There’s a version of Jenni Maroney’s story that starts with a failure.
She’d spent 11 and a half months building her first course – recording every lesson over and over until it was perfect. No ums, no stutters, no wasted words – all while holding a newborn in one arm and chasing a toddler with the other. She’d told her business coach she was about to have a six-figure launch. However, behind the scenes, she had no email list and no marketing plan; just a strong belief that if she built it, they would come.
Instead, just six people signed up.
As she boarded a pre-booked celebration trip, she was crying so hard on the plane that other passengers thought she was headed to a funeral. “It felt like s—,” she admits in her signature candid style. “I cried a lot. I played the same sad song on repeat all day.”
But Jenni wasn’t going to stay down. “Giving up isn’t in my nature,” she says.
Today, she’s crossed $3 million in total revenue, launched 11 courses, hosted 10 retreats worldwide, and helped dozens of her own students build six- and seven-figure businesses – some of them generating $100,000 in their first eight or nine weeks inside her programs. And she’s done all of it with a “tell it like it is” straightforwardness that’s become her calling card: she teaches what she’s done – including the parts that didn’t work.
Here’s her story.
| By the numbers → $3M+ in total revenue → $350,000+ revenue in her first year of coaching → $1M+ revenue in her second year of coaching → 11 courses launched→ 10 retreats hosted worldwide → Worked with 215 clients in 2025 → Students have generated $100,000 in their first 8-9 weeks → VIP Launch in a Day program starting at $12,000 → Dozens of entrepreneurs scaled to six and seven figures and beyond |
Before reading the full case study, here’s a quick snapshot of Jenni and her business
A photographer who was done with photography
Long before the launches, the retreats, and the coaching programs, Jenni Maroney was a photographer. A good one. For two decades, she photographed weddings, families, and newborns – and by 2018, she was fully booked.
On paper, it looked like success, but behind the scenes, it was a different story.
“I was maxed out,” she recalls. “If I didn’t show up, I wasn’t getting paid. I had a newborn and a toddler at home and I just wanted to be there for them.” She’d actually begun hosting in-person events and retreats for photographers as far back as 2015, catching a glimpse of what a different kind of business could feel like. Then in 2017, she joined a mastermind with a coach who was doing exactly what she wanted to do. “Everything fast-tracked,” she says. “I didn’t need more photography clients. I needed leverage.”
What she couldn’t have anticipated was the catalyst that would force the pivot.
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COVID, Zoom calls, and an accidental mastermind
When the pandemic hit, Jenni was stuck in an 800-square-foot mountain condo in Colorado, U.S., with her husband, two young kids, and a puppy. Photography work stopped overnight. About three weeks in, she started hosting weekly Zoom calls for her photography community – friends at first, then a growing audience of photographers asking whether their businesses were going to survive.
“It started as kind of an ask-me-anything slash therapy session for photographers,” she says. “But every week the call got longer and longer. It was supposed to be 30 minutes. Then it turned into an hour, then an hour and a half, then a couple of hours. And the attendance just kept doubling every week.”
That’s when it clicked. She turned those calls into a mastermind, launched it quickly, and started charging. She scaled it to over $350,000 in that first year, and then over $1 million the following year.
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The launch that flopped – and the big lesson it taught her
With her mastermind gaining momentum, Jenni decided to build her first course. She threw herself into it entirely. Eleven and a half months of recording and re-recording lessons, determined to get it right, all while managing life with a newborn and a toddler.
She called her coach, confident and excited. “I said, ‘I’m about to have my first six-figure launch,'” she recalls. “And she said, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s amazing. How many people do you have on your email list?’ I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I don’t have anyone on my email list.’ And she said, ‘What’s your marketing plan?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I don’t know. If you build it, they’ll come, right?’ And she said, ‘No, no, no, no, but good luck.'”
Six people signed up.
“I was so embarrassed,” she says. “I had booked this big trip for my sister, my daughter and me for the next day. We boarded the plane. My sister says, ‘Congratulations.’ I said, ‘It’s terrible. It flopped. No one signed up.'”
She arrived in paradise with her family and a mounting feeling of sadness – but somewhere between the waves and the sunburn, something shifted. “I remember thinking: wait, hold on. That was not a failure. I’m just collecting data. I’ve never done this before. I have no idea what I’m doing. I didn’t need to go create a whole new course. The course itself was solid. I just needed to learn how to sell it.”
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“We’re Maroneys. We don’t quit!”
It would have been the moment most people walk away. But Jenni doesn’t come from a walking-away family.
“We have a saying amongst my siblings: ‘we’re Maroneys, we don’t quit,’” she says. “And I didn’t want to go back to photography. I’d gotten used to being at home with my kids. I wanted to be there for school drop-offs and sporting events. Going back wasn’t an option for me. I had to make it work.”
So she did exactly what she now teaches others to do: she hired a coach who had successfully done what she was trying to do, got feedback from those six students, collected their testimonials, and went back to the drawing board – not to rebuild the course, but to fix the one thing that was actually broken.
The content was never the problem. The marketing was. “That’s all it was,” she says simply. “Just a simple tweak.”
Four of those original six students went on to join multiple programs and attend her in-person retreats around the world. They’re still in touch today.
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The trap that catches even smart creators
Jenni is refreshingly blunt about why so many course creators fall into the same trap she did, regardless of how experienced or intelligent they are.
“Our industry has taught us – and I think we’ve been lied to as coaches and course creators – that we have to go record the whole thing first,” she says. “So many of my clients come to me and they say, ‘I have to record the whole course before I can sell it.’ I say, ‘No, you don’t. Let’s pre-sell it.'”
This approach now underpins her entire business model, but it was also a hard-learned lesson.
“I was watching all of these big coaches who had been at it for years,” she says. “They had these huge audiences, these huge launches. So I said, ‘I’m just going to sign up for whatever they’re doing because they’re doing it right.’ Without really knowing how they were using it in the back-end or how it all pieced together. I signed up for expensive platforms and templates that were really meant for the scaling stage – and I was still at the starting stage. I was duct-taping the whole thing together. I was trying to build the business before validating the offer.”
She spent tens of thousands of dollars on platforms and tools she never ended up needing. “Then I realized I literally just needed one.”
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ThriveCart: the only tool she actually needed
When Jenni discovered ThriveCart, something became obvious to her very quickly: everything else had been making a simple process unnecessarily complicated.
“A lot of the other platforms out there are very clunky in my opinion,” she says. “ThriveCart is so simple. It sells, which is exactly what I need it to do. I needed it to help me scale. I needed it to grow with me. There’s no fluff, no unnecessary complexity. Just control of your funnel and your revenue. With all the new features, you really don’t need anything else regardless of whether you’re starting or scaling. ThriveCart has it all.”
She now teaches every one of her students the same stripped-back starting point she wishes she’d known on day one.
“All you need is a sales page and a ThriveCart checkout. That’s it. Get out there. That’s where the people who are getting the biggest results right now are. They’re not more ready than you are. They’re just willing to put it out there.”
Explore ThriveCart’s features, including order bumps, upsells, downsells, subscription management, course hosting, A/B testing, affiliate management, and more.
The pre-sell model: get paid before you record a single lesson
The philosophy that Jenni teaches – and that she credits ThriveCart with making practically possible – is the opposite of what she did on her first launch.
Rather than spending months building a course and then trying to find buyers, she now teaches her students to validate the idea with a sale first, then go and create the content.
“You need a sales page and a way to get paid. And that’s ThriveCart,” she says. “As long as you educate your students that the course will be available on your chosen launch date, you just need to start by selling an idea: ‘I can help you with this problem. The solution is inside my upcoming course.’ And that lights a fire.”
The results speak for themselves. “If you get 10 people to sign up at $1,000, you’re like, ‘Okay, now I actually have to go record the lessons. I have to deliver.’ It motivates my students, and they’re also so excited because they’re thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I just made $10,000 without recording anything.'”
Within 60 days, she says, a creator who commits should be able to pre-sell a course and generate at least a $10,000 cash injection – which can then be reinvested into paid advertising to scale the offer further.
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VIP launch in a day: from idea to live checkout in hours
Jenni’s most intensive offer distills her entire methodology into a single day. Her VIP Launch in a Day program – starting at $12,000 – takes a client from a raw idea to a live sales page, a live ThriveCart checkout page, and paid ads running to it, all before dinner.
“I take the whole thing off my client’s plate,” she explains. “I’ll often fly to them or we meet somewhere fun – Mexico, Miami, New York City – and we spend the entire day together. We map out the offer: what’s the price point, the positioning, the messaging, who’s the ideal client, what problem does it solve? Then we build the sales page, the checkout, get it live, and have ads running to it that same day.”
ThriveCart, she says, is what makes that speed possible.
“My clients don’t have to figure anything out. They just show up, sit beside me, and approve as we go. We move really, really fast. The goal is that you have applications or sales by dinnertime. And honestly, ThriveCart makes that speed possible because there are no complicated setup steps slowing us down.”
She also has a philosophy on checkout page design that she teaches to every client: keep it ruthlessly simple.
“By the time they get to the checkout, we don’t want to make this harder for them,” she says. “They have their credit card in hand. They clicked the button. They’re ready to sign up. I like to just have what’s included, a reminder of what the outcome is, a ‘this is for you if’ section, payment information, contact information, and a couple of testimonials. Keep it super, super simple. And then duplicate it every time – there’s no need to rebuild a checkout page over and over. Pick one, customize it to your brand, and just duplicate the product each time you have a new offer.”
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Zig when everyone else is zagging
Once the offer is live and validated, Jenni’s growth engine is paid advertising – specifically across Meta (Facebook and Instagram), alongside email and organic marketing, all pointing toward the relevant sales page. “Meta ads are so inexpensive,” she says. “You could run them for $5 a day and you’re literally putting your offer and your expertise in front of people who need it, 24/7.”
“I’m not talking about boosting posts,” she clarifies. “I’m talking about actually running Meta ads. You can have thousands of eyeballs on you, your offer, your brand, your programs – every single day.”
And when it comes to standing out in a crowded market, her advice is as direct as everything else she says.
“You don’t need more content. You need better marketing, better messaging, and better positioning. Zig when everyone else is zagging. A lot of people are following the exact same playbook. Real marketing is about owning your uniqueness – showing up as you, not as a perfectly curated version of every other coach on the internet.”
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The results: $3 million and still building
Today, Jenni runs a business that would be unrecognizable to that burned-out photographer version of herself who couldn’t take a booking without trading hours for dollars.
She’s crossed $3 million in total revenue. She’s launched 11 courses. She’s hosted 10 retreats worldwide. She’s helped dozens of entrepreneurs scale to six figures and beyond – including students who have generated $100,000 in their first eight to nine weeks inside her programs.
She scaled her team to eight people at the height of the business, then made a deliberate choice to recently scale back down to just herself, refocusing on the work she loves most: retreats, done-for-you launches, and private coaching and consulting.
“I took my own advice and scaled back to what I really, really love doing,” she says. “Right now it’s just me, and it feels really good.”
She’s not planning to slow down. After a break from in-person events, she’s bringing these hyper-focused live sessions back – events where, she says, students achieve in one to three days what would otherwise take them six months or more. Her vision is clear: helping more people build leveraged income, more freedom, more money, less dependency on their time. This includes her fall 2026 retreat mastermind, which is being held in Mexico.
“Your income stops depending on you. That’s the whole point,” she says. “No one’s going to give you a trophy for almost launching. You learn by doing. So get out there, try it, pre-sell it. All you need is a sales page and a ThriveCart checkout. The people who are getting the biggest results right now aren’t more ready than you are. They’re just willing to put it out there.”
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Jenni’s top 5 lessons for creators ready to launch
1) Validate before you create.
“Sell the idea first. Get the cash injection. Then go build the course. I got paid to create my course – and so can you.”
2) Your content is probably not the problem.
“Most people who’ve tried to launch and haven’t seen results have solid content. The issue is the marketing, the messaging, and the positioning. Fix those first.”
3) Start with the simplest possible tech stack.
“I spent tens of thousands of dollars on platforms I didn’t need. You need a website, a way to get paid – ThriveCart – and ads. That’s it.”
4) Run paid ads from day one.
“If you have no audience and no email list, the fastest path is Meta ads. Even $5 a day puts you in front of the right people. Don’t wait until you’re ‘ready.'”
5) Done is better than perfect.
“You don’t need a film crew. You don’t need everything mapped out. My son created a course to teach math to younger kids and we ran ads to it. Kids have less fear than we do. Go at it with that energy.”
Ready to go from idea to your first sale? Join Jenni Maroney and thousands of other successful creators who use ThriveCart to power their checkout, courses, and growth.