Rachel Jimenez has long wanted to be a teacher, specifically a college professor. But "I've always just been debt averse," she says, and she knew the field doesn't always offer competitive salaries, even after the multiple degrees it requires.
Instead, the 35-year-old mom went the business route, ultimately starting an Etsy store in 2019 in which she sells printables like an Elf on a Shelf game that people buy and print out at home. In 2022, the store brought in more than $110,000 in passive income, the second year it brought in six figures.
With Etsy going strong and Jimenez able to put in just two to 10 hours of work on it per week, in January 2022, she decided to try diving into her longtime interest in teaching and launched an online course. Jimenez has a masters in positive organizational psychology from Claremont Graduate University, the study of positive experiences in the workplace and their effects on the quality of work life. Her course, "Optimize Your Life Academy," draws on her knowledge of positive psychology and its ability to bring about personal success.
Jimenez currently charges $297 for the course. Since launching "Optimize Your Life Academy" in January 2023, it's brought in just over $10,000.
Here's how Jimenez has built her new venture and what she plans to do with it going forward.
'When you're thinking positively,' you take action
Jimenez always found positive psychology to be a powerful tool in helping her frame her own attitude toward life. The field focuses on people's character strengths and suggests exercises in gratitude, for example, according to Psychology Today.
"When you're thinking positively," she says, "you're more likely to take action, and when you take action, you're more likely to get results."
"My course kind of talks about the strategies and the tools that a lot of people don't know because they don't study positive psychology," she says. "Optimize Your Life Academy" includes a series of videos about defining success and time management, for example, and a 70-page workbook with exercises around goals and stress, among others.
'It just feels like the promise statement is so big'
About 30 people have taken the course thus far, and Jimenez has some takeaways. The biggest is she might've tried to tackle too grand an issue — the course's subtitle is "how to achieve happiness and success." One woman who took it told Jimenez, "I enjoyed your course, I liked it. But it just feels like the promise statement is so big."
"I believe all these concepts that I've learned have helped me achieve" happiness and success, says Jimenez. But as it pertains to outcomes for her students, "how do you measure that? And when?"
She realized when it comes to what she can guarantee, "if I sell it that it's going change your life and it doesn't, you might be disappointed," she says.
'It's all about trial and error'
Jimenez is considering tweaking her course based on student feedback or creating another course altogether. Either way, her goal is to come out with the amended product or new product in January 2024.
Meanwhile, she's embarked on another teaching journey. In June, she started teaching a course about starting and managing a home-based business as an adjunct professor at Mt. San Antonio College.
"I think what I'm learning in my entrepreneurial journey in general is just that it's all about trial and error," she says. "And sometimes something might feel like a failure or like it's not doing as good as you expected it to be but … you learn something from it."
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