Embracing "Blissipline" with @elyseholladay

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Maker of Habit #33

Elyse (@elyseholladay)

Why she’s featured

• She took the indie maker leap–she quit her job to focus on her side hustle full-time

• Pre-sold her personal style development program, The Unfolding, for a $16k initial launch and grew to $80k in a year, with no paid ads, and a conversion rate of 14.78%

• Taking what she learned from The Unfolding to create an outfit tracking app, Jumpsuit (you can beta test it here) 

• Helping out with product strategy for Generalist.world, the community for career generalists (which let’s face it–most of us indies are)

3 Strategies that Elyse leverages in her work:

🪜 Creating multiple offerings

Elyse’s bread and butter is teaching others how to develop their personal style. But rather than having just a one-size-fits-all service, like most online courses, she has many different versions of this offering:

• The Unfolding course + group coaching program ($3,240)

• Style Lab, a low-cost monthly membership for those just getting started

• Video bundles with standalone lessons

• A Wardrobe Knowledge Bank Notion template you can get on Gumroad

• Jumpsuit, a mobile app (currently in beta), where you track your outfits, helping you define and improve your personal style.

This allows her to meet her users where they are and deliver her value proposition at different commitment levels. And they all lead to The Unfolding, which is the “flagship” product—which helps clients move along the funnel.

🚪 Application Process

These days you can sign up for most things by just entering your email on the landing page and paying. Elyse strategically introduces some friction in her sign up process for the Unfolding by having users fill out an application. This allows her to weed out low-intent clients so she can focus on the ones that are ready to put in the effort (and invest the $) into solving this problem for themselves.

👋 Being reachable over DM

Elyse encourages potential clients to reach out to her via DM on Instagram. This allows Elyse to build relationships, rather than just “sell”.

In the end, selling is all about relationship building, and “social selling” enables a high-touch sales via DM, voice notes, and automated emails.

So instead of simply asking leads to sign up for an expensive course off a website, this human touch helps clients feel really seen and heard about a problem—clothing and identity—that is very personal.

3 Habits that Changed Elyse’s trajectory:

🛏 Consistent Sleep

This is my keystone habit. Without good sleep, our brains and bodies don’t function and our emotional balance is compromised—and any entrepreneur can tell you that a clear mind and steady emotions are critical to business creativity and success.

A lot of advice about sleep hygiene talks about going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time every day. One thing that changed my perspective was going for consistency, not constancy. For me that looks like not going to bed or waking up at exactly the same time, but being overall consistent with it. Loosening up the rigidity really helped. 

I also do a few things to make sure I get good sleep:

• I keep it really dark in my room and keep the temperature down (when you’re sleeping, you actually want it in high 60s, which is cold!) 

• I invested in nice sheets, pajamas, pillowcases 

• I have a dedicated charger for my phone away from my bed so I don’t have my phone in bed—and I have to get up for the alarm. 

• Setting my wakeup alarm in 90 minute intervals so I don’t wake up mid sleep-cycle. This makes you groggy!

Overall I’ve learned when I’m working on something I’m excited about, often the best thing I can do is put it aside and get some good rest, not grind til late at night.

🤔 Embracing Blissipline

Blissipline is discipline’s fun aunt. Instead of a “strict training that corrects or strengthens mental ability or moral character”, Blissipline is about not forcing yourself to adopt the behaviors or processes of others and instead embracing and honoring who you are and how you like to work. 

In general, I rebel against the traditional productivity and habit culture that you see every day online (I am a Rebel in Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies!). 

Instead I try to focus on flow state, not “productivity”:

• I use Otter voice notes with transcription instead of writing (note: this is actually how Elyse sent me the notes for this newsletter)!

• I set goals, often by asking myself, “What are the three things that I’m most excited about or are most important to me today or this week?”. Making space for tasks in a natural flow of my how I’m feeling means the important work gets done with less pressure

• I try—most days!—to get in some morning journal, meditation and movement

• Using Notion to organize my business notes, processes, and goals, so it’s all in one place, aka not in my head

In other words, putting myself in positions where I don’t have to force myself and can follow my natural energy and flow.

🛫 Collaboration

I’m not the specialist with incredible design skills, or the best copywriter, or developer. And even though I was a developer professionally for a long time, all of those skills–writing, coding, design–they were all means to an end.

My strength is seeing how things fit together—my husband calls it “designing systems” except domain non-specific!—and making things go. 

So the most powerful thing I know how to do is take my ideas to other people and see if I can get them excited, get their input, and then get something in their hands and iterate.

Collaboration is how I fill in the gaps from my strengths and weaknesses. It also is just more fun than working alone! For The Unfolding, I used my clients as collaborators to make sure I was building something that resonated with them.

For example, all the marketing copy I wrote for my program came from words used by my clients. I’d schedule calls with them and get their feedback on different phrases:, “Does “authentic” resonate more than “best self”? What about “define” or “discover” your style?”

Lately, I’m helping two other entrepreneurs right now, Milly at Generalist.World and Shaina at HelloGeneralist.com and in both cases, my role is helping bring their ideas to life (making things go!) with whatever skills I have to hand. Some days that’s writing, or building Airtable processes, or product strategy planning. I love the variety, and it’s such a delight to work with someone, whether a friend or collaborator or client, to get to a better outcome than you can get alone.

That’s a wrap!

Thanks for sharing your habits with us, Elyse!

Always fun getting to know another rebel 😈

How to stay up to date with Elyse:

Twitter: @elyseholladay 

Instagram: @elyseholladay

Oh, and one last thing! Stay updated on all the cool work of our past makers with the Maker of Habit Twitter list. It’s an awesome way to feel more connected to the maker community.

What maker do you want to see featured next? Reply to this email and let me know.

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The Honest Guide to Indie Making

I spent 2 months writing 50k words about my journey going full-time on my side project. The Honest Guide to Indie Making is a thorough documentation of everything I learned the hard way, so you can learn the easy way.

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