HEY, WE'RE JEN AND YVONNE
We walked away from a $1.4 million profit business.
Here's why and what we built instead.
When we told people we were walking away from Simple Germany, the reaction was always the same.
"Are you crazy?"
And honestly?
We understood why they asked.
Simple Germany had grown to 86,906 YouTube subscribers and a 17,537-person email list.
It had generated over $1.4 million in profit over six years.
From the outside, it looked like everything was working.
But from the inside, something had quietly shifted.
HOW IT STARTED
2014: We met on a Gaelic football pitch in Düsseldorf
I (Jen) had moved from Guatemala to Germany in 2012.
Yvonne, a German who'd spent years living abroad in Spain, France, the USA and on cruise ships, had only returned in 2013 to her own country and rediscovered it as an adult.
We ended up on the same Gaelic football team organized by a local Irish Pub, fell in love, and got married in 2017.
As our professional careers progressed, a question kept coming up between us: what if we started our own business?
Yvonne was working as a sales manager in language travel.
I was a software developer who had just changed jobs from a big corporation to a small startup.
We were driven by something very specific.
Not just a good business idea.
We wanted time, location, and financial freedom.
We wanted to be in the driver's seat of our own life. Not dependent on an employer, not dependent on anyone else's decisions about our future.
As we explored different angles and business models, we learned about affiliate marketing and SEO.
And the topic we chose was one that was a big part of our life at the time: why is settling into life in Germany so unnecessarily hard for newcomers?
The answer to that question became Simple Germany.
A YouTube channel and website designed to help internationals navigate life in Germany.
From bank accounts, insurance, bureaucracy, to culture.
All explained in plain English.
And for a while, Simple Germany delivered what we were looking for.
SIMPLE GERMANY
The business that taught us everything
Our first business model was affiliate marketing paired with SEO.
We recommended services that anyone moving to Germany needs. Think bank accounts, insurance, telecommunications, German learning tools.
We earned commissions when people signed up.
It worked extraordinarily well.
Month after month, our Google traffic grew.
Month after month, commissions came in.
Then...
The Google released its Helpful Content Update.
Almost overnight, traffic dropped.
But here's what saved our business...
...YouTube.
We had started the channel almost as an afterthought.
Our goal was to bring some personality to a very dry topic.
We started with the cheapest equipment available out there.
We found this picture in our records.
One of the first pics we ever took of our studio inside our tiny apartment.
Turns out that decision was more important than we knew.
While the SEO traffic collapsed, our YouTube channel kept growing.
The business didn't die because YouTube held it up.
So we adapted.
We started creating our own digital products and selling directly through video.
We released around 15 offers.
Some worked, and some completely flopped.
And then something else happened that changed everything.
Our biggest affiliate partners started closing their programs.
The products we'd been genuinely recommending, not because they paid us, but because they were the best options for our audience, stopped paying commissions overnight.
We weren't willing to recommend second-rate products just to fill the gap.
Our integrity mattered more than a commission check.
That was the wake-up call.
We had built a successful business, but we hadn't built one we truly owned.
We were still dependent.
Just on different people than before...
EMAIL...
The shift that changed everything
We'd heard the phrase a hundred times.
The money is in the list.
But we didn't really understand what it meant until we hired a business coach who finally showed us how the money is in the list.
We stopped selling directly from YouTube.
Instead, we started using YouTube as a lead generation machine.
Building an email list of warm, qualified people who trusted us.
Below is a screenshot of our email marketing software. It shows the moment we implemented a system to actively drive passive viewers into our email list.
Then we launched our first high-ticket offer, a live cohort program, exclusively to that email list.
One launch, sold only through email, to leads we had generated from YouTube, outperformed a product that had been running for two years!
That's the moment we understood what momentum actually means in a business.
The shift also introduced us to something we hadn't expected: we fell in love with the format.
Live cohorts, real people, real feedback, real impact.
Having a YouTube channel can feel like talking into a void sometimes.
Live programs reminded us how important human connection is.
But it also revealed something else...
WALKING AWAY...
The moment we knew it was time to walk away
We were driving to meet friends one evening, listening to a podcast from one of our business mentors.
He asked one question that landed differently than we expected:
Is what you're doing now what you're supposed to be doing?
There was a long silence in the car.
And for the first time we both individually voiced a shy "No".
Six years in, a business that worked, and we both quietly knew it was no longer ours.
I (Jen) had moved to Germany in 2012. That was 14 years ago.
I'd grown into a completely different person.
Yvonne had never really imagined spending the next decade explaining Germany to the world.
The topic had served us well, but we'd outgrown it.
So, with this new alignment, we decided to step away from Simple Germany.
We decided not to shut it down, because we know the content still helps thousands of people and we don't want to take that away.
So we decided to put it in maintenance mode.
Taking this decision opened a big space and a world of possibilities.
And the natural question that came was:
What's next?
STOPPING OUR WORLD TO...
Take inventory
We sat down and listed everything we'd actually learned over six years of building, breaking, and rebuilding a business.
- SEO
- Copywriting
- Affiliate systems
- Digital products
- Email marketing
- Launch strategy
- Video production
- High-ticket sales
- Live cohort delivery
- YouTube for business
- Audience psychology
- Tracking and attribution
- Never ending personal development
- Building a business as a married couple
- Creating a lifestyle business without falling into the hustle culture
But one thing appeared on the list that was bigger than all the others.
YouTube.
YouTube had been the constant through every business model, every pivot, every hard moment.
It had saved us when SEO collapsed.
It had built the audience that made our email launches work.
It had proven, over and over again, that long-form human-created content is the most powerful tool an online educator can use to build genuine, lasting trust with an audience.
Especially now, in an era where the internet is filling up with AI-generated content, a real human showing up consistently on camera to teach, share, and connect is how you stand out.
After this exercise, the next step became clear to us.
Help other online education business owners generate momentum with their YouTube channel to grow their business.
We call this new business 5% Magic.
THE NEXT CHAPTER
Why we built 5% Magic
5% Magic exists because of everything Simple Germany taught us.
We spent 6 years figuring out how a video turns into a lead, and a lead turns into a customer.
We built tracking systems, tested frameworks, launched products, and made every mistake worth making.
We learned what creates momentum and what is just empty content.
And we want to help other online educators skip the years of trial and error.
We don't want to teach YouTube growth hacks or general tactics.
We want to help educators build a system that turns their YouTube channel into a consistent, measurable engine for their business.
One that works even when they're offline.
We have named our playbook to do this The 5% Momentum System™.
And we know it works.
We're genuinely excited to share it with other educators who want to create the kind of impact their business is actually capable of.
We teach our system on YouTube and help eduactors implement it in our Bootcamp.
If any of this resonates and you want to build something similar for your own business, here's where to learn more about our Bootcamp.
To your success,
Jen and Yvonne are married and live in Düsseldorf.
They hike trails on multiple continents, explore corners of the world they never thought they'd see, and run a business that genuinely doesn't need them to be at their desks 24/7.
