If Mei Pak’s story sounds just like a fairy tale, we totally get it: a young woman from Malaysia moves to Wisconsin to study math, brings a suitcase full of craft supplies, starts making $3 an hour selling handmade jewelry, and somehow ends up running three businesses, helping her husband quit his programming job, and pursuing her acting dreams.
But here’s the thing – it’s not a fairy tale. It’s the result of a very deliberate, very counterintuitive philosophy – one that flies in the face of almost everything the online business world tells creators to do.
Mei doesn’t build her audience on Instagram. She doesn’t rely on Etsy to sell her products. And she doesn’t chase complexity. What she does instead has helped her scale Creative Hive, her coaching business for makers and artists, to a million-dollar launch in 2020, a combined $2 million across her businesses that same year, and around $890,000 in Creative Hive revenue in 2025 alone.
Here’s the story – and the strategy behind it.
By the numbers → $2 million in total revenue across businesses in 2020 |
The $3-an-hour turning point
Mei started Tiny Hands – her handmade polymer clay jewelry business – at 15, back in Malaysia. By the time she graduated summa cum laude with a math degree in the U.S., she was working full-time on the business.
But in 2011, that full-time effort earned her around $9,000 for the entire year.
“That was the first year I went full-time in my business. Full-time meaning full-time hours, not full-time income,” she clarifies.
She was doing everything the internet told her to do: social media, blogging, craft shows, website refreshes. Plenty of activity, not nearly enough return. “I was doing a lot of busy work,” she says. “Things that took up a lot of time but that didn’t pay me a proportionate amount of money.”
What changed wasn’t more hustle. It was a lucky accident that pointed her toward a completely different marketing model.
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The earned media breakthrough
When people started featuring Tiny Hands organically on their blogs and websites – plus in Rachael Ray magazine and on the TV sitcom Parks and Recreation, Mei noticed something. Every feature sent a surge of traffic and sales – and not just in the first week. That traffic kept coming.
“No one told me to do this thing,” she says. “Of course, my next question was: how do I do this on command?”
She taught herself to pitch to media, collaborated with influencers, and borrowed the audiences of people who already had the attention of her ideal customers. The results were so strong that she launched Creative Hive in 2014 specifically to teach other artists and makers the same approach – one she refers to as the “earned media tactic.”
The philosophy is simple: instead of slowly building your own social following from zero, find people who already have your audience and get in front of them. “I always remind people that social media is not the only way to make an income online,” she says. “It might be the easiest way to get started. But it’s not the best ROI you can get for your time.”
Her flagship course, A Sale A Day Business System (priced between $1,997-$3,016), is built entirely around this model, teaching creators how to get pitch-ready and then get featured.
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Why Etsy isn’t the answer
Mei has a strong view on Etsy as a platform for selling physical products – and she’s not shy about sharing it. Her core message to the thousands of artists she coaches is this: don’t build your business on a platform you don’t control.
“Don’t put all your eggs in the Etsy basket,” she says. “There’s so much you cannot control. It’s algorithm-based. It can change on you overnight.”
Her conviction got some unexpected personal reinforcement when her husband Peter started testing his own Etsy shop. “One year he made all this money on Etsy, so he decided the year after to do all these improvements, thinking it was going to be great,” she says. “And then it didn’t. Every single idea he had flopped.”
The lesson wasn’t that Peter did something wrong. It was that Etsy, like so many marketplace platforms, is inherently unpredictable. For anyone trying to build a stable, sustainable income, that’s a shaky foundation to stand on.
What Mei advocates instead is selling through channels you own and control – your own website, your own checkout, your own email list – using earned media to drive the traffic. It’s a model that’s less flashy than going viral on TikTok, but far more durable.
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YouTube, the free workshop, and ThriveCart at the end of the funnel
If earned media is the acquisition strategy, YouTube is Mei’s main owned channel. With 294,000 subscribers, her channel has become the engine behind Creative Hive’s growth – but it took a long time to get there. She started taking it seriously around seven years ago, after finding that podcasting wasn’t a natural fit for her.
“YouTube was the big game changer because now people could see me, they could hear me – they could really get as close as possible to me being in front of them,” she says. The sales funnel is clean and intentional: YouTube videos drive viewers toward a free workshop, and the workshop leads them toward A Sale A Day Business System. The moment someone decides to buy, ThriveCart handles everything.
“When I started taking YouTube seriously, I heard over and over from buyers that they found my work, Googled me, watched all of my videos, and then bought my course,” Mei says. “YouTube made it easier for people to get to know me, like me, and trust me. The trust was the biggest thing.”
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How ThriveCart fits in – and why she made the switch
Before ThriveCart, Mei was on SamCart. The move came down to something that matters a lot to small business owners: predictable, fair pricing.
“My biggest beef was the monthly fee,” she says. “As a small business owner where your income is a roller coaster, it was really painful to pay $99 a month.”
When SamCart raised prices without adding new features and without grandfathering existing users, Mei decided it was time to move. “I really felt like from a leadership vision perspective, I didn’t agree with how they handled that,” she says. “So I took the leap with ThriveCart. I had known it existed for a long time and was ready to make the switch. I’m very happy that I did.”
ThriveCart is now at the core of Creative Hive’s operations. The checkout pages are branded and on point. Payment plans and dunning are baked in – useful for a $2,000+ course with a significant chunk of buyers using installment options. Order bumps and upsells are active on lower-ticket products. And the automated student onboarding is, in Mei’s words, something that “just works.”
“The automations handle everything: adding students to my email list as customers, adding them to WordPress where they get access to the program,” she says. “It’s all automated, and it’s fast. There are no issues with it.”
The automations actually save Mei somewhere between 5-10 hours a month. “If ThriveCart didn’t offer that,” she says, “I’d have ended up paying a programmer thousands of dollars to stitch together all the different software.”
That efficiency isn’t just a nice operational win. For Mei and her husband Peter, it’s what makes the whole multi-business setup sustainable – and what’s given her something most entrepreneurs can only dream about: more time to focus on what she wants to.
“It’s very important to me that my students have a seamless, positive experience on the fulfillment side of things. I was very happy to see that it was so easy to set up in ThriveCart,” she adds.
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The freedom to audition
In 2017, Mei moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. She’s been doing it ever since, most recently providing voiceover on a AAA video game and guest-acting on an episode of the dystopian TV drama Paradise. The reason she could make that move comes straight back to the businesses she’d built.
“So many actors in Los Angeles are broke,” she says. “They have to work two or three jobs – and doing auditions when you’re that tired and desperate is really hard. Not being able to afford acting classes or proper headshots is really hard.”
Her business successes have completely changed that equation. “The businesses earn me money even when I’m not working,” she says. “That allows me to sign up for courses, work with great headshot photographers, and work with coaches who really help me understand how the industry works. And it allows me to do auditions without feeling desperate that I have to book this because it’s my only ticket to pay rent.”
The same applies to her husband Peter, who Mei helped free from his programming job back in 2018. Peter now runs their print-on-demand wall art business – a company he started in 2019 with a $2,000 investment, made $11,000 in the first month, and has since grown to seven figures. He runs it like a programmer would: systematized, automated, and increasingly hands-off. “He’s put programmer fingerprints everywhere on that side of the business,” Mei says. “He’s automated and systematized so many things that I just never would have been able to do on my own.”
Together, they’ve built a structure where the three businesses run efficiently, the automations handle the friction, and both of them have the time and financial security to pursue things that matter to them beyond spreadsheets and checkout pages.
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Mei’s advice for fellow entrepreneurs
For any creator wondering whether their handmade business or creative passion can become a real business, Mei has plenty of encouraging advice.
1) Don’t wait to start pitching
“You are most likely more ready than you think you are,” she says. “Editors and media contacts don’t need you to have thousands of sales already. Being fresh and undiscovered can actually be an advantage. Just make sure your pitch is relevant and your photography is press-ready.”
2) Stop chasing social media metrics
“The amount of time I spent on social media in the early days was very disproportionate to how much money I was making,” she says. Follower counts and vanity metrics are seductive – but they don’t pay the bills. Earned media and email will serve you far better in the long run.
3) Don’t get comfortable on Etsy
Build your own checkout, your own list, and your own traffic. “Don’t put all your eggs in the Etsy basket,” she says. “Platforms can change their algorithms, their fees, their rules – and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your own infrastructure can’t be taken from you.”
4) It’s the small levers, not the big swings
Your progress compounds over time. “A lot of people are hoping for that one silver bullet that’s going to change everything,” she says. “But it’s really those small tweaks that stack over time that make the biggest difference.”
5) There’s always more you can do
Thinking of quitting? “I promise you there is always something else you haven’t done yet,” she says. “I have felt that hopelessness – multiple times in my journey. The people who tell me they’ve tried everything – 100% of the time – haven’t literally tried everything that’s possible. They’ve done everything they knew about. That’s different.”
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