Building a successful business doesn’t always mean adding more. Sometimes it means figuring out what you can simplify.
That’s the lesson Brittany Hardy keeps coming back to, and over the last ten years, it’s led her to streamline her tech stack, let go of a high-traffic website that wasn’t serving her anymore, and pivot her business in a powerful new direction after a devastating social media hack threatened to unravel everything.
Today, Brittany is a Podia Pro and marketing expert who builds websites for clients around the world. She runs a marketing membership community with her business partner and also regularly connects with her email list of over 10,000 subscribers.
Here’s a closer look at how Brittany built a Podia service business she loves, while helping other entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life at the same time.
A dozen mismatched tools became overwhelming to manage
Brittany started Empty Desk Solutions in 2014. Initially, her marketing agency offered anything her clients needed to grow their businesses, whether that was business cards, flyers, social media management, or other support for their projects.
To promote her agency, she needed a website, and she built her first website by herself, entirely from YouTube tutorials. Over time, some clients noticed her website and asked if she could help with theirs, too.
“I was actually a little hesitant at first,” she says as she remembers those first website requests. “I wasn’t really a web designer. But I figured, sure, I could put a few pages together. And it really grew from there.” Brittany quickly realized she had a talent for designing sites and enjoyed helping clients turn their vision into reality.
Around that time, Brittany and her business partner launched a business called The Marketing Club, a membership community for entrepreneurs and small business owners who want to learn how to DIY their marketing and get support while doing it. But as both her businesses gained traction, Brittany’s tech stack grew more unwieldy.
WordPress for the website. ConvertKit for Brittany’s email. MailerLite for her business partner’s email. Notion for hosting membership content, with members manually added and removed as they changed plans. A Calendly link connected to a Zapier workflow.
Everything was technically working, but it felt very overwhelming to manage.
When Brittany was diagnosed with ADHD, she realized that she was going to need a simpler solution to keep things growing in the right direction. “This is why my head feels so messy, and I can’t focus,” she shares, “because I’m logging into, like, a dozen tools to do one thing.”
Having too many tools to manage was making the business feel unorganized and eating up valuable time and headspace for Brittany. She needed a way to make things simpler and more sustainable long-term.
Finding Podia and making the switch to simplify
As she researched easier solutions, Brittany came across Podia. She signed up for a trial and immediately messaged her business partner, saying:
“I found this thing called Podia. I don’t know how I haven’t found it before. I think we can host our whole membership here, and probably build our website on it, maybe do email marketing too!”
Ready to ditch the tech tangle, Brittany rebuilt the Marketing Club membership on Podia. She fell in love with the website builder and how easy it was to connect her products, community, blog posts, and email list without a ton of integrations.
“Podia does all the things. It consolidates all the systems,” she shares.
So then Brittany did something that shocked her entrepreneur friends. She shut down the WordPress website she’d been using for 10+ years and rebuilt everything on Podia.
Her WordPress blog had been pulling in 50,000 visits a month, which is pretty impressive on paper. But when she looked at whether those visitors were actually signing up for her email list or booking consultations, the results were disappointing.
She asked herself, “Why am I hanging on to these stats? Yeah, they’re cool stats, but do they equal more email subscribers? Do they equal more consultation calls for me? Do they make me more sales? The answer was no.”
Her WordPress site might have been attracting visitors, but they weren’t the right fit for her business, so they essentially did nothing for her bottom line.
(For example, one of her most popular blog posts was about how to add an admin user to a Facebook page. People would visit the article, see how to do it, and leave her site, never to return.)
While it can feel tough to give up that kind of visibility, the proof was in the numbers. More traffic wasn’t turning into more money, so it was time to stop chasing views just for the sake of views.
She migrated her email subscribers into Podia, rebuilt her website, moved her blog, and consolidated everything into one place.
“I kind of saw Podia as my way out of the chaos,” she remembers. “I haven’t yet found anything that it can’t do.”
The hack that changed everything
Podia brought order to Brittany’s tools, but facing a crisis forced her to re-evaluate the role email played in her business.
At the start of COVID in 2020, her business Facebook account got hacked. Because the hackers were logged in as her, they had full access to every client page she managed and every ad account connected to her Business Manager.
Brittany spent weeks calling clients one by one to cancel their credit cards, while simultaneously trying to reach Facebook support (which was nearly impossible).
Wading through the mess that the hack caused, Brittany thought, “I can let it break me and destroy my whole business… or I can figure out what other assets I have that can carry me forward for now.”
So she turned to her email list.
At that point, it had around 400 subscribers. She started writing to them honestly, not the polished formal newsletter she’d been producing, but something closer to how she’d actually talk to a friend.
“I just started talking about the real things that were going on in my business. I told them that I got hacked, and here’s what’s happening, and here’s how it’s gonna maybe destroy my business.” Her subscribers started writing back, and they thanked her for being open with them.
That experience showed Brittany how important it is to prioritize email, especially when other platforms can be unpredictable and make it difficult to get help when you need it most.
“The email list is where it’s at,” she says. “It’s one of the only digital assets for your business that you truly own, that no one can take away from you.”
She started emailing weekly, then twice a week. Today, she has over 10,000 active subscribers on her email list, all managed through Podia.
For Brittany, the value of email has only grown over time. “Even if 30% of the people open my email, that’s 3,000 people reading a message from me. On social, am I gonna get that? No, not a chance.”
Growing from 400 to 10,000 subscribers
Growing an email list to 10,000 subscribers is no small task. And Brittany started the same way most people do, one subscriber at a time.
She would send follow-up messages after networking events, ask people who reached out with questions if they’d like to be added, and manually enter contacts she met in real life. It was tedious work, but it gave Brittany traction at the beginning.
“Do whatever the heck it takes to get your first hundred subscribers,” Brittany explains, “because once you get a little bit of momentum, the other pieces will come into place.”
As her list grew, she added automations, tagged people based on how they found her business, connected Calendly to automatically manage client intro calls, and kept experimenting with ways to grow faster.
Then she found something that changed the game: Facebook Lead Ads.
She’d been experimenting with Facebook Traffic Ads for a while without much luck, but then one day, she posted in a local moms’ group looking for feedback on a product. She offered a social media content calendar template she’d built for her own clients, shared as a Google Sheet. When she posted asking if anyone wanted it, over 250 people responded on a single post.
Brittany realized, “I think I have found the lead magnet that will finally convert.” So she ditched the Facebook Traffic Ads and focused all her energy on Facebook Lead Ads to get more eyes on her content calendar template.
Today, her list grows by 10 to 20 subscribers per day on autopilot. Once a year, she refreshes the lead magnet, ad image, and copy, but other than that, it works on its own to bring new people into the business.
From there, she can send custom automated welcome emails and promote products that she knows they’ll like, because they’ve already expressed interest in her lead magnet.
Running a service-based business in Podia
In addition to running a marketing membership with her business partner, a lot of Brittany’s work is service-based, meaning she provides 1:1 or done-for-you offers for clients. She’s able to use Podia to automate a ton of the administrative work that goes into custom services.
Her packages live on her Podia site as products, with pricing and deliverables laid out clearly. When someone purchases, an automated campaign kicks in with a welcome email, then the client agreement, and then the onboarding questionnaire. The whole thing runs behind the scenes, so she doesn’t have to manually email each piece.
“I haven’t sent a proposal in 3 years. It’s so streamlined now. People get on a call, 9 times out of 10, they’ve already gone to the sales page, they know what the service costs, and they already know they want to work with me.”
Since most of her clients are building businesses of their own, Brittany recommends Podia since it lets them keep everything in one place. She uses her own setup as an example of what’s possible, and the reaction is almost always the same.
“Their mind is kind of blown. I show them that Podia has my services, my blog, my newsletter, and automated emails that send contracts.”
When a website client decides to go with Podia, the interface is so easy to use that even non-techy clients can make edits to their own sites after the project ends.
“You just log in, you change something, you hit publish, and it’s done. It’s not like 18 clicks deep to change a photo in your media library in WordPress,” Brittany says.
Rather than making clients dependent on her for minor edits, Brittany prefers to show them how to do it themselves and check in six months later to see if they need any tune-ups.
“They don’t feel like they have to have someone else do it for them. They have the control. It’s empowering.”
Brittany’s advice for new entrepreneurs
When people ask Brittany for advice about starting a business, launching something new, or pushing through the fear of putting something out into the world, she almost always gives the same answer.
Just start.
“You don’t know the path until you start walking, you gotta just go. Just pick one small thing, and just go, and the path’s gonna reveal itself,” she says.
The same logic applies to everything she sees creators struggle with, like waiting for a website to be perfect, holding off on a launch until the timing feels right, or telling themselves they need 500 subscribers before they can sell anything.
“There’s never a good time to launch. And the truth is, your website is actually never done.” Her sales page for her design services says exactly that. Your website will always evolve and change with your business, and that’s a good thing. But none of that growth can happen until you start.
“People are gonna judge you either way, like, whether your product’s perfect or not, so you might as well just put it out there. There is no right or wrong way to do it, and the world needs to know what you have to say.”
The only guaranteed way to fail, she’d say, is to never start.
