Photo of ThriveCart merchant Melissa Henault in a white suit, alongside the case study's title text, 'Rebuilding After a $10 Million Funnel Collapsed: How ThriveCart & Tripwires Helped Melissa Henault Return to 7 Figures in Just 17 Months'

As the founder of Burn Out to All Out, she helps coaches, consultants, and online business owners attract better-fit, higher-paying clients through marketing, offer strategy, and LinkedIn lead generation.

Her first million came without ads and with just 2,000 LinkedIn followers. Later, she built a launch funnel that generated around $10 million. At its peak, one nine-day launch brought in almost $900,000 from cold traffic.

But then the market changed.

By May 2025, the funnel that had made her business so successful was no longer working. The final launch converted at less than 1%, barely covering a $100,000 ad spend. Melissa could have kept trying to force the old model to work. Instead, she shut it down, rebuilt her offer flow, and created a new path for premium buyers to get to know, trust, and buy from her.

Since that pivot, she’s generated around $2 million in new revenue. Her $15,000 Inner Circle has around 56 clients (as of mid-October 2026), and she’s taken just one sales call to enroll them. ThriveCart sits at the center of the new customer journey, powering the checkouts, tripwires, payment plans, and ascension paths that move buyers from a small first purchase to a premium offer.

A successful funnel can still have an expiration date

Melissa didn’t build Burn Out to All Out by accident. Before becoming an entrepreneur, she was a medical director in big pharma. But the travel and long hours made it difficult to be present with her three children.

“I left corporate America knowing that I didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom. I wanted to be a work-from-home mom,” she says. “I wanted to create legacy. I wanted to create impact. But I also wanted to be available for my children.”

For years, her main sales engine ran like clockwork: six times a year, she’d run a free nine-day master class, bring in cold traffic, and invite people into a $5,500 offer. At the model’s peak, it worked extremely well.

“At the peak of that campaign, in November 2023, we did almost $900,000 in sales in nine days to cold traffic who showed up for nine days and bought,” she says.

But the numbers slowly moved in the wrong direction. Cold traffic conversion fell from around 3% to 2.5%, then 2%. In May 2025, it dropped below 1%. 

“That was the pivot moment,” Melissa recalls. “This was $10 million in. I had made $10 million in that business model and it was no longer serving me. But I knew, once our clients were in, they loved the offer and they stayed because our mentorship was – and still is – phenomenal. The front-end of my funnel was broken. A cold audience was no longer committing to a $5,500 offer.”

The stakes were real. Melissa had more than $160,000 in monthly overheads and knew the business would soon run out of money if she didn’t find a new way forward.

“I didn’t have a full plan yet and it was like the hardest thing,” she says. “But I decided to still go on a big family trip to Iceland that we’d booked, because I felt like it would have been so soul crushing if we’d canceled. So I went and when I came back, I got to work on restructuring my funnel.”

That became the beginning of the next phase of the business.

→ SEE HOW IT’S DONE | ‘How Nicole Culver Scaled Past $4.3 Million With ThriveCart Checkouts Built in Under 60 Minutes‘

The pivot: from instant sales to taste-to-trust offers

Melissa calls the current market a “trust recession.” Buyers are more cautious, online content is noisier, and a cold audience is less willing to invest thousands of dollars after a single introduction.

Her answer wasn’t to make the premium offer less valuable. It was to change the front door.

“Even the guy that buys the Maserati is going to test drive it first,” she says. “I had to check my ego at the door and say, ‘How do I create a taste-to-trust offer that is still a premium experience?’”

The new model lets people experience Melissa’s thinking and get an early win before they’re asked to make a much bigger investment. The entry point teaches attraction marketing and premium buyer psychology. From there, buyers can move into her mid-tier offer, Queen’s Chamber, where Melissa teaches her “silent sales engine,” and then into Inner Circle, her highest-proximity coaching offer.

The journey usually starts with LinkedIn content, a lead magnet, and a small paid offer. The buyer then enters an email sequence that builds trust and explains the next best step. In the right situation, someone moves from a first purchase to the higher-ticket offer. “Before you know it, in the next 30 to 60 days, they’re in my $15,000 offer, and I never had to take a call with them,” Melissa says.

→ READ MORE SUCCESS STORIES | ‘6 Years, Many Offers, 1 Backbone: How Melissa Guller Built a More Stable Online Business With ThriveCart‘

Why tripwires are the first step to premium sales

Tripwires are a central part of Melissa’s new offer flow. When someone downloads a free resource, she gives them a relevant next step at a low price, often through a ThriveCart checkout and order bump.

One example is a $22 master class offered alongside her Offer Flows That Create Millions checklist. It’s a small purchase, but it does something important: it turns interest into intent.

“What I know and what I teach to my clients is that the highest-intent moment to get someone on your list to move to a paid customer is to ensure that when you’re giving something for free that there’s a tripwire,” Melissa says. “There’s that high-intent moment that they’re willing to give you their email address. They’ve already said, ‘I’m really interested in this.’ And in that moment, if you can make a very frictionless, low-priced offer that complements what they’ve just opted into, the buyer journey begins.”

When Melissa analyzed the data from her Inner Circle membership, the $22 offer was the most common first purchase. That’s a useful lesson for coaches selling premium programs: a smaller offer doesn’t have to attract bargain hunters. If it solves the right problem, it can identify serious buyers and give them a reason to keep going.

Melissa also uses order bumps, thank-you page offers, and short upgrade windows. In one sequence, buyers can apply their $500 investment toward Queen’s Chamber if they upgrade within seven days. That offer has produced a 23% ascension rate from the low-ticket product into the mid-tier program.

But she’s careful not to add offers just to increase the order value.

“If you put a cart bump in just for a money grab, you’re going to lose credibility,” she says. “I’m only putting things there that are going to collapse time to trust. I want to sell them something that’s going to move them further in trusting me and getting results.”

→ ESCAPE THE CONSTANT LAUNCH CYCLE | ‘From 9-Hour Call Days to $60K Passive Months: Melanie Aubert’s ThriveCart Story‘

Button with the words 'Explore ThriveCart's features and plans' on it

Selling a $15,000 offer without a long sales page

Melissa recently reviewed the source of her Inner Circle sales and found that none came directly from the website.

“Every single sale of my high-ticket offer came from a ThriveCart checkout in an email sequence,” she says. “Short form, short copy for a $15,000 offer. The reason it works so well, and they don’t have to go to this huge WordPress page with pages and pages of copy, is because we’ve created that offer-flow logic that collapses time to trust.”

By the time a buyer sees the Inner Circle checkout, they’ve already experienced the content, the smaller offer, and the email sequence. The checkout doesn’t have to do all the selling. It simply makes the next step easy.

Melissa says around 90% of her revenue comes from email rather than social media feeds. Her email open rate is typically between 45% and 50%, giving her a reliable way to keep showing up for people who’ve already raised their hand.

ThriveCart helps her turn that interest into a clear buying path. It handles the checkout, payment plans, upgrades, and recurring payments, while giving Melissa and her team a central view of what’s happening.

Before ThriveCart, Melissa used Ontraport but says the “interface was clunky, difficult to integrate, and prone to recurring payments dropping without notification. Reporting was also slow and difficult to use.” Now she can connect ThriveCart data with AI tools and get answers while decisions are still being made.

“From a founder’s perspective, where I’ve loved going into a rabbit hole is literally its integration with AI right now,” she says. “How quickly I can get real-time data with ThriveCart and be able to make assessments in my business through data pools on ThriveCart through Claude. It has become our true north, our source of truth.”

That speed matters during launches and renewals. Reporting that once lagged by about a month can now be checked in real time, helping Melissa and her team see payment plans, renewals, customer value, and sales attribution without waiting for another spreadsheet.

Her favorite feature, though, is simpler but far more powerful overall: “The best thing about ThriveCart is its ease of use,” she says.

→ ANOTHER SUCCESS STORY | ‘Easy Checkout Customization Leads to 50% Higher Conversions: Stefanie Gass’s ThriveCart Story‘

The lesson from the pivot

Melissa’s story isn’t about finding one perfect funnel and running it forever. It’s about noticing when a successful model is starting to fail, then having the courage to rebuild. The old funnel had generated $10 million, but the market had changed. She kept the premium positioning and quality of the coaching, while completely overhauling the way buyers entered the business.

“I’ve just lived the pivot. We’ve embodied the pivot and we’re teaching the pivot so our clients stay,” she says. “I know upfront I’m bringing in a premium client who should be in this $15,000 offer. But I’m not going to sell them the $15,000 offer on day one. I’m going to gain their trust, overserve, surprise, and delight, and have a very strategic structure to move them up the offer ladder quickly.”

→ RECOMMENDED READING | ‘How a Self-Taught Mindset Mentor Consolidated 7 Separate Tools Into ThriveCart & Built a $2 Million Business‘

The AI component: going beyond teaching, into implementation

Melissa is a big fan of letting AI do a big chunk of the heavy-lifting work. It’s part of her processes as well as her product. For example, her Inner Circle members get access to high-touch coaching and mentorship from her and her team, as well as access to their AI tools. 

“I call them my AI employees,” Melissa says. “It’s how we’ve been able to go from a team of 18 to a team of four and a half people. Now, for the first time ever – this still blows my mind – our clients can install those employees into their own companies. They used to have to hit play and watch a course and learn a methodology. Now they can install my copywriters. They can install my funnel builders. They can install my graphic design.” 

Melissa believes this approach is the future, even if it’s giving away her IP. “My business mentor when I first started this, she was like, ‘Are you sure you want to do that? Like this is your IP.’ And I’m like, ‘I think the death of course creation has come and it is now how do you install that knowledge as quickly as possible through AI.’”

“So I’ve taken my intellectual property and beyond just learning the principles, my clients can literally install the ‘AI employee’ that knows that intellectual property but customized to their business and they can run it the day that they download it. I’m not scared of giving away my IP because by selling a course, I was always giving away my IP. Now I’m just collapsing time to speed so that the solution is integrated, implemented, and actually used.”

FOR YOU → | ‘Earned Media, Not Etsy: How Mei Pak Scaled From $3/Hour to Seven Figures and Freed Herself to Pursue Acting‘

Melissa’s advice for fellow entrepreneurs and coaches

Melissa’s advice is straightforward: be patient, stay curious, and don’t confuse a hard season with the end of the business.

“A successful business mindset is about persistence and patience,” she says. “It’s really hard to beat someone who doesn’t give up. As my mom would say ‘everything is figureoutable.’”

She also believes resilience starts with taking care of yourself before the crisis arrives.

“This might be a controversial opinion but I believe that if you want to start a business, start with a routine of taking care of yourself,” she says. “If you can commit to that even when the days are hard, you will build the mental tenacity and reps to be able to do it. It’s the same discipline in business.”

For coaches, her practical advice is to stop trying to sell the biggest offer to a stranger. Give people a useful first experience, use tripwires to identify intent, and make every bump or upgrade relevant. Then let trust, not pressure, do the work.

That’s how Melissa turned a broken front end into a new path to premium sales, and how Burn Out to All Out is helping more entrepreneurs build businesses that grow without recreating the burnout they wanted to leave behind.

Ready to Scale Your Business With ThriveCart?

Create tripwires, upsells, and customized checkout pages in minutes, not hours, so you can easily pivot when you need to. Join Melissa Henault and the 75,000+ entrepreneurs, creators, and coaches who use ThriveCart to power their checkouts, courses, and communities.

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