What Selling a $12,000 Mastermind From Zero Taught Me About Conviction – The Nourished CEO Episode 63

What would it look like to sell something that doesn’t technically exist yet, with no testimonials, no returning cohort, and almost no runway?

That’s exactly what I’ve been doing this month with The Decision Room, a $12,000 six-month mastermind I built from scratch and started selling before I had a single person in it. 

The most important thing I learned in the process had nothing to do with marketing tactics. It had everything to do with what was holding the offer up when there was nothing tangible behind it.

In this episode, I’m walking you through the full behind-the-scenes of this launch: what I did that most marketers would call unhinged, the moment I almost talked myself out of running it, and the one shift that changed how I sell.

If your sales have felt harder lately and you can’t quite name why, this episode is going to give you a sharper way to look at the problem.

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There’s a specific kind of difficulty that comes with selling a mastermind from zero.

It’s not just that you don’t have proof yet. It’s that the most valuable part of a mastermind, the relationships between the people in it, literally can’t exist until you’ve already sold it. 

You’re asking people to trust something that’s still entirely in your head.

That’s what I set out to do this spring with The Decision Room: a six-month mastermind for coaches and service providers earning six figures or more, capped at fifteen people, priced at $12,000. 

No existing cohort. No testimonials from this specific container. A qualification threshold that ruled out most of my current client base. And, by most conventional marketing standards, almost no runway.

From the outside, I’m sure it looked a little unhinged. Somewhere in the middle of it, I realized something important about what actually makes selling feel hard for experienced business owners, and it had nothing to do with tactics.

 

What Selling Without Conviction Actually Looks Like

The experienced coaches and consultants I work with don’t usually have a strategy problem. They have more strategies than they could execute in a year.

What’s quietly happening for a lot of them is that they’ve lost the thread on what they actually believe about what they’re selling.

Conviction erodes gradually. An offer you launched with real energy in 2021 might feel different to sell now, even if it’s objectively better.

You’ve grown. Your thinking has developed. The offer may not have come with you, or you simply haven’t fully committed to the version you’re selling today.

When conviction is even ten percent missing, buyers feel it. Not consciously, usually, but in how you write about the offer, how you talk about it in conversation, how you respond when someone hesitates.

You can’t talk your way around a belief you don’t have.

 

The Two Ways This Shows Up

The first pattern is outgrowing the offer. You built something that matched a version of you that existed a few years ago, and you’ve moved through enough since then, in your business, in your life, in your thinking, that there’s a gap between what you’re selling and who you are now.

The offer hasn’t kept up.

The second is more subtle. You believe in the offer, but you haven’t gone all in on selling it.

You’re half-committed to the price. You’re still hedging on whether it’ll actually work. You’re doing enough to say you tried without fully staking yourself on it. And that halfness shows up in how people respond.

When I started selling The Decision Room, I found both of these at different moments. The offer itself, I believed in completely.

The question I hit mid-launch was whether people would actually buy it, which is a different thing but still shows up the same way in your behavior.

 

What It Actually Takes to Sell a Mastermind From Zero

I broke most of the conventional rules on this launch.

I gave myself almost zero runway. I decided to sell it and then started selling it, with no pre-launch warming sequence and no lead collection event beforehand. I did a training on Substack about decision-making frameworks, but that was it. There was no formal launch.

I set an income standard for the room, a minimum of six figures or being on track for six figures, that disqualified most of my current clients.

I named the offer after the mechanism, not the outcome. “The Decision Room” is not what most of my ideal clients say they’re looking for when they’re searching for help, but I knew it was the accurate name for what the room is actually designed to do, and I trusted the right people to understand that.

I priced it in a way that made people think. The $12,000 price tag isn’t there to be accessible. It’s there to make sure the people who say yes are actually committed to showing up.

And I capped the room at fifteen people, which means I left money on the table to protect the quality of the experience.

None of that is typical marketing advice. Some of it is the direct opposite of what I’ve been told to do.

 

The Moment I Almost Stopped

About a week or two in, with slower momentum than I’d hoped for, I was questioning the timing. Not the vision. Not the offer itself. Just whether I should push it to next year.

A business friend who runs her own masterminds, and knows exactly how hard it is to launch one from zero, told me I should probably put it off and focus on one-on-one instead. Her advice was reasonable. She wasn’t wrong about the difficulty.

I ignored it.

Partly because her saying “don’t do this” somehow clarified that I was going to do it. Partly because I gave myself permission to run the group at any size, even two or three people, which removed the hurdle that had been making the whole thing feel impossible.

That decision changed everything. Once I stopped needing it to be a certain size to be worth doing, I stopped selling from a place of pressure and started selling from a place of belief in what I was building.

 

The Outreach I Did That Most Marketers Would Hate

I sent DMs. Not the slow-burn warming kind, but direct ones. People I’d worked with before, warm contacts I thought would be a genuine fit, and yes, some people I’d never met. 

Every message was specific to the person. Most were voice memos. I told them why I thought they’d be a good fit and asked if they wanted more information.

I reached out to a few people whose businesses overlap with mine to ask if they’d be willing to refer anyone who might not be the right fit for their own offers. 

I reached out to a former coach who I thought had clients in the right range. She said she was interested in sharing it with her audience.

I mentioned it in passing to people I’d met in a networking group an hour earlier.

None of this was scripted or elaborate. The through line was that I stopped pre-deciding what people would say. I stopped assuming the ask would be awkward, or that someone would be offended, or that they’d say no in a way that would sting. I just kept asking.

If this is the kind of decision you’re sitting on, that’s exactly what The Decision Room is built for. Explore coaching programs built for where you are right now.

 

Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds

Asking directly, without apology or elaborate setup, is uncomfortable because it requires you to actually stake yourself on the offer.

If you pad the ask with a lot of warmup and framing and softening, you’re managing the distance between yourself and a possible no. Asking cleanly means you’re exposed.

That exposure is exactly what conviction requires. You can’t hold that kind of confidence about an offer you don’t fully believe in.

Which is why, if selling has felt increasingly like managing a process rather than an extension of who you are, the thing worth looking at isn’t the process.

 

What the Data Actually Says

I went into this launch with no existing cohort, no renewals, a disqualifying income threshold, a name and positioning that bucked conventional advice, a price that slowed down impulse decisions, and outreach tactics that most sales trainers would call naive.

I also went in fully sold on what I was building and willing to start it at any size.

The room started filling.

Not because I found the perfect sequence or the right template. Because I kept asking, kept holding the vision, and stopped managing my exposure to rejection.

 

Final Thoughts

The most moveable thing in your sales right now probably isn’t your funnel or your offer or your price point.

If you’ve been in business long enough to have a track record, if you already know how to sell, if you have offers that used to work better than they do now, the thing worth examining is what you actually believe about what you’re selling.

Not what you say you believe. What shows up in how you talk about it when you’re tired, or when someone hesitates, or when you sit down to write about it on a slow week.

Conviction either carries the offer or it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, no tactic covers for it.

The good news is that it’s recoverable. 

Sometimes that means updating the offer so it actually reflects where you are now. 

Sometimes it means making the decision to go all in on the thing you’ve been half-committed to. 

Sometimes it means running something small so you remember what it feels like to deliver it well.

Whatever it looks like, it starts with deciding.

 

Ready to stop circling decisions and start moving on them with full confidence?

Take the “What’s Your CEO Type?” Quiz to identify your natural leadership style and how it’s shaping the decisions you’re making right now.

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