How to Sell Digital Products (with a Tiny Email List!)
Katie is not a web designer. She's not even in a remotely design-adjacent industry. She's an engineer by background who got hit with a wave of Glow Forge ads during COVID, got laid off from a long corporate career around the same time, and ended up building a full education business around laser engraving machines — teaching people how to use them, and how to build businesses around them.
I love this conversation for exactly that reason. The niche is about as far from Squarespace design as you can get, but the mechanics underneath it — building an audience, figuring out what to sell them, understanding why a launch works or doesn't — are identical to what I teach. If you've ever wondered whether the strategy actually transfers outside the "online business" bubble, this is your proof.
Prefer to watch? Catch the full conversation below, or keep reading.
From corporate layoff to laser engraving educator
Katie's story starts in the middle of COVID, getting served ad after ad for Glow Forge. She got excited about the possibilities of what she could make with it — and then, not long after, was let go from a long corporate career and suddenly had time on her hands.
"I don't want to go back into corporate life. What can I do?" is the question she actually sat with. And what she found, exploring that, was that she genuinely enjoyed teaching the machines, the process, and the business side of it far more than she expected to.
She still makes products under her business, Things Katie Makes, but most of her time now goes to helping people who've outgrown their first machine. A lot of her students start with something like a Glow Forge, which her friend likes to describe as "valet parking" — it does everything for you. The moment you move to a bigger, more powerful machine, the software gets a lot more complex, and that's where Katie steps in.
She built an entire education business out of the gap between "I bought a machine" and "I actually know how to use it."
Getting bored making the same thing, and finding YouTube
Katie originally pictured herself running a product shop. What she found instead, fast, was that she got bored making the same thing over and over. So she started working on more unique projects instead — and filming them, and putting that footage on YouTube, and talking through what she was doing.
That's when she realised what she actually liked: not the making, exactly, but doing new things and figuring them out in real time. And once she started sharing that process, people started asking her how. How do you do this. How do you do that. Can you explain this part? That's the entire origin of her courses and education work — she was just answering the same questions enough times that she turned the answer into a product.
Laser machines themselves range enormously — from tiny diode machines that cut paper or engrave a coaster, all the way up to machines that can engrave metal, cut cleanly, or wrap around a rotary attachment to engrave a curved tumbler. They range in price, size, power, and capability, and figuring out which one does what is its own learning curve. Katie built two products around that curve:
→ "You Can Laser" — her beginner course, built for someone who just got their machine and doesn't want to spend months hunting YouTube for answers to questions they don't even know how to ask yet
→ Business coaching — helping people figure out their niche, who they're selling to, and where, since most generic "how to sell on Etsy" advice doesn't actually fit how laser engravers sell
Wix, and wanting to actually understand the "why"
Before any of that, Katie built her very first website on Wix. She hated it. Didn't find the interface intuitive, didn't feel in control — and control mattered to her specifically because she's an engineer by background. She wanted to understand how things worked, not just have them work. Paying someone to build her a beautiful site she then couldn't touch, update, or manage herself was never going to sit right with her.
So she found Squarespace and thought, okay, I want to learn how to actually do this properly. But what she found when she found me was less about the platform and more about the explanation underneath it — the here's-why. Here's how this impacts your SEO. Here's the buyer psychology behind this decision. Here's the pages you actually need. Here's why you only have four links in your top navigation.
"I just I loved your teaching style. It was very straightforward. No fluff, no BS." That's Katie's own line, and it's exactly the distinction that got her to dive into Square Secrets.
From a template to a blank canvas
Before Square Secrets, Katie had tried the template-and-plug-things-in approach. It didn't feel cohesive. It didn't feel like it had the right parts, because she was assembling a site without understanding what any of the parts were actually for.
After the course, she started from a blank canvas instead — and knew exactly what needed to go into it. Not just what to build, but how to build it quickly, effectively, and linked to the right next step. If she's building an opt-in page, she knows what has to come after it. She knows how to remove the header. She knows the small mechanical things that make the difference between a page that just exists and a page that actually moves someone from "I have this problem" to "I've solved it."
Why she joined Audience Academy — and got off Instagram
Everyone talks about growing your email list. It's the number one thing you hear, over and over, in this space. But for Katie, the real question underneath that advice was more specific: how does she manage the audience she already had on YouTube and actually get them onto a list? How does she build relationships with people, not just followers?
She got sick of Instagram fast — it just wasn't for her. What she did want was the relationship-building and the conversation, the parts she loved about Stories. And what pulled her into Audience Academy specifically was that I was still talking about blogging and long-form, searchable content when most people had stopped.
"When we talk about the Instagram algorithm, if someone sees it at the wrong time, it doesn't matter. But when they go searching, if you come up and you can solve the problem — bingo, that's what you need." That's the whole reframe, in Katie's words, and it's why she built her content strategy around search instead of feed timing.
The six months it took to find her footing on YouTube
Growth wasn't instant. Katie says it took about six months on YouTube to get to a place where she understood what she was capable of and what people actually wanted to see. Her blog is honestly still growing.
But once she connected the pieces — a video, that led to an opt-in, that led to a blog post supporting it — the system started compounding. She now has a single video with over 30,000 views that's become her biggest lead-in to her email list. One video. One download. That's it.
300 people on the list, 13 sales
When Katie launched her first course, her email list sat at around 300 people (it's around 200 now). From that list, on that first launch, she made 13 sales — a conversion rate she describes as far better than she expected, from a genuinely small list.
She didn't need a huge audience. She needed the right one.
What she actually sends to a 2,500-person list
Katie's overarching goal with her content is simple: help laser engraving business owners make more money with their lasers. That shows up as marketing content, how-to content, and a lot of software tutorials — LightBurn specifically, which she compares to the jump from Canva to Illustrator in terms of complexity. People get overwhelmed by how much is available in it.
She also deliberately shares resources from outside the laser niche, because the best person to teach something — SEO, marketing, whatever it is — might not live inside her world at all. To her list, right now, she's talking a lot about niching down, because a lot of laser engravers get started wanting to make everything, simply because they can. What they end up with is people throwing spaghetti at the wall — and becoming completely unreferable in the process. She'll also cover simpler things that feel obvious to her now, like paint-filling acrylic, or answer questions she's gotten repeatedly, just so people keep building the skill set.
Her most popular opt-in is a download of her top five LightBurn tips. Not because the content is flashy, but because it solves a real, specific memory problem — steps that are genuinely hard to keep in your head the first time you hear them, packaged as a quick reference you can go back to.
The $27 workshop that made $3,000 in a weekend
One of the best examples of what an engaged list can actually tell you happened last summer. Katie had run her live workshop that fed into her bigger course, and she kept hearing the same thing from a specific group of people: I don't need all of that. They had similar, more specific questions about the software itself.
So she said, okay — I'm going to throw this out here. A live workshop, an hour and a half, going through every single button in LightBurn. $27, if you buy it today.
She made $3,000 in a weekend. And then she turned it into an evergreen product that now lives inside her welcome sequence — the first real taste new people get of how she teaches, before they ever consider her bigger offers. It's not just a product. It's the thing that keeps them in her ecosystem.
Why Audience Academy exists in the first place
Katie's workshop story is the exact pattern that made me build Audience Academy. I'd watched so many people build something, launch it into the world, and get demoralised when it didn't sell — and then draw completely the wrong lesson from it. They'd assume they'd rushed the launch, or picked the wrong product, or put out the wrong thing.
So I'd ask: how many people actually went to the sales page? And the answer, over and over, was basically no one.
You don't have a product problem. You have a lack of an audience problem. Sometimes that's the whole story — you made the right thing, you just don't have the eyeballs yet. Sometimes it's both: you made something no one wanted, specifically because you never had the audience conversations that would have told you what to build in the first place. Katie's workshop worked because she'd been listening to her list long enough to know exactly what they were stuck on. She never would have guessed people would pay for that content — until she asked, and they said yes. She ran a deeper-dive follow-up after people asked "what's next," and now it's a bundle. An evergreen funnel is next.
Is course-creator life actually the dream?
Launching is exhausting — Katie will say that outright. Whether it's worth it depends entirely on where you get your energy and how you want to spend it.
What actually surprised her was how much she enjoys the live interaction with students once they're in a course. She assumed she'd want to be hands-off — record it once, be done, let people go through it on their own. That's not what happened. Even something as small as an hour call every other week ends up shaping her content directly: the questions people ask reveal challenges she hadn't caught, and make the material better for the next round of students.
What Katie wishes she'd known sooner
Asked what she'd tell her past self, Katie comes back to structure. What she loves about the courses she's taken is that they gave her a system to follow — not a pile of automations to set up on day one, but a clear set of steps to make sure everything she does is actually moving her forward.
The bigger piece is measurement. Not just doing the thing, but tracking the results of the thing, so you're not reacting to vanity metrics or what everyone else seems to be doing. A piece of content that gets 10 new email subscribers is a win, even if it never goes viral. A YouTube video with modest views that reaches exactly the right, highly engaged group of people is a win too — she just didn't know to measure that at the start, and it would have saved her a lot of frustration wondering why a specific video "didn't work."
Does growing an email list actually grow the business?
Katie's answer is unqualified: 100%. Partly because it brings in new people who need what she's already built. But just as much because of the relationships she's developed with people on that list — she'll get emails saying "this came at the perfect time, what's next," and those conversations directly shape what she creates. The $27 workshop only exists because she was listening closely enough to notice the same specific questions coming up again and again.
Katie on Square Secrets, Audience Academy, and Squarespace Business
On Square Secrets: she could have learned the clicks on YouTube. What she couldn't have gotten there was the why — in what order, what's important, why it's important. She still goes back to it when she's building something new and needs to remind herself where a piece goes and why.
On Audience Academy: she calls it exceptional, and points out she rarely finishes courses all the way through — she got through both of mine completely because the content held up. The biggest thing for her was learning to systematise so that every piece of work she puts in actually moves her forward, and understanding why ranking on Google (and now, everywhere) matters enough to justify the time. A YouTube video and a blog post last for years. An Instagram reel lasts minutes.
On Squarespace Business, Katie points out something I hadn't fully clocked myself: the client-getting skills taught in that course reach well past web design. A lot of laser engraving business owners want the same thing web designers want — fewer, higher-ticket jobs, like weddings or big events, instead of a high volume of small ones. The strategy for landing those clients doesn't change much by industry. I've actually had a student who took Squarespace Business with zero interest in becoming a web designer — she just wanted the content, because it applied directly to her own business.
If there's one thing to take from Katie's story, it's this: the list doesn't need to be big to work — it needs to be listened to. Start there, and the products, the launches, and the evergreen funnels tend to follow.
