Everyone tells coaches they need a bigger audience… but what if that’s not actually the problem?

In this episode, Kendra breaks down the lie behind audience growth and why chasing followers, viral posts, and vanity metrics can keep coaches stuck. She explains the difference between having an audience and actually building a business, why your audience size matters more than you think, and the numbers you should be paying attention to if you want consistent growth.

Kendra also shares why relying only on organic content can create a slow and unpredictable path, and how paid advertising can help you get in front of more of the right people faster. If you’ve been posting consistently but still aren’t generating enough leads, clients, or sales, this episode will help you rethink your entire approach to audience growth.

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In This Episode:

• Why Small Audiences Are No Longer Enough to Build Predictable Sales
• The Math Behind Sales: Why Small Lists Create Limited Results
• Why Lowering Your Price Usually Doesn’t Fix a Sales Problem
• The Audience Size Factor: How More Leads Create More Predictable Revenue
• The Webinar Reality Check: Why Small Audiences Make Selling Harder
• Better Messaging Helps, But It Can’t Replace Audience Growth
• The Truth About Selling Through DMs: Effective, But Not Always Sustainable
• How Low-Budget Ads Can Amplify Your Content and Grow Your Audience
• The Red Flags to Watch for When Choosing a Business Coach or Program
• The Numbers Every Coach Needs to Track for Business Growth

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Apply for HCA: https://kendraperry.net/apply

 

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Why You Actually DO Need a Big Audience to Make Money Online in 2026

You’ve heard it a thousand times. “You don’t need a big audience.” “It’s not about reach, it’s about relationships.” “I made 10K from an email list of a thousand people.”

Some of that was even true a few years ago. But most of it in 2026 is a complete bullshit lie.

I need to say this clearly because this messaging is everywhere, and it’s hurting people. It’s being sold by hot boss babes and celebrity business coaches as if it’s gospel, and coaches are out there working themselves to the bone, doing everything they’ve been told to do, and getting nowhere. Not because their messaging is bad. Not because their program is bad. But because nobody told them the truth: numbers matter, and today they matter more than ever.

In this post I’m going to walk you through exactly why a small audience makes consistent sales nearly impossible, what the real conversion math looks like, and the only growth lever you can actually control. This is going to be a bit of a reality check, but it’s the kind of reality check that frees you up to stop blaming your bio and start fixing the actual problem.

 

The “You Don’t Need a Big Audience” Lie

This is what’s being sold in the business space, and it has been sold for as long as I’ve been online. You can do this without a big audience. You don’t need a big audience. You don’t need ads. On repeat, constantly.

And here’s the thing. Pre-2022, pre-2023, there was some truth to it. I have personal experience with this. I’ve always dabbled in paid ads, but I built a multiple six-figure business primarily with organic content and organic strategies. Back then it worked. You didn’t even need to be that great at content. It was easier to go viral, easier to get reach with your reels and posts, and my students saw a lot of success with organic growth alone.

But we are in a very different ball game now.

The truth is that this messaging is predatory. It does not matter how good your messaging, your branding, or your strategy is. If you don’t have the numbers, you won’t sell. Strategy without an audience is like owning a Ferrari with no gas. It looks nice, but it’s not going to get you anywhere.

 

Why Organic Got So Brutal

This is no secret anymore. In the post-COVID world, a lot of people are trying to make money online, and we are dealing with a very saturated space. That saturation changed the math.

Look at the reach numbers. An Instagram post now reaches on average about 3 to 5 percent of your followers, and that was the 2025 figure. It’s probably lower now. Back in 2020 it was 10 to 15 percent. That means roughly 96 percent of your audience never sees your content.

That’s why organic got really brutal, and it’s why the math makes a small audience nearly impossible to win with. And this isn’t just a newbie problem. An account built to 10,000 followers may only reach 200 to 300 people per post. Go look at the bigger accounts, the ones who are genuinely great at content with huge followings. Run the numbers on their engagement and you’ll see it’s still low for them, and significantly lower than it was even a few years ago.

A big part of this is that social platforms are now pay to play. It’s not that Meta wants to penalize people who can’t pay. It’s that there isn’t enough space in the feed. So the people who pay get priority. That’s just the design.

So when someone promises you can get rich off this without a big audience, you really have to take that in and understand it’s not true in 2026.

 

The Conversion Math Nobody Wants to Tell You

Here’s the piece most people don’t understand: conversion.

When I talk about conversion here, I mean sales conversion, the percentage of your audience you’re actually likely to turn into buyers. And this number has been roughly flat for 20 years. It’s low by design, because most people just don’t buy. The great majority of people are never going to become your buyers, even when they follow you. That hasn’t shifted much, and if anything it’s gone down slightly in the past year.

Let me give you the real numbers.

Even a strong, well-messaged, well-designed webinar will only convert around 1 to 3 percent of registrants. That’s been true for years. So if 100 people sign up for your webinar and you get three clients, you’re killing it. One client is still great, but it’s usually not enough for consistent sales. And remember, that’s registrants, not your whole list. You are not converting 1 to 3 percent of your email list.

Here’s a reality check on the list itself. When you’re just sending broadcast emails with no excitement, no urgency, no reason to take action, that conversion gets even smaller. There isn’t a lot of good public data on this, but I’ve run my own numbers for a long time. I’m almost always selling with some kind of webinar, evergreen or live. And when I look at my numbers, I’m converting under 0.5 percent of my list.

Keep in mind, I still have a very successful business. I generate just under a million dollars a year. I’ve worked with thousands of health coaches and looked at thousands of numbers. And you’re probably not going to convert more than 1 percent of your email list. That’s just what I’ve observed.

 

Pricing Won’t Rescue You

A lot of people think the fix is to drop their prices. If I just make it cheaper, conversion will climb. It’ll nudge up a little, but cheaper does not equal a flood of buyers.

When I look at my own conversion on lower-ticket offers, it’s not that different from my higher-ticket items. This is a big reason I teach people to sell high ticket and premium. When you sell low ticket, you just need a much higher volume of leads, and in today’s world that volume costs money. That’s expensive, and it makes your profit margin shrink.

People think, “I’m having trouble selling my $2,000 offer, so I’ll sell something for $100 and just make more sales.” But you still need a bigger audience to sell that $100 thing. Cheaper doesn’t mean more people buy. It’s often harder to sell, because the value is less clear. The value of a coaching package with support, accountability, and access to lab testing protocols is actually far easier to communicate than a self-study DIY course.

 

The Client Who Thought She Failed

I always think of a client of mine who had 100 people on her list. She sent out an email campaign, made no sales, and decided she’d failed.

Here’s what I had to tell her. Me, someone who’s been online for almost 15 years, an expert in messaging, an expert business strategist who knows how to make money online, I would probably still not make sales from a list of 100. Even with all my skills and experience. Because numbers matter.

This is what kills me. So many people think they’re doing terribly when really they never had the numbers to succeed in the first place. If you have 200 people on your email list, you’re not going to make sales, and it has nothing to do with how good your program is. Good messaging and strong relationships with your audience will give you better conversion, yes, but it’s the difference between converting at 3 percent and 2 percent. It is not the difference between failure and a thriving business.

A lot of well-known business coaches either don’t know this, or they don’t tell you. And here’s something else worth keeping in mind. Many of them have been online a long time, and they didn’t grow their audience today. Neither did I. Someone with 200,000 people on their email list is going to have an easy time selling because of sheer volume. They can put almost anything out there and it’ll work. But for someone just starting out, that’s not apples to apples.

 

Email Is Still King (And the Numbers You Actually Need)

When I think about audience growth, it’s not really about Instagram followers. Tens of thousands of followers is great, but the lead I care about is an email list subscriber. That’s your most valuable lead. You can communicate with them directly, you can get an email into the inbox, and with good subject lines and deliverability around 30 percent of them should be opening it. Thirty percent is a lot better than the 3.5 percent you’ll get from Instagram.

And I don’t care who’s out there saying email marketing is dead. People who say that are wrong. The stats don’t support it and neither does anything I’ve seen. Email is still the most effective way to sell, and that hasn’t changed. Is conversion a little lower now? Yes, mostly because of competition. Your people have more choice and they’re comparing you with other coaches. But the channel works.

So how many people do you need on your list to make predictable, consistent sales?

I typically tell my students not to launch a webinar until they have at least 1,000 on their list, ideally 2,000. That might seem like a big number, but I’ve done the math. Pre-2020 you could have 300 to 500 subscribers and do pretty well with a webinar. Conversion is lower now, which is exactly why those “you don’t need a big audience” claims don’t hold up anymore.

Let me show you the math. From what I’ve seen across my own business and my clients, on average 2 to 6 percent of your email list will register for a webinar. So if you have 500 subscribers, 2 percent is about 10 people registering. Not everyone who registers shows up or watches the replay. A good show-up rate is about 25 to 30 percent, so out of 10 registrants you might get 2 to 3 people live. And when 1 to 3 percent of registrants convert, 1 to 3 percent of 10 people is basically zero.

So it doesn’t matter if you have the best webinar of all time and a deeply engaged list. The math just isn’t mapping. (And quick note: if you go ask Claude or ChatGPT for industry-standard conversion numbers, you’ll often get highly inflated figures I rarely see in the real world. These numbers are very industry-specific, so trust what your own data tells you.)

That’s why I push you to do everything it takes to get to at least 1,000 subscribers, and then to keep adding to that list every single month. What’s that monthly number? I’d say 300 to 500 new leads minimum, and 1,000 is better. For context, I add about 1,500 new leads to my list every month. You need fresh leads constantly, because you can only present the same offer to the same people so many times before they need something new.

 

The Only Growth Lever You Can Actually Control

So how do you grow? There are really two paths, and you have to pick one. Where people get stuck in purgatory is refusing to do either.

The free path is DM outreach. You can get to consistent revenue fairly quickly without much of an email list if you’re willing to go hard in the DMs. I’m talking 30 to 50 outreach messages a day. It’s a lot. You’ll get rejection, people will be rude, and it’s a volume game built on rejection. But over time you’ll convert maybe 2 percent of those DMs. I’ve had several clients come into HCA making $5,000 to $10,000 a month doing exactly this.

The problem is it burns people out. Manual DMing is like bailing water out of a boat with a coffee mug. It keeps you afloat today, but you can never put the mug down. It doesn’t scale. It’s a great early-stage strategy. If you need money and you can’t pay for ads, get in the DMs. But for most people it has to be temporary.

The paid path is the one growth lever you can actually control. With paid advertising you tell the platform how many people you want reaching your content and roughly how many leads you want, and you set your inputs. You see your average cost per lead and work from there. Right now I’m paying about $1.50 per email subscriber to a lead magnet, which is cheap. Knowing that, I can say if I spend $3,000 a month on ads, that’s 1,500 leads a month, and I can work backwards from the numbers I need.

With organic, you’re just hoping the algorithm picks you and shows your content to the right people. With paid, you’re buying the seat. That’s the difference.

This is also why vetting a coach matters so much. I do a lot of business audits, and I talk to coaches paying expensive mentors who are only teaching them posting strategies. It blows my mind, because the best strategy and the best messaging in the world won’t move the needle if the audience isn’t growing. If you have 800 people on your list, you’ll be lucky to get any sales.

So if you’re considering a program, course, or coach, look hard at how they teach you to grow. The only organic tools that genuinely build an audience are intensive DM strategies and intensive collaborations, things like summits, podcasts, freebie swaps, and course bundles done consistently and hard. If they’re not teaching those and they’re not teaching paid advertising, that’s not just a red flag. It’s a fluorescent, hot-pink, worst-kind-of red flag. Ask them how they help you grow, and ask for proof. Stats. Client examples with the numbers people came in at and where they are now.

To be clear, paid advertising isn’t magic and it isn’t free. It takes setup, testing, and budget, and new people have to invest upfront before seeing ROI. But it’s the one input you can dial up on purpose. You want more leads, you spend a bit more. Full control.

 

Your Takeaway: Run Your Real Numbers This Week

Here’s what I want you to do. Run your real numbers this week. How many genuinely new people entered your world last month? Not followers. New people who joined your list. If it’s under a hundred, or even under a few hundred, that’s your problem. It might not be your bio. It might not be your niche. All those things matter, but you have to have the numbers.

If you choose to stay organic only, you’re committing to volume and accepting snail-pace growth. If you want predictable, you’re learning paid, and even a tiny budget gets you far more bang for your buck than posting on organic social.

Don’t fall for the grift of audience growth. I see it being sold more than ever. You actually do need a big audience to sell. Not massive, but you need to start growing it, move it toward big, and keep it consistently getting bigger.

 

Enroll in Health Coach Accelerator:

Apply for HCA: https://kendraperry.net/apply