Katelyn Bourgoin: The Info Creator, Teaching 280k People “Why We Buy” 

Meet the Woman Who Turned Buyer Psychology Into a 7-Figure Weapon without selling her soul—or a course every 3 weeks.

Before she was dubbed a “visionary entrepreneur” by Forbes,

Katelyn Bourgoin built everything. Then lost most of it.

🧩 A branding agency that boomed.

🍴 A restaurant consultancy she sold.

💸 A VC-backed startup that… well, you can guess.

“Failure isn’t the opposite of success. It’s part of the recipe.” — Katelyn (probably quoting a trauma therapist)

But somewhere in the late-2020s creator gold rush, while everyone else was building content empires that quietly owned them, Katelyn built something… weirder.

She launched an email newsletter called Why We Buy.

Now?

⚔️ She owns the internet’s conversation on buyer psychology

📊 Runs an insight-based business scaling past 7 figures

🧠 Educates over 280,000 subscribers—without needing a viral reel every week

And no—she didn’t do it by posting 14 carousels about “value.”

She built something different.

Not coach.

Not influencer.

Not even just educator.

But an Info Creator.

A product-led business, powered by insights, not content addiction.

A creator business designed like a liquid asset, not a leaky funnel.

Now, buckle up, this could get heavy and weird.

🧭 READ THIS FIRST: How to Approach This Deep Dive Without Melting Your Brain

Welcome to The Info Creator Dept.

This isn’t just a blog post. It’s an unlicensed field manual disguised as a case study.
A rogue operating system for creator-educators.
Part documentary. Part blueprint. Part breakdown of someone’s eerily replicable online empire.

⚠️ And yes—it’s a DEEP DIVE, and it’s long.
But no—you’re not supposed to “read” it.
You’re supposed to explore it. Like a secret archive. Or a suspiciously well-organized conspiracy board.

Here’s how to survive the dive (and steal its secrets)

🔍 1. Skim Like a Scientist, Not a Student
Don’t start at the top. Let your curiosity lead.
Scroll the headers. Chase rabbit holes. Jump around like it’s an interactive Netflix doc.

✍️ 2. Take Notes on What Feels “Strangely Useful”
If something makes you whisper, “Wait… I could use that.”
Pause. Highlight. Screenshot. That’s the signal. Follow it.

🧪 3. Don’t Memorize. Prototype.
This is not school. This is war.
You don’t need to learn everything. Just steal the weapons and remix them into your business.

🧠 4. Come Back When You’re Stuck
Bookmark it. These pieces are built to be revisited.
When your growth plateaus or you’re drowning in content chaos—return here. Something new will click.

📚 5. Share It If You Want More Like This
These deep dives take 100+ hours, 50+ tabs, and mild existential panic to build.
If you find value, a share = signal for more.

This is not content.
It’s a creator operating system.
Read it like you’re trying to escape the simulation.

Table Of Contents
  1. Prologue: What We’re Actually Investigating Here 👀
  2. Crash Course on Katelyn Bourgoin
  3. CHAPTER 1: Ace Ventura Meets Gandalf the Grey
  4. 🧠 CHAPTER 2: How Katelyn Built a Creator Business That Doesn’t Rely on Posting 24/7
  5. CHAPTER 3: How to Hijack the Customer Journey (Without Feeling Slimy)
  6. CHAPTER 4: 🎯 Growth Levers That Don’t Require Selling Your Soul (or DMs)
  7. 📼 Chapter 5: The CORE Dominos That Built an Info Empire
  8. 🧠 Chapter 6: The Osmosis Effect: How Katelyn Became Un-ignorable
  9. 🧭 Inside The Mind of an Info Creator
  10. 💥 What This Means for You (and Me)
  11. 🧠 Chapter 7: The Bourgoin Protocol
  12. 🧩 The Bottom Line: Build for Why They Buy, Not What You want to teach
  13. 🧭 READ THIS FIRST: How to Approach This Deep Dive Without Melting Your Brain

Prologue: What We’re Actually Investigating Here 👀

How does one woman, with no team of video editors,
no content hamster wheel,
and zero TikTok dances…
manage to sell more than most full-time course creators?

And what does her story say about the future of creator education?

Because here’s what I’ve been seeing while helping creators on sabbatical:

Most info creators?
They’re building products to teach.
Katelyn?
She builds to transform.

This essay isn’t just a highlight reel.
It’s a breakdown of how she escaped the “freelancer matrix,”
and what her playbook reveals about:

From Crash to Clarity: Why This Deep Dive Exists

I didn’t study Katelyn out of fanboy curiosity.
I studied her out of desperation.

I’ve burned out on content.
Built “smart” products no one bought.
Watched creators grow broke while growing followers.

So I hit pause.
Started digging.
Rebuilt how I think about creator products.
(And built a system—more on that later.)

It felt like a crowbar to the skull of the creator economy.

Katelyn was one of the key people who made me rethink everything:

Not just what we create.
But why it matters.
And how to make it last.

So this is the deep dive I wish existed 3 years ago.
Less “how to go viral”…
More “how to build a business that doesn’t break you.”

If you’ve ever felt like:

“I’m posting 24/7, and still nothing feels real.”

This?
Is for you.

Crash Course on Katelyn Bourgoin

Okay, first, let’s get this out of the way:

If you think Katelyn Bourgoin just started tweeting and blew up, you’re missing years of painful, sweaty backstory and about 300 customer interviews’ worth of mistakes.

Supposedly, Katelyn started making content around late 2020s. But before she got into the whole schebang…

She did 300 customer interviews for a software product, telling people what she was building just to find out what she was building the wrong thing for people.

But she was able to use all her experience, her journey and her failures into a Multi-6-Fig Business answering 1 simple question —WHY PEOPLE BUY?

And since this has been going on since 2010, it would be stupid of me to cram everything (else we’ll be here till Tuesday), but here’s a few notable moments in her journey from Bankrupt to WHY WE BUY + UNIGNORABLE.

Career Highlights & Ventures

  • Serial Founder: By her late 20s, Katelyn was already a three-time founder. She sold her first business, a restaurant consultancy, and then launched RedRiot, a branding agency that grew rapidly, landing clients like Target and Holiday Inn.
  • Tech Startup – Vendeve: In 2014, Katelyn founded Vendeve, a peer-to-peer mentoring platform for women entrepreneurs, described as “the next LinkedIn for women entrepreneurs” by Forbes and Inc. Magazine. The venture was venture-backed, won pitch contests, and attracted media attention. However, despite early success, Vendeve ultimately struggled, leading Katelyn to a turning point in her career.
  • Customer Camp (now learnwhywebuy): Cue 2020: She launches Customer Camp, builds the “Why We Buy” newsletter, and pivots to info creation rooted in consumer psychology.

Today, she’s the Buyer Psychologist of the Internet—teaching 280,000+ people how to unlock hidden buying triggers instead of shipping another mediocre course.

Thought Leadership & Influence

  • Why We Buy: Katelyn is the creator of the “Why We Buy” newsletter, which distills insights from consumer psychology and buyer behavior for marketers and founders. Her newsletter and social media  have become go-to resources for actionable marketing advice.
  • Un-Ignorable: She co-created “Un-Ignorable” with Demand Curve in 2022, a program helping entrepreneurs build audiences of future buyers.
  • Featured Expert: Katelyn has been recognized as an “influential entrepreneur” by Forbes, named among the “top 20 wonder women of SaaS marketing and growth,” and featured in major outlets including Forbes, Inc., USA Today, HuffPost, CBC, and Bustle.
  • Educator & Speaker: She is a sought-after speaker and workshop leader, known for translating complex psychological concepts into practical marketing strategies.

Our good old customer whisper went from being a brand strategist to being THE BUYER PSYCHOLOGIST by compounding on all that happened with her.

This allowed her to distill her experience and pick a pain point that practically every business has, but nobody has solved effectively…until her.

With that out of the way, let’s get do to the meat and potatoes of her genius moves to building herself a category.

CHAPTER 1: Ace Ventura Meets Gandalf the Grey

In a world where creators chase the algorithm like it owes them money, Katelyn Bourgoin has done something absurd:
She built an IP ecosystem by being radically useful, dangerously smart, and stupidly entertaining.

🧠 SECTION 1: What I Discovered (And Why You Should Care)

Katelyn doesn’t just “post content.”
She operates like a media-trained psychologist armed with memes, spreadsheets, and stand-up material.
While others chase followers, she builds demand engines rooted in behavioral science.

At first glance? It’s just good marketing.
But underneath?
She’s created a playbook for escaping the Creator Hamster Wheel (here’s mine) — without burning out, selling out, or pumping out vanilla course factories.

That’s what pulled me in.

🔍 SECTION 2: Deeper Than Content: Positioning As Performance Art

Katelyn runs a triple-threat archetype stack:
🃏 The Jester (funny)
🧙 The Magician (insightful)
📚 The Sage (research-backed)

She’s proof that being educational doesn’t mean being boring—and being entertaining doesn’t mean being a clown.

She memes complex buyer psychology into digestible, dopamine-rich hits (see: her JTBD breakdowns with jokes).

This matters.

Because most creator businesses?
They don’t fail because of “bad content.”
They fail because of mispositioned offers, misunderstood audiences, and mismatched creator-product fit.

She solved for that.

How?

“We exist to help marketers understand what triggers people to buy, so they can market smarter.”
Katelyn Bourgoin, via multiple podcast appearances, 2022–2024

Her work blends:

  • Jobs-to-be-Done Theory (Progress > Personas)
  • Extreme Customer Proximity (“Whoever gets closest to the customer wins”)
  • Transparency-First Storytelling (Openly sharing failures, burnout, pivots)
  • Visual Signals + Content OS + Distribution Flywheels

It’s not just content—it’s research-infused brand IP turned into a recurring traffic machine.

Strategic positioning like that has got her noticed by waayyy tooo many popular sources (which made things harder for me to research), she is also the subject of an internet business case study as a B2B creators and on Growth in Reverse…and now Me.

(mine probably doesn’t count right now but someday this will reach her)

She managed to become a spike in the creator economy in a better and more efficient way than anyone…its scary. Genius. but scary.

🔍 SECTION 3: Unpacking the Shift: Why This Matters More Than You Think

When I started my sabbatical to help burnt-out creators escape the content hamster wheel, I kept hearing a recurring whisper:

“You don’t have a content problem. You have a psychology problem.”

I dismissed it.
Then I watched creators with smaller audiences outsell mega-influencers.
I studied their products. Their writing. Their systems.
And at the center of it, every time: intent and buyer psychology.

Which brings us to Katelyn.
She didn’t just understand the game—
She rewired the board.

Her insight-led brand shows us how to:

Build products that sell without hard selling
Escape content-for-growth traps
Monetize your knowledge like a liquidity asset
Design info products people actually finish

She does it by solving a core problem most creators miss:

“They build to teach. Not to transform.

(Spoiler: This is also the core thesis of the Don’t build to teach. Build for intent. model, which you should check out.)

⚠️ SECTION 4: Creator Reality Check: Welcome to the Insight Economy

Let’s get something straight:

Most creators burn out because their business isn’t structured to scale their brain.

They’re still trapped in the Freelancer Flow:
Post → Engagement → Offer → Delivery → Repeat → Cry → Recharge → Start again.

Meanwhile, Katelyn flipped it:

Instead of trading time for visibility…
She bottled her insights into scalable knowledge assets.

She monetized attention horizontally—not vertically.

Here’s what I mean:

The Old Way (Content Economy)The Katelyn Way (Insight Economy)
Volume > ValueValue → Insight → Asset
Teach what you knowUnderstand what they believe
Launch fast, burn oftenDesign for intent
Content drives growthProduct fuels distribution

If you’re building in the content economy…
You’re climbing the wrong hill with the wrong boots.

🧠 CHAPTER 2: How Katelyn Built a Creator Business That Doesn’t Rely on Posting 24/7

“Wait… she only has three products?”
“No, she has a system disguised as a business that makes products look like tools, not temples.”

Welcome to the strange world of Katelyn Bourgoin, where you don’t scale by teaching—you scale by making people do things faster.

In a world where creators overdose on “value,” Katelyn has quietly built an ecosystem that breaks every rule in the “Creator Bible.”

It’s low-effort to manage.
It’s high-leverage to scale.
And it’s psychologically engineered to feel like buying relief, not learning.

She’s not caught in the Lighthouse Trap.

She’s not playing the Audience Growth > Launch > Burnout loop.

She’s doing something… freakishly smart.

So let’s break this ecosystem open like a frog in biology class.

🧰 Main Offer: The Clarity Calls Cheatsheet (aka The Jobs To Be Done Bat-Signal)

ProductTypePriceFulfillment
CheatsheetDownloadable$129Instant
Cheatsheet + 1:1 CallHybrid$6495 Slots/Month

Purpose: Help creators and marketers stop guessing why their customers buy. – Check out here.
Features: Interview scripts, note templates, journey maps—basically, a research lab in a Doc.

“People don’t want a 6-hour course on Jobs To Be Done. They want to run the interviews tomorrow.”
— This Product, Probably

Here’s the kicker: She split one offer into two fulfillment modes. That’s not just smart packaging.
That’s Product Strategy 101: Build once, monetize twice.

🧠 Behavioral Economics Angle: This solves the Intention-Action Gap. Buyers intend to understand their customers—but never take action. Katelyn lowers the friction to doing the thing immediately.

☠️ Dead But Not Forgotten: The Ghost of “Golden Nuggets: Review Mining System”

Katelyn used to sell a system that turned customer reviews into marketing ammo.

Now? Discontinued. Vanished like your motivation mid-launch.
Even the Wayback Machine is like “bro idk.”

Why does this matter?
Because it proves a truth most creators ignore:

Good info products don’t die. They evolve or get absorbed.

(We suspect some of its features morphed into the Painkiller Messaging System.)

🧠 Economic Theory Tie-In: This is an example of Creative Destruction (Schumpeter)—where old products die so better, more relevant ones can be born.

💣 The Un-Ignorable Challenge (Co-Created with Demand Curve)

ProductTypePriceFormat
CoreGroup Challenge$799Videos, Community, Coaching
VIPLimited Group$3,000Private Mastermind

Purpose: Help people build an audience of buyers, not just followers.- Check it out here.
Format: Not a course—an experience. You don’t watch content, you do content.

What’s wild is this isn’t even positioned as “audience building.” It’s attention psychology in disguise.
It’s not just personal brand stuff—it’s Persuasion Architecture. And turning you into an Operator rather than the creator.

🧠 Behavioral Insight: This solves the Accountability-Execution Gap by creating structured peer pressure and small-group attention.

📈 Demand Curve + Katelyn = 1M+ founders, marketers & attention-nerds.
So yes, distribution was baked in.

📜 Wallet Opening Words (The Copywriting Playbook)

ProductTypePrice
PlaybookInteractive Guide$129

Built with Phill Agnew—a known marketing psychology witch scientist—this 175-page beast is Harry Potter for conversion copywriting.
(No brooms, just bots.)

Check it out here.

What makes this work?

  • 26.5 (!) techniques
  • Cheatsheets for testing
  • AI Copy Bot 🤖
  • Templates for ideation

🧠 Nudge Theory in Action: This is choice architecture—by structuring decisions for the user, you reduce overwhelm and increase usage.

And it works because it’s weirdly specific. That “.5 technique”? That’s semantic intrigue.

🧨 Painkiller Messaging System: DIY and DFY

VersionTypePrice
DIY WorkshopSelf-Paced$475
DFY ServiceBespoke$20,000+

This one feels like a cheat code.
Imagine trying to do customer interviews, write your own copy, fix your messaging… and also post content daily?

Yeah. No.

This is done-for-you messaging surgery, wrapped in systems thinking and GPT bots trained by top-tier marketers.

Check it out here.

🧠 Productization Theory: This is vertical integration of creator services. She sells you the system, the tools, and the implementation—without needing a massive team.

🔥Check out:

🎒 Everything Else in the Katelyn Ecosystem

AssetType
The Ouchy Pain Finder BotFree
NewsletterTrust Engine
Newsletter OS (it’s an old asset)Invisible IP
Thread System (an old asset as well)Distribution Stack
CollaborationsCredibility Layer
Speaking GigsAuthority Layer
WebsiteEvergreen Hub
PodcastCredibility Layer

She’s not just building products.

She’s building knowledge assets that function like operating systems.

The newsletter doesn’t sell a product—it sells the persona.

The bot doesn’t sell a cheat sheet—it opens a pathway.

This is not a sales funnel.
This is an info asset stack.

✍️ The Real Secret: Don’t Teach.

Let’s be brutally honest.

Most creators build info products like this:

StageThe MythThe Reality
Step 1“What am I an expert in?”🧠 Wrong question.
Step 2“Let me teach that.”🧨 No one buys education alone.
Step 3“Launch it!”😫 Crickets and refunds.

Compare that to Katelyn’s method:

All her products are deceptively simple. They don’t overwhelm. They don’t preach. They don’t teach.

StageThe Katelyn Way
Step 1Study people like a behavior scientist 👀
Step 2Find their high-intent moments 🔥
Step 3Build for transformation, not information 🧱
Step 4Package insights as assets, not content 💰

This is what separates Intellectual Assets from Digital Junk Drawers.

She builds Products of Utility, not just Products of Knowledge.

That’s the difference between a glorified explainer and a potential flagship info product.

CHAPTER 3: How to Hijack the Customer Journey (Without Feeling Slimy)

Let’s be real.

Most customer journeys in the creator economy are just glorified link trees dressed in Canva drag. You scroll, you click, you bounce. No climax. No transformation. No story.

But Katelyn? She built a damn theme park.
Her brand’s customer journey is what happens when behavioral psychology meets Disneyland meets strategic empathy.

Let’s break this down like creator anthropologists with a mild caffeine addiction.

SECTION 1: 🌀 The “Visual Funnel” Isn’t Dead. It Just Went to Art School.

At the heart of Katelyn’s system is Sarah Hart’s signature visual branding—an aesthetic so clean it feels like a sales page and a bedtime story had a baby. 

Her audience doesn’t just “scroll.” They journey. They wander. They explore. And most importantly?

They convert—without realizing they were sold to.

We’re calling this: “Edu-drip” marketing.
→ Education, dripped slowly through story, surprise, and strategic dopamine hits.

Katelyn’s newsletter Why We Buy is a masterclass in this—using visuals as frictionless signposts.

The real genius? She doesn’t rely on bland popups or discount timers. Instead, she does something most creators never do:

She designs for intent—not just attention.
 

SECTION 2: 🧪 The Fun Funnel: Making Behavioral Science Stupidly Addictive

Here’s her unspoken thesis:

Most behavioral science content online is like broccoli boiled in an MBA lecture. It’s healthy. But no one’s binging it at midnight.

Katelyn flips that.

She uses real stories, sneaky humor, and clickable visuals to Trojan-horse complex concepts like “cognitive bias” and “loss aversion” into the brain without tripping the “this sounds boring” alarm.

Takeaway?
Don’t create content to teach. Create to tickle ego, curiosity, and identity.

📌 Research Note: The “cognitive fluency” principle (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009) shows that people are more likely to believe and act on ideas that are presented simply. Katelyn weaponizes this—on purpose.

CHAPTER 4: 🎯 Growth Levers That Don’t Require Selling Your Soul (or DMs)

Let’s break this down. Not all growth is good growth.

Katelyn isn’t optimizing for vanity metrics or “going viral.” She’s engineering relationship velocity—how fast trust turns into transformation.

Her growth strategy is compound content with emotional triggers:

StrategyDescriptionLeverage
📬 Newsletter Teasing (Twice)Mentioning newsletter drops before they land.Anticipation bias
🧠 Reader TestimonialsFront-loading audience wins to trigger identity lock-in.Social proof
🔄 Thread → Newsletter → Archive FlywheelThreads send people to the newsletter, newsletter sends them to the vault.Content ecosystem loop
🎁 Secret FreebiesEaster eggs inside newsletters for subscribers only.Delight & reciprocity
🧩 Teaching Other People’s AudiencesPodcasts, workshops, newsletters of others.Borrowed trust

And she doesn’t do it alone.

Katelyn builds in co-creation energy—letting the audience build the story with her. From fan highlights to user-generated testimonials to reactive storytelling, she makes fans feel smart, seen, and slightly smug.

“We don’t teach. We co-obsess.” – probably something she’d say

🎤 Co-Creation > Promotion

Appearing on podcasts and channels isn’t about exposure. It’s about signal.
If Signal > Size is the new growth truth, then Katelyn’s strategy is an invitation engine. Her fans don’t just follow—they replicate her work. They remix it. They make memes out of it.

→ See also: The Creator Economy Is Not a Business—It’s a System of Leverage (If You Know How to Play It)

Bonus: This aligns with the “Teaching Signal” theory—a concept from educational psychology showing that the more we teach others, the more we internalize the learning. Katelyn doesn’t just grow by teaching her own ideas. She grows by seeding them inside others’ playgrounds.

📼 Chapter 5: The CORE Dominos That Built an Info Empire

“You don’t go viral because of luck. You go viral because you did the homework and laid the traps.”

Let’s talk about how a few key pieces of content didn’t just grow Katelyn Bourgoin’s brand—they detonated it.

Her rise wasn’t an accident. It was a precision-engineered explosion using behavioral psychology, Twitter, and an industrial amount of caffeine.

Here’s the playbook she accidentally-on-purpose ran.

⚡ 1. The Trigger Technique: The Thread That Shook The Timeline

“21 must-follow accounts who give incredible value for free”
— Amanda Natividad (aka the domino that fell first)

In 2021, Katelyn dropped a thread about buying triggers. One of those threads that feels like a casual post… until it blows up your brand. 💣

Amanda Natividad listed Katelyn in her “must-follow” thread. But not at the bottom of a boring listicle. She was first. That thread? It featured The Trigger Technique—and the ripple was instant.

Impact:
+10,000 followers in 24 hours.
From ~24k to over 40k by New Year.
A trust bridge, built overnight. 🚀

🧠 Internal note: That’s what I call a “Signal Boost Asset.” It’s not just viral—it becomes reputation equity.

🧬 2. How to Use Buying Triggers to Outsmart Competitors = 💰

Katelyn didn’t just introduce a shiny new idea and dip.

She followed up with a use-case thread disguised as a breakdown of Casper’s DTC magic. In reality? It was a stealth manual on how to weaponize the Trigger Technique.

Check it out here.

Effect:
🧩 It connected the dots between idea → implementation → conversion.
📈 Became a strong promoter for her Clarity Call Cheat Sheet lead magnet.

“Most creators teach ideas. Katelyn engineers usage. That’s how you build intellectual assets, not just info.

📌 3. 19 Concepts that Marketers need to know: The Heuristic Hall of Fame

This one felt like an easter egg for nerdy marketers:
1500+ hours studying behavioral economics.
Distilled into 1 Twitter thread. 19 bulletproof ideas. 👩‍🔬🧠

But here’s the twist:
This wasn’t just a flex—it was strategically pinned.
A low-friction onboarding tool.
Your brain says: “Wow, this person does the work. I trust them.”

Effect:

  • High-converting profile funnel
  • Frictionless qualification system
  • Built-in indoctrination

Reminder: Every pinned tweet is an opt-in page in disguise.

💸 4. How I made $14,950 in 57 minutes with 2 emails and a Google Doc: (No Funnel, Just Fire) 

“Two emails. One Google Doc. One creator who knew the assignment.” 🔥

This thread broke the algorithm’s neck. Over 1M views.
It was her prelaunch case study for the Un-Ignorable Challenge.
She talked about priming, pre-suasion, and psychological momentum.

And it read like a live heist.

Effect:
Trust x Time x Scarcity = $14,950 in under an hour.
All without a fancy funnel. Just a proof of work → offer → cash.

It was more than just a win. It was a Creator Leverage Event.

🧠 Chapter 6: The Osmosis Effect: How Katelyn Became Un-ignorable

“Some brands get remembered. Others get absorbed.”

There’s something weirdly sticky about Katelyn’s brand.

You don’t just follow her.

You start thinking like her.

Repeating her phrases.

Adopting her frameworks.

Sometimes, you accidentally quote her without realizing it.

This isn’t content marketing. It’s neuromarketing.

Let’s break down 9 Behavioral Psychology Triggers that explain how Katelyn engineered her brand to lodge itself inside your brain like a marketing parasite:

🧠 9 Brand Osmosis Triggers (🧪 + 🧱 = 🧠)

TriggerWhat It IsWhy It Works
🧠 Cognitive FluencyClear, simple visuals + plain languageYour brain loves easy-to-digest content.
🧃 Authority Bias“I spent 1500 hours on this.”Signals competence. We trust experts.
🪞 ReciprocityHigh-value free threadsWe feel obligated to give attention or money back.
🚦 Signaling TheoryPinned thread = PositioningMakes her look like the “go-to” without saying it.
🔁 RepetitionTrigger Technique → multiple usesMemory is built through pattern recognition.
Narrative AnchoringReal-world case studies (Casper, Un-Ignorable)Makes abstract ideas stick via storytelling.
🚨 Scarcity + UrgencyLimited-time challenges and salesTriggers FOMO-driven action.
🤝 Priming + FramingSpecific phrases: “Un-Ignorable,” “Buying Triggers”Creates a shared language.
🧘‍♂️ Fluency FluorescenceHer metaphors feel sticky“Trigger Technique” hits harder than “psych trigger.”

As Rory Sutherland says:

“Creativity is a substitute for certainty.”

And in Katelyn’s case, every post creates clarity… but feels like creativity. 🧠✨

🧭 So What Did She Actually Do?

She productized her thinking.

She engineered conversion into every piece of content.

She used social proof, structure, and simplicity to turn her free work into brand equity.

And she created behavior loops that make people come back, reference, and share.

That’s not just marketing. That’s behavioral leverage. And Knowledge Liquidity.

🧭 Inside The Mind of an Info Creator

You don’t need to “think like a marketer.”
You need to think like a psychologist.

That’s what makes Katelyn so dangerous.

She doesn’t talk about branding. She talks about beliefs.
She doesn’t teach copy. She teaches conversion context.
She doesn’t sell content. She builds behavior-driven products.

And that’s the thesis of this entire deep dive.

🔗 You can escape the content economy.
🔗 You can build scalable info assets.
🔗 You can use insight as a moat.

But first:
You have to understand why we buy.
Not just them. You, too.

Because if you’re building info products without this lens, you’re not selling.
You’re assigning homework.

💥 What This Means for You (and Me)

Most creators are chasing bigger audiences.
More reach.
More content.

But here’s the shift I’m building my business on:

🔁 From: “How do I post more?”
⚡ To: “How do I create intent-based products people are already primed to buy?”

And it started with Katelyn’s work.
Now it’s turning into an entire info product strategy lab I’m building—
One that flips the script on content-first creation and prioritizes:

🧠 Chapter 7: The Bourgoin Protocol

Filed under: “Methods from a Well-Mannered Marketing Therapist Who became an insight trader”

A framework you can steal reverse engineer, for your own info empire.

→ What levers she pulled

→ Why they worked

→ And how you can build your own creator business that doesn’t rely on posting 24/7.

“Study your people like a stalker with a spreadsheet.”
— probably something Katelyn would say if she had less chill.

🪞PART 1: THE CORE — Stalk Your Customer, Steal Their Brain

Let’s get something straight: Katelyn didn’t go viral.

She went surgical.

While the rest of the creator economy was duct-taping hot takes together and calling it “strategy,” Katelyn turned her newsletter into a mind-reading machine.

Not because she “nichified”—but because she obsessed over buyer beliefs.

Welcome to the Bourgoin Protocol.
At the center? One heretical, almost-too-simple-to-sound-sexy idea:

“You don’t sell to demographics. You sell to why people buy.

Her real audience wasn’t “marketers” or “founders.” It was people with purchasing anxiety, hiding behind job titles. She sold to their inner irrational monkey brain—not their LinkedIn bio.

🛠 PART 2: THE TACTICAL — Escape the Creator Hamster Wheel

Okay, here’s where the chaos turns calculated.

Katelyn doesn’t run on a content treadmill. She reverse-engineered content as an IA Asset—not a chore. She built what I call “High-Leverage Teachables”:

TacticLeverage Outcome
Newsletter → Customer research lab“Talk of the town” reputation
Twitter Threads → User testing playgroundViral clarity & demand data
Free resources (like customer ranking calculator) → Trojan HorsesBrand trust + email growth
Selling Workshops → Research-backed IP sales engine6-figure info stack 

While most creators are stuck posting to stay visible, Katelyn built assets that sell without her being online.

She didn’t scale her output.
She scaled her understanding.

🧠 PART 3: THE MINDSET — The Anti-Growth Hack Ethos

Let’s go meta for a sec.

Most creators secretly crave a one-weekend-course-to-riches. But what Katelyn teaches by example is this:

🚨 If your content strategy feels like your job, you’ve built yourself another 9-5.

She’s playing long-game IP, not short-term clout.

She said “no” to the Lighthouse Trap (aka: giving so much value, no one buys). She said “yes” to:

  • Building demand-first
  • Teaching from insight, not inspiration
  • Launching when belief tension is at its peak (not when her calendar said so)

🚨THE PAYOFF: What You Can Steal From Katelyn

Here’s your stealable stack:

🧠 Start with research — not creativity
💬 Turn conversations into content — and content into customer discovery
🎯 Build assets — not posts
📈 Launch when demand hits boiling point — not just because you “need to ship”

This isn’t content strategy.
This is Knowledge Asset Engineering.
And Katelyn nailed it before most creators realized they were running in circles.

The bottom line?
You don’t need more content. You need a clear conversion mechanism built from customer psychology + compounding IP.

🧩 The Bottom Line: Build for Why They Buy, Not What You want to teach

So here’s what I realized after reverse-engineering Katelyn Bourgoin’s info empire…

Most creators are still selling what they know.

Katelyn? She sells what people are already trying to decide.

And that single distinction?
It’s the difference between another ghost town course and a business that prints demand on autopilot.

Her model doesn’t require 24/7 posting.

It doesn’t hinge on virality.

And it definitely doesn’t start with “What should I make?”

It starts with the buyer.
Their friction points, their micro-moments, their “I’m stuck, help me” brain loops.

She builds for their uncertainty, not her expertise.
That’s not marketing. That’s behavioral economics in motion.

See: Daniel Kahneman, B.J. Fogg, and Gerald Zaltman’s work on subconscious buying (Zaltman found that 95% of purchase decisions happen in the subconscious).

The punchline?

“When you study your people harder than you study your competition, you don’t need to compete.”
– Probably Katelyn in some podcast I forgot to cite

So if you’re a creator… stop building to teach.

Start building for purchase intent.

🧵 This deep dive wasn’t about Katelyn. It was about what’s possible when you exit the Content Hamster Wheel and build your IP like an architect.

Now it’s your turn.

→ Study their behavior
→ Build your Flagship
→ Make the shift from free content to scalable revenue

You don’t need 280,000 followers. You need clarity.

(Writing this piece has taken me upwards of 200+ hours, from all the research to making sense of things and putting it up in a slightly easy-to-digest format.
So for some reason, if you decide to share this piece of content with others on social, it’ll be appreciated (and won’t go unnoticed, so thank you).

Sudhanshu Pai is the writer of THE INFO CREATOR DEPT. He spends his days researching knowledge business, creators economy, why & how 7 fig info business scale (or flop) and generally figuring out blueprints, breakthroughts and strategies to help creator educators get higher return on their expertise.

The deep dives and other content take more than 100 hours to put together, so sharing this content with others on social media will be much appreciated (and won’t go unnoticed.)

Let’s do more together:

  • Book a 1:1 Clarity Call. I’ll help you find & plan the best info-product or get clarity on building the perfect offer ecosystem for your business.