Want to add $100K in creator income to your existing services business?
In this week’s episode, I coach Ali Schwanke on pricing, bundling digital products, and leveraging her existing audience—showing you exactly how to build profitable, scalable offers without cannibalizing your core services.
Join us as we explore identifying your best passive income opportunities, packaging your expertise into clear products, and quickly validating your idea before you launch.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:13 Marketing Is Simple When Your Strategy Is Sound
03:07 Escaping Marketing Chaos
06:18 Why Most LinkedIn Outreach Fails
08:02 How Ali Built Simple Strat
10:08 Growing Her HubSpot YouTube Channel
15:59 Mapping Revenue & Audience Assets
21:11 Finding Ali’s Best Passive Income Opportunities
25:48 How to Price & Package Digital Products
38:51 Using Decoy Pricing To Boost Sales
46:39 Designing the Perfect Pilot Program
55:18 Recap & Next Steps
Follow Ali:
LinkedIn
Website
Instagram
X
YouTube
Follow Nathan:
Instagram
LinkedIn
X
YouTube
Website
Featured in this episode:
Simple Strat
Marketing Deconstructed
HubSpot Hacks
Tubebuddy
Kit
Highlights:
00:09 – We need to retrain how we think about marketing
01:13 – “Marketing is simple when strategy is sound”
03:07 – Start with what already works
08:20 – From YouTube tutorials to a $2M agency
16:00 – Potential offers and decoy pricing
45:40 – Becoming the “Oprah of marketing”
26:00 – Pricing and packaging strategies that won’t compete with your main business
31:00 – Decoy pricing tactics that boost sales without undercutting services
39:00 – Validating a new digital product quickly before a major launch
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Nathan: Do you want to add passive income to your business? My guest today is Allie Schwanke, a HubSpot and inbound marketing expert with over 15 years of B2B marketing experience.
[00:00:09] Ali: We need to retrain how we think about marketing. Marketing is simply communicating the value to your customer, the right customer, so that they take action.
[00:00:17] Most people are missing a lot of that strategy piece. The way that people are searching now is like. That’s my bread and butter when it comes to a content strategy for how to do things.
[00:00:27] Nathan: Let’s jump up on the board and map out how to add 100,000 in passive income. If we go 10 years out, what’s the goal for you and your brand?
[00:00:36] Ali: I am that central hub in all of these, and there’s teams of people that are all solving similar problems.
[00:00:41] Nathan: When we know what we’re optimizing for long term, then these other decisions become so much more clear. I want to play with decoy pricing. I don’t want someone deciding, should I buy this or not? That is a terrible decision.
[00:00:53] Just which one should I buy? Which one should I buy? I would keep the price point the same and the offer the same, and I would just…
[00:01:01] Ali: Oh, that’s a great idea.
[00:01:02] Nathan: There’s a pretty clear path to getting to 100K in revenue there.
[00:01:05] Ali: The clarity now that I have, this will move it forward.
[00:01:13] Nathan: Allie, you have this line that I hear you say fairly often, and that’s that marketing is simple when your strategy is sound. What does that mean to you?
[00:01:21] Ali: Well, as a lifelong marketer, one of the things that I see people struggle with is that they just want to do all the things or they get stuck and it’s this analysis paralysis. What you should do is really driven by where your business is going and what you want to achieve, and setting goals and putting those in, let’s say, 90-day timeframes.
[00:01:38] When I do that for clients, they end up… their mind is blown because it’s less noise and more focus.
[00:01:44] Nathan: I see a lot of people dive in and they’re like, okay, I need a marketing plan, and they start to immediately go to tasks, right? So I’m going to write these blog posts, I’m going to produce these YouTube videos, or I’m going to level up from here.
[00:01:59] It makes this marketing chaos and mayhem entirely activity-driven and not strategy-driven in any way. Is that something that you see, where you’re trying to say, let’s take a step back and focus on the strategy?
[00:02:12] Ali: Yeah, and we’re trying so hard to define what we think marketing is. Marketing now is do YouTube videos, do this, do that, but it’s all driven by who your audience is, who they trust, and what action they need to take to solve their problems.
[00:02:28] Do you think blogging is effective? The answer is not, is it effective, but is it the right thing for your business to drive the results you need? So it’s less about making really cool, creative things and more about a business step-by-step approach.
[00:02:44] That becomes clear because in a 90-day timeframe, you say, this is important, or it isn’t. Same for 12 months. Maybe down the road, we need to start a YouTube channel. That can’t be today.
[00:02:58] Nathan: How would you take someone who is in that chaotic, marketing-tasks focus and bring them back to create a strategy?
[00:03:07] Ali: Yeah, I’ll give you an example from this morning. The business owner wanted more people in her sales funnel. So I asked, where did your current clients come from? That question tells me if it’s by referral, or if someone else stumbled upon them.
[00:03:26] My question: if I could just find more clients like that, would that work? She says, yeah, how would you do that? So I said, go to your current base and ask them for referrals. She hasn’t done that. In the next two weeks, send three emails to everyone. We’ll check in two weeks.
[00:03:35] That’s clear. I’d be shocked if she doesn’t get one meeting from that. Then it’s not LinkedIn outreach. Focus on what already works and work your way back.
[00:04:10] Nathan: It’s working backwards from what’s already working, whereas so many people set marketing and business strategy by listening to a podcast and copying something into their business with no context. They do it for three weeks, get discouraged, and jump to the next thing.
[00:04:35] Ali: If you think about LinkedIn, when was the last time you got a generic message that wasn’t personalized, and you thought, wow, I’m glad I got this?
[00:04:48] Nathan: Never.
[00:04:48] Ali: Exactly, and yet we do the very things we despise. We hire someone to do it and then wonder why it doesn’t work. If you’re going to use LinkedIn and your CRM to drive leads, figure out your target customer, what motivates them, and start personal. Quality over quantity.
[00:06:18] Nathan: How would you find those common threads that you want to target more people like?
[00:06:29] Ali: I’m going to take it back one step. People say, I need more clients, more leads, more everything. First thing is, look at your customer journey from start to finish. If a hundred leads come in and you convert one, you’re either getting the wrong people or you’re a terrible salesperson.
[00:06:50] So, when focusing on strategy, see where in your funnel you need to focus right now. What are two places? Then laser-focus those. The rest can wait. It’s not going to burn your business down.
[00:07:05] It goes back to how we think about marketing: it’s communicating the value to the right customer so they act. That action could be newsletter sign-up, webinar, purchase, referral. You have to know what you’re asking them to do and what motivates them. Most people are missing the strategy piece, and then execution becomes simple.
[00:08:02] Nathan: I love it. You have thought about this for thousands of hours. Give listeners a sense of your business today—both from the content side and the services side, how it ties together.
[00:08:20] Ali: Sure, I’ve been a marketer my whole career, but in 2016/2017, I started Simple Strat, a services business (with some residual we’ll get into). We help folks get more out of HubSpot CRM—automations, CRM training, etc.
[00:09:01] In 2019, we launched a YouTube channel called HubSpot Hacks. People started converting and asking for HubSpot consulting. We pivoted to serve that. Over time, we refined that, and now we have six consultants and we focus on HubSpot services. We also have a new podcast, Marketing Deconstructed, to address channels and problems higher in the funnel. That’s where we are.
[00:09:55] Nathan: What’s the revenue map for your services?
[00:09:59] Ali: Our revenue target is between 1.5 and 2 million.
[00:10:08] Nathan: That’s fantastic. I know you want to talk through adding 100,000 in passive income. We’ll jump up on the board soon. Before that, talk about the YouTube channel launch. You had great timing, but you didn’t go viral right away. Talk about that strategy—why start the channel, and how you found momentum.
[00:10:46] Ali: It was partly strategy, partly timing. Our channel is HubSpot Hacks. In 2019, HubSpot had a channel but wasn’t doing the deep teaching type content. We were creating Loom videos for clients, realized how valuable quick video was. We tested a few videos, got thousands of views in the first day on a random channel. So we launched HubSpot Hacks with a real brand behind it.
[00:11:20] Our first goal was 100 subscribers in the first month. We got 72. Then about six months in, I stepped in and fixed a lot of backend issues. We optimized with TubeBuddy, started ranking for “beginner HubSpot tutorial,” and after that, it was a hockey stick. Then the pandemic hit, marketing teams got cut, people needed to learn HubSpot, so they found us.
[00:12:41] That’s how it grew from there.
[00:15:59] Nathan: Let’s jump up on the board and map out your business, where you want it to go, and how to add 100K in passive income.
[00:16:00] Ali: Sounds good.
[00:16:27] Nathan: So we wrote out short, medium, long term. Let’s talk about your business revenue (2 million target) and audience (25,700 on YouTube, 5,000 on the newsletter, etc.). The question: Why does 100K in passive income matter to you?
[00:17:50] Ali: For me, I can identify new opportunities and create revenue, but in the agency, that means scaling and hiring. This new income not only leads to more leads but sets me up with a separate portfolio if I ever decide to sell the agency.
[00:18:20] Nathan: That’s great. Let’s talk about the possible offers to reach 100K. Sponsors, courses, live training, coaching, memberships, resources, or playbooks. If you had to pick one, which do you think?
[00:24:24] Ali: Courses or resources/playbooks. Sponsors could work too. But resources are easy. I have so many existing templates. That might be the easiest path.
[00:26:00] Nathan: Let’s talk about combining those resources into a bundle. If we do a LinkedIn + HubSpot approach, we can add message templates, scheduling, cheat sheets, analytics, that sort of thing.
[00:27:05] Ali: That might be a full system with a quick course or accountability. For pricing, I was thinking 499 for templates, 2,500 for everything. But that could cannibalize the agency if we’re not careful.
[00:29:04] Nathan: Right. Since your agency starts around 2,000 or 3,500 for “fix my HubSpot,” we want to avoid cannibalization. Probably keep these below 1,000 to stay in the impulse/credit-card buy range. Maybe 299 or 999. But let’s talk about decoy pricing.
[00:34:35] Ali: So we do 500 for resources, 500 for the course, or 599 for both?
[00:35:08] Nathan: Exactly. Let the bundle be obviously the best choice. Then it’s “Which do I buy?” not “Should I buy?” That sets you up to sell the full package.
[00:38:51] Ali: That’s great. The next question is: how do we find time and test?
[00:39:59] Nathan: Right. We can set up a pilot program at full price but with extra personal feedback from you. Then you gradually roll out the modules, gather testimonials, and build from there.
[00:45:40] Ali: Eventually, I’d like to be the “Oprah of marketing.” We have the short-term, medium-term, and long-term vision. This clarifies a lot.
[00:55:18] Nathan: The clarity is huge. You have an actionable plan to reach that 100K. Thanks for sharing your journey, Ali. Let’s wrap up.
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