When Andreea Ayers starting looking for jobs after moving with her husband to Boulder, Colorado, in 2006, she was five months pregnant with her first child. After a handful of interviews that went nowhere, she realized she might be better off building her own business, where she could have some flexibility with her new baby. "I always had side businesses along with full-time jobs," the 39-year-old says. "So I thought. Let me pick one idea and devote myself full time to it."
She decided to start a T-shirt company, using her savings to get started. "It was definitely under $1,000," she remembers. "I wanted to start with $1,000 because I figured, 'If I lose $1,000, it's not that bad.'" Ayers placed her first order for 96 shirts in four colors, drove them to a screen printer in Denver who walked her through the process, took her own photos, and set up a website and Etsy shop in April 2007 selling the tees for $28 each to "see what would happen."
Orders started to trickle in during that first month, and then she had an idea. At a yoga class, she noticed her instructor was wearing a shirt that said, "Be present." "I was riding the bus back, thinking that shirt was so inspiring," she remembers. "I thought maybe it makes sense to sell the shirts to yoga studios." That weekend, she spent two days combing through yoga websites and magazines to build an Excel spreadsheet of 3,000 yoga studios in the US and the names of the owners. "I spent the next week emailing every single one individually," she says. She offered the shirts, which cost her under $8 each to make, to the studios at wholesale, around $14 each. Within a week, she had sold out of her initial order and was able not only to pay herself the starting costs from her savings, but also make a profit and finance another order of shirts.
From there, the business snowballed, and that first year it earned about $124,000. As the business continued earning more, up to $160,000 a year, she was able to pay herself at least $3,000 a month — sometimes up to $10,000— until she sold the business in February 2011, right before her third child was born.
"I was getting so many emails from people asking questions," Ayers remembers. "I had a lot of success getting in magazines, and people would say, 'How did you do it? Can I hire you?'" So she started consulting in April 2011 and took on five clients for $500 a month each, teaching them how to launch their businesses.
But with three young kids, helping five clients was too much. Ayers decided instead to launch an online course, "basically teaching them what I had been teaching them one on one — everyone had the same questions and the same needs." She had been blogging about her experience launching a T-shirt business and had started to build an email list and an audience, to whom she offered her course for $47. Since then, she's begun offering the courses on her website, LaunchGrowJoy.com.
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