Amy Porterfield

A former corporate marketer who left her job in 2009, learned from a $267 first launch, and built an online education business around digital courses and a top-ranked podcast.

Grew up: Orange County, California
Country: United States
Known for: Digital Course Academy, podcast
Based in: Nashville, Tennessee

Early life

Amy Porterfield grew up in Orange County, California, in a working-class family. According to one profile, her father was a firefighter and her mother a hairstylist. She started her career in the corporate world, where she describes herself as an eager-to-please "yes girl".

Corporate career

Amy worked on major campaigns for Harley-Davidson and later became Director of Content Development at Tony Robbins' companies. There she built the marketing and content skills that shaped her later career. A boardroom meeting showed her the freedom an online business could offer, and she started planning her exit. She has said she wrote a date on a sticky note on her bathroom mirror: she would quit on 19 June 2009.

The $267 launch

Her first online course taught authors to launch a book using social media. She sold it to an email list of about 600 people she had never emailed, so they had no relationship with her, and the launch made only $267. She has talked about the lesson often: list size was not the problem, the relationship with the list was. She also says she had chosen a topic that she was not the right person to teach.

Early on she also built the wrong business for herself, a consulting practice that left her burned out. She later chose to focus on courses she could teach at scale.

Repeat what works

Instead of chasing a new idea each time, Amy moved in steps: a starter course, then a spotlight course, then a signature course called The Facebook Marketing Profit Lab, priced at $997. The first launch made about $30,000. She then relaunched the same course again and again. In July 2015 she published a detailed review of a launch that came in just under $1 million with more than 1,500 new members. It ran about 20 days and she spent about $48,000 on ads.

Digital Course Academy and the podcast

In 2019 she launched Digital Course Academy, a course that teaches others how to create and live-launch their own digital course, and she has said she built it as an asset she could relaunch each year. She also hosts a marketing podcast, Online Marketing Made Easy, now called The Amy Porterfield Show, which had been downloaded nearly 50 million times by 2023. By her own count she has created eight courses.

Her reported results are large: her site now says the business has generated $130 million and helped over 100,000 students, while earlier she gave figures of $120 million and, in 2021, over $35 million across twelve years. These numbers are self-reported and cumulative, not audited annual revenue. In January 2026, SUCCESS magazine reported that she plans to retire Digital Course Academy to focus on doing less, better.

Author

In 2023 she published Two Weeks Notice, a New York Times bestselling guide for people who want to leave a 9-to-5 and start a business. Her company has twice made the Inc. 5000 list of fast-growing private companies, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, CNBC, Business Insider and Entrepreneur. She lives in Nashville with her husband, Hobie.

Timeline

2009Quits her corporate job on 19 June and starts her business.
2010Her first course launch earns $267.
2015A Profit Lab launch brings in just under $1 million.
2019Launches Digital Course Academy.
2021Reports eight courses and over $35 million in revenue across twelve years.
2023Publishes Two Weeks Notice.
2025Reports $120 million in course revenue.
2026SUCCESS reports plans to retire Digital Course Academy.

Recognition

Inc. 5000 fast-growing private companies, twice
Author of the New York Times bestseller Two Weeks Notice (2023)
Host of a top-ranked marketing podcast
Featured in Forbes, Fast Company, CNBC, Business Insider and Entrepreneur

Leadership lessons

Build relationships before you sell. A cold list of 600 made $267, while a warm one can do much more.
Pick a topic your audience wants. She credits her later success to teaching what they asked for.
Repeat one winner. A signature course relaunched many times grew from $30,000 to nearly $1 million in one launch.
Share the failures. She keeps the $267 in public next to her big numbers.
Do less, and do it better. She has said this about her business choices.

The takeaway: a failed first launch can become a playbook. Amy Porterfield went from a $267 flop to a business she reports at over $100 million by building relationships first, teaching what her audience wanted and relaunching one strong course instead of chasing new ideas.

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Sources

Written from public information, including Womopreneur, Startup Founder Stories, CNBC and her own About page, plus press reports. The CNBC article could not be opened in full, so only its search summary was used. Sources disagree on her birth year, so it is left out. Revenue and student figures are self-reported and cumulative.