Dana Wilde didn’t set out to build a business. She just wanted to sell some CDs.
She’d spent years as the mindset person in her direct sales company, known for teaching her team how to think their way to results. When she left, people kept asking for more of that. So she figured she’d package it up, ship some CDs, and call it done.
That was the beginning of what would become a multi-million-dollar business built around a single, powerful idea: that happiness isn’t just the goal, it’s the tool.
Today, Dana is a bestselling author, the host of a podcast called Positive Mindset for Entrepreneurs, and the creator of the Train Your Brain method. She’s helped thousands of coaches and entrepreneurs ditch the hustle mindset and build joyful businesses that actually work. And she’s done it without a college degree, without a background in marketing, and – until she found ThriveCart – without any tech setup that made life easy.
“ThriveCart has been one of the solutions my brain found to reduce tech overwhelm to a minimum,” Dana says. “I made a list of everything I was using when I was building my business and it’s just a ridiculous list of stuff I was using but it’s all gone now. I’m not paying for any of it anymore because I’ve just replaced it with ThriveCart.”
Here’s her story.
| By the numbers → $1M in annual sales from her first (offline) business within 19 months → $1M in annual sales from her online business in under two years → Over $2M in total sales across both businesses → $974,888 in tracked ThriveCart sales – with over 21,000 transactions → 30,000+ downloads of the Train Your Brain program → 20% of early revenue previously swallowed by tech costs → 7 separate tools replaced by ThriveCart → ThriveCart user since August 2017 |
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“I’m a high school graduate – and that’s it”
Ask Dana where her expertise comes from and she’ll tell you straight: no doctorate, no PhD, no string of initials after her name. “I am a high school graduate. I have no degree beyond that,” she says. “And I think that’s kind of what makes me stand out.”
Where most people teaching positive psychology hold credentials from Harvard or similar institutions, Dana’s authority comes from 40 years of self-study, real-world application, and working directly with people to see what actually shifts results. She started taking mindset seriously at 19 and has never stopped. “I’ve read every book out there,” she says. “But more importantly, I’ve worked with people and helped them train their brains and seen the results. I think because I’m only high school educated, I can explain it in a way that anybody can understand.”
That accessibility is exactly what drives the Train Your Brain method. Dana’s whole brand is built around the idea that mindset isn’t a soft skill – it’s a business strategy. “When you feel good, you open up the creative pathways in your brain. You get access to better ideas. You feel like taking action. Stuff gets done faster,” she explains. “That’s why we say: when you leverage happiness, this is how you work less and make more.”
She calls it JoyFluency – and she’s built a multi-million-dollar business proving it works.
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From stuffing envelopes to seven figures
When Dana first launched her online business, she genuinely didn’t know what she was doing. She’d left a successful direct sales career, started getting requests for her Train Your Brain content, and decided to record some CDs and mail them out. She calls that early phase “ignorance on fire.”
“I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but I was so excited,” she recalls. “I just kept hoping I’ll figure it out.”
That attitude turned out to be more powerful than any marketing credential. Her first business – a direct sales venture where she’d become the go-to mindset coach – hit $1 million in annual sales within 19 months. When she launched her online business, The Mind Aware, the same thing happened. She reached $1 million in annual sales in under two years.
Over $2 million in total sales across both businesses. Without a degree, without a marketing team, and without, for a long time, any tech that actually made her life easier.
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The tech stack that was costing her a fortune
At peak revenue, around 20% of everything she made was going straight back out the door. “Either paying people to do the tech or paying for tech tools. And that’s not including the affiliate payouts,” she says.
Before using ThriveCart, Dana was cobbling together an intimidating list of separate subscriptions: a page builder, sales cart software, affiliate software, an A/B tester, a course delivery platform, membership software, and dunning software – the tools that send retry emails when payments fail. She was paying for all of it. Separately. Every month.
And because she self-describes as “not a techy person,” she was also paying a full-time tech team just to manage it all. “I’m not tech-averse,” she’s quick to clarify. “I like learning and poking around. But I figured out early on that tech could be a stopper for me if I let it be.”
The irony wasn’t lost on her. Here was a mindset mentor who teaches entrepreneurs to remove overwhelm from their businesses, and she was drowning in exactly that – a patchwork of platforms that didn’t talk to each other properly, cost a small fortune, and demanded constant attention.
“It wasn’t my happy place,” she says. “And it was stopping me from doing what I was actually supposed to be doing.”
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The affiliate nightmare that changed everything
The breaking point, fittingly, came down to affiliates.
Dana had tried every affiliate plugin on the market. None of them worked the way they should. Some were clunky to set up. Others failed silently, meaning affiliates weren’t getting properly tracked or paid. The whole thing was a source of constant stress and, almost certainly, lost revenue.
When she discovered ThriveCart, the built-in affiliate management was the feature that sealed the deal. “That was the game-changer that sold me,” she says. “After years of every plugin under the sun not working properly, here was something where it was just… built in. And it worked beautifully.”
She’s been a ThriveCart customer since August 2017. And while she admits she spent the first few years mainly using it for lead magnets – “Can you imagine?!” she laughs – once she got properly into the platform, there was no going back.
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One tool to replace them all
Today, ThriveCart sits at the center of everything Dana does. And what she values most isn’t just the functionality. It’s the fact that ThriveCart has allowed her to consolidate most of the tech she needs into one platform.
“Before, if I was going to do a launch, I would have to try a lot of different things, study a lot of different things, build out a bunch of different things, use and connect all these tools. Now, I can go in with ThriveCart and literally, in half a day, my whole launch is set up and I can spend my time doing what I’m supposed to be doing – talking about training your brain, feeling good, JoyFluency, all of that. That’s everything,” she says.
The sales page builder was a particular revelation. For the first five years she used ThriveCart, Dana was sending people directly to order forms – and they converted well. It wasn’t until around 2022 that she discovered ThriveCart’s full page-builder capability. “I was like: this is a for-real page builder,” she recalls. “I’ve been sending people to just an order form for five years and I could have been making gorgeous pages this whole time.”
Her first proper sales page was for a program called 52 Weeks of Abundance. “Easy peasy, drag and drop,” she says. “Everything’s built in – the buttons go where they need to go, the confirmation page is all set up. It just worked.”
She also uses order bumps, ThriveCart’s checkbox-style add-ons that let customers bolt on an extra product at checkout. “That’s just free money as far as I’m concerned,” she says. “It takes me 10 minutes to set up the copy and suddenly money is coming in that I wouldn’t have ever built into a system before.”
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What $2 million actually looks like
Dana is refreshingly honest about what her revenue story means in full. Yes, she hit $1 million in annual sales in her first online business within two years. But what she rarely talked about publicly until recently is how much of that was being eaten up behind the scenes.
“You can make a lot of money, but if you can’t hang on to it, you’re not really making that much,” she says. “That’s what was happening to me in the early phase. Affiliate payouts, tech costs – it was a big chunk gone before I even got started.”
That context makes ThriveCart’s impact on her business tangible. By consolidating tools, eliminating the need for a tech team, and building a platform that she can actually run herself, she’s kept significantly more of what she earns. She has now processedalmost a million dollars through ThriveCart, runs a team of five core people plus freelancers, is the sole provider in her household, has over 300 people in recurring membership programs, and is in the process of moving her entire content library into ThriveCart’s course and community platform, ThriveCart Academy.
“It was a really easy transition to ThriveCart Academy and it’s just gorgeous. I’m kind of a design snob. Something has to really look good for me to feel like, ‘oh, I love this place’. I want to come in here and play. I love the way it’s laid out. Why would you go anywhere else when you could do it all in one place?” she says.
Moving her tech stack to ThriveCart was a game-changer for Dana: “It’s just such a no-brainer. I am the biggest advocate of ThriveCart. I tell everybody to use it, especially people like me who are tech challenged,” she says.
“The dollar value for what you get with ThriveCart is off the charts. You can get rid of most of the software that you’re using. You can have people sell your stuff with the affiliate plugin without having to worry about whether it’s going to work or not. So that’s immediate money that starts rolling in. Plus, you have the option for bumps and upsells. So, again, that’s like free money that just falls in your lap.”
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Dana’s advice for fellow coaches and entrepreneurs
We asked Dana what she’d tell a coach or creator who’s right where she was a few years ago – overwhelmed by tech, bleeding money on tools, and not sure where to start.
1) Your mindset is your most valuable business tool
“Action cannot make up for a messy mindset. If you don’t have positive expectations, then the tech, the marketing, all of it becomes harder. Your job as an entrepreneur isn’t to build a website – it’s to keep your mindset in check so everything else can flow.”
2) Stop tolerating tools that don’t work
“I tried every affiliate plugin. I tried every membership software. I kept tolerating things that didn’t work properly because switching felt overwhelming. Don’t do that. The right tool makes everything easier, including the stuff you hate.”
3) You don’t need a degree to be an authority
“I’m self-taught. I’ve studied this for 40 years. What makes me stand out in my niche is that I can explain things in a way anyone can understand. Your lived experience and your results are credentials. Don’t discount them.”
4) Simplify before you scale
“I learned the hard way that complexity is expensive. The simpler you can make your tech, your offers, and your processes, the more time and money you actually get to keep. Consolidate first.”
5) Step into your leadership sooner
“The biggest mistake I made was taking too long to step into my authority. It resulted in undercharging, undervaluing my work, and probably a lot of lost revenue. The world needs what you have to offer. Don’t play small.”
Ready to simplify your business and keep more of what you earn? Join Dana Wilde and 75,000+ creators and coaches who use ThriveCart to power their checkouts, courses, affiliates, and communities.
