Natalie Ellis: Growing Bossbabe to a $20M Community

Natalie Ellis’s resume is nothing short of impressive. Natalie is the founder and CEO of Bossbabe, host of the chart-topping Bossbabe Podcast, and an angel investor in some of your favorite female-owned brands. Over the years, she’s grown her online audience to over 4 million followers, generated multiple 8-figures of revenue through organic social media marketing, and worked with over 100,000 students through her online courses for entrepreneurs. Here’s a snapshot of Natalie’s Bossbabe success: 

• Generated over $20M in online course and membership revenue 
• Grown a combined social media audience of over 4M 
• Worked with over 100,000 students

While Natalie has grown the Bossbabe community into an audience in the millions, follower count is not top of mind. Instead, community is what drives her.

“We're not just trying to gain followers for the sake of gaining followers [and] we're not just going to make something go viral for the sake of getting eyeballs,” she says.

Bossbabe’s true mission is to help entrepreneurs create freedom-based businesses while empowering like-minded individuals to learn and connect in their online community.

She adds, “We want to grow a community. We want to grow our business. Even to this day, when I look at my annual goal setting, I look at my revenue goals and my community goals, and I want to ensure both of them are growing.”

The Challenge: A Growing Audience and Unscalable Systems 

Growing up with an entrepreneurial spirit, Natalie knew she’d inevitably start a business. She began by launching her own supplement company early in her career, but it didn’t take long for Natalie’s founder mindset to form another business idea: a community for women who were starting businesses without prior experience. The idea stemmed from her own desire for connection and access to other women who were on entrepreneurial journeys similar to hers. This longing eventually led her to create Bossbabe, which began as an online community before becoming the thriving membership platform that it is today.

“My first business was really just a big stepping stone into what Bossbabe unfolded itself into,” says Natalie. “I created our first product, the membership, because I wanted the community and I wanted to learn from other women. I thought, ‘Well if there's more of us in the group, those women will be more inclined to say yes to support us.’”

Since Bossbabe was created before the days of TikTok, Natalie used Instagram to grow the Bossbabe social community. It didn’t take long to see that viral, short-form content helped people discover the Bossbabe brand, but Natalie wanted to go beyond brand discovery and ensure followers could identify as a Bossbabe and see themselves as part of a community. To deepen the relationships and provide more value, she began creating long-form content by starting an email list and eventually launching her podcast. 

The successive expansion of her content was organic, as she explains it.  “It was very much just, how do I continue engaging more? How do I continue to build that relationship with my community, taking it a step further each time?”

With the success of her community growth, Natalie launched her first monetized product, the Bossbabe membership. As the business continued to grow, the systems she had in place on the backend weren’t set up to scale with it. She was using different software programs for every aspect of Bossbabe — from funnels to memberships to checkouts — and knew something had to change.

The Solution: Going All in by Migrating to Kajabi

As soon as Natalie embarked on online courses, Kajabi was her platform of choice. However, her primary membership business was built on a custom membership platform — a decision  Natalie does not recommend for most entrepreneurs. 

“Don't build your membership [platform] custom unless you're literally trying to build a software company,” suggests Natalie. “You will end up managing developers and banging your head against a brick wall, wondering why on earth you did that.”

She knew that she needed to consolidate her business into one single platform if she wanted to scale, so she decided to go all in on Kajabi. 

“Last year, I migrated my entire membership off of my custom platform onto Kajabi,” recalls Natalie. “I spent months making it look like a custom site — which, by the way, if anyone wants to see a really well-done membership, join ours because it looks custom when you log in, and I'm so proud of how it looks.”

The Results: A Streamlined Membership Platform Earning 8 Figures

In addition to migrating the Bossbabe membership platform to Kajabi, Natalie now uses Kajabi for the brand’s funnels, email sequences, and checkouts. 

Not only does this set up Bossbabe to scale, but it’s also saved Natalie tons of money that she previously spent on building custom software. Plus, she no longer has to worry about her checkout or membership platform crashing during a launch when thousands of members try to sign up — an issue she often ran into during webinar launches on her custom platform.

“Being on Kajabi has been awesome because the platform scales with us,” she says. “I'm not trying to be a software company — I'm trying to deliver awesome content.”

Looking Forward: Expanding the Bossbabe Community

With a seamless and stress-free platform powering the Bossbabe community, Natalie has her sights set on big plans for the company.

The brand recently introduced an accelerator program called Freedom Fast Track that helps entrepreneurs build a sales engine for their businesses. She also has plans to serve more women and make her entrepreneurial online education even more accessible. 

“I really want to get into the hands and minds of women who might not even know entrepreneurship is their path or might not even believe that they can do it,” says Natalie. “Keep your eyes peeled for next year.”

Natalie’s 3-Part Sales Engine for Success

Natalie credits much of her success with Bossbabe and other ventures to her three-part sales engine, which means having a profitable, predictable, and repeatable business. If you want to build a sustainable business that sees continued success, follow Natalie’s three-step playbook: 

• Profitable: The starting point to any successful business is to have an irresistible offer. What can you offer that your audience wants, and how is it unique? “A great funnel can’t fix a bad offer,” says Natalie. “There’s a lot of competition out there, [so] what makes your offer really irresistible?”
• Predictable: Your offer should be followed up with predictability if you want to see continued success. This means setting up a reliable sales funnel. “Do you know your numbers?” says Natalie. “If you put a hundred people in, how many sales do you make? That is your funnel. That's your predictability piece.” 
• Repeatable: And finally, after creating your offer and setting up a funnel, can you repeat your results month after month or launch after launch? Repeatable success means “having reliable traffic coming to you on a consistent basis,” according to Natalie. 

Ready to scale your online course or membership business to Bossbabe’s level? See how Kajabi can help.