Lindsay Maloney has three kids, a full-time job, and a homeschool routine she runs like clockwork. She has no team, no virtual assistant, and no interest in spending eight hours a day in her home office.
She also has more than 10,000 sales through ThriveCart, a course suite that generates income every single day, and a one-on-one coaching practice so sought-after that clients sometimes place deposits just to get on her waitlist.
None of that came from doing more. It came from doing less – but doing it smarter.
Here’s how Lindsay built a business that, in her own words, adds to her life instead of taking her out of it.
| By the numbers → 10,919 total sales processed through ThriveCart → 6,000+ sales of her flagship offer, The Dream Client Code → $43 flagship offer with a four-step upsell funnel → Multi-six-figure coaching business → $297+/month in software costs eliminated → 1-2 hours of focused work per day → Three kids to homeschool |
Building a business on borrowed time
Lindsay’s story starts in 2011, when she lost 90 pounds after having her first child and found herself fielding questions from everyone she knew. “Losing the weight was actually really easy – you just don’t eat crap and you move,” she says. “And everyone was attracted to how simple it was.” She started helping people informally, charging $10 and inviting neighbors over to her house. Then she took it online.
By 2015, she had pivoted from health coaching to business coaching – finding she thrived far more in helping other coaches build their businesses than in tracking anyone’s macros. And she was doing all of it in the hours most people waste: nap times, early mornings, the quiet window before the house came to life.
“Whether I had one, two, or three kids, every time somebody would lay down for a nap, I knew that was my power hour,” she says. “Once they woke up, it was over. And then I had to be mom again,” she recalls.
Lindsay, whose three children are now 16, 11, and 8, started homeschooling in 2020 and never looked back. The business had to flex around the family – not the other way around. She redesigned her entire day to make that work, batching homeschool prep on weekends, stacking routines so the kids knew exactly what to do independently, and building a business model that required only one to two hours of focused effort each day.
“I don’t want a business that takes eight hours from me,” she says. “So I’ve always made sure to build one that doesn’t.”
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The launch cycle that almost broke her
For a long time, though, the business wasn’t quite as streamlined and simple as Lindsay wanted it to be.
Like most online coaches, she was running on a familiar playbook: create a high-ticket program, build a webinar, send the launch emails, make the pitch, repeat. Month after month. Same funnel. Same offer. Same grind.
“It was killing my motivation,” she says. “It got to be really mundane and stressful. And I felt like I couldn’t create anything else in my business because I thought I had to put everything into that one program.”
The launch cycle had another problem. She was trying to sell a $1,000 program repeatedly to the same audience – and the economics just didn’t work. “You can’t ask people for $1,000 via a Facebook ad,” she says. “That’s not how it works. But I was stuck, because if I wanted to create something new – a low-ticket offer, a new course, anything – I’d have to hook it up to this platform and that platform, set up a Zap, create a new checkout page. It completely deteriorated any drive I had to make anything new.”
She had a folder full of unrealized ideas – course concepts that never became courses and offers that stayed stuck in her head because the technology required to bring them to life felt like more trouble than it was worth.
She was trapped. And she knew it.
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The tech stack that was costing her more than money
Before ThriveCart, Lindsay was running her business across SamCart for checkout pages, MemberVault for hosting her courses, and Zapier to stitch it all together – spending around $297 per month just to keep the lights on.
“I had all these tabs open,” she recalls. “Courses, client work, checkout pages, everything. And if I want a life and a business that has to be simple, I can’t have all this stuff band-aided together. It was stopping me from creating.”
She had actually tried ThriveCart once before, years earlier. “Initially, I didn’t like it,” she laughs. “You couldn’t change the color, you couldn’t do anything. It was so basic. I need everything to be my brand.” She closed the tab and moved on.
Then a friend told her to try it again. The platform had changed – a lot. All the functionality she’d previously wanted was now there, from better personalized branding to customizable checkout templates. “I love all the new features that ThriveCart has added, plus I was really attracted to that lifetime fee,” she says. “So I thought: what will future me – 2027 me – be really glad I did?”
Moving to ThriveCart seemed daunting but went smoothly. She signed on for ThriveCart Pro+, moved all of her students over, cancelled SamCart, cancelled MemberVault, cancelled Zapier – and never looked back.
“I have so many course ideas,” Lindsay says. ThriveCart helps me keep it simple and easy. I could do it in my sleep. I love that once I’ve designed a brand-new course, I can just set up the payment processing and ThriveCart makes sure that buyers are added to the membership – it’s automatically done.”
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In search of the simple life
For Lindsay, the real unlock wasn’t just saving $297 a month. It was what happened to her creativity once the friction disappeared.
“There’s no more band-aiding anything together,” she says. “Once I set up a course, I can just check a box and students are automatically added to the membership. I don’t have to clog up anyone’s inbox – ThriveCart sends the login details. It’s all taken care of.”
The course portal alone has become something her coaching clients ask about constantly. Students can see the entire suite of courses Lindsay offers – with courses they haven’t yet purchased appearing greyed out. “Everyone wants to mimic that,” she says. “Having the ability to see what you don’t have creates FOMO. I’ll get emails from people saying, ‘I don’t want to enter my credit card 30 times – can you just tell me how much it costs for all of your courses?’ Besides ThriveCart, you can’t get that with any other platform I know of.”
She uses ThriveCart’s checkout templates consistently – two or three go-to layouts she knows convert – and every morning, coffee in hand, she logs in to check her daily metrics before anyone else in the house is awake.
“If I can get all my business work done before everyone wakes up on a Saturday morning, and then go downstairs and just be present for them, that’s the mom’s goal,” she says. “That’s my most important thing. Not sitting upstairs trying to plug this into this.”
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How a $43 course changed everything
The centerpiece of Lindsay’s business is The Dream Client Code – a $43 course that has now generated more than 6,000 sales and become the foundation of her entire client acquisition model.
It was born from a problem she knew intimately: discovery calls. “I would have to rush through my homeschool day, head upstairs to my home office, go on a free call, go through the stress of before, during, and after – and most of the time the calls were successful, but the ones that weren’t were very draining,” she says. “They had no intention of investing anyway. It was a frustrating feeling like they had just taken 45 minutes of my time away from my kids who were sitting downstairs waiting for me.”
Her solution was elegantly simple. She created an offer called the Sales Breakthrough – a Loom video in which she audited a client’s entire business and delivered honest, specific feedback. No call. No live pitch. Done on her own time, sent straight to the buyer.
“Pretty soon, I was booked out within days by clients who wanted to work with me,” she says. “I had people putting down deposits. They watched me go through their business. They trusted me on a whole new level than you could ever achieve on a discovery call.”
She turned the method into a course, taught coaches to replicate it, and set the price at $43 – low enough to remove every barrier to entry.
The checkout funnel inside ThriveCart takes that $43 offer considerably further. An order bump for $47 can take the cart value to $90 before checkout is complete, and Lindsay typically runs a four-step sequence of upsells and downsells afterward. “I go four times,” she says. “I know some people will reach out and say they didn’t like all the upsells – but then I look and see they bought them all.” The sequence isn’t padding, she insists. “I’m not putting them there because I want extra money. I know this will help you. So in case you don’t go back to my website, it’s right here.”
Facebook ads drive traffic to The Dream Client Code at scale, and Lindsay checks her ThriveCart metrics against her ad spend every day. “I need to see that what I made today is going to pay for my ads,” she says. “If you’re spending $50 or $4,000 a day, you need to know what’s happening.”
The result is a business that generates consistent daily income – not a spike once a month when a launch fires, but a steady, reliable flow that doesn’t require Lindsay to do a single discovery call, run a single webinar, or trade any more of her hours for someone else’s result.
The results: consistent, daily sales
The headline number – 10,919 total sales through ThriveCart – is only part of the picture. The more meaningful shift is what daily sales have done to the rhythm of Lindsay’s life and business.
“When I was using tools I didn’t enjoy, I might have a few sales a month if I wasn’t launching,” she says. “Now, if I don’t have a few sales a day, I’m wondering what’s happening. It takes you from a few a month to multiple sales a day.”
She has scaled back her one-on-one calls almost entirely, moving toward Voxer-based coaching packages and directing her creative energy toward new low-ticket courses instead. The ideas that once sat in a rainy day folder now see the light of day – quickly, cleanly, without the overhead of piecing together a dozen different tools.
Her 1-on-1 client packages remain in demand, sometimes with a waitlist. The low-ticket front door, she says, is exactly why. Clients arrive having already watched her work, already trusting her judgment, already sold.
“They’ve heard me,” she says. “They watched me go through their business. That trust – you can’t get it on a discovery call.”
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Advice for coaches and entrepreneurs
We asked Lindsay what she would tell coaches who want to build what she has built. Here’s her advice.
Do the math first
“Sit down and write down everything you’re spending every month to support your clients, your students, your sales pages. The math is not going to lie. Once you realize how much you’re spending, it might be a huge eye-opener. And that’s the only way you’re going to justify spending this or that.”
Simplicity is not a compromise – it’s the strategy
“The more I complicated my business, the more I didn’t want to work on it. Complicated doesn’t mean success. Keeping things simple and straightforward is what allows you to stay creative and keep making new things.”
Learn the fundamentals
“The biggest gap I see is people not learning basic skills like writing copy. They go for the shiny stuff first and figure it out after. Your copy is what makes people trust you enough to invest. That work is being skipped over.”
Tell your story
“You have to be able to solve problems with your story. There is somebody out there who’s going to hear you and say, ‘This is exactly what I want.’ Make people feel like they finally found someone who understands them and their problems. That comes before everything else.”
Don’t compare your beginning to someone’s middle
“It just takes a little bit every single day. If you have the drive to help people, you can do it. Keep your eyes on what’s important for you and your family – not how everyone else is doing it.”
Lindsay’s business was built in pockets of time most people don’t think to use. Today, it runs on one to two hours of focused work, a simple suite of courses sold through ThriveCart funnels, and a philosophy she hasn’t deviated from in more than a decade: keep it simple, keep it real, and make sure the business fits around your life – not the other way around.
“People hire me,” she says, “because I have a simple mind. We have to make everything simple. If it’s not, we’re not going to do it. It’s just how it is.”
Ready to build a coaching business that works on your schedule? Join Lindsay Maloney and thousands of other creators who use ThriveCart to power their sales and courses.
