← The Spiritual Hustler
The Spiritual Hustler
From $63/Year to $900K/Month: How Maria Wendt Built an 8-Figure Machine and Is Teaching Others to Build Theirs
01:05:46
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Jessica Zweig
Welcome to the Spiritual Hustler Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Zweig, multi seven figure serial entrepreneur, best selling author and branding and business coach. And this is a show where we are redefining the word hustle. Reclaiming our true feminine nature of magnetism and putting down the self judgments and shame around loving to work and making a lot of money at it. On this show, you're going to learn how to stop hustling and start spiritually hustling. By pressing play, you are now part of a new movement of women who don't hustle for money. We hustle for meaning. We don't hustle from lack. We hustle for love. We don't hustle from survival. We hustle for humanity's thriving. We hustle toward healing the ancestral programming of fear and step into a new understanding of safety in the body to receive this shift isn't going to only heal your life.
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It's going to make you a whole lot richer too.
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This is the Spiritual Hustler podcast.
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Well, hello my beautiful spiritual hustlers and
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welcome back to the podcast. Get ready to get your minds blown today. If you are any type of entrepreneur running your business, using social media and the Internet to market your business, you are about to get a masterclass. If you're new to the show, welcome. I'm your host, Jess. If you're not new, welcome back. You guys know the drill here on the Spiritual Hustler podcast, we go as woo. And you know how I feel about that word. I'll just be sidebar blunt. I don't really love that word. It just is a diminishing word to awake conscious, remembered evolutionary humans having a spiritual experience and doing the work. But we call it woo just to make it simple. But we do talk about all the mystical, all the magical, all the quantum on this podcast. But we also get down to business. We talk about money, we talk about how to generate real impact, how to grow a community, how to build a business, scale it to multi seven figures, eight figures and beyond. And today you are going to learn from one of the top female entrepreneurs in the industry. I basically just picked Maria Went's brain on this podcast on how she's done it. Maria Went is a globally recognized business coach and entrepreneur with over a decade of experience. She is guiding her clients, of which she has thousands of, into growing their companies. And as she has done so, she's grown her company $1 million a month. She is almost cracked it. She's like in the 900s, she's so transparent. She is so honest. She does not gatekeep. She breaks down how she makes the sausage, if you will, inside of her business. And if you are interested in scaling low ticket products, mid ticket products, high ticket products, services, businesses products and offers that come in the form of packaging, online or offline how build a team where you are in your business couple days a week versus all day long. She has got the codes. I just was so struck by Maria's heart. She has been through real life, she has gone through her own seasons of poverty, she went through a divorce, she's a single mom. She really has a consciousness that I think really speaks to the power of resilience and how to really create a business that yes, makes you a lot of money and helps a lot of people at the same time. She has created an audience over 3 million devoted followers. She's someone to really follow, learn from. I think that women like Maria need to be on pretty much every microphone because her honesty is what is missing from the space. If you're one of those people, and I'm not saying that you are, but there is a layer in the online world that can feel triggered at times by people sharing their wealth at such a high level. But I want you to look for the people that are doing that in service of bringing you up with them, that are sharing their playbook, that take the time to be generous with their knowledge. I really think that if you're going to take anything away today, you're going to take so many things away. This is again a masterclass. Get out your pen, get out your paper, you're going to learn social media, you're going to learn ads, you're going to learn productization, you're going to learn how to build a team, you're going to learn how to scale your time, you're going to learn how to think like an eight figure CEO today. But if you're going to take anything away, it's to take away the principle of generosity. Because I think that is actually Maria Went's magic and her code that has made her so successful. She pays it forward. She doesn't move in exclusivity, she moves in inclusivity. And to me that is a sister with a capital S. I have been a student of Maria's work for a while. I've been watching this girl rise over
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the last few years.
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She's basically blown the fuck up. And when she came into my studio in Nashville and we sat down in this meta moment where I was like above my body watching this interview and could not believe how open she was about how she has really, really done it. Because she wants you to do it too. When you lead from the heart. And I talk about that all the time on this podcast. The magic of being truly of service. You get to rise, she gets to rise, and we all get to rise. And that is what it's all about. So without further ado, here is my incredible conversation with Maria. Went and go find her on social. Go check the links in the show notes. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast, rate and review this show. This specific episode I know is going to blow your mind open, but most importantly, blow your heart open. Enjoy.
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I'm so happy to have you on my show. You came into my Explore page a year ago.
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Doing my job.
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Maria Went
Then, girl, you are.
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Jessica Zweig
You've been raising the ring.
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Maria Went
Thank you.
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Jessica Zweig
So I know your story. I'm so excited to talk to you. I'm so impressed by what you've built. I actually love what you just said about that carousel because it really speaks to how grounded you are. And like, it's all about vantage point, perspective. And it's important to always have, like a beginner's mind. Stay hungry, continue to have ambition for more. There's nothing wrong with that. That's like the spiritual hustler movement's mission where you just started from the bottom, girl.
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Maria Went
Truly, like the negative started what it was below the bottom, because that's where I started.
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Jessica Zweig
And now we're here. Yeah. And I'd love to actually go back because you're making what, $25 million a year? Like, what's the number?
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Maria Went
Yeah. Average right now is $900,000 a month. This close to doing that. But I think the remarkable thing is how we're delivering that. It's all in a low ticket. Like, it's $27 per hour.
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Jessica Zweig
I know. I want to dig into the model. I have so many questions for you. I want to really use this episode, actually to get super granular on how you're building.
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Maria Went
I like talking numbers.
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Jessica Zweig
I know you do. And I love talking about, like, science and mechanics and systems and strategy and psychology and productization. We'll get into all of that.
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Maria Went
But what I really would love for
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Jessica Zweig
everyone listening to go back to the year you started your business. You made $60.
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Maria Went
Yeah.
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Jessica Zweig
And 2013. Yeah. Now you're multi eight figure business. So take us all back. What were you doing? Who were you? And then let's take people up into the now. Let's like do a TLDR version of It. But let's tell your story. I'm really fascinated.
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Maria Went
Well, I'm exc. Excited for the opportunity to share it. I think my story. And at the time, it's hard, right? A whole year of working, you've made, you've got $63 to show for it. That was a really hard year. And then the second year I only made $350. So it took me two years to make like $400.
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Jessica Zweig
You're working a side job, I imagine,
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Maria Went
in college, working essentially what was a full time job between the several. I had like three little part time jobs ended up being about 40 hours a week. And I was trying to get this business off the ground. So I really didn't have a life at all in college. And at the time, that's so frustrating. That's so discouraging. But now I'm so glad that I only made like $60 in my first year. Because if I have a student that comes to me and says it's been 90 days and I've only made, I've only done three sales and I've only made $300 in my first three months, I'm like, do you understand that like I would have given anything for the opportunity to make three sales in a three month period. You made like 10 times more than I did in my first year. And so it's such a good reminder to them, like, hey, I made $63 in my first year, $350 in my second year, $8,000 in my third year. But like, that's three years where I really wasn't making significant amount of money. And meanwhile everyone's always like, oh, I had my first $10,000 a month. I had my first 30,000. Like you see the big numbers and then you compare them to your reality and I tell them, like, look, I'm not a fast learner. If anything, I'm a slow bloomer. Like, it took me a long time to figure this out. And so I actually do mean it when I say that if I can figure it out, anyone can. Because I'm not that good at tech. I don't think I'm that stupid. But the one thing that I have that I think I do better than anyone else is consistency and perseverance. Like, I have such a love for solving problems. I am a workhorse. You can't beat that. The skills that I have are developable skills. Anyone can do it. Anyone can learn the muscle of perseverance and learn the muscle of consistency. And that's encouraging. That's good. Thank God I didn't have a huge year because people would have used that as an excuse to not go for what they want in life.
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Jessica Zweig
I'm obsessed. So $8,000 a year you went into coaching more mid High Ticket?
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Maria Went
Yes, at first, yes.
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Jessica Zweig
And now you're doing all exclusively low tick, which is phenomenal. Fascinating. We'll get to that. But talk to me about how the business started to like kick and take off and walk us through the evolution into High Ticket and then out of High Ticket.
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Maria Went
Yeah. Basically three stages of my business. I started off as a freelance graphic designer and that's what I was doing in 2013, 2014, pretty much all the way up until like 2016 or 2017. I was just literally designing logos, designing websites. And that was phenomenal. I learned sales skills, I learned delivery skills, I learned client relations skills. And I got super good at sales and marketing, especially marketing. Marketing. And it got to the point where people were paying. I had such a long wait list me. To design people's logos. Just me? Yeah, just me. And people would pay me in February and wait all the way until November to actually get their logos and websites designed. And so I had this, like, cult fans of people who needed to have their logo designed by Maria went. And so my other, like artist friends, my other graphic designer friends came to me and they're like, what are you doing? How do you have such a wait list? What are you doing? Right. So I started showing my graphic designer friends out of college or just like in the space what I was doing to get clients. And then they sent their friends. And about a year after that, I looked up and I realized I had more people wanting me to show them how to get clients, how to like make money in their businesses than I did actually designing logos, which was remarkable because I had such a lot of people wanting me to design their logos. And so I think it was around like 2018 is when I fully pivoted into like just, hey, here's how to get clients. And I did that. And that was like $2,500 for like three months of one on one calls for a while. And then eventually I had to pivot to group coaching because I had so many people wanting to do.
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Jessica Zweig
And this was your network that then expanded into like their network?
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Maria Went
Yeah, Facebook and word of mouth. Like, it was nothing. Like, I wasn't that savvy. Like what we've got going on now versus what we had then is very, very, very word of mouth. They sent me people and then just. I Did do organic marketing in Facebook groups. And then eventually I was like, okay, I gotta charge more. So that's when I started selling more high ticket stuff. I eventually worked up to selling $72,000 coaching packages. Wow. And it was good. I'm good at selling. I got, yeah, I can sell anything. But I also felt very responsible for charge. Like if I'm going to charge $72,000, like that's a lot of money. And I really want to do a good job delivering that. And so it got to be a lot of self imposed pressure. Like I put that pressure on myself. And then I had my daughter and I was like, I'm sick of being on Zoom calls and I'm sick of her being in a daycare. Like that's what I had chosen to do at the time. This was 2022 to 2023. I don't wanna do this anymore. I wanna do something low ticket. And all my mentors said, you can't do that. You can't have a seven figure business.
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Jessica Zweig
Why did they say that, do you think?
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Maria Went
Because couldn't see the volume side of things. They couldn't wrap their brain around the volume that they knew I would need. At the time, I was only making like a million dollars a year. So they couldn't see the way I could get to seven figures selling a $27 thing. Because. Right. They do the math and you're like, you would need thousands, hundreds of sales a day and thousands of sales a month. And that's exactly what we're doing now. Yeah, yeah. But they had a vision of what they had done. I had a vision for what I wanted to do. And it was very much pioneering. Like I don't really know that many people that are running an eight figure business off of $27 low ticket products. And so very few. And I had to really figure it out. But I knew somehow that I could do it. And I knew somehow it was just a gut instinct thing. And so I took that leap and shockingly like almost replaced my income on the first or second month. So it was a very scary pivot. Like I think the second or third month of doing the ticket, I had like an $80,000 month, which was huge for me. Right. Because that was about what I was doing with high ticket. I was a, call it a God thing, call it an alignment thing, whatever you want to call it. And then, then the business exploded because I was out of the delivery. Because when you're out of the delivery, all you need to do is focus on the Sales and the marketing, and that's so scalable. And I could bring in 250 people a day and the business wouldn't break. It would just grow.
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Jessica Zweig
Okay, I want to reverse engineer all this. I'm so excited to personally learn from you as much as everyone listening. So you sunsetted all your high tickets?
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Maria Went
Yeah, I phased out. Contracts are refunded.
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Jessica Zweig
Okay. Wow. And then you went deep on that low ticket model, and in the first one to two months, you were making 80,000. What were you selling?
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Maria Went
Y.
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Jessica Zweig
What levers were you pulling? And how did you create all of that client acquisition and demand?
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Maria Went
Because I talk to a lot of people who want to pivot their business from high ticket to low ticket. They're burnt out. They don't like having to take a bunch of sales calls. They want to unlock a lot of time freedom that I get to have. And so one of the things I tell them that I didn't realize when I made that pivot from high ticket to low ticket is that there's so many people who have wanted to work with you, who have been in your world for several years, who are warm, who are waiting for you to launch a low ticket thing. You know, you've been charging 10,000, 30,000, $72,000, and then you drop something that's like $197. All those people that have been saying no to you on the sales calls or have been following you but couldn't afford it, they're falling over themselves to buy. And I didn't think about that when I launched. I just was like, okay, I'm just going to make this pivot and hope it works. But I made all that money because for years, I had been just creating these leads that couldn't buy my high ticket thing. And we just don't think about that when we're not. We're used to nine out of 10 people saying no or, you know, whatever it might be, people just not being a good fit, but they like you and they like your content, and they like what you stand for, and they like what you teach. And then you finally release an offer that they can afford. They're so excited. And that is when I realized the thing that I had been missing that I am now obsessed with with low ticket, which is the impact that I can have is so much bigger. Think about it. I used to maybe get three sales a month, four sales a month. Now I do 250 orders a day. That's 250 people a day that I get to help and that I'm very clearly very passionate about what I do and, and who I help. And so for me, the low ticket, Jo, not just been the money, although that's fabulous and I love it, it's also been the sheer volume of people that I get to help and impact. Yes.
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Jessica Zweig
I mean, that's what we're all about here. It's not just money, it's impact. It's making money in service of the greater good and the greater collective. And you can so feel that from you.
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Maria Went
Yeah.
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Jessica Zweig
So you sold. What was the product that you took off?
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Maria Went
It was talking about how I was getting clients with Instagram. I don't. It was. This was like three years ago, three or four years ago. And it was a great product. It was just kind of walking them through my organic, like funnel, what I had been doing. I'm always a really big believer that I'm never going to teach something that not just I have done myself, but I've experimented with, I've tested. Now with every course that I release, we have students in all different industries stress test it to make sure it works really well. So our courses are extremely vetted to make sure they're going to work for everybody who buys them. And I did my own version of that with my very first one. And now, you know, three years later, we have quite an extensive process for us to launch a product.
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Jessica Zweig
I know you do. Actually, that's a great segue into my next question because it's like, like your story is so inspiring and I love the comment you made around your perseverance and your consistency is like the secret sauce to basically creating the life of your dreams, full stop. It's really sexy to hear that you make $900,000 to a million dollars a month.
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Maria Went
But what I would love to break
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Jessica Zweig
down to because I'm in the space too. Like, I know you've gotten yourself to a place where you only work a couple hours a week and we'll talk about that. But like the amount of engineering and science of funnels and lead pages and social media and organic and ads. Like, can you really walk me through how you have scaled it? I mean, you've opened up your product suite, you sell how many low ticket?
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Maria Went
I don't know, hundreds.
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Jessica Zweig
Right, Exactly. So you have to build the product, right?
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Maria Went
Yeah.
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Jessica Zweig
So let's maybe start with what makes a really strong low ticket offer.
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Maria Went
That's such a good question. And I don't get asked that enough because anyone's experience and selling a high ticket is almost useless when it comes to selling a low ticket. And so a lot of people in my space see what I do and they want to make that pivot, but they're bringing their experience in selling high ticket and they can't seem to understand why the low ticket is floundering. And so I've become like a little bit of this mission. Like I want to tell everybody what to do so that they do it well. In a high ticket product, it's typically covering a broader range, right? So like, you know, manifesting your way to millions or like the wealth academy or you know, seven figure business, right? There are these broad titles and then you get in. It's a huge lot of modules and it covers a lot of things. And the goal is like, this is all you need or this is pretty much all you need, right? Like you have a really good end to end experience with a high ticket product for most people.
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Jessica Zweig
You just described mine.
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Maria Went
Yeah, and that's very typical. That's very, very typical. Problem with that is that won't work for a low ticket. What works for a low ticket is like 8 to 10 videos solving a very, very specific problem. You know, for me, it's like how to get more sales with your Instagram stories. Whereas in a high ticket program, it might be everything related to Instagram, it might be everything related to sales, it might be everything related to organic marketing. But with a low ticket, as little videos as possible to achieve one specific, and like I use the word hyper specific very intentionally. Problem. When people make the pivot from high ticket to low ticket, they struggle because they're used to filling high ticket programs with value. But in a low ticket product, you're looking to solve one problem, one burning problem in as few videos as possible. That's the value. So my students go in, they'll watch eight videos, know exactly how to get more sales with their Instagram stories, and then they'll go post to their stories and then they'll make eight sales from that. And then they come back and post my group and give me a ton of testimonials. Like that's this like beautiful cycle I've got going on where every product achieves the result. It's meant to. So then I get testimonials. So then people buy more and then there's an amount of trust in that customer because they bought that one little low ticket thing, they got eight sales from their stories. Then when I launch my next product, they're like, oh, well, I want that one too. And so that's where a lot of Our just growth has come from is. Yeah, we have like a 60 repeat customer rate which is very high.
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Jessica Zweig
That's huge.
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Maria Went
Yeah, it's very. Our industry is like 15 to 30, so we're doing at least double what our industry does. Yeah.
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Jessica Zweig
Okay, I have a couple more questions on the product side and then we'll get into the marketing side. You said you have hundreds of low tickets at this point.
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Maria Went
I think so. What I know we have is 15 pages of products in the Kajabi portal and there's like 10 products per page. I think like around 150 if I were to guess.
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Jessica Zweig
And how are you coming up with them?
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Maria Went
Well, we have a product developer now.
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Jessica Zweig
Oh, you do?
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Maria Went
So we brought someone on he full time helps us idea.
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Jessica Zweig
You're the visionary behind it, right?
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Maria Went
Are you ideating? I'm out of that a lot. I'm still in it. But we knew we set a goal that this year we were going to launch 50 products. And last year we had done around 12. And so to go from 12 products to 50, that's going from one a month, which was very much of a push to us to now like essentially four a month a product a week, which is. We knew right away making our goals for 2026 that there's no earthly way that I'm going to be able to do that. Or even my sister Rose, who's like my right hand in the business, we weren't going to be able to do that. And so we brought on someone who had spoken at our events. He's a phenomenal guy and he has a lot of experience specifically in creating products for Etsy, which is like one degree adjacent from what we do. But it's still in the low ticket digital product world. There's a lot of harmony.
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Jessica Zweig
Are you doing like customer survey data? Like how are you finding what the market wants?
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Maria Went
That's a good question. That's a really good question. We just know, and I know that's not a good answer, but we just have a really good finger on the pulse of our customers. And what I will say is that what we do as a company very well, that I think a lot of people struggle, which even we struggle to do is put what we want aside and we launch the products we know our customers want. And so sometimes that means I'm teaching on things I give a shit about, like copywriting. People desperately needed me to launch a copywriting course. I didn't want to teach copywriting because I knew the copywriting well, like writing good copy is very hard to teach. And I knew that it was going to be a lot of work for me to figure out how to teach a copywriting course in a way that would actually make an impact on their checkout pages and, you know, their conversion rates. So I really didn't want to do it. But we just knew that that's what they needed, and so we did it. And so we have our finger on the pulse of our customers and we launch what they want, even when we don't necessarily want to do it ourselves.
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Jessica Zweig
Wow.
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Maria Went
Yeah.
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Jessica Zweig
So, okay, from 25 to 26, you've gone from 12 products a month.
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Maria Went
Yes.
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Jessica Zweig
To 50. You're making close to $1 million a month. This all has happened in the last couple of years.
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Maria Went
I would say two years. Like, this last, like 2025 was huge. And 2026 is going to be even bigger. Like, it's insane.
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Jessica Zweig
And that speaks to your marketing.
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Maria Went
Yeah.
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Jessica Zweig
And your following has blown up. I mean, you just said you are almost close to a million on Instagram. Yeah.
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Maria Went
A million on Instagram. 500, 000 on YouTube. And something I took because we're not even on TikTok right now. So I told my content director, I'm like, we need like something decent on TikTok. I don't even care what it is, but I think we have like 800 followers on TikTok right now.
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Jessica Zweig
So what's amazing though, still. Congratulations. Thank you. Your content is fire. I'm going to go follow you. You link it in the show notes, but because social media is front end. Right. And then we get people into our funnel and our email and check out pages and to transact and I'd love to dig into to your notes on that.
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Maria Went
Yeah.
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Jessica Zweig
But let's talk about social first and how you've been growing at that rate. What your strategy is. Are you using ads? Like.
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Maria Went
Yes. I'm glad you mentioned ads. I was about ready to say that. So about 60% of our new customers come from ads and 40% come from organic. We spend about $250,000 a month on, which is about $10,000 a day.
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Jessica Zweig
Thank you for being that transparent.
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Maria Went
Yeah, we have a. If people follow me, I literally share, like, what I spend in my personal life. So you can go online and see, like, what I spent on restaurants and what I spent on clothes. Like, what I pay. Like, I don't. I just have a general, like, labor line item. It's. People are nosy, so it's good content. Right. But like, they're nosy because no one ever Shares that, like, nosy doesn't have to necessarily be a negative word. Like, that's the stuff I wanted when I started my business, and I don't see what I have to lose by disclosing it. I can't think of a single reason not to. Such a good point. I share my good months, I share my bad months. I share the months where I make $500,000 in profit and the months where I only make $200,000 in profit. Like, I share it all. It's really good trust, which is a big part of my social media strategy. So we believe that every business owner, even the brand new ones, should be running ads. Could not agree more. Huge core component of our teaching, and especially meta, with, like, all the AI changes that meta has been rolling out. Anyone who can publish a photo to Facebook can run ads and get sales. And what it does is it shortens the time horizon for you to get sales, which as a beginner is the momentum that you need. You run an ad like, our students will get sales within a 24 to 48 hour period. Do you run ads as one of your courses? For sure. We have several ads courses. Teaching different. Like, because we use ads to grow on social media as well. So we have courses on that as well. And that's like a big thing. Our students, they always wait too long to run ads. Newbies always wait too long to run ads. I waited too long to run ads. I bet you probably. Yeah. And most people do. And so one of our big things is getting more people to run ads. And so that's one of the first things I like to share is, hey, even though we're this ginormous company with ginormous followings, 60% of our stuff still comes from ads.
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Jessica Zweig
And I want to also normalize. You said you spent $250,000 a month on ads. 10k a day you scaled up.
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Maria Went
Right? Exactly. I started with $5. Right. And that's something I. Yes, we have to teach our students that, because otherwise they hear big numbers. Yeah. You take $5, you turn that into a 27 sale, you take some of that, and then you run ads for another $5. Now you have two sales.
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Jessica Zweig
It's actually like the most fun math
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Maria Went
you could ever play.
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Jessica Zweig
Like, if you get your ads right, it's truly like money out for money.
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Maria Went
It's literally amazing. Yeah. You put one dollar in, you get two and a half dollars out.
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Jessica Zweig
Yes.
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Maria Went
Okay. Yeah.
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Jessica Zweig
So organic is another big part of your strategy. I feel like you show up one of those that's posting like multiple times a day.
- [24:26]
Maria Went
Yes. What I think about when it comes to social media, and this is especially relevant for women or really any minority, is that the fact that we have access to an opportunity to reach people and grow our businesses and make money and essentially advertise for free is such a remarkable opportunity that I lose my shit when people complain about posting on social media because it is the most ungrateful complaining attitude. And I get that it takes consistency. So I want to have grace. But at the same time stop complaining and realize what an opportunity you're sitting on and you can't be bothered to pick up the phone and film your face two or three times a day. Like that is my attitude towards it. And it's tough love. It's tough love. But do you understand that like in the 1930s and the 1940s and the 1950s, you would have to have access to so much capital to run commercials to locations. Right.
- [25:19]
Jessica Zweig
And by the way, only men could do it because we didn't have credit cards until 1950s.
- [25:22]
Maria Went
This is exactly what I'm saying. My grandmother, when she was maybe a little younger than me, could not have gotten a credit card unless her father or her brother or her husband signed for it. And so you have access to an opportunity to get your message out, to get your content out, to get your product out. And all you have to do is film a one minute video and get it scheduled once a day. I'll take even one time a day. Like if you can't give me two or three times a day, I will take once a day. And so it is just a matter of perspective that needs to get flipped so we realize what an amazing opportunity we have to post on social media.
- [25:55]
Jessica Zweig
Thank you for saying that. In my community, I segmented them with love into three different categories. The hiders, the provers and the floaters. Floaters are like the women that are. I teach a lot of like feminine embodiment into business that just struggle with structure and systems and need to anchor into the reality of 3D and like actually make money. And that's how provers is my old identity. It's like putting all of our worth into our productivity.
- [26:19]
Maria Went
Yeah.
- [26:19]
Jessica Zweig
And then majority of them are hiders, like women who are just so afraid of being seen. And what you just framed is honestly, Maria, one of the best justifications and motivations that I've ever heard. I couldn't said it better.
- [26:31]
Maria Went
Thank you.
- [26:32]
Jessica Zweig
Serious.
- [26:32]
Maria Went
Just think that anytime. You know this too, right? Anytime we shift into gratitude, like stuff flows Right. It's better that way. I think, too. I think people hide because they have. Like, their fears are so unrealistic. Like, I'm worried to show up because what if people make fun of me? Or what if people lose comments? Or what if the video flops? Or what? Like, all these different what ifs? And I. Cause I hear the. You know, the same thing with my students. They're worried to show up. I've been doing this for a long time, and there have been a few hateful comments, but for every 1,000 loving comments, there's a troll.
- [27:04]
Jessica Zweig
Absolutely.
- [27:04]
Maria Went
I'll take that ratio any day.
- [27:06]
Jessica Zweig
Yes.
- [27:07]
Maria Went
And we did the math because we can track how much each reel makes or each carousel makes. We have very sophisticated software, which I'm happy to talk about, and I make around, like, $2,000 per Instagram reel that I publish or per carousel that I publish. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but, like, that's the average. And I'm like, oh, okay, cool. So, like, literally getting paid to post. And, like, my students, like, it's. We're living in this post 2016 social media era where your follower count doesn't matter. It's the content you post. So someone who has two followers can get a reel that has 200,000 views, just like someone that has two followers. So your followers don't even really matter anymore. Sadly, as someone that has a lot of followers, I wish they mattered more than they do. But this is good news for our hiders. For those who aren't, like, you have just as good of a chance. I have to work just as hard as you do to get my content seen, so you're not off the hook for that reason either.
- [28:02]
Tali Kogan
Okay, you guys, you know that I am all about the rituals, the energy,
- [28:06]
Maria Went
the practices that keep us in touch
- [28:08]
Tali Kogan
with the divine and our power, the things that we can add to our life that really, really remind us who we are. And one of my favorite rituals pretty much every morning, true story. Is putting on my Malkari jewelry. Okay? Because honestly, these pieces are not just jewelry, they are activated sacred talismans that honestly help me lead with a consciousness as a confident woman in my business and my life. They are seriously activations, you guys. When you put them, not only are they gorgeous and versatile and they stack, and there's so many options to choose from, they are spiritual activations. And that's really because the founder of Melcari is my best friend and stylist, Tali Kogan, who is a visionary woman in the world of fashion who lives by the Belief that you can have anything in life that you want as long as you dress for it. And I am here to preach from the mountaintops that that is true.
- [29:11]
Maria Went
And so when I wear her pieces,
- [29:13]
Tali Kogan
I feel freaking unstoppable. Yes, they're edgy and high fashion. They'll take your do this little outfit or your T shirt and jeans to absolutely new heights. But they're also deeply spiritual. Each necklace, each ring, each bracelet is a code. And like the lion of Malkari roaring through you, it reminds you that you are already the queen of your own business in your life. When you put them on, you're going to feel a difference. And if you're curious, which I know you are, to up your style game and your frequency, check the link in the show notes and use the code JESSICA15 for 15% off your order. Because it's not often that accessories feel like medicine. And Lakari is feminine power you can wear.
- [30:05]
Jessica Zweig
Okay, so you have your ad strategy running clear on the investment. You post three times a day.
- [30:11]
Maria Went
Yes.
- [30:11]
Jessica Zweig
And you have a sauce to how you post. I've heard you talk about this before. Can you talk about your particular formula? I'm sure it switches up.
- [30:18]
Maria Went
Yes. Do you mean, like, with, like, how. I always make sure it's vulnerability or caveat.
- [30:21]
Jessica Zweig
Do you have, like, a formula, like a day to day? Because three posts per day, seven days a week, can feel really overwhelming. But I heard you talk about this, actually, on a different podcast, and I thought it was so brilliant the way you've segmented it to just keep yourself accountable and consistent.
- [30:34]
Maria Went
So Instagram is my big one. It's my, you know, meat and potatoes. And we're posting four times a day on Instagram right now. Oh, my God.
- [30:39]
Jessica Zweig
Four times a day.
- [30:40]
Maria Went
So we're posting four times a day. We have a content director. He's. Oh, my God, he's so amazing. He's literally starting Monday. I don't say poached him from another company because I don't know that that's accurate. But let me just say it this way. He decided to work with us in January and couldn't start until April because he was honoring other commitments. Got it. And I can't wait for him to get started because he's right now he's been, like, the content director for this massive Instagram account. And so I think when he comes on board, we're going to be posting even more than four times a day on Instagram. So stay tuned. This is the current schedule. In the morning we have. So it's two reels, two carousels is like every day. Um, 7:00am is a reel that's basically just a straight CTA, straight pitch. Um, the way we pitch is very strategic. So I'm never going to say, like, buy my course, invest here. Like, I never use pitching language. What I do is highlight the pleasure points and kind of stop talking in that silence. People want to learn more. I don't think enough people realize that you actually kill the sale when you link in bio. You kill the sale. When those pitches kill the sale, you highlight the pleasure points of whatever it is the problem you help them solve and then you just shut up.
- [31:43]
Jessica Zweig
So everyone's gonna go run to your Instagram now and see all the content you posted at 7am and take notes.
- [31:47]
Maria Went
Okay. Please do. Please just literally copy and paste.
- [31:49]
Jessica Zweig
Obsessed with you. Your generosity is so beautiful.
- [31:51]
Maria Went
Okay, I'd to like, like talking about this.
- [31:52]
Jessica Zweig
Continue.
- [31:53]
Maria Went
So the noon is carousel.
- [31:55]
Jessica Zweig
Okay.
- [31:56]
Maria Went
And it's typically a nurture. Those are the ones that like, the one, this tax one that's blowing up and getting myself boiled alive is like, that was a nurture one. And it's basically just Maria's diary. What's going on in Maria's life with nothing shared. So that could be some of the things I go through as a single mom. That could be some of the things I go through as a business owner. That could be some of the things I go through as someone that had to pay over a million dollars in taxes. Like, it's just me sharing what I think of as what are the things in our industry that are taboo that no one talks about. I'm gonna talk about it. And so I actively look for the things we're not allowed to talk about. And I purposely talk about it. Cause I think, A, you need to talk about it, but B, it gets me good engagement.
- [32:33]
Jessica Zweig
Well, yeah, it's strategic of being provocative. I often say be loved or be hated, but don't be ignored. It's like one of my favorite quotes. Have a point of view.
- [32:41]
Maria Went
Yes.
- [32:41]
Jessica Zweig
Be willing to trigger people.
- [32:43]
Maria Went
Yes. And that's hard. That was really difficult. I was really worried to be hated. Born people pleaser. I'm Midwest girl, Right. I grew up in Ohio. Like, we love to please everybody. And so I had to teach myself that it was safe to be hated. And it's okay. Like, it's actually, you're safe, you're fine. Your physical body is fine. And I so regulated now, frankly, going through my divorce is what regulated me. Because it's like, regulate or die. Yeah. You know, regulate or die. Yeah. And so T shirts. Yeah, true. I don't know truly. So the noon is. The is. Is nurture as a carousel. And then same thing for 3pm what's been working really well for me at 3pm now is sharing my past, my story. So I've been talking a lot about the fact that I was homeschooled. I grew up in a very religious family. I'm the oldest of nine kids. Like, we weren't allowed to wear jeans. Like, we had skirts past our knees. Like, very conservative, like ultra conservative background. And I'm very grateful to my parents. Like, we have a fairly good relationship. And so it's never coming from a place of attacking and it's just observing how that made me who I am today. And frankly, a lot of it was amazing. And that is like, me being homeschooled is one of the reasons I'm an entrepreneur. I'm okay to be different. Freaking nerd. Like. Like, I liked being homeschooled. I'm going to homeschool.
- [33:55]
Jessica Zweig
Ellie, I've heard you talk about that. It's like it was a competitive advantage.
- [33:58]
Maria Went
It was such a competitive advantage. I have been free of a lot of the things I see my peers have to work through, which you totally can a lot of my students do. Being a homeschooler and being raised to even just dress the way I was asked to dress. You stand out, you're looked at and so you get used to it. So that's 3pm and that's been doing really well. So it's a lot of just like nurturing, trust building. And then at 5pm is typically what we call like a studio reel, which is like, yeah, it'll be a clip from this or other podcasts or I also do, in my studio, I will just do like CTA call to action ones where it's like, I just made a list of 150 Instagram hooks to help you get more followers. Comment hook below. Like literally just straight pitches on those. And those do really well. Those actually get me the most followers. The studio reels. People trust people with microphones. And so we can go into that. There's a whole. I have a whole thing on that, but those give me the most followers. And then the other content nurtures and monetizes.
- [34:56]
Jessica Zweig
So you go into the nurture and monetizing content because you're driving people from your social and it sounds like you're on YouTube, but let's just stick with like the Instagram play into the DM'S to sign up for something or go to a landing page.
- [35:08]
Maria Went
Straight to a checkout page. Checkout.
- [35:10]
Jessica Zweig
Straight to a checkout page.
- [35:11]
Maria Went
Yes, that's a huge one.
- [35:12]
Jessica Zweig
Yes, let's talk about that. Because you skipped the, the landing page, the sales page is all the education, it's all right there on the checkout page.
- [35:19]
Maria Went
People from our world who have been doing it for a while have all these things that they think nurture people, warm them up. But what I like to say is that the things that we think warm them up, the things we think nurture, actually act as obstacles to the money. Your webinar is an obstacle to the money. Your 7 day email sequence is an obstacle to the money. Your video sales letter is an obstacle to the money. Send them straight to the checkout page. That's what I do.
- [35:45]
Jessica Zweig
Okay, there's. Let's dissect this like.
- [35:48]
Maria Went
Because I love it. Yeah.
- [35:49]
Jessica Zweig
Very counterculture. Yeah.
- [35:50]
Maria Went
Yes, it's very. People are very surprised.
- [35:52]
Jessica Zweig
But it's only makes sense if you know well a couple things you're doing all of the right things. You're nurturing the relationship on social by showing your face, sharing your story.
- [36:00]
Maria Went
But I would argue that a good checkout page, you don't even need to be. They don't even know me. A good checkout page. A cold like our checkout pages. Even from ads, like it's a cold ad.
- [36:08]
Jessica Zweig
So you're not getting your checkout pages optimized.
- [36:11]
Maria Went
And the way you optimize it is with a good low ticket product that solves a very specific problem. Because people have a solution to problem, they don't give a shit who's teaching them. They just want a solution to that problem. And so if you can articulate this is the burning problem that you've been struggling with and I'm going to specifically teach you to solve that. And you only have to pay $27 for it. It's a no brainer.
- [36:29]
Jessica Zweig
It's my follow up question though. Do you feel like that strategy of that customer cycle only works best for low ticket?
- [36:35]
Maria Went
I mean if it's anything under a
- [36:36]
Jessica Zweig
thousand dollars, Anything under a thousand dollars,
- [36:38]
Maria Went
that's how I break up. Anything over $1,000 is high ticket. Anything under a thousand dollars is low. That's how I think of it.
- [36:42]
Jessica Zweig
At least got it right. So let's go back to the checkout page because I know we're not like actually looking at it, but if there are any specific like bells, whistles, optimization, placement.
- [36:51]
Maria Went
There are, there are actually. So the Most important one is you get something that's like the, you've probably seen it, the little pop ups that say so and so. Just bought this thing 10 minutes ago or whatever. Yeah, that makes a tremendous difference. We'll be like, why is this page not converting? And then we'll be like, we forgot to install the on it. So that's amazing.
- [37:06]
Jessica Zweig
That's a big one about like marketing tactical tools that just make all the difference.
- [37:11]
Maria Went
That's a must have. Yeah.
- [37:12]
Jessica Zweig
Yes.
- [37:12]
Maria Went
Okay. What I find with checkout pages, and this is what I teach my students, is people click away from your checkout page and don't buy, especially in something under a thousand dollars when they aren't clear on what they're going to get. Like really clear. Right. Like we forget that we're selling digital products, we're selling pixels. So you better do a damn good job of articulating why they should get those pixels on their computer or their phone. And if you don't do that, they're not going to buy. And most people don't do that. So they don't buy. And then the other thing is urgency. They need to know not just what I'm going to get, but why do I need to get it right now. Low ticket world. That's the world of impulse wise. That's the world of like, hell yeah, I'm in and just, I'm going to fill my checkout information out. And so you have to have. We have like nine urgency angles that I teach and the best pages have like four or five urgency angles. I'll let you get away with just one. But the more you have, the more they're like, oh, I can't click away from this page until I buy. That's how we want them feeling when they're on that checkout page.
- [38:04]
Jessica Zweig
And how did you come to learn
- [38:05]
Maria Went
all of this for stupid trial and error?
- [38:07]
Jessica Zweig
Really?
- [38:07]
Maria Went
Yeah. Like I experiment all the time with everything. And I tell my students, like nine out of ten experiments are disasters. I lose money, I lose time, I lose years off my life. But that's how like it's Edison with the light bulb. He's like, oh, I know 9,999 ways to not make a light bulb. That's how I feel about marketing. I know thousands of angles that don't work. I know thousands of pricing structures that don't work. I know thousands of deliveries. Like, I've done it all memberships, I can't stand them. Like, I have, I have opinions on all of it. But like, because I know because I've experimented.
- [38:36]
Jessica Zweig
Yeah. So what's your opinion on mem? I have so many questions for you, but let's.
- [38:39]
Maria Went
Memberships. Okay. This is my. I'll give you my quick soapbox.
- [38:41]
Jessica Zweig
Please do.
- [38:42]
Maria Went
With memberships. The average membership life cycle is on average, some are better, but on average it's like 90 days. It's three billing cycles on average. You know, if you're like a standard, around a hundred dollars a month, but in general, even at like higher ticket things, it's around three to four months. Right. So you have all this work. People are reluctant to sign up for a membership. Like, they're becoming more and more reluctant to sign up for a subscription. Right. And then you have this insane pressure of delivery to keep the customers. You're trying to get your. Yes. You're trying to get. What is the word for. I'm blanking out what the word for it is. But you're basically like your turnover rate. What, there's like attrition. Attrition, yeah, exactly. You're trying to like, make sure that stays low. So you are working like 10 times harder for someone who statistically is likely to leave after three to four months. What I tell people to do is stop doing a membership. Let's say you were charging like $100 per month. Charge $300. That's essentially the same lifetime value that you were going to have either way, but give them lifetime access. So whatever you were going to put in the most. People who have memberships have like an unbelievable library of stuff already. They get lifetime access to that. This. The conversion rate on someone to pay $100 a month or $300 for lifetime access. It's insane. You convert so much more. You're getting so many more sales per the amount of people going to that ch. And the value perception for the customer is so much higher because they're getting lifetime access after, like, they're get. It's the same thing, but it's how it's positioned that makes it so valuable.
- [40:04]
Jessica Zweig
What do you think about having a live component to your membership?
- [40:06]
Maria Went
You can, but it's a bonus. I have a Facebook group where you pay $200 and you get lifetime access to the group. It's. I should be charging more for it, honestly, because at this point we have like 3,000 successful students in it. So it's really good. I just go live and answer questions for a month, but there's no obligation on my end. So once a month I pop on. I can stop tomorrow if I decide I Want to stop to do?
- [40:24]
Jessica Zweig
I can do it whenever you want.
- [40:25]
Maria Went
I do it whenever I schedule it as I.
- [40:27]
Jessica Zweig
When you have time.
- [40:28]
Maria Went
Yeah.
- [40:28]
Jessica Zweig
Amazing. Okay. I want to go back to your whole sales journey. Instagram, we got sales pages. They sign up, they enroll that you have their email. Do you nurture in your funnels. Do you have like that all built out?
- [40:39]
Maria Went
I send emails three times a day.
- [40:41]
Jessica Zweig
Okay.
- [40:42]
Maria Went
But I don't think of it as like nurture slash pitch. Every email is going to nurture and every email is going to pitch. So every email, Every email. But like even my pitches give you value is how I think about it. Like you extract value from even the way that I pitch. There's value in that to you. And so. So in the morning, it's what you would consider a more traditional nurturing. It's just, hey, here's what's going on in my life. And I went down like, it's just so whatever I'm feeling like talking about, there's literally no structure to it. I just sit down and like. Because my content director hasn't started, I'm doing like 90% of my Instagram content, a hundred percent of my emails, and a hundred percent of YouTube.
- [41:13]
Jessica Zweig
Like, and you still only work a
- [41:15]
Maria Went
couple hours a week, which we're gonna talk to. I work Tuesdays and Fridays.
- [41:18]
Jessica Zweig
We're gonna come back to that.
- [41:20]
Maria Went
So I send an email at 7am Pretty nurturing. But there's a PS pitch and then a 1pm straight pitch. Like I created a course on copywriting. Click here to buy it. Like it's straight up pitch and then a straight up pitch for 5pm so it's two pitches, one nurture. And each email on average makes me around 15 to $1,700. Because we track that too.
- [41:39]
Jessica Zweig
How many subscribers do you have?
- [41:41]
Maria Went
Almost a million.
- [41:42]
Jessica Zweig
Wow.
- [41:43]
Maria Went
Yeah, I think maybe 600,000, 700,000. I don't know. Like, I'd have to ask my sister Rose. She knows that number. But hard to take a guess.
- [41:49]
Jessica Zweig
What's your email software? Do you recommend ActiveCampaign?
- [41:52]
Maria Went
I spend thousands of dollars though.
- [41:54]
Jessica Zweig
Yes, it's very.
- [41:55]
Maria Went
But. But let's say I spend $3,000 a month or $4,000 a month on ActiveCampaign. I make that in three days.
- [42:01]
Jessica Zweig
Well, it's just, it's any industry. Money in, money out. You're an online information based business. Your best vehicle. It's like you're not stocking a warehouse full of products.
- [42:09]
Maria Went
True, it's true.
- [42:11]
Jessica Zweig
Thousands of dollars on an email software because it's a main vehicle for how you reach your customers full stop.
- [42:16]
Maria Went
See, I shouldn't be complaining. You're right. Yes. No, you're right, you're right.
- [42:18]
Jessica Zweig
That's how I think about it.
- [42:19]
Maria Went
It's a great way to think about it.
- [42:20]
Jessica Zweig
I run my business online. I use active campaign as well. I think it is the best I'm trying to get them to be a sponsor on my show. So, like, thanks for talking about it. But like, truly, it's the best offer you can use. It's the most sophisticated and it truly lets you understand the intelligence of your community and it generates revenue.
- [42:38]
Maria Went
Yeah. I mean you can do all kinds of segmenting with it and all of that. We have tons of email automations. Again, like that's. I have my sister who has people who works for her. Like, that's where the, like it's starting to get to the point where I don't know everything going on and I don't know, like there's people on the team who know more than I do.
- [42:53]
Jessica Zweig
How big is your team?
- [42:54]
Maria Went
You know? Can I tell you? We just went through a huge hiring stage and I sent a slack to the whole channel and I almost shit myself when I saw it was going to 23 people. I was like, what? Because I was. I'm so used to being like. Like it was me by myself until 2020. And then we brought on three people who are still with us. There's people that are like everything about you. Yes. We have a very high people on Team Maria only leave when we ask them to go. No one quits because they, like people don't want to leave. Sometimes we do have to fire people and I'm not, not shy about that. Oh, I don't mind at all. Like you. Yeah. If you're getting to the point where Maria's bothered enough, you've been cruising for bruising for a long time. No, no, I don't give me some of those quotes.
- [43:31]
Jessica Zweig
I'm such an empath. Even when people suck and have to
- [43:34]
Maria Went
go at like, it's a loving act to release them.
- [43:36]
Jessica Zweig
It is.
- [43:36]
Maria Went
And it's a loving act to your team members and to yourself. And to myself. Exactly. I see. Keeping on a subpar team member is one of the most disrespectful things you can do to the other people that work with you that bring your A game. So I have no problem letting people go at all. We give them opportunities. It's not like you're shocked. Like we're very communicative of and we're very good in our hiring process, and expectations are very clear. So if you can't do it.
- [43:59]
Jessica Zweig
Yeah, yeah, I know. I love that authority. It was like a rite of passage for me back. I've been running business for 18 years. The first person I ever had to fire. It felt like a rite of passage.
- [44:08]
Maria Went
Yeah.
- [44:08]
Jessica Zweig
It's super painful.
- [44:09]
Maria Went
Yes. Yes.
- [44:10]
Jessica Zweig
I've gotten a lot better at it over time, but you're absolutely right. Like, people don't not know. Like, it shouldn't come as a surprise.
- [44:17]
Maria Went
I can't speak to every female founder, but I feel like in general, female founders are much more forgiving, you know? Yeah. And so I think that we need. And I can't speak for every woman. Right. Everyone's different. But I feel in general, with all of the women that I work for, these are people that should have been fired six months ago. Like, they should have been gone a long time ago. And so you're okay. You gave them plenty of chances. Like, you were off the hook. Permission granted. Like, have the tough conversation, like, you want to be a founder, you want to be a leader, have the balls to fire someone. Yeah.
- [44:44]
Jessica Zweig
It's such an activation.
- [44:45]
It really, really is.
- [44:46]
It's an upgrade.
- [44:47]
So. Okay.
- [44:48]
I love that we broke this down. Thank you for explaining, like, the whole way you've engineered. I'm sure there's so many more things we could hear from you and getting into the true nitty gritty, but I just wanted to normalize, like, the $900,000 a month top line revenue. It's an operation. Yeah. And it's a ton of trial and error. Like you said, it's a ton of systems, it's people, it's investment, it's tech, it's strategy. And it doesn't come overnight. There's no hacks. Right. And you've really mapped that out now. At the same time, you built this big, beautiful team. And like I said, I came prepared. Maria, like, I've been studying your stuff.
- [45:22]
Maria Went
You work two days a week, and
- [45:24]
Jessica Zweig
you have this philosophy that founders, entrepreneurs in general, are doing so many things they don't need to be doing.
- [45:31]
Maria Went
Yes.
- [45:32]
Jessica Zweig
So what are those things?
- [45:33]
Maria Went
Yeah.
- [45:33]
Jessica Zweig
And what do they need to be doing?
- [45:35]
Maria Went
Well, you're gonna get me on a soapbox with this one too. So I'm here for all of the soapboxes. I feel like, like, many founders who haven't yet made the jump from seven figures to eight, like, what's the word? Like, productivity decisions or working decisions, or, like day to day job decisions. Based on their ego. You want to feel needed. You want to feel like you are the savior of the business. You want to feel like you're the required one, you're needed. That misguided sense of ego is keeping you at the level you're at because actually, you're not needed and you're not important. And that's a good thing for the business. You're throttling your baby. It's your baby and you love it and you're suffocating it and you're being a helicopter parent, parent. And it is so hard. So I just want to validate that because I am not perfect at that. I don't even know if we're formed. I'm a control freak, like, and I'm working on it and I'm trying to get better, but my instinct is to micromanage the colors of a checkout page button. Like, that's my instinct. That's where I come from. But I was forced to overcome the te, like my ego when I had Ellie and I became a single mom and I wanted to be with her. It was a core value of mine that I was going to be essentially a stay at home mom to her. I refused to compromise the abundance and the career that I wanted. I just, like, made a decision to the universe that I'm having both, and you go fuck yourself.
- [46:49]
Jessica Zweig
Like, I'm having both.
- [46:51]
Maria Went
Damn it, I'm gonna do it. And so I realized that I had to stop doing a lot of things. And it wasn't like, I was a genius. And I just instinctively was like, oh, yeah, I'm just gonna quit. I just had to stop doing 80% of what I was doing. I just couldn't do it anymore. All the things that I thought were important, and I was unable to do it because I needed to feed my baby. Literally feed my baby. Right? And so then, yet the business kept going and I kept making money, and I kept making money, and then I kept making more money, and then I scaled further than I'd ever scaled before. And then I doubled it, and then I doubled it again. And so that taught me all those things that I used to do at seven figures that I thought were important. My peers who are still at seven figures, they're still doing them, except they didn't have a horrible divorce when their baby was six months old and had to, like, upend their life on purpose the way I did. I'm grateful for that because that created a lot of company upheaval that I don't know how I would have gotten without that. But it made me realize pretty much I can confidently say 80 to 90% of what most people are doing who aren't at eight figures or like a million dollars a month. You don't need to be doing it. And if you stop doing it, nothing would break, nothing would happen, the world wouldn't end. And then you could be freed up to put your time towards sales and marketing, which is what would actually scale your business.
- [48:01]
Jessica Zweig
Business, wow.
- [48:02]
Maria Went
So meetings, to give you an example, like meetings. We are a zero meetings company. We don't have meetings. People spend so much time on meetings. That could literally be a two second slack. And so I can't physically be on meetings because most of the time I'm with Ellie. And so it's just a company policy that we don't have meet. You know, maybe once a month I have to sit down there and update Zoom and hop onto a meeting. But like for the most part we're a zero meetings company and we all collectively get more done. Everyone hates meetings. But I tell my people, like, even in your delivery, you think that meeting, that weekly meeting where you have with your clients client, it's not actually really helping your client either you think it's part of your delivery, so you have to do a weekly call or you have to do this, that your client know that your customers actually need to not be listening to you on Zoom. And they need to be out there implementing and doing their own marketing experimentations. So don't just get you off meetings, don't just get your team members off meetings. Get your freaking clients off meetings too. They should not be sitting around these hour long Zoom calls. That has a very low chance of implementation of anything. It makes you feel productive again, the ego. And no one's actually getting any marketing done or sales done, which is actually what drives the needle forward in your business. So that's my soapbox. I warned you.
- [49:05]
Jessica Zweig
I'm here for it.
- [49:05]
Maria Went
It's so good to hear.
- [49:06]
Jessica Zweig
It's so refreshing. It's so inspiring. It's so needed. I think what I want to know now is Tuesdays, Fridays.
- [49:13]
Maria Went
Yes.
- [49:14]
Jessica Zweig
What as the eight figure CEO mindset, what are you doing and how are you spending that time?
- [49:20]
Maria Went
It's a very good question. What you see on most days when I'm at the beach with Ellie and I'm living this like luxurious, laid back life is the exact opposite of that when. So she was with her dad at like 8am to Tuesday to 8am Wednesday. So like a literal 24 hour period. And that looks like a manic cartoon of a time lapse because of everything I'm getting done in that 24 hour period. Usually either on a Tuesday or on a Friday, I have a speech somewhere out of state or in state or I have a podcast appearance. So usually in that week. One of the days can't be like a sitting at my desk working day. Exactly. Today is Friday. That's exactly what we're doing today. I usually do them on Tuesdays or Fridays days. And so one of the days is an appearance somewhere. Those are very good for content. Whether it's content with a stage and with people listening, which is great social proof, or it's content like this that are really good clips. That's typically a Friday or typically a Tuesday. That's one of my days. And that's usually because of the way I travel. I have to wake up early, go do my appearance and come back same day. And I do that because I don't want to be away from. I have a nanny that I could use. I just never do. She's actually, actually brought Ellie with me to this weekend. It's first work trip with Ellie. That's beautiful. And we're testing it out and it has been sick. I think I'm bringing her to every work trip. It has been awesome. So after this, they're actually going to pick me up and we're going to go do like some candy thing. There's something you can do. We can make like candy. I don't know. I don't know. Kelly, my nanny found it.
- [50:44]
Jessica Zweig
Nashville's a great city for.
- [50:45]
Maria Went
So yeah, we're going to go do something together after. So that's a cool new unlock. Typically what that looks like is I fly in, do the appearance or do the speech and then fly out. Like that's what I'm doing next week. I'm speaking at Natalie's event. I'm flying into Austin, gonna speak at her event. And then me and my videographer are flying back.
- [51:01]
Jessica Zweig
And is your videographer capturing like B roll? Cause they're creating a ton of content besides the camera content.
- [51:06]
Maria Went
Yes. So he's the new content director that I talked about. So he's. We were just discussing this this morning. He's gonna set up some cameras to get like horizontal, professional stuff. And then he's gonna be like bopping around with an iPhone, just kind of getting everything else. And I sent him my slide deck. So we've already discussed like, these are gonna be the clips probably that will like, so look for them when I say that. So we do a lot of that kind of prep work. And then what I do on the Tuesdays and pretty much everything that I do can be categorized under the umbrella of content creation. So Tuesdays, that's when I sit and write all my emails. That's when I sit and create all my Instagram content. That's when I plan like for shoots or I respond to emails about speaking, like other speeches I'm having. Everything that I do is directly related to content creation in some way. And that's what drives our ad creatives and that's what drives or Instagram, like organic content or YouTube. Because I'm the brand, it's the marketing. I think that people do things that feel productive to them but don't actually drive the bottom line eyeballs on your checkout page is what actually makes more sales for you. And so if you're in a low ticket business, your whole reason for existence is to get more eyeballs on the checkout page. And that's how you need to be thinking.
- [52:13]
Jessica Zweig
I'm obsessed.
- [52:14]
Tali Kogan
Yeah.
- [52:14]
Jessica Zweig
So a lot of women listening in the process of going from seven to eight. Yes. A lot of women are in the very beginning of scaling their business, wanting to even like leave their corporate job and go into entrepreneurship. You have such codes at such a high level of entrepreneurship at this stage in your career. But you've, you started from the bottom now. Yeah. Like we said at the beginning. And if you were talking to the woman who's like really building her platform, formulating her model, putting herself out there for the first time, think about the woman, the identity you want to be, and then start showing up as her and you. Maria just painted a beautiful picture of like the ideal eight figure CEO consciousness. And we should start thinking and operating as her now to the best of our ability. But there is seasons of build and there is seasons of grind and the testing and the learning and all of the things that you have done. Like I loved what you said, like I 99 of the time I fail. That's really where I found it.
- [53:09]
Maria Went
Yeah.
- [53:09]
Jessica Zweig
But a lot of women who listen to my show are, you know, know at the early stages of building their entrepreneurial business. Many of them are in the online world, coaching, consulting, services based, but want to really scale their own platforms. What would you say to her? Like what would you say is the most important thing or things for her to think about right now?
- [53:32]
Maria Went
A couple of things even just looking at my own journey, we didn't talk about it at all. But getting out of that marriage was so important.
- [53:40]
Jessica Zweig
I wanted to ask you about that.
- [53:41]
Maria Went
Yeah, there's a lot we can talk about. I'm super comfortable to talk about it. Um, I'm very loyal. And so I stayed until there. It was literally impossible to. And for me, for, like, for the good of everybody, it was just not good anymore. And so what I didn't expect and didn't realize in that moment was how much of my energy and capacity and joy was. Came back to me, let's say it that way, came back to me later. And that energy going into a vacuum gets to be redistributed. And so I redistributed it into my daughter and into my business. And it's not an accident that my business started scaling when I was free of that. It is super correlated. And so I'm not telling people, you know, get out of a marriage or get out of a relationship, but just pay attention to where your relational energy is going. Are the people in your life adding or subtracting? And. And pay attention. Just. Just observe. You don't even need to do anything at that stage except just observe and see. Because I wish I had done that sooner. I think I was plateaued for a really long. Like, it was plateau, plateau, plateau, plateau.
- [54:43]
Jessica Zweig
Right.
- [54:44]
Maria Went
Wow. And so you can literally see it in my revenue data. That's the first thing is pay attention to the energy in your life, because it matters a lot, I think. And then the other thing is you can't be a consumer and a creator. And so people expect that I'm going to sit there and doom, scroll and scroll and spend an hour on Instagram or an hour on Netflix, and yet I will have the brain capacity to joyfully create content every day. You can't do both. And so you really have to sit and think about, is this Netflix show worth my dreams? Is doom scrolling people's Tiktoks worth my dreams? It's not. I don't think that you can do both. And I think when people say, oh, I'm really burnt out, I tried posting a lot. I'm burnt out. Yeah, you're burnt out because now you're spending four hours a day on Instagram, three of them. Are you scrolling? Right? I don't pay attention to how you consume. And I seek in all areas of my life to be a creator, not a consumer. So when I switched from Netflix watching to painting, it was such a joy. Like, I paint now a lot. And it's such a joy when I try to give to my friends rather than take from my friends, it's a joy. And so in all areas of my life, I look to be a creator and I try to avoid consumption even in like the apartment that I live in, it's so minimal. I try to be moderately anti consumption because I think that there's so much joy in the creation. And I, I think you can't do both. And so if you want more of the benefits that come from being a creator, make choices that align with that.
- [56:01]
Jessica Zweig
What did you learn about keeping promises to yourself?
- [56:05]
Maria Went
I think for me, I tell this to people specifically when it comes to being able to create content or just any consistency muscle. But also when I was able to persevere through those first few years of business when I was making $63 and then, you know, 350, I had a habit of keeping my word to myself. And that's what got me through the dark hard times of, especially in the first few years of my business, I told myself I'm going to be a millionaire before I'm 30. And I didn't have any financial evidence that I was going to do that, but I had evidence that when I said I was going to wake up and go to the gym, I went to the gym. I had evidence that if I said I was going to turn in something, I was in the call the price. I'm going to turn in the paper on Wednesday. I turned the paper in on Wednesday. And so I had a habit of keeping my word to myself. And so I trusted myself when I said I was going to be a millionaire by 30. And I literally turned 30 and hit a millionaire millionaire status that month. Like it was the same 30 day period. And so I'm living that now because I, I'm not dating right now because I'm honoring, I'm waiting until my divorce is finalized. It's been ongoing for three years. And so I'm not, I feel very convicted to not date until my divorce is finalized. Like I don't owe him that loyalty at all, but I owe the marriage. I take it really seriously. And yet I want four more kids. And I'm 31. And so the math is like not mathing for me, right? I mean it can but like the temptation is to panic and worry about that outcome the way I could have panicked and worried about am I going to actually be a millionaire? People obsess over the outcome. And so I could be sitting here like, oh my God, am I going to have more kids? Am I going to get married? I can't even date right now. Like I could be sitting here in scarcity, in this moment, with that new life thing that I want, that I'm going to keep my word to myself. I said I wasn't going to date until my divorce was finalized. I'm honoring that. And I have so much trust in myself at this stage that I know that if I can build an eight figure business, which is statistically impossible as a female founder, like it's something like 0.04% of female founders hit eight figures, then I can find a magical lovely husband and have four more magical, amazing kids. And I'm not worried about it. And so I think keeping your word to yourself has such a trickle down effect that you don't realize. You think, oh, I'll skip the gym, it's not a big deal. But it's a really big deal.
- [58:10]
Jessica Zweig
You're a big deal, Maria.
- [58:11]
Maria Went
Well, thank you.
- [58:12]
Jessica Zweig
It's amazing to have you.
- [58:13]
Maria Went
Thank you.
- [58:14]
Jessica Zweig
I could talk to you all day.
- [58:15]
Maria Went
Well, you ask great questions. Thank you. You're very good at interviewing.
- [58:18]
Jessica Zweig
Oh, thank you. I was excited to have you and I really went deep on you and I've been going deep on you for a minute and I'm so glad I got to go deep with you in person. I'm sure we could talk for hours. Maybe I'll have you back for a part two. I get to spend more time with
- [58:31]
Maria Went
you this weekend anyway. Yeah, I'll see you tomorrow.
- [58:35]
Jessica Zweig
But I just a few final quick fire questions for you. You know, we're, we're a bit woo over here. So we're just, we're going to start with some practical. Are you a reader?
- [58:43]
Maria Went
Oh, I read constantly. I feel like, yeah, I'm a homeschooled nerd. Of course I read.
- [58:48]
Jessica Zweig
Incredible. So do you have. Have a favorite business book that you've read and a favorite spiritual book, a personal development book that you've read?
- [58:54]
Maria Went
Okay, so business. I'm really glad you asked this because it's a book every entrepreneur should read, which is called Ready Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson. He breaks down every stage of business. Zero to a million, a million to 10, 10 to 50 and 50 to 100 million. And I'm at stage 10 to 50 right now. I follow it like it's the word of the Lord and I don't deviate from it at all. And that's why I've prospered. Like I really believe that I'm reading that book. It is, I cannot recommend it enough. Let me tell you, aim, exactly what to do to get from 1 to 10, follow it perfectly and then honestly, a spiritual book. Well, I'll do two. I think for me, the Bible, I'm a person of faith and I really just love. I think the Bible has so much practical wisdom and process, like wisdom for wealth. Like I'm very anti debt. I don't like, I'm very like truly believe that debt. Like the borrower was slave to the lender. That's from the Bible. A wise man leaves an inheritance to his children. That's why I'm not quitting work yet. Like I haven't left an inheritance for my children yet. And so I'm not done.
- [59:49]
Jessica Zweig
That's why you're not rich.
- [59:50]
Maria Went
Honestly, I'm not rich yet. I'm a God, people coming for me. But no, I'm. My faith has been something that has sustained me through this last three years and I was very anti religious for a decade before that. So I, you know, coming from my background, I was anti religious for a decade and then I've refound God in the most beautiful way. And I go to church every Sunday and no one knows who I am. And a lot of times I'm getting recognized in public a lot now. And so it's nice to go to, just to go to church. And I'm nobody. I just sit in the pew and I'm nobody. It's just me and God and the peace that I get and the way that the weight of the world is lifted off my. It's intoxicating. I want to go to church more than once a week. It's amazing. So I have to save the Bible for me just from the many things I've gotten not just from the Bible, but my relationship with God. And then I think very practically a more spiritual leaning book that a lot of people should read is called the Big Leap. I love that book by Gay Hendrick. And it's just people self sabotage people at the six figure level and the seven figure level. They're sabotaging left and right, up and down. Like you just see their interpersonal issues. She was ruining their business and throttling their business. And they haven't learned how to allow layers of happiness like, like abundance of happiness. And so they experience a win in one area and they sabotage in the other. And Gay Hendricks talks about that and the Big Leap. And so I think a lot of people should read that book as well.
- [61:03]
Jessica Zweig
I'm obsessed with that book.
- [61:03]
Maria Went
Yeah, it's a great book.
- [61:04]
Jessica Zweig
It really reframed my entire trajectory in my career, to be frank. Okay. Provocative question. Do you believe in extraterrestrials?
- [61:11]
Maria Went
I don't think there's any reason why I couldn't. I haven't thought about that question, but I don't know why I think about that from like a Christian perspect perspective. Like, why do we think we're the only species that somehow Jesus came to? Like, that's a little presumptuous of us. So I'm totally open to it. Yeah.
- [61:25]
Jessica Zweig
Okay. I love, I love that answer.
- [61:26]
Maria Went
The universe is big. It's kind of weird to think that we were the only people.
- [61:29]
Jessica Zweig
It's actually bigger than big. It's infinite. Yeah.
- [61:31]
Maria Went
It's never undoing. Yeah. It's probably more statistically possible that we aren't the only ones. So, yeah, I think probably I'd have to say, yeah, that's a good question.
- [61:37]
Jessica Zweig
I am an extraterrestrial.
- [61:38]
Maria Went
And we can talk more about that offline.
- [61:39]
Jessica Zweig
So you have met one.
- [61:41]
Maria Went
Do you.
- [61:41]
Jessica Zweig
You mentioned God, you mentioned Jesus, and a lot of people answer this question this direction. I believe that God means it's such an intimate relationship. It's like our own definition. And we find. We, we, we leave it, we find it again. I'm, I'm like, hashtag God is cool again. Like, it's really in the mainstream and I'm here for it. I'm wondering if you. Do you have, like, a particular angel or like, ancestor or spirit guide that you feel a relationship with?
- [62:06]
Maria Went
Yeah, that's interesting lot there, I think, for me. So I was raised Catholic and I'm. I stepped away from the Catholic Church for 10 years and was very anti Catholic. Not just anti religion, but like, specifically anti Catholic. But it has been such a joy for me to come back to Catholicism. Like, I'm hard. It is kind of trending, actually. I didn't know that, like, but it is kind of coming back into the mainstream media and. Or just mainstream. Like, we're more aware of. Half my tick tocks are Catholic tick tocks now. And there's a person, person that, like, there's a saint, Saint Joseph, and he was the stepfather of Jesus. He was the husband of Mary, who was the mother of Jesus. And he's what I look for in my next spouse. He was a stepdad. He treated the mother of Jesus with such respect. He was so loyal. He was so, like, traditionally he's known as so loyal and so quiet. And so I guess a spiritual figure that I speak to or think about or talk about would probably have to be him. He just resets my Standard for what I want in a manner can. And just that there are men like that out there which obviously me going through what I went through, like oh man, suck. And then I'm like having to come away from that. And so I think I would have to answer. Yeah. St. Joseph, that's a beautiful answer. Yeah.
- [63:17]
Jessica Zweig
Thank you for sharing that final question for you, babe. I speak a lot about the new earth in my work. Okay. The new earth is a consciousness, a reality, a dimension if you will, that is here right now, that is rooted in love, that is rooted in possibility, that is rooted in, in limitless supply, infinite abundance for all. And it's very antithetical to a different paradigm which I call the 3D, which is rooted in fear, which is what most people think is real, which is rooted in scarcity and survival and competition.
- [63:48]
Maria Went
And like if you win, I lose.
- [63:49]
Jessica Zweig
Me versus you, polarity, separation, consciousness versus like unity consciousness. And it's a place I, I believe women like you are actually living.
- [63:59]
Maria Went
That's interesting.
- [64:00]
Jessica Zweig
So my last question for you is, as that lands.
- [64:04]
Maria Went
Yeah.
- [64:04]
Jessica Zweig
What does it mean to you to be a co creator of the new Earth right now?
- [64:08]
Maria Went
I think that I channel a lot of stuff I don't have words for. So I know about this much of the metaphysical and I channel it about this much. And so it's interesting to hear you describe what I've thought and I'll explain how I think about it if that's helpful, please.
- [64:23]
Jessica Zweig
Yes.
- [64:25]
Maria Went
I think that we don't understand the brain at all. And I think that we don't understand consciousness at all. And I think that people say things like manifesting isn't real. It's like, well, I've manifested everything in my life. And so I think that just like we didn't understand the law of gravity and an apple went up and it came down. I think that there's also a reality that we don't understand yet that I can tap into and bring things into life. And so it sounds like a little bit about what you're thinking about, about, but I think it's not understood. I think that we're just ahead of the curve. I think that you project us out another couple thousands of years and I, I hope more people understand this. All I know is I do create things and I am a co creator and it's actually like Christian people have a problem with it and I'm more in the Christian circle and they have such a problem with it. But I'm like, it's actually very biblical to be a Co like Jesus says, ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. If you had the faith of a mustard seed, you could move a mountain. Like, there's so much evidence, evidence that we are tapping into something that we don't understand yet. And it's tangible, it's real. And even people like my mother who are super like, anti it, like sometimes they're like, oh, that was spooky. Like, I can get you like people who are like, very skeptical to see it in myself. And so, yeah, I think that there is, I think you have words for something that I don't have words for. But I feel what you're talking about and I tap into what you're talking about. You just have better, more labels for it than I do. It's just, I just have the sense of, of like I create things and haha, there it is.
- [65:51]
Jessica Zweig
Yeah.
- [65:51]
Reflect something to you.
- [65:52]
Maria Went
Yeah.
- [65:53]
Jessica Zweig
I think we're, we speak the same language. We just have different expressions, words, embodiments of it. But it's the same mission, which is taking the channel that you are. The channel that I am, the codes and the gifts that you have. The codes and gifts that I have, and spreading them with so much service and love and true passion, which you clearly are like the walking embodiment of, to help humanity, AKA your students. My clients rise and remember how limitless they are.
- [66:22]
Tali Kogan
Right.
- [66:22]
Maria Went
Don't deserve that at all.
- [66:24]
Jessica Zweig
Yeah. And it takes women like you and I, and I think every single one of us is available to be that conduit. Yes, absolutely. We just have different trajectories where we get a little bit, maybe more insight or courage earlier on. So we become a leader, we go first, but then women can step up and they can go first for the women that they touch and they. So and we all have that, honestly, I believe, responsibility.
- [66:46]
Maria Went
Yeah, I agree with that. I think for me, what my gift is practice. Like, I take things that are so complicated and I have such a strength to like, boil it down and get to like, okay, one plus one is two. And so I sometimes get lost with some of my peers who are, you know, very deep in the metaphysical. I'm like, this all sounds amazing. I have no idea what you're talking about, but it sounds awesome. And so I think that like, maybe that's what like my gift is, is just taking these things. Like, all I want is for women to make an extra. Like, like really? I would say, like, I don't want to help a few people make millions of dollars. I want to help millions of people make a few extra thousand dollars a month like that. I know for sure that's what I was put on this earth for. And some people who make more than a few extra thousand dollars a month they do go on to like full and total abundance. I am hyper focused on that first step. Like if I can get someone to make her first dollar online, it's all over from there. Like so that's, that's my like hyper focus. Yeah.
- [67:38]
Jessica Zweig
You're doing it.
- [67:39]
Maria Went
Yeah. Thank you.
- [67:40]
Jessica Zweig
You're changing the world. It was an honor to have you.
- [67:42]
Maria Went
Thank you. So thank you so much for having me. I don't often get such a great interviewer, so thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, you're so welcome.
- [67:48]
Jessica Zweig
Thank you. I received that.
- [67:49]
Maria Went
Thank you.
- [67:50]
Jessica Zweig
It was a joy to have you. I could again talk to you forever more for that came from.
- [67:53]
Maria Went
Thank you. Thank you so much.