Behind the Build: From Idea to Launch of Our 5-Day Cash Flow Investor Challenge
Messy Airbnb setups, yellow walls & big ideas behind the scenes.
We were in a car on March 5, 2025, driving between Las Terrenas and Juan Dolio, Dominican Republic when the idea hit me like a bolt of lightning.
A 5 day challenge for people just like us who wanted to build an investment portfolio and earn their first $100 per month in dividends.
A challenge for the freedom chasers.
For the ones who want to ditch the wait-until-65 retirement plan and turn their savings into a portfolio that prints money monthly.
Zing.
I saw it all unfold. Funnels, masterclass invitations, landing pages, a marketing plan and a behind the scenes Freedom Diary entry to document it all.
Have you read Inside the Making of Our 5-Day Challenge for Future Cash Flow Investors? It’s the first article I wrote taking you behind the scenes of building this offer.
It was kind of extraordinary, watching it all come together.
From idea to open for enrolment, everything was created in just 11 weeks on only 6-7 hours of work per week.
I’ve spent over $75,000 in coaches, courses and masterminds over the past ten years to help me figure out how to run an online business, and it was in a single moment that I saw those YEARS of learning and dollars spent come together in rapid succession.
I knew exactly what web pages needed to be built, what scripts to write and what software to use.
And we knocked out those to-dos, one after the other after the other.
In today’s diary, I’m taking you behind the scenes in the final instalment of this “Inside the Making” series before we open the presale on May 21st and launch on June 1st.
It’s my attempt to document the process of building a new business from scratch and take you along with me!
Ready to dig in? Let’s go.
Letting Go of “Pretty”
In the past, my business aesthetic has been clean, white, bright and minimalist.
When we landed home from the Dominican Republic, raring to record all of the lessons we had spent the past month outlining…
…I had to make peace with the YELLOW.
The most viable recording spot in our new Airbnb was a dark corner with bright yellow walls, a bed in the background and blue curtains.
It was a solid exercise in letting go of perfection. I had to remind myself that it’s the CONTENT that will change lives, not the professional looking background of the videos.
That’s what a program version 2 is for, right? 🤣
I was in my element recording content but for my husband Flynn, it was a different story.
Man am I proud of how far he has come. English is his second language (he was born and raised in the Philippines) and he still feels self conscious of his accent on camera.
I remember that feeling of being on camera for the first time.
Your brain is moving too fast for your mouth, yet not fast enough.
But I gotta say, he did an AMAZING job. Watching him get better on camera made me so proud. He has such a great story to share, I should probably write a diary about him some time so you can get to know him.
Now, the videos are recorded and we’ve finally got them uploaded and ready to watch.
We are using a software that I’ve used called Systeme.io that has been my go-to for building courses for the last 5 years.
It’s an all in one funnel builder, check out page, email campaign builder, course hosting and landing page platform all in one.
It ended up coming together as 5 days worth of short videos, for a total of 15m to 45m to watch per day of the challenge.
These videos included step-by-step tutorials, screen shares and direct to camera heart to heart conversations on how to think like us and answer big, scary questions like “What if I lose money?”.
As fun as the videos were to record, I had even more fun making the bonuses.
Building Out the Bonuses
Our list of ideas for bonuses was SO long, but we did our best to be concise and straightforward with only the things we thought would directly help.
We ended up deciding on 3 major bonuses, which included a workbook, a collection of our tracking sheets to make seeing progress so easy, and a masterclass.
The Cash Flow Investor Workbook takes the lesson content and offers the opportunity to map out a game plan for success.
(This is where I THRIVED! I love spending time in Canva designing covers and layouts. Plus, we got to use all of the photos from our Dominican Republic family photoshoot!)
The spreadsheets on their own are a work of art.
We called it The Cash Flow Investor Dashboard (fancy, hey?) and included:
Our dividend cash flow tracker to watch your monthly income grow
Our portfolio tracker to keep organized with your investments
Our monthly cash tracker to help budget and stay on top of spending
Our freedom calculator to help you figure out your financial independence $$$ target.
We threw in a few extra bonus resources, including a sample list of cash flow funds you can invest in if you’re investing in the Canadian OR U.S. market, as well as top investment brokers from both Canada or the United States that you can choose from.
Lastly, we recorded the Portfolio Design Masterclass. I walk you through my thinking and every step I would take to build a portfolio for monthly cash flow, including what funds we already invest in and what I would do differently if I started again today.
Odds & Ends
The last few things to build out were the sales page, check out order form and the community!
I built and designed our sales page in Hostinger, which is our website host company.
We used a fun, palm tree/beach theme throughout our pages and marketing because that’s what freedom feels like to us and how we chose to live once we reached financial independence (on the beach!).
Literally everything you’ll need to know about our Cash Flow Investor 5 day challenge is on that page.
The last thing we needed to do was set up the community! We decided to offer 6 months of community access and Slack coaching with Flynn and I.
We chose to do Slack coaching because it lets us stay connected to our new investing friends from any time zone in the world, even with horrible internet that can't sustain a Zoom call.
In August, we leave for 4 months in Bali and we felt like Slack’s features would serve our students well in the community.
We can drop screenshots, leave video feedback & voice notes, or send over a message from our phones with data plans that are much more reliable than local WiFi.
It was important for us to be able to jump in to the community often because we get how overwhelming investing can feel.
Our dream is to build out a supportive community of like-minded cash flow investors to help out, every step of the way.
Launch Incoming in 3, 2, 1….
If you’re reading this right when I publish it, you’ll see this all play out over the next few weeks.
Although the content, videos, bonuses and community all open up on June 1st, we decided to do a presale.
Why? Because something really neat has happened behind the scenes as we share what we are growing.
People have been reaching out and asking to be DM’d as soon as the challenge goes live.
(Umm, this is SO cool. This never happened in my last business 😳)
Right now, we have THIRTY ONE people who will be receiving a private DM in advance of the public ‘cart open’ announcement because they asked for it.
So we wanted to do something fun.
We have 2 coupon codes for our action takers, ready to jump on this presale.
CASHFLOW25 will get 25% off for the first FIVE people only. (This is why you might want to be on this list… drop a comment if that’s you!)
CASHFLOW10 will get everyone else 10% off until we start on June 1st.
We decided to price it at $349 USD, which comes out to about $488 CAD for my Canadian friends at today’s exchange rate.
Why this price? Because we’ve had friends who we’ve mentored make this back in the first MONTH after learning from us.
It’s a no brainer price, considering Flynn and I pay $135 per month to be part of an investing community right now and paid nearly $12,000 last summer for one on one investing support.
Our big goal is to make it so accessible that it doesn’t even feel like a choice. Just exciting.
And how fun that you could be one of the 5 people to snag 25% off too?? 😉
On Building in Public
This one is for my creators, writers, entrepreneurs and business owners.
Creating in public has been SO valuable.
Not only do we have a list of people who have raised their hand and shown interest in what we are building, but the feedback has been invaluable.
One of my husband’s friends said our original messaging that we had built a $250k cash flowing portfolio was confusing. Real estate cash flow? Business? Something else?
Point taken. We changed it up and now it’s clear - we make $8,000 in dividends per month with our portfolio.
We also had someone reach out with a specific question: “Do you teach us how to design a portfolio?”
On it! This is why we included the Portfolio Design Masterclass.
Our program was built on YOUR questions and feedback, from my Substack comments and DMs, to Instagram connections to real life coffee dates with new friends.
I have loved the experience of creating in public and showing you inside the making of our 5 day Cash Flow Investor Challenge.
Our brand is based on transparency and authenticity, so this felt like a full body YES to share it all.
Last Thoughts
So here’s what’s going to happen:
On Wednesday, May 21st, presale opens for enrollment.
I’ll send out an email, Substack post and IG story at 12pm PST with the link to the sales page so you can read it all, ask your questions and head to the check out if this is what exactly you’re looking for.
I’ll also be on standby answering questions!
If you’ve asked to be DM’d personally, you’ll hear from me earlier in the morning.
Wednesday’s email will also include a rapid fire Q&A of some of the curious questions we’ve received so far, including how much cash you need to start, if this is good for beginners (it is!), and our take on feeling scared to invest and lose money.
I hope this has been fun!
Whether or not we end up hanging out on Slack in the challenge community for the next 6 months OR just stay friends on Substack, I appreciate you coming along for this ride.
Read Wednesday’s diary here:
Tanessa
P.S. - Are you interested in making your first $100 in monthly dividend income?
Our 5 day paid Cash Flow Investor Challenge is now LIVE! Click HERE to learn more.
it was just an idea. It’s about to go live. 😁