85: Why I'm Going All In on Email (& Done Being the Posting & Instagram Girl)

✨💌 DOORS ARE OPEN: The Newsletter System: my 6-week program for building a newsletter you'll actually keep writing. Doors are open this week only. Limited spots, we begin Sept 24th!

🌟 Everyone Keeps Asking If This Was Sudden

You've felt it before. That quiet tug telling you it's time to change direction, sitting right next to the louder voice telling you not to rock a good thing.

For six years, I was the Instagram and Canva girl. It's what I was known for, what I taught, what paid my bills.

And lately, nearly every person in my world has been asking me the same thing about my pivot to email: "Does this feel sudden? Are you freaking out, or are you all in?"

From the outside, I understand why they ask. It looks like I woke up one morning and flipped my entire business upside down.

But that is not even close to the truth.

This shift has been building quietly for years, in a pile of small moments nobody else got to see. A poll here. A gut feeling there. A number on a spreadsheet I kept ignoring.

I want to walk you through the real version, because the way I finally listened to my own gut might help you listen to yours.

And because if you've been sitting on a change you're too scared to make out loud, you need to hear that slow is not the same as failing.

💡 The Moment Two Numbers Broke My Brain

Let me take you back to the moment the record scratched for me.

Years ago, one of my early courses was called Batch Like a Boss. Inside, I was teaching women to plan their content, and one of my tips was that one post each week should promote a freebie.

Simple enough. Except a freebie only works if you have somewhere to send people. An email list.

So I asked the room, all 40 of them, who had a list set up.

Two hands. Out of 40 women, two of them had an email list.

I remember the sound in my own head, that record-scratch noise. What? You've built a whole business and you have no way to reach your own people without begging an algorithm to show your post first?

Here is the part I'm not proud of: a few years before that, I was those other 38 women. I had every big name I followed telling me I didn't have a real business without a list, and I plugged my ears. I did not want to hear it.

That day with those two raised hands cracked something open. It became my next course, Start and Grow Your Email List From Scratch. But more than a course, it planted a seed I'd spend years pretending not to see.

Because the truth was right there: the thing my people needed most was never prettier graphics or a smarter posting schedule. It was a room they actually owned.

📉 The Trust Recession Nobody Warned You About

We are in a trust recession. So many people got burned by cheap digital products and overpriced courses that never delivered, and it made the rest of us who actually do the work run uphill for a few years now.

Which means the single most important thing you can do as a small business owner is earn the trust of your audience. Not chase reach. Not go viral. Earn trust.

And trust does not get built by posting a few times a week and praying the algorithm shows it to the right people. On Instagram, you're lucky if a sliver of your followers ever see a given post.

It gets built by landing in an inbox every week, for the people who raised their hand and said, "I want to hear from you." When you send something valuable to that list, you reliably reach around half of them. Compare that to the fraction of a fraction you reach on social.

So when you're finally ready to launch or sell something, those people already know you, like you, and trust you. The newsletter does the quiet work long before the pitch ever shows up.

🎯 The Signals I Kept Walking Past

Once I started paying attention, I realized my gut had been waving a flag for a long time. These are the signs I ignored, and what each one taught me.

📊 Every Poll Came Back the Same

Whenever I asked my audience what they needed from me, the answer was some version of email and newsletters. Not Canva. Not another posting hack.

I asked again this summer, in three separate places: my Instagram stories, my email list, and inside my membership. Same question, same answer everywhere.

The lesson: your warmest people will tell you exactly where to go if you ask them. Stop guessing. Put the question out, then believe the answer they hand you.

🎤 The Stage That Left Me Deflated

About a year ago, a group invited me to speak to 200 women at a conference in Nashville. They gave me two topic options: Instagram and posting, or email marketing. They picked Instagram.

I should have been thrilled. They chose the thing I'm known for. Instead, I felt genuinely let down, and it made no sense to me on paper.

I sat with that feeling for over a year before I understood it. The disappointment was the answer. Sometimes you don't know what you want until you flip the coin and catch yourself quietly rooting for one side to land.

The lesson: your reaction is data. When the "good news" leaves you flat, stop and ask why.

📧 My List Grew While My Reach Shrank

For years, I watched my email list climb past 25,000 people while my Instagram reach quietly got worse and worse, no matter how much I fed the beast.

Today my list sits closer to 11,000. That drop was on purpose. I stopped chasing every subscriber and started keeping the ones who open, click, and buy.

Those 11,000 people do more for my business than every follower I have ever had, combined.

The lesson: a smaller room where people can hear you beats a giant room where nobody does. Size is a vanity number. Attention is the real one.

🌱 Three Weeks Off Made It Impossible to Unsee

This summer I took three full weeks away from posting. I still sent my weekly newsletter and published my podcast, because my systems made those two things nearly effortless.

In the quiet, I finally felt how much energy Instagram had been draining out of me. I came back with more clarity than I'd had in years.

The lesson: you cannot diagnose the treadmill while you're still running on it. The growth you can't seem to force sometimes just needs a change of environment.

💪 The Confirm Button I Stared at for Five Minutes

Right around the time I made the call, I changed my Instagram handle from my business name to my own name.

For six years, I'd been standing in front of you asking you to build on land you rent from an algorithm, while my own name was built the exact same way. I couldn't keep teaching one thing under a name built for another.

So I sat there and stared at the confirm button for a solid five minutes. I kind of wanted to throw up. I had people I respect a lot in my ear saying, "Why are you doing this? Don't."

I hit save anyway.

The lesson: I have a business friend who calls this climbing cringe mountain. The thing that makes you cringe, that scares you, and you do it anyway. I've been climbing it since day one, and every single time, it got easier only because I did it scared instead of waiting to feel ready.

📣 If You've Been Waiting to Feel Ready

The doors to my brand new program, The Newsletter System, are open right now, and this is the only week they open all year. The next round isn't until February.

It's the whole system I wish someone had handed me back when I hit send on my very first newsletter, cursor blinking, laptop open, certain everyone was about to judge me for even trying. Built and rebuilt from over 300 weeks of my own sends, packaged so you never have to figure it out the hard way like I did.

If you want an audience you own and a newsletter you can keep up without dreading it, that is exactly what we build together inside.

🛠️ Resources From This Episode

• The Newsletter System: my 6-week program for building a newsletter you'll actually keep writing. Doors are open this week only. 

• Start and Grow Your Email List From Scratch: my original email course, the one that came straight out of that two-hands-out-of-40 moment. 

💪 You're Allowed to Change Your Mind

If this pivot looks fast from where you're sitting, I promise you it wasn't.

The real, sustainable things build slowly in the dark, long before anyone else gets to see them. My shift only became visible this fall. It started years ago, in raised hands and unread polls and a feeling I couldn't explain on a stage in Nashville.

You are allowed to be really good at something, even known for it, and still decide it's not what you want to go deep on for the rest of your business. Being good at something is not the same as it being your life's work.

It took getting trimmed back and set in a new environment for me to see it clearly. And the only reason I could act on it at all is that I'd already spent years quietly building the one asset nobody can take from me: a list of people who said yes to hearing from me. Nobody can shadow ban it. Nobody can wake up one morning and decide to hide it from my people.

That's the whole bet. Owned beats rented, every single time.

If you're ready to build that asset for yourself, The Newsletter System is open this week, and I would love nothing more than to see your name land in my inbox.

Now I want to hear from you: what's the change you've been too scared to make out loud? Drop it in the comments below, I read every single one