Justin Khoe

“Will anyone pay $5 for my devotional?”

A mom of four asked me a version of this question today. She runs a blog and an IG page, and she’s building a 5 day Proverbs 31 mini course.

My answer? Absolutely. People make a full time living selling five dollar PDFs and ten dollar devotionals.

But that’s the wrong question.

Here’s the right one. What do you want to make?

Let’s say you want to make a $1,000 this month.

Now do the math. At $5 a copy, that’s 200 sales.

If you’ve got a real audience and you’re good at getting attention online... go for it. The five dollar devotional can absolutely work. Sell it, stack it, build on it.

But if you’re a smaller creator, 200 sales is a steep hill. And that’s where you have to think differently.

Do you know at least ONE person who’d pay $1,000 for the right solution?

Because it takes the same amount of time to create a product that solves a thousand dollar problem as it does to create a product that solves a five dollar problem.

“What do I read this morning” is a five dollar problem.

“My marriage is falling apart” is a thousand dollar problem.

“I’ve been stuck in p**n addiction for twenty years” is a thousand dollar problem.

“My church is imploding and I don’t know how to lead us out” is a thousand dollar problem.

Same time investment. Completely different ceiling.

This is the exact insight that let my student Eliana make $10K in 45 days with 246 followers. She didn’t sell a five dollar devotional 2,000 times. She solved a bigger problem for a smaller number of people.

This Tuesday, July 7, I’m teaching a live workshop inside my mastermind called Five Ways to Monetize Your Ministry Expertise. Five models that content creators and faith based coaches are using to make money right now... and how to pick the one that matches YOUR audience, YOUR skills, and YOUR season of life.

And since it’s five ways to monetize, I’m keeping the theme going. Five people get to attend for free.

Want a spot? Comment FIVE below and I’ll send you the details.

A pastor wanted my help building a $100 "how to preach your first sermon" course...

By the end of the hour, we were talking about McDonald's.

He runs a campus ministry out of a borrowed prayer chapel on Sunday nights. The modest salary they've offered has been dwindling to nothing over the past few years.

So the real plan underneath "teach preaching" was simple. If the church can't pay... pick up shifts somewhere else.

I asked what was wrong with working at McDonald's.

He didn't mention money at all. He mentioned how every hour spent at another job was an hour he wasn't building the church. Less time with the kids. More long days.

He had seen his dad spend years in burnout... still showing up, preaching, health falling apart the whole time. He didn't want to repeat that cycle.

So we stopped talking about a $100 course for broke college students. We did the math. It wouldn't work. 3-5 students a semester was never going to replace a salary.

But training pastors and church elders? That's a different number.

We rebuilt the offer around training the pastor and his leadership team to preach as a rotation instead of carrying that burden alone. After all, this was what he'd already gotten incredibly proficient at as a bi-vocational minister.

That's the shift. A guy who spent an hour circling a $100 idea and left with a $2,500 one, because we found the real problem underneath the one he walked in with.

If you've been sitting on decades of ministry experience and you're still guessing at how to charge for it, that's exactly what we do in the First Client Sprint.

Five spots this July, three are already gone. I personally walk you through building your offer, your outreach, and your first paid client conversation in 30 days.

If that's you, reply "tell me more" and I'll send the details.