Chapter 1: The Breaking Point

The "$94K in 11 Weeks" Case Study

(... a true story)

J. Glover | December 2025

It started on a gray Monday morning. (the kind where your coffee tastes like defeat). In less than 48 hours my wife and I would wake up in a brand new year ...But neither of us felt 'ready' to start 2025.

We’d been “successful” before. Big launches. Big clients. Big stress. But for the last year, we had been observing a 'shift' taking place. We watched as AI began rewriting the rules of business, and we saw something coming that most people were ignoring:

Everything that once gave small creators an edge was about to get replaced. Funnels. Ads. Agencies. Coaching models. All of it.

So we did something most sane people wouldn’t do.

We shut it all down.

And we made a public challenge:

Could we build a brand-new business from scratch (using only AI) ...and hit six figures before summer? No lists. No products. No audience. Just curiosity, caffeine, and wifi.

Here's a preview of the offer we put out to our social media following:

Twenty-five people signed up to watch us try. Every week, they saw everything ... Wins, flops, spreadsheets, late-night pivots, and real-time results.

By the end of week 11, the number on the whiteboard said $94,000. But that’s not even the interesting part. The interesting part is HOW it happened. Because if you trace every sale, every referral, every commission ... it all leads back to one moment.

The moment we hit “publish” on a single page that didn’t even exist the day before. That moment when an idea stopped being a plan and became an asset.

It wasn’t perfect.

It wasn’t fancy.

But it was real.

And that’s where everything changed.

Years earlier, long before AI or challenges or case studies, I’d heard a line from my old mentor that never left me:

“If you want to make a lot of money, sell products and services. But if you want to get rich, you must create and control markets.”

When I asked him what that even meant, he smiled and said:

“Build an email list.”

He explained that your list is your market. And when you cultivate the relationship the right way, you don’t just sell to them… you guide them. You serve them. You control the market you created.

Listening to that advice turned out to be the best decision I ever made. Despite not having my parents approval, I haven’t had a "real job" since 2008. (I’ve lived entirely from my email list).

When I needed sales calls booked for my coaching? I emailed my list.

When I wanted more YouTube views? I emailed my list.

When I wanted more podcast downloads? I emailed my list.

If I want to sell anything, I ...

EMAIL. MY. LIST.

This is NOT a new concept. It's called 'direct response marketing' and it's worked since way before the invention of 'email' in 1971 ...and it'll continue to work for the rest of our lives. (even if something finally comes along to replace email)

These days, I can dominate pretty much any affiliate contest on demand (often beating marketers with lists ten times bigger) ... because I do things differently.

That same mentor I mentioned earlier once joked, “Only send emails on the days you want to make money.”

Obviously I want to make money EVERY DAY, so for a while, I copied what I saw other marketers doing:

I started blasting daily promos, chasing clicks, thinking quantity & frequency was the secret. It's not. My revenue went DOWN, not up. I was burning out my list (and myself).

That’s when I got serious about segmentation, storytelling, and serving first. I stopped treating subscribers like numbers and started treating them like readers, like friends.

I deleted (literally deleted) hundreds of thousands of dead subscribers. Hard-earned leads, gone. Painful lesson learned.

As I type these words today (November 2025) I just saw a memory on Facebook pop up from TEN YEARS AGO! (click the screenshot and check out the original post if you think I'm making this stuff up)

It's SCARY to start over like this from scratch. But from that pruning came growth. I rebuilt with purpose, and changed my approach.

I learned how to engineer trust and authority from the first email forward... (the same advanced stuff I now teach inside my own newsletters). That’s why, whenever you get the chance, you’ll want to be on that list. Because it’s where I share what actually works.

But before I invite you to join it, I want to show you the framework behind all of this ...because it's the exact same process we used to go from zero to $94K in 11 weeks.

When we stopped chasing shiny tactics and decided to build the one thing we could actually own, everything shifted.

But not the kind of list that spams offers daily. And not the kind built on funnels and fake urgency. A different kind of list. One that attracts the right readers, speaks to them in the right voice, and earns their trust automatically.

That list became the engine behind every dollar that followed. And in the pages ahead, you’ll see exactly how we built it (step by step) using a simple three-part process we now call the LAB Framework.

It starts with the first step that made everything real:

L = Launch.

The moment your list comes alive.

In the next 'chapter', I'll show you exactly what that means. You'll learn how we launched ours from zero, what we did differently, and why this single step created momentum that never stopped.

Next: How to Launch Your List (& Why This Step Alone Can Change Everything)

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