Dow Janes collected $40,000 from customers nine months before its course existed

Baker and King put the bar at 20 sign-ups before they would build anything, and failing that test would have cost them nothing. The test ran at meetups the two were already hosting in people's living rooms, "kind of like book clubs for money," Baker said ^[9]. Twenty sign-ups would have justified building it, at a founder's price of $1,000 ^[3]. "That whole idea of sell it before you build it really worked for us," Baker told Business Insider ^[2].

The customer cash came first, and the founders' own $2,000 went in afterwards, to incorporate the business and cover initial website costs ^[5][19]. That makes the presale twenty times the equity the two of them ever put in, and they have never taken outside money ^[20][8]. Across the nine months of building The Million Dollar Year, the $40,000 worked out to roughly $4,400 a month ^[4][21].

Forty women had paid for a 12-step course that was then built in real time with them ^[3][6]. The development risk sat with the buyers. Baker and King ran about 20 customer interviews before writing a sales page ^[10], and Baker said the course has changed relatively little in the seven years since ^[11].

The $30 million for 2026 is the company's own projection, taken from a profit-and-loss statement its CFO provided to Business Insider ^[7]. And delivering a course costs little more than the founders' time; a business that needs premises or stock before it can serve anyone will not turn a $1,000 deposit into nine months of runway.

Baker's calendar is sorted the same way. Her split is roughly 70% on green-light work, which she defines as sales calls, webinars, promotions and optimising the funnel; 25% on yellow-light work such as product updates, tech maintenance and legal or operational tasks; and about 5% on red-light work ^[17][14][15]. Red-light is branding, logos, email and social media, which Baker said are "the most tempting to work on" ^[16]. "We didn't have a website at that time. We didn't have social media. We just went straight to the green-light activities to see if this was a viable business," she said ^[18].

Growth now runs on paid media. Advertising on Meta and YouTube routes people to a free webinar, where they hear the company's approach before deciding whether to enroll ^[13]. Business Insider did not report the ad spend. "A product doesn't sell itself," Baker said. "Just because it exists and is for sale on your website doesn't mean anyone is going to buy it." ^[12]