Kim Garst (Social Selling Business)

Kim Garst recognized a critical pain point in the small business market: entrepreneurs wanted to understand not just how to use social media, but how to actually leverage it to increase revenue. As a Forbes top 20 social media influencer and best-selling author, she had proven her expertise by growing her own email list from zero to over 50,000 subscribers and accumulating more than 100,000 Twitter followers. She built a business focused on teaching consulting, training products, and services specifically designed to help small business owners master social selling.

Kim started with content that solved immediate problems. One of her early wins came from a simple blog post featuring 17 Facebook post ideas—content that resonated so strongly it revealed an obvious market pain point. She beefed up the post, applied her design background to create a polished e-book, and deployed it as a lead magnet. This became the foundation of her funnel: free value to build her list, low-cost upsells to get customers to spend their first dollar, and a premium membership to create recurring revenue.

Kim leveraged Facebook offers to scale acquisition, discovering they outperformed standard Facebook ads in reach-per-dollar spent. She ran the free e-book through Facebook offers and saw immediate traction: "almost 12,000 new subscribers in the last month." The funnel pulled people in through the free resource, converted them to the $9 mini-course (which taught implementation), and then upsold them into the $47/month Social Selling Inner Circle. Within 30 days of focusing on marketing the inner circle, she added over 400 new members—generating approximately $7,500 in new monthly recurring revenue alone.

Kim's biggest insight was the power of recurring revenue over one-off product launches. Rather than the "hit-wonder" model of releasing new products every few months, she built a membership business with an 85-87% monthly retention rate. The true value, she explained, wasn't just the training content but the community: "It's the community and the support that is inside of that group... people connect and support one another and build out family almost in an online environment." She also emphasized the importance of outsourcing early: "You cannot grow, you cannot scale your business if you do not grow your team." For tools, she relied on WordPress, LearnDash for course delivery, iMember for membership management, and Canva for visual content creation.

As of the interview date, Kim's Social Selling Inner Circle had 560 members, generating over $27,000 in monthly recurring revenue ($324,000+ ARR). With 85-87% monthly churn retention, each customer has a lifetime value of over 15 months at $47/month. She was hosting her own SocialBoom conference focused on social selling strategies and continued to grow through Facebook offers and community engagement—a blueprint that proved recurring revenue, content-driven growth, and community-building create a sustainable, scalable business.