Kit is her nine-to-five, and she still runs Systems Saved Me in about ten hours a week. What follows is a look at how she keeps it all moving with a fraction of the effort most of us spend.
This is an abridged version of our conversation. Listen to the full episode right here, or find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Can you tell us who you are and what you’re working on right now?
Recently I joined the Kit team. Kit is an email marketing platform, similar to Beehiiv, Flodesk, or MailerLite, and I came on as their Senior Affiliate Marketing Manager. I’ve been a user and an affiliate of Kit since 2021 or 2022, so I’m very familiar with the product and honestly obsessed with it. When this opportunity came up, it felt so right, because I’m such a relationships person. And from running my own business for the last ten years, systems saved me.
Being good at both systems and relationships can feel like a unicorn situation. Most systems people are like, nobody talk to me, it’s me and my laptop. And relationships people are like, don’t talk to me about APIs and integrations. I’m comfortable both ways. The affiliate manager role fits that, and it leans a little more on the relationship side.
So I’m splitting my time. My nine-to-five is Kit, and then Systems Saved Me, I spend maybe ten hours a week total, if that. And the timing was kind of poetic: literally on my ten-year business anniversary, I accepted the role at Kit. So it felt very complete. From a systems perspective, it’s a full circle.
You call yourself a systems person. What do you mean by that?
When I think of systems, it’s really just chronological tasks to hit a goal. A certain number of tasks in a certain order to hit a certain outcome.
That could be a makeup routine. First the primer, then the foundation, then whatever else, in a certain order to get the face you want for the day. Or a workout routine, or a webinar setup. I keep it straightforward. They don’t have to be automated. Everything generally has a system. It just may not be the most efficient one.
That’s where it can feel like, well, I’m not a systems person. But everyone technically has systems. They just may not have been tweaked and optimized so you’re doing fewer steps, or things are happening without you.
Which marketing systems do you have running for Systems Saved Me right now?
Quite a few. One I’ve done for years is that I’m pretty active on Instagram, so if people comment a word, they get a DM. That’s just using ManyChat. I don’t do the super intricate, full-blown conversations. As a relationships person, that would be hard, because I meet people all the time. I use it for delivery and sometimes a follow-up, and I’m very upfront about when it’s me talking versus a robot. I think people trust that.
So I grow my email list from Instagram, and also from guest experts and speaking. Then I send three emails a week to my list, minimum. Partly for deliverability, but also because I want a closer relationship with my list. I’m a natural problem solver, so when I’ve figured out how to solve a problem, it’s immediate. I’ve got to spit it out and tell the people.
If people click something, they get tagged as interested in an offer or an area of interest. Then I have a visual automation: they clicked this, and three hours later they didn’t purchase, and I know because they don’t have the purchase tag. So my system says, hey, maybe you got distracted, here’s the link again. I don’t do a lot of urgency in my selling. I’m not setting up countdown timers. It’s there. If you’ve got the problem, here’s how to solve it. If not, cool.
How do you know it’s worth spending all that time building automations on the back end?
I’m a big fan of templates. If you’ve been following me for a little bit, you’ll see I just pop up with an offer. I don’t really do waitlists. I don’t do “hey, this is coming.” And it’s because I have a lot of templates. My sales pages are templated. I know the three emails I’m going to send when I launch a product. I know the ManyChat sequencing. I just duplicate it and change the name and some things.
So I’m rarely starting anything from scratch. That’s the power of systems and automations. If I have templates, I can turn it around really quickly.
It’s more about the front end. The first time you do something is always going to be the longest. That’s the mentality I have: I don’t have to do this every time. This first time, let me just do it right, so that moving forward it can be a duplication machine for me.
Have you noticed your emails performing differently as inboxes get more crowded with AI?
I haven’t. It’s stayed pretty steady. But I’m also a bit of a psychopath when it comes to my email list. I don’t do any reactivation campaigns. I’ll watch trends of people who aren’t engaging, and I’ll just boot them off. A lot of people clutch their pearls and freak out, but it’s actually worked in my favor.
Because I email three times a week, if you don’t see me there anymore, that makes you want to come back. You don’t want to miss out. Reactivation works for a lot of people, but sometimes it can come off as desperation. Please stay here, don’t leave me. I’d rather cut it off and see if you come back, and if not, cool.
I do keep all the emails I’ve ever gotten on a Google Sheet. So they’re not gone. They’re just sitting there, and I’ll usually re-engage them through ads to see if they’ll come back on my list that way.
You’ve also cut some pricey tools. Tell me about that.
I really only run Meta ads. I used to use Hyros to manage and look at all the data, which was great. But through vibe coding — using natural language to build the tool you actually want — I was able to rebuild basically my own version of it, and save myself about $400 a month. That was the most expensive tool I was paying for by far. I wasn’t even using 60 or 70% of what it could do. I really only needed 30%. So let me get what I need and let the rest go.
I was paying $97 a month for another software I really loved, but I was only using the page builder. So I look for those inefficiencies. On the systems side of my brain, it’s reduce, reduce, reduce.
Are there channels you’ve intentionally stayed away from?
There are channels I’ve tried that I want to work. One is YouTube. Every time I do it, it somehow gets into the hands of 18-to-24-year-old boys, and that’s not my market.
LinkedIn is tough for me because it feels stuffy, or it feels like posturing. Instagram is like, yo, hey guys, hair in a bun, this is what we’re doing today, and everyone’s cool with it. LinkedIn feels like I need to go find a desk to sit at and brush my hair.
So I’ve leaned into what works: Instagram, even Threads, and then collabs and speaking. And ads. I kind of have paid, borrowed, and organic all working together.
You produce a lot. How do you know your limits?
I have a very obsessive personality. When I get hit with an idea, I’m being thrown into this dust of magic and sunshine, and I must bring it to the world. If it’s a quick creation, usually a micro tool or a course, it’s a 24-hour turnaround for me. But there are ideas I’ve tabled because I knew it wasn’t right for right now. It didn’t fit the story I had going. It would have distracted my audience instead of adding to what I was already solving.
I know I’m not going to do ongoing one-on-one calls, and I’m not going to do a big mastermind that meets weekly. Those offers are off the table, and have been for a while. So it’s really: is it a quick, digestible product, is it a micro tool they can use themselves, or is it aligned with a partner opportunity?
I just did a collaboration with Gemma Bonham-Carter. I surveyed my audience, and the number one thing they wanted was a look at how I work behind the scenes. And I had zero interest in creating it. So I said, Gemma, let’s partner, because this is what the people want and I have zero interest in making it. We did a webinar, and it was great, because I can still fulfill that need while knowing my own capacity and my own desires.
If someone’s overwhelmed and wants to start with systems, where should they begin?
Base level: please, for the love of all things, have a calendar scheduling link. A Calendly, an Acuity, a TidyCal, I do not care which one. But if you’re still manually going back and forth about times, people can’t calculate time zones. Save everybody a headache and get a scheduler. That’s always my first go-to.
You also want to start closest to revenue. If you have an email list you’re selling to, set up the automation for when someone clicks but doesn’t purchase. Pretty much every email platform has automations now. If they click a link and don’t purchase within a set number of hours, send at least one follow-up email. Sometimes I send up to three. That way you get that money back right away.
It could also be your client onboarding. After a sales call, is that automated? The proposal side of things would be a great system to start with too.
What does growth mean to you right now?
Growth for me is really about leaning even more into AI. Not for relationship-building, and not for being fake Jordan. Those two things will always be off the table. But for everything else, it’s: how do I use AI to reduce anything I truly don’t need to be doing? I’ll use it to help structure what I’m trying to say, then record my own content. I even have a video editor in Claude now that edits the video for me. That kind of editing doesn’t fulfill me at all, so it’s a perfect thing to hand off.
Then I can elevate the number of reels and carousels I put on Instagram, and the ads I create for my different offers. My ten hours is truly 90% marketing and very little delivery, because delivery is the smallest thing I have time for. Instead of one reel a day, now I can produce four, sit down, batch, and move on with my life.
And success? What does that mean to you?
With Kit, success is tied to metrics, how many signups come in through affiliates. So I’m always looking for ways to partner with people and hit those goals.
With Systems Saved Me, success means I’m not working on anything I shouldn’t be working on. Not the same shoulds as everybody, my own shoulds. Spending the majority of my time speaking or creating content, and not messing with the other stuff that still needs to get done but shouldn’t be me doing it.
Success honestly means keeping generally the same revenue, but it may come from different places. Less new stuff. I don’t need a ton of new offers. It’s more about smarter integration of the offers I have, so they feed into each other and sell each other, instead of me having to sell everything one-off.
Listen to the full conversation with Jordan Gill wherever you get your podcasts.
Jordan’s Website: systemssavedme.com
Jordan’s Instagram: @systemssavedme