Podcast Episode: From $9 Days to Seven Figures: Grit, Growth, and Digital Entrepreneurship with Tarah Baiman

If you’ve ever seen those “I made $100K in my first month online” posts and wondered what the hell you’re doing wrong, this conversation is going to be a reality check you didn’t know you needed.

I sat down with Tarah Baiman – seven-figure entrepreneur, creator of the Smashing Sales series, and someone who’s become one of my most respected peers in this space – to talk about what building a real online business actually looks like. Spoiler alert: it’s nothing like the highlight reels you see on Instagram.

The $4,000 Reality Check

Let’s start with some truth that’ll make you feel better about where you are right now. Tarah’s first year as an online entrepreneur? She made a whopping $4,000 total. That’s about $9 a day.

“I made $4,000 total dollars my very first year online,” Tarah shared. “That’s about an average of $9 a day, just to keep everything relative for those of you who might be listening, who are just starting out.”

While everyone else was selling the dream of overnight success, Tarah was grinding it out in network marketing, selling essential oils, and slowly building the foundation that would eventually support a seven-figure business.

This isn’t just important context – it’s essential truth that the industry needs to hear more of.

Why Mindset Isn’t Just Fluff (It’s Your Business Foundation)

Here’s something most people don’t understand: your business is only as strong as the space between your ears. Tarah and I both came from network marketing, where mindset work isn’t optional – it’s literally part of the curriculum.

“I’ve never approached anything about my business like, ‘I need to do this so that this happens in my business,'” Tarah explained. “It’s like, I need to do this because I will grow as a person, which will not only benefit my business, but will benefit everybody in my life.”

This is the difference between people who build sustainable businesses and those who burn out after their first setback. When you understand that entrepreneurship is fundamentally about personal growth, you stop looking for shortcuts and start building real skills.

The Exposure Therapy Approach to Business Fear

Tarah shared something profound about overcoming business fears that I haven’t heard anyone else articulate this well. She compared facing business challenges to exposure therapy – the psychological technique where you gradually expose yourself to what scares you until it no longer triggers the same response.

“The way that you beat the bear is by facing the bear,” she said. “If you’re not good at speaking to the camera or speaking to the camera is what scares you, that’s exactly what you have to do.”

For Tarah, this meant forcing herself to get comfortable with Instagram stories, even when every fiber of her being wanted to hide. The result? She became known as one of the best story strategists in the business.

The Master Resale Rights Reality

Both Tarah and I entered the digital product space through master resale rights courses, and we both had to make some tough decisions about what we wanted to be associated with as the space evolved.

“I started to get very bored,” Tarah admitted about her master resale rights journey. “I started to ask myself some big questions. Like, is this really it? Are you really making an impact? Yes, you’re making income… but what am I really doing here?”

This is the conversation nobody wants to have about master resale rights. Yes, it can be a bridge into digital entrepreneurship. But if you want to build something lasting, something that truly serves people, you’re going to need to evolve beyond reselling other people’s products.

The PLR Bridge to Original Creation

What I found fascinating was Tarah’s strategic approach to transitioning from master resale rights to creating her own products. She didn’t jump straight from reselling to original creation – she used private label rights (PLR) products as a bridge.

“Private label rights allows you to take a done-for-you product and basically make it your own,” she explained. “I always have had a creative streak in me. I like to make things. I like to create things.”

This gradual progression – from reselling to rebranding to original creation – shows the kind of strategic thinking that separates real entrepreneurs from people just looking for quick money.

The Small Following, Big Profits Reality

Here’s something that’ll blow your mind: Tarah made her first six figures in digital products with fewer than 3,500 Instagram followers.

“Please know that I absolutely made my first six figures in the digital product space with 3,500 followers, less than 3,500 followers,” she revealed.

This completely destroys the myth that you need massive followings to make serious money online. What you need is the ability to connect with and convert the people you already have.

“It’s not about how many followers you have. It’s about the ability that you have to use things like sales psychology to convert the people that you already have in your audience.”

The Launch That Changed Everything

When Tarah launched “Smashing Sales in Your Stories,” it wasn’t just successful – it was a multiple six-figure launch that established her as a leader in the space. But here’s what made it work:

1. Unshakeable Conviction

“I 100% believed in it,” she said about her product. “You cannot orchestrate a launch like that unless you were living, breathing, eating… I was obsessed with my product.”

2. Strategic Beta Testing

“Having beta testers, having people who were respected in the space review the course before I launched it to then give me the social proof… that turned out to be massively pivotal.”

3. Relentless Promotion

“I was relentless in my promotion of it. And I think that everybody has to remember that it takes the average person seven exposures before they will even consider the purchase.”

4. Perfect Market Timing

Tarah launched when the market was hungry for stories education, but before it became saturated. This wasn’t luck – it was strategic awareness of market gaps.

The Expertise Myth That’s Holding You Back

One of the most damaging beliefs in online business is that you need to be the world’s leading expert to create a product. Tarah completely debunks this.

“To be an expert at something, you don’t have to have a PhD. You just have to be 10% ahead of your target audience,” she explained. “I’m not the best story sequencer in the world. I was at least 10% better than the audience of people who are buying the stories course.”

This is liberating for anyone who’s been stuck in analysis paralysis, thinking they’re not “expert enough” to help people.

2025 Predictions: What’s Coming Next

Tarah and I are both seeing major shifts in the online space, and our predictions for 2025 align perfectly:

The End of Income-Led Marketing

“We’ve already seen some of the breakdown of this income-led marketing,” Tarah noted. The days of leading with income screenshots are numbered, and good riddance.

The Rise of Comfort Marketing

Instead of pain-point marketing that shames people, we’re moving toward “comfort content” that builds people up and shows them what’s possible.

Strategy vs. Mindset Balance

Interestingly, Tarah’s pivoting away from pure strategy toward more mindset and resilience training. “The mindset is what is really required to be a successful long-term business person.”

Paid Traffic and Memberships

Both of us see heavy emphasis on paid advertising and monthly recurring revenue through memberships as major trends for 2025.

The Real Work Nobody Talks About

What you don’t see behind the successful launches and seven-figure years are the sleepless nights, the self-doubt, and the constant questioning of whether you’re cut out for this.

“What you’re not seeing all of the sleepless nights, all of the self doubt, all of the… there’s so many times that I was not feeling what I appear to be feeling,” Tarah shared.

But here’s the key: “The bigger part of me always prevailed.”

This is what separates successful entrepreneurs from those who quit. It’s not that they don’t feel the doubt – it’s that they’ve learned to act despite it.

The Bottom Line

Building a real online business isn’t about finding the perfect strategy or the next big opportunity. It’s about developing the resilience to keep going when things get hard, the wisdom to evolve when markets shift, and the courage to create something that truly serves people.

“You can’t get the six pack without doing the sit ups,” Tarah said. “You just got to do it. You just got to keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it.”

The work is the work. The reps are the reps. And there’s no substitute for putting in the time to build something real.

If you’re in those early days, making your own version of $9 a day, know that you’re exactly where every successful entrepreneur started. The question isn’t whether you’re capable – it’s whether you’re willing to do the work when nobody’s watching and keep going when the results aren’t immediately visible.

Because that’s where real businesses are born.

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Ready to dive deeper into building your digital empire? Subscribe to Beyond the BS and follow me on Instagram @the_no_bs_newyorker. You can find Tarah Baiman at @tarahbaiman on Instagram.

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