You built something people love. Running the business of it is a different problem entirely.
Dani Donovan is the creator of The Anti-Planner, a self-published ADHD productivity workbook that generated over $1 million in its first year and has now sold more than 115,000 copies with a 4.9-star rating. She built it without a business plan, without onboarding documents, and without a team that had done any of this before.
In this conversation, Dani explains how a single ADHD comic from 2018 nearly never got posted, how a business coach’s field guide exercise became the product she actually needed, and what happened when she had to tell 28,000 pre-order customers their books were running late.
We also get into the part nobody warns you about: what hiring looks like when there are no SOPs, no infrastructure, and no clear handoff between the creative work and the operational side of the business.
This is a conversation about the hidden cost of scaling creative ADHD-led businesses — and why building the thing is often easier than building the systems around it.
What We Cover:
How Dani designed The Anti-Planner around what she actually used instead of what productivity systems were “supposed” to look like
Why she turned down traditional publishing and protected creative control over the product
The pre-order strategy that generated 42,000 orders across two launches
What happened when she had to email 28,000 customers about delayed orders — and why almost nobody asked for refunds
Why scaling an ADHD-led business gets operationally difficult long before it looks successful from the outside
P.S. Losing work because the admin layer around your business can't keep up with you? Invisible Systems is a 90-day done-for-you sprint where I (Skye) extract the processes from your head, build the operating layer, and find the right person to run it. Six spots left at the founding price, book a call at https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com/
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