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Acquisition by a major company is something most small business owners can only dream of – but our latest podcast guest has successfully come out the other side. Katie Gatti Tassin, better known as Money with Katie, is the face and voice behind one of the top personal finance media brands for women. Her mission is to close the gender wealth gap by creating content about money that women actually want to consume.
In this conversation, Katie shares how she took her blog from a side hustle to a million-dollar business in just a few short years, the hidden stress behind that astronomical growth, and what she learned from being acquired by Morning Brew.
Press play for the full interview or keep reading below!
From Corporate to Starting a Blog
Before starting Money With Katie, Katie worked full-time for big corporations. Her days started at five or six in the morning and went until 10 pm. In 2020, she was working in the airline industry and in-person fitness when the world shut down.
Less than a month into the pandemic, Katie decided to start a personal finance blog. She’d been blogging on the side for years but never on the topic of money.
The First Spark
“I didn’t have credentials or a background in finance,” Katie says. She only became interested in the topic because she wanted to learn how to stop overspending and manage her money better. Despite working multiple jobs, she could never seem to get ahead.
So she started reading personal finance books and listening to podcasts. The more she learned, the more she started to enjoy herself. Money With Katie was born from her desire to share what she was learning with other women.
Making Money Fun
One of the reasons Katie never resonated with traditional finance advice was that it was all based on budgeting and restriction. So she took a different approach.
Instead of shaming women for spending money, she focused on helping them visualize and prioritize their future selves (the same strategy I use with my students inside The Blueprint Year!).
The game-changing moment came when Katie started investing and realized it wasn’t as complicated as the male financial gurus made it seem. “That was the aha moment when I was like, I have to tell everyone I know.”
Turning a Passion Project into a Business
In the beginning, Katie didn’t think of Money With Katie as a business – she was just looking for something to hold her over until the airline industry reopened. But as her interest in money grew, she applied for a writing job at a personal finance media company.
She made it to the end of the interview process but didn’t get the position. That was when she realized she didn’t need someone else to hire her to write about money; she could create a job for herself through the blog.
Katie decided to conduct an experiment: for the next year, she would post two blogs a week and see what happened. If it didn’t gain traction, then she would move on.
Just a few months later, she had the beginnings of a business.
Explosive Growth for Money with Katie
By the fall of 2020, Money With Katie had expanded from a blog to an Instagram account, where Katie’s following continued to grow. Her first product launch (a digital wealth builder spreadsheet for $25) made over $4,000.
In February 2021, Katie started pitching her first sponsors. She was shocked that brands were willing to pay $2,000 for a blog post on her website.
By the end of the year, she’d made over $250,000 in revenue – but that was nothing compared to where the business was headed next.
Being Acquired by Morning Brew
In late 2021, Money With Katie was acquired by Morning Brew, a company she’d been a die-hard fan of for years. Building Money With Katie on her own was challenging and Morning Brew had the resources to help her grow and scale. They’ve been on an upward trajectory ever since.
Money and Self-Worth
When Katie first started working, she was content making $50,000. That was what her Fortune 500 employer told her she was worth and she believed them. Then she launched her first Money With Katie course and made more in a single day than her yearly salary.
“Entrepreneurship was very eye-opening, even as a side hustle, because I saw directly how my ideas and creations were generating money.”
Katie’s income grew in tandem with her sense of self-worth. From 2020 to 2021, her take-home pay went from $74,000 to $292,000. The next year it almost doubled to $446,000. In 2023, Money With Katie made over $1.5 million.
Even now, she says it feels hard to believe. “That’s something I’m actively working on internalizing. But as time goes on, I’ve become more and more confident in myself to be able to create that kind of money.”
Money Can’t Buy Happiness
Money With Katie’s rapid-fire growth wasn’t all sunshine and roses. Reading back through her 2022 journal entries, Katie was surprised to realize how miserable she sounded.
She’d just finished the best professional year of her life, was happily married, and lived in a beautiful house…but she wasn’t happy. She was too stressed out to enjoy the life she’d created.
Over the next year, she resolved to find out where that discontent was coming from and identified three main stressors:
- Expectations (both internal and external)
- Too much screen time
- Inconsistent routines
Getting Back to Balance
This year, Katie is committed to quality over revenue. She’s taking more time off and learning how to prioritize her health and routines. She sees a brighter future for Money With Katie – and Katie herself.
“The sources of misery in my life are fully within my control and self-inflicted. And now that I can see that, I can see the path back to a more balanced life. And I know the business will be better for it, not worse.”
More from this Episode
To hear the full story and more about Katie, press play on the player above for the full interview or click here to download the transcript.
RESOURCES MENTIONED:
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Katie Gatti
Katie Gatti Tassin, better known as Money with Katie on the internet, is the face and voice behind one of the top personal finance media brands for women today. Her ultimate mission is to close the gender wealth gap, and she does that by creating content about money that you’ll actually want to consume. She knows women’s experience with money is fundamentally different from men’s, and approaches it accordingly.
