How Did This Broke Math Teacher Make Millions After Writing a Self-Help Book?
Last December, Christie Hayden was recovering from her fourth surgery for life-threatening conditions related to the birth of her baby. Fortunately, she had a job that allowed her to stay at home — she was teaching academic courses online to overseas students. But it certainly wasn’t paying the bills.
Around that time, without even remembering how she got on this list, she received an email from Angela Lauria’s “Author Incubator” program, asking the simple question, “Would you like to write a book?”
This might seem like the least-likely time someone might think of writing a book, but when Hayden saw that email, she knew it was for her. “I thought, ‘I’ll never get in,’ as I was not a writer,” she said. But the next day, she got a call, saying they loved her application, and they wanted to interview her. Right after the interview, she found out her proposal to write a book was accepted.
“After a good cry,” Hayden said, “I thought to myself, ‘This is the moment when I surrender.” She wasn’t sure how she was going to afford the program. “My lizard was climbing the walls,” she said, referring to the fearful part of her brain. But she gathered all her resources, because she knew she had to do it. Once she signed up, “I wanted to have buyer’s remorse, but there is no buyer’s remorse. Angela won’t let you — she holds your hand from the first moment and makes sure you are progressing towards your dream, without looking back.”
Hayden had a small Facebook group called “Fearless Intuitive Babes,” where she auctioned crystals and did live psychic readings. She wanted to write about manifestation, and one of the main features of Author Incubator is the insistence that authors develop their platform for their book by teaching. With the newfound confidence she gained from the program, she did a Facebook Live for her group, and in that broadcast, she announced a 5-day manifestation challenge.
Ninety-eight women signed up for the challenge, and Hayden was off to the races. One of the women in her challenge manifested $5,000 during the five days. Another one manifested a car. Hayden knew she had something special here.
Hayden’s teaching was a big hit with the women in the group — they loved that she was adding material that was complementary to their interest in crystals, but that also went beyond this topic. The women in her group asked how they could continue studying and working with her.
This is when Hayden decided to create her Fearless Intuitive Babe VIP group, as a subscription-based model. “Everyone said you can’t do subscription-based VIPs unless you have 100,000 followers. And I only had a few hundred followers. But again… sacred rebel. I felt the fear and did it anyway.” Forty-eight of the ninety-eight women in the challenge signed up for the VIP, at $33/month. Hayden went from $0 to $1,500/month in the space of a month.
But that was just the beginning. The women brought their friends into the group, and it grew from 300 to over 2,000. The women were getting such amazing results, and were so excited to be together in this group, that they were asking Hayden if she had any way for them to go deeper with her. That’s when she created the “Ignite Your Truth” mastermind. Twenty of the women signed up for $4,444. With one offer she earned more in a month by far than she had been earning in an entire year of teaching academic courses online.
Hayden says that, in her mastermind, “I take women through a process of shedding the shit that no longer serves them, helping them fill the cup and loving the shitaku out of themselves. We peel back the layers of their onion, find their zone of genius, set their heart on fire. I help them build a business, market, and get their first clients.”
Hayden works both with women who are in the corporate world, and stay-at-home moms, but these seemingly different groups have something important in common. “They’ve been putting other people ahead of them their whole lives — and they’re ready to put themselves first in their lives for the first time ever, and live their dream lives, on their own terms.”
The magic was flowing — as 11 of these women signed up for an additional $22,222 backend program. Plus 20 more women signed up for the mastermind, which had been raised to $5,555. All of this with no advertising, affiliates, or referrals. “I just show up as me, as my authentic, raw, vulnerable self. I give people love, energy, and hope. I get them to see, “If I can do this, so can you.”
Last month, in May of 2018, Hayden booked her first $1 million in revenue and at this rate, she is set to bring in more than $2 million in her first year of business. And all this was before her book, Ignite Your Truth, came out from Difference Press. With her book finally out, the growth is happening even faster.
Hayden is now building out a team to keep up with the expansion. And, she’s looking for land in Florida to build a center where people can come and experience healing and growth first-hand. “It’s going to be a Harry Potter-like campus,” she said. The magic continues. And it all started when Hayden answered one simple email.
