How to get started with self-led offers
And add more sustainability and creativity to your business
Looking to start 2026 with more calm and clarity in your business? I currently have spaces for 1:1 mentoring starting in January, and would love to support you.
Last week I wrote how I made my business more spacious by adding asynchronous offers to it. I love creating courses and programmes—it allows me to use my brain in a different way than in my 1:1 mentoring, and express my creativity differently.
You might want to add more space (and financial sustainability) to your business too. In this post, I share how to get started with self-led offers in your business, and how to use what you know and do already.
Getting started with self-led offers
Self-led offers can take many shapes and forms, from downloadables like e-books, patterns and templates, to courses with video and audio. Simply put, creating them happens in four steps: deciding on a topic, picking a format, creating the content and then hosting and selling your offer.
Picking a topic can feel daunting—these four questions can help you decide.
Deciding on a topic
Question 1: What complements your business?
Some self-led options might be really obvious for your business (though no less valuable!).
If you’re a life coach, a self-led course on goal setting can complement your 1:1 work nicely. If you have a fabric or wool business, a pattern is a great addition. If you run a stationary business, an e-book on creating a journaling habit makes sense. As a yoga teacher, you could offer an email series with 10 days of short recorded yoga classes.
If you find it hard to think of something, try taking your vision and values of your business as a starting point. If you have a candle business and your vision is for people to create comfortable, sustainable homes, what else could contribute to that? Can you create a mini-course around decluttering, thrifting or otherwise designing that comfortable, sustainable home?
What can’t you stop talking about?
Question 2: What do you find yourself talking about a lot?
This is how my course Substack for small business owners was born. After digging into Substack for 6+ months before making the move myself, I found myself explaining Substack to so many people that a course became like a natural thing to create.
Question 3: What are your clients and customers curious about?
Supporting many clients with their newsletters led to Small business newsletter magic. And redesigning my own marketing and sharing my experience with others, led to my gentle marketing programme Grow.
Are your clients and customers curious about creating their own daily art practice? Would they love to get into reflection and journaling more? Do they want to discover their own style and refresh their house decor?
Question 4: What is obvious to you—but not to others?
If you’ve been doing something for a while, it might be completely obvious to you.
You’ve designed so many cards for weddings and births, that it’s not even special to you anymore. You’ve figured out how to use a piece of software or a tool on your own, so you think everyone else will figure this out too.
Sharing your skills and experience is valuable.
But that’s not the case—and, taking a course by someone who is knowledgeable is often a much more pleasant process than having to figure everything out yourself.
Don’t worry that you’ll put yourself out of business.
Just because you’re offering a series of recorded yoga classes, doesn’t mean people won’t attend your live classes. Just because you’re helping people to design their own cards, doesn’t mean they’ll never book you.
In fact, they’re more likely to spend more money with you if they’ve bought a self-led product before.
You won’t put yourself out of business. Self-led offers create more business.
One of my former clients got to know me through my Substack-course. When she started watching it, she knew she wanted to book a 1:1 mentoring package. She loved how I explained things, how I organised the course, as well as the knowledge I was sharing. And we ended up working together for over two years, on her own Substack and much more.
Do you already use self-led products in your business? Would you like to? What would you like to add? Leave a comment to join the conversation.
If you want to go deeper
I’ve created a 30-minute workshop to help you create your own self-led products, from coming up with a topic, through picking a format, deciding on the content and figuring out where to host/sell it.
At the end of this workshop, you’ll have designed a self-led offer that makes your business more sustainable (and allows you to express the full you).
Take a peek at the first part of this workshop below—love what you see? Upgrade your subscription to join the Female Owned community, and get my small business support through our quarterly recorded workshops, monthly accountability club, behind the scenes posts and quarterly office hours.
💌 Coming up in the Female Owned community:
How I created and marketed my small business podcast (December)
The numbers: what I earned in 2025 (exactly!), and my goals for 2026 (January)
This workshop includes:
a 30-minute video in which I walk you through creating your own self-led products;
a workbook with worksheets to help you brainstorm, answer questions and go deeper;
a checklist for all the elements of creating a self-led offer.
Do let me know what resonates with you from this newsletter, and whether you’ve been experimenting with self-led offers too. I hope you’re staying warm and cosy if it’s cold where you are, and that you’re finding glimmers of light as we’re nearing the darkest time of the year. x
