucking much.
People choose a strategy, overcomplicate it, execute half of it, don’t get the result they expected quickly enough, panic, decide it doesn’t work, and jump to something else.
Then something else.
Then something else.
Meanwhile, the original strategy might have been completely fine.
Julie gave me the example of a client whose webinar took 34 attempts before it started converting.
THIRTY. FOUR.
Now that webinar generates $50K–$60K months.
Imagine if she’d decided after webinar six that webinars just don’t work for her.
This is also why Julie isn’t necessarily thrilled when something works immediately.
Because if your first launch goes beautifully, you can accidentally learn the wrong lesson.
You start believing that’s the baseline.
Then the next launch makes less money, an ad stops converting, or something breaks and suddenly you’re spiralling because:
But it worked before.
Ask me how I know.
My first course launch had 183 people on the waitlist.
Forty-four bought a $997 offer.
Which, as Julie kindly informed me while laughing at my younger self, was fucking fantastic.
Do you know what 2021 Sara thought?
Where are the other 139 of you?
I genuinely thought I was going to make $100,000 because apparently I believed putting your name on a waitlist was legally binding.
I had a $30,000 dental bill. I was going to pay that, have $70K left, buy a house, live happily ever after.
Very sound business forecasting, obviously.
It took YEARS before a launch strategist showed me typical waitlist conversion rates and I realised my launch hadn’t underperformed.
My expectations had been absolutely unhinged.
And that’s why Julie kept bringing the conversation back to two things:
Strategy and capacity.
You need a strategy that actually makes sense.
But you also need the financial, emotional, and nervous-system capacity to stick with that strategy long enough to find out whether it works.
Sometimes that means taking one-on-one clients while you’re building the scalable thing.
Sometimes it means doing the webinar 34 fucking times.
Sometimes it means continuing to talk about an offer even though YOU feel like you’ve said it 800 times.
And sometimes it means recognising that the problem you’re calling “analysis paralysis” is actually just a giant, vague problem you haven’t made specific enough to solve.
At the end of the episode, I gave Julie a hypothetical:
My evergreen course isn’t making enough money.
She immediately started interrogating me.
What does “enough” mean?
How many sales?
In what timeframe?
Okay, 100 sales in four months.
That’s 25 sales a month.
Roughly one a day.
Where do you currently have the most leverage?
Threads.
Okay. Have 20–30 conversations a day. Talk to the right people. Get into DMs when there’s genuine buying intent. Give someone a reason to make a decision.
Suddenly MY COURSE DOESN’T MAKE ENOUGH MONEY AND MY ENTIRE BUSINESS IS BROKEN becomes:
I need approximately one sale per day. What can I do today to create opportunities for that sale?
A much less sexy problem.
Also a much more solvable one.
Or, in Julie’s words:
Go get fucking paid today.
POINT OF THE STORY
Julie’s answer to basically everything is “what’s the problem?” She asks this until the vague fear in your head turns into something specific enough to fix.
Love you, mean it. 🖤
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OTHER LINKS
This episode was edited by Adrienne Cruz.