Trying something new in my business and the low-key success it brought

The learning opportunities are plentiful, even from small, one-off experiments

A couple of weeks ago, I experimented with a new-ish offer

I’ve launched a lot of offers this year and for the remainder of 2026, I have more workshops and group programs mostly mapped out.

So I wasn’t planning on offering something sort of last minute and since I’m not an overly compulsive person, I thought through carefully whether it made sense and what value it would offer me, my business and my audience. I also wanted to make sure that if no one signed up, I still felt like it was worth it.

What if no one signs up? - I figured that if no one signed up then just the exercise of thinking through the value of the offer and codifying that in a sales page was definitely worth it. I would also be able to launch the offer again without having to build it fro scratch - this definitely felt like a win.

What if only one person signs up? - I still calculated this as a win. With one person, I would get a new Notion learning perspective that could either give me new information or help confirm things I think I already know about the specific Notion learners I work with and look to attract. I could also make a mini-case study and use that to promote the offer again.

I ultimately decided to go for it and launched Pop-up Coaching - a one-hour coaching session with limited availability.

Meeting people where they are

In Notion Builders Club (a series of 9 workshops packaged under one offer) I was getting some very detailed questions from members who were clearly grappling with larger challenges in their Notion workspaces:

• How do I create a high-level, integrated system?

• When do I know when to start a new database?

• How can I manage tasks across my different projects?

These were big questions that my hyper-focused workshops weren’t designed to answer. That wasn’t a bad thing but it meant there was an opportunity to meet people in this deeper place of seeking.

I decided that offering a one-off coaching session to my whole audience wasn’t the best fit. My suite of offers is designed around a laddering of knowledge, skills and trust which made it an easy decision to just invite those who were already actively engaging with my work.

Specifically, this was anyone who had purchased a one-off workshop, become a member of Notion Builders Club or joined a cohort of Digital Gardening - fewer than 50 people.

And you know that when you launch a thing or pitch a thing or send out a proposal, a flame of hope burns inside you that your intended audience will come running. In my case, that both did and didn’t happen.

I certainly had the capacity for about 10 people but I knew that a realistic conversion rate was about 2% which is exactly what I got. And if you’re not great at math, 2% of 50 is 1.

Does 1 customer sound like a failure? Not to me.

You see, pivoting a business is basically like starting a new business. Even though I’ve been in business since 2018, I’m about 7 months into this pivot and so the results I can expect are year 1 results, not year 8 results. So I was thrilled that one person signed up for my Pop-up Coaching offer - an experiment based on a need I identified from a more mature offer.

Meet Melinda Staehling

Melinda is a late-diagnosed AuDHD Certified Nutrition Specialist® and Licensed Nutritionist whose focus is nutrition for neurodivergent people in their menopausal stage in life. She’s also a writer (she writes incredibly informative and engaging blogs about menopause) and a podcaster - check out this episode about recognizing the challenges of regular eating in menopause.

The crux of Melinda’s challenge was seeing the value in a tool like Notion and she’d dipped her toe in enough to know she liked it but not enough to make it stick, defaulting back to Google products plus pen & paper. In fact, she described her Notion use like this:

I don’t use Notion until it’s an emergency (haha not really but that’s what it feels like). The way I interact with Notion feels very reactive - I realize my podcast organization is behind, so I go in and update that dashboard, I’m about to have a client introductory call, so I open Notion to fill in some info there, and then it’s hidden away again.

As a service provider who needs to be mentally and emotionally available to clients in the throws of menopause, using core systems in this way is going to create a level of disregulation I’m sure Melinda could do without.

And this really gets at the core of being able to figure out the right systems, the right tech stack, the right integrations so we’re able to get to a place where we’re offloading a lot of the mental work in order to stay focused on what matters to us.

You can read the full mini-case study I created for my work with Melinda here.

Creating a hypothesis-focused coaching session

I reviewed Melinda’s intake information, developed a list of suspicions as to why she was using Notion in this reactive way and came up with a hypothesis to test.

I ran my theories by Melinda to get her reaction:

Me: I think the two Notion systems you identified aren’t fully working for you - they may be overbuilt or they may be templates that you don’t fully understand. Does that sound right?

Melinda: Yes (points out the template)

Me: Your Notion set up isn’t part of a larger connected system - one that would include what comes before and what comes after. In other words, there’s no trigger that easily moves you into a Notion system and you don’t know when the system in Notion ends so then you don’t know when to stop. Does that sound right?

Melinda: Yes (+ emphatic nodding).

Me: You’re not fully committed to the systems you’re using so there’s no habitual use and therefore no way to tell what’s work and not working. Does that sound right?

Melinda: Yes (more emphatic nodding + sheepish grin).

With my suspicions confirmed, I offered my idea - let’s focus on something small so you can experience a win before you grow your workspace further. Melinda agreed, here’s the hypothesis I came up with:

Hypothesis

Notion’s functionality is fundamentally different from all of the other operation-type systems that came before it which makes for a steep learning curve. Melinda is struggling to find enough purchase that would lead to successful use and so creating a simple but highly functional and impactful system will encourage increased confidence with Notion which will in turn allow Melinda to expand into new systems with added complexity.

The results of my experiment went beyond my expectations

I didn’t go into this with everything fully outlined. For example, it wasn’t until the morning of my call with Melinda that I decided to make a mini-case study and that I could get some of it done before our call using the answers to her questions - information I was already reviewing in anticipation of our call.

Our coaching session was at midday so I continued writing the mini-case study after our call and had it wrapped up by the end of the day.

I identified the following outcomes:

• I had helped Melinda in a way that directly addressed what she needed.

• I had an marketing tool to help future clients get a sense of how I approach coaching around Notion.

• I had a deeper understanding of what my audience struggles with as Notion learners.

• I accurately diagnosed what was causing Melinda’s behaviour - confirmation that I know what I’m doing.

New offers aren’t just about making revenue or hitting sales goals - they are also experiments and opportunities to respond to our audience and learn what they have to teach us.

To get a notification for the next round of Pop-up Coaching - join the waitlist here.