Dr. Destini Copp has spent more than 25 years in marketing. She teaches in an MBA program. She’s led a remote team of 1,000+ people in corporate America. So when she tells you that order bumps and upsells are the single best thing she’s found for growing revenue, it’s worth listening.
Destini runs two very different brands. HobbyScool is her business-to-consumer brand. It runs free online summits for hobbyists – think watercolor painting, card making, quilting, and art journaling. Creator’s MBA is her personal brand, and it helps digital product creators build steady, recurring income. Two different businesses with two very different audiences – but the same playbook behind both, built and run entirely on ThriveCart.
Today, she’s a six-figure seller who’s brought in over $600,000 through ThriveCart across both businesses. And the story of how she got there says a lot about the quiet power of a well-built checkout.
Two brands, one person running the show
Destini didn’t plan on running two businesses. Creator’s MBA came first, back while she was teaching online in a graduate MBA program. HobbyScool showed up later, almost by accident.
“I was on vacation, sitting at the breakfast table drinking my coffee at the beach in WaterColor, Florida. I was on one of those domain name generators and I ran across this really cool name: HobbyScool. I’m like, ‘That’s really cool. I feel like I can build that into something.’ And that’s literally how it started,” she recalls with a laugh.
At first, she had no idea how she’d actually make money from it. She tried paid bundles. She tried a marketplace idea. Neither one really worked. What did work was something she already knew from her own brand: free virtual summits.
“I knew that they were a really, really good way to grow your audience and monetize at the same time,” she says.
Today, HobbyScool runs a live, free online summit every single month, covering everything from card making to needlework. Contributors promote the event to their own audiences, which grows Destini’s email list, and the whole thing gets monetized on the back-end with a paid VIP pass, an order bump, and a couple of upsells – all built and run through ThriveCart.
→ READ ANOTHER CREATOR’S SUCCESS WITH BUMPS & UPSELLS | ‘How a Self-Taught Mindset Mentor Consolidated 7 Separate Tools Into ThriveCart & Built a $2 Million Business‘
The moment order bumps and upsells changed everything
If there’s one idea running through Destini’s whole story, it’s this: the checkout page isn’t the end of the sale. It’s the start of the next one.
“The biggest thing here was discovering order bumps and upsells to increase average order value in ThriveCart,” Destini says. “Once I started including those into my checkouts, average order value went up on every launch.”
Here’s what that looks like in a typical HobbyScool funnel. Someone signs up for the free event on a landing page. The next page they see is the VIP pass sales page. If they buy, they land on a ThriveCart checkout with an order bump, then an upsell for the previous year’s workshops from that same event, then a second upsell for the Craft & Create Club membership.
“For the B2C audience, I’m only doing one order bump there, just to make it clear and easy for them,” she explains. “Generally, I’ll have an upsell there that sells the previous year’s workshop, and that always does very well.”
The numbers back it up. Add-on bundles alone now make up around 8% of HobbyScool’s total revenue, and that’s before you even count the VIP upsells stacked on top. Summit revenue has grown from about $6,000 in HobbyScool’s first partial year to $153,000 in 2025 – roughly 25 times growth in two years – and 2026 is tracking to more than double that figure.
Over on the Creator’s MBA side, the same basic structure shows up with a few more layers, since it’s a higher-touch, business-to-business audience. “For some events in my B2B brand, I might do multiple funnel offers,” Destini says. One recent example: her “Beyond the PDF” event funnel includes a free registration page, a VIP upgrade, an order bump, an upsell for lifetime access to her Newsletter Profit Club, and even a downsell to a monthly plan if someone says no to lifetime.
It’s a simple structure repeated everywhere: a free entry point, one clear upgrade, then a couple of relevant offers stacked right after the sale. And it works because every offer in that sequence makes sense for where the customer already is – not because there are more offers thrown at them.
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What HobbyScool actually looks like behind the scenes
HobbyScool runs monthly live events that last two to three days, with workshops going live at 9am each day and staying free to watch for 24 hours. Some events pull in 7,000 to 12,000 attendees. The ones that have been running for years, with returning speakers and real brand recognition, can pull in 20,000 or more.
Across the roughly 19 paid summits HobbyScool has run, one now brings in around $18,000 on average. The best performers, like the Art of Handmade Summit that runs every fall, have historically brought in around $40,000.
Contributors and speakers who promote each event earn a 50% commission on VIP pass sales, and ThriveCart’s built-in affiliate tools handle all the tracking and payouts. That matters a lot at this scale – HobbyScool now has more than 300 affiliates actively promoting its events every month.
“The creators benefit, because they get that affiliate commission. And we benefit because they bring us an audience we’d never reach on our own,” Destini says. “We use ThriveCart to manage the whole affiliate program. It’s seamless, and it’s done very well for us.”
The membership piece, Craft & Create Club, along with every VIP pass and workshop, also lives right inside ThriveCart’s course management platform. “When our customers come to view one of the VIP pass workshops, they’re coming to our ThriveCart login and viewing their workshops there,” she says.
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Running two businesses without doubling the work
Before ThriveCart, Destini ran everything on Kajabi, but it wasn’t built for the kind of customer journey she wanted to create, she says. “With Kajabi, it was very difficult to do the upsells and all of that,” she says. “When I switched over to ThriveCart, I saw an immediate bump in the revenue from just being able to take people from a free lead magnet or free event, to the tripwire, to the order bumps and upsells. It made a huge, huge difference.”
She’s also found a way to build new funnels fast. She uses Claude to write her marketing copy and course pages in HTML, then drops that straight into ThriveCart. “I had these funnels set up in no time,” she says. “I just take the HTML, upload it into ThriveCart, and hit publish. I’m done.” It’s a workflow she’s trained her team to run without her, which has freed her up to spend more time on Creator’s MBA. “Because I’ve shifted my focus, I’ve had some of the best couple months in my personal brand that I’ve had in a long time,” she says.
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The framework behind it all
Creator’s MBA is built around what Destini calls the Creator Growth Flywheel: attract, engage, nurture, retain, advocate. It comes straight from her academic research, but it’s been tested and proven through her own two businesses.
“Once they sign up for your lead magnet, on the next page have some type of easy, lower-ticket offer for them to say yes to, and then build out your ThriveCart funnel from there,” she explains. “Have your order bump on the checkout page. Make sure you’ve got an upsell and downsell in each funnel.”
The retain and advocate stages are where the flywheel really pays off. “In HobbyScool, we have 300+ affiliates that are engaged and actually help us sell our events every single month,” she says. “A big component for us is testimonials. After an event in HobbyScool, we can get 30-50 testimonials just from that one event. That advocacy stage is very important, because those testimonials become marketing content that fuels the attract stage. When people are telling other people about you, it makes that attract stage so much easier,” she says.
→ RECOMMENDED READING | ‘Proof That Low Ticket Works: How Liz Wilcox Hit Nearly $2 Million With a $9 Membership and ThriveCart‘
Not every launch is a hit – and that’s okay
Destini is refreshingly honest that not everything she’s tried has worked. For example, a summer kids’ camp-themed event in HobbyScool didn’t land. “I’ve learned the hard way that my audience does not respond well to that,” she says. “They like the more adult-type hobbies.”
But she’s just as quick to point to a win that surprised even her. Her Newsletter Profit Club membership, now one of her most popular products ever, didn’t take off overnight. “I had no idea when I first launched it that it was going to turn out the way it did,” she says. “It took me a few years to get there, kind of testing out different things.”
→ READ ANOTHER CASE STUDY | ‘From Passion Project to 7 Figures in a Year: How Chris Huntley Built a Recurring Revenue Empire With ThriveCart’
Destini’s advice for fellow creators and coaches
If someone came to Destini today wanting to build something similar, her advice starts well before any platform decision.
“Start your email list,” she says. “A lot of people go start on Instagram or TikTok and think, ‘Okay, I’m building my audience.’ No, you’re not. We’ve worked with creators, even in HobbyScool, that have hundreds of thousands of people on Instagram. They have trouble selling. It’s not the same as someone actually signing up for your email list.”
Once people are on that list, she says the next move is to test, not guess. “I don’t think anyone knows what’s actually going to land with people until you start testing it,” she says. “Once you get people into your world, test out different things, see what they’re reacting to, then get that funnel and checkout set up.”
She also doesn’t recommend spreading yourself across two brands, especially when starting out. “For most people out there, I would recommend that you focus on one thing,” she says. “I get bored very easily and I just wanted to try new things. But if I had to go back, I would say focus on one thing and go all in on it.” That said, she’s quick to add that running two brands has worked for her mostly because of skills she built managing large teams earlier in her career – something she doesn’t assume everyone will have.
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Long-term goals: doubling down on a system that works
Destini set up her businesses using two separate ThriveCart accounts with a long-term plan in mind: to eventually sell HobbyScool. “I’m so thankful I had the foresight to set up the two businesses in two separate ThriveCart systems and that ThriveCart’s affordability and ease of use made that a possibility,” she says. “Having the businesses on separate ThriveCart accounts means things will be so much smoother when it comes time to sell.”
To get there, she’s sticking with the model that already works instead of chasing side bets. “In the beginning, we went after corporate sponsorships – that was hard. Corporate wellness – that was also hard, with a long lead time,” she says. “So we’ve put those to the side and said, okay, we’re going to focus on what we do well. What’s the ‘rinse and repeat’ model for us? These monthly events! That’s what we’re doing.”
On the Creator’s MBA side, she’s doubling down on her two core offers, the Newsletter Profit Club and the Creator’s MBA AI Mastermind, while running five events through the rest of the year – all built on the same simple formula that’s supported by ThriveCart’s sales funnels: a free entry point, one clear upgrade, and a couple of well-placed upsells.
It’s not a complicated system. It’s just one that Destini has run, tested, and refined across two very different businesses – one that keeps quietly increasing her average order value on every single launch.
