For years, Stefanie Gass built her business around hustle.
She spent hours networking, posting on social media, sending direct messages, and trying to keep up with the latest marketing advice. The work took over her days, but it didn’t create the freedom or consistency she wanted.
Today, Stefanie runs a multi-seven-figure podcast-led business with a team of around 10 people and roughly 500 students in her main coaching program. She works around 17 hours a week, while her podcast and YouTube channel continue to bring new leads every day.
A big part of that change came from simplifying her customer journey.
After moving her checkout to ThriveCart, Stefanie saw conversions at checkout increase by 50%. She also used ThriveCart to automate enrollment, course access, payment reminders, email sequences, and student tracking.
“When I first added the ThriveCart checkouts, that was just this ‘aha moment’ where we started converting 50% higher at checkout because the clunkiness and the obstacles to checking out – when things either look unprofessional or have way too many fields where people have to sit there and enter a bunch of information – were just gone,” Stefanie says. “It was truly such an increased conversion rate at the point of checkout.”
The result is a business that generates more revenue without requiring more manual work.
Here’s how she did it.
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From hustle to a podcast-led business
Stefanie has been an entrepreneur for 16 years. Before she built her podcast-led business, she worked in corporate America and later joined a network marketing company. At the time, her business was built around constant activity.
“It was 100% just grinding,” she says. “All the networking events I could find, constant Facebook groups, Instagram, the DMs, the back-and-forth conversations. It was just extremely exhausting and so time-consuming just to get a couple of clients here and there.”
Social media became her main source of leads when she moved into coaching. But the effort quickly became difficult to sustain. Stefanie was spending five to six hours a day creating stories, liking posts, following people, and replying to messages.
“I felt like it had become such an addiction in my life that I had to constantly touch the app and check the app and show up,” she says. “I almost felt like I had this screen in front of my face 24/7.”
She wanted a different way to sell digital products. One that would let her build deeper relationships with her audience without needing to be online all day.
That led her to podcasting.
Stefanie now helps coaches and entrepreneurs build podcast-led businesses, using long-form content to attract an audience, email marketing to nurture that audience, and one core offer to generate revenue.
“I help faith-led men and women build profitable podcast-led businesses,” she says. “I help them get clear on that calling and what the niche specifically is, then build an audience-generating machine using podcasting so they don’t have to be on social media.”
Her own podcast has now reached over 3 million downloads and is a top 20 business show. She also has more than 71,000 YouTube subscribers, with millions of video views across the channel, including her “How to have a business meeting with God’ video, which has over 266,000 views.
But while podcasting became her main growth engine, Stefanie still needed a simple and reliable way to turn that attention into sales.
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The checkout problem that was costing her money
Before ThriveCart, Stefanie was using the checkout included with her previous course platform.
The process looked straightforward on the surface. Someone would hear a podcast episode, visit a sales page, and click through to purchase. But once they reached the checkout, many people didn’t complete the transaction.
“The biggest challenge with the previous platform was really clunky checkouts. The checkout was just awful,” Stefanie says. “For people to have to try to navigate this clunky thing for the course I’d created, I knew I was losing a lot of sales.”
Her data showed just how frustrating the situation was – around half of the people who reached the checkout didn’t complete their purchase.
“About 50% of my sales were lost right there,” she explains. “They would go, ‘I don’t have time for all this,’ or it wasn’t pretty on the phone, or whatever was happening. They would bounce out.”
The customers who did complete the purchase created another problem. Stefanie and her team had to manually assign them to the right course, set their access period, add them to email sequences, and make sure they received the right information.
The process took time and created plenty of room for mistakes.
“We had to do a lot of manual checking to make sure that people were in the right places with the right level of access,” she says. “Not to mention the lost revenue because of the sales page bounce rate.”
For a growing business, that kind of friction adds up quickly. Every extra field on a checkout, every manual enrollment, and every disconnected tool creates another opportunity for a customer to drop out of the process.
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A 50% increase in checkout conversions
Stefanie first discovered ThriveCart through other people in her industry. She noticed that the checkouts looked clean, simple, and easy to use.
At the time, she wasn’t looking for a complicated all-in-one platform with features she didn’t need. She wanted an efficient payment and checkout system that could work alongside the tools she already used.
“Most of the platforms that were promising what we needed, like hosting your courses, checkouts, affiliates, and all these things, were literally hundreds to thousands of dollars a month,” she says.
She signed up for ThriveCart and started with the checkout, because that was the biggest problem in her business. The impact was immediate.
“We immediately saw the bounce rate go down to around 20% and then 15%,” Stefanie says. “We started capitalizing on the sales simply because the checkout was clean and simple, and the phone view was much easier for customers to use.”
The ability to remove unnecessary checkout fields made a major difference, too.
“Being able to remove fields that didn’t matter to the consumer so that there was as little obstacle as possible for them to check out made a huge difference,” she says.
That improvement gave Stefanie a stronger foundation for every offer that came after it. Instead of losing potential customers at the final step, she could give them a faster, clearer path to purchase.
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Customization that helps her team sell more
Alongside order bumps and upsells, checkout customization has become one of Stefanie’s favorite ThriveCart features.
Her team can duplicate an existing checkout, make a few changes, and create a personalized payment experience for a specific customer. That could mean offering a different payment plan, adding a discount, or creating a special option for someone overseas.
“One of my favorite things is being able to duplicate ThriveCart’s checkouts and customize them,” she says. “The customization is one of our greatest sales assets.”
For example, a customer might want to pay $1,000 upfront and then move to a lower payment plan. Someone else might qualify for a special discount or need an extended payment option.
“My team literally duplicates a checkout, does some tweaks to make it look really customized, and is able to shoot it over,” Stefanie explains. “It still gets added to the right course with all the right parameters for people to be in the course they need to be in for the right amount of time.”
That flexibility gives her sales team more options without creating a new manual process every time. It also means the customer gets a checkout that feels personal and relevant, rather than being sent to a generic page that may not match their circumstances.
Stefanie’s checkouts include her branding, videos, testimonials, payment options, and other elements designed to build trust and make the decision easier.
“We try to really eliminate any type of time and frustration from the checkout process,” she says. “ThriveCart is just getting better and better at that.”
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Automating the work behind every purchase
After seeing the difference at checkout, Stefanie moved her courses into ThriveCart’s legacy course platform.
Today, her main offer is Podcast to ProfitⓇ, a six-month group coaching program. Students move through six main modules, with lessons and submodules unlocking automatically over time.
That means Stefanie’s team doesn’t have to manually track where every student is in the program.
“There might be somebody in step one, somebody in step six, and somebody who has come back as an alumni,” she says. “There are people all throughout the program being automatically tracked by ThriveCart.”
The typical customer journey starts either with Meta ads or, if it’s organic traffic, with Stefanie’s podcast or YouTube channel. Listeners are invited to join her Profitable Podcast Bootcamp, which introduces them to her approach. From there, some people apply for Podcast to ProfitⓇ.
Once someone is ready to join, Stefanie’s sales team sends them a customized ThriveCart checkout. When they complete their purchase, they’re automatically added to the right course and given the correct level of access.
“With ThriveCart, they’re automatically added to the back-end from the course itself,” Stefanie says. “They’re zapped into the community and into the proper email lists. They’re automatically added to the email sequences and automatically added to the calendar reminders for all the calls.”
In total, she estimates that 99% of her enrollment and access process is now automated thanks to ThriveCart.
“Basically, the only thing my team is doing when a new person signs up is to customize a contract and then add it as a link on the checkout,” she says. “I think that’s the only thing we have remaining that’s truly manual.”
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Managing hundreds of students without adding more work
The difference becomes even clearer when Stefanie looks at the size of her student base.
She currently has around 500 students in her program. Some are just starting, some are midway through the program, and others continue as alumni.
Without ThriveCart’s automated tracking, managing that many people would require constant checking and manual updates.
“I think the ease of managing our students is what surprised me most,” Stefanie says. “I have 500 students right now in my program, and people are falling off, people are coming in, and some people are upgrading so they want to stay in as alumni.”
Because each student is tagged correctly when they join, ThriveCart can track their access and move them through the right parts of the program.
“They’re automatically removed when their time is up,” she says. “When they’re graduating, they start getting an email sequence about staying in and getting upgraded into our alumni program. It’s just this, ‘Whoa, whoa.’ We don’t have to deal with any of it. It’s just done.”
The same system also helps Stefanie’s sales team work independently. Her team can create the right checkout and payment option without needing to ask her to step in.
“My sales team has whatever they need or, when they have questions, they simply hop on to our dedicated Slack channel with support,” she says. “They don’t have to ask me anything. They just go in and they’re able to do whatever they need to do to customize that experience for people and make the payment plan work for the customers.”
That flexibility has also helped increase conversions because customers can choose a payment option that fits their needs.
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More revenue, fewer hours, and a simpler business
While ThriveCart is a major factor in her growth, Stefanie says her success has also come from building a strong team, improving her sales process, simplifying her offers, and focusing on the channels that generated the most traction.
“Along with really amazing operating systems, getting a team in place, getting better and better at sales, and simplifying from loads of offers to one, all of those things along with better software like ThriveCart have been integral in going from that six-figure level to the multi-seven-figure space,” she says.
But success doesn’t mean working longer hours. Instead, she now works around 17 hours a week.
“That’s really attributed to having super great systems, great software in place, and having as much automation and simplicity as humanly possible,” she says.
Stefanie has also become more disciplined about stopping activities that don’t create results. Her Instagram is “now mainly used like a business card,” she says. She no longer blogs, posts constantly on socials, or tries to show up everywhere online.
“We as a company are not afraid of not continuing to do something that is no longer lead- or sales-generating,” she says. “Some of the things we used to do, like blogging, we don’t do anymore. Some of the things we did on social media, we don’t do. There are certain things that we know don’t produce income. They produce stress. So we let them go.”
That focus has helped her build a business that continues to grow without taking over her life. “The reality is, overall, this business feels really peaceful while it’s still growing exponentially,” she says.
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Stefanie’s advice for fellow entrepreneurs and coaches
Small audience = big opportunity
Stefanie’s first piece of advice is not to wait until you have a large audience before creating an offer. “Having a small audience is actually not a problem. It’s an opportunity,” she says. “It’s the place where you get to figure out who the one person is that you want to help.”
She believes a smaller, more engaged audience can often be more valuable than a large audience that rarely takes action.
“It’s not really about the audience size,” she says. “It’s about the audience depth. How much conversion are you getting from 15 people who avidly listen to every single podcast? Probably 50% or more.”
You can’t be everyone at once
She also recommends choosing one primary channel instead of trying to be everywhere.
“I think if we’re everywhere, we do nothing,” Stefanie says. “Be faithful somewhere. Pick one channel to start.”
For her, that channel was podcasting. She focused on making the podcast work before adding YouTube, paid traffic, and other growth channels.
Strategy + systems = success
Finally, she believes entrepreneurs need both a strong strategy and strong systems.
“Strategy without systems burns you out,” she says. “It’s just a million great ideas, and everyone’s frantically trying to make them all happen. Systems without strategy just make you efficient at checking boxes. You do need both. You need strategy and you need systems.”
For Stefanie, ThriveCart has helped bring those two pieces together by making the customer journey simpler, the checkout experience more effective, and the day-to-day work easier to manage.
As she puts it, “My favorite thing about ThriveCart is the simplicity and how it helps you create an incredible customer journey.”
