Jes Sudbrink had been teaching in person for years. Then 2020 arrived, and like a lot of teachers, she moved everything online. At the same time, she started homeschooling her own kids, and right away, she ran into a problem she hadn’t expected.
“I started to find that it was difficult for me to plan art activities for my own homeschooling, which is a bit ironic, because I was an art teacher,” she recalls.
She went looking for resources on Pinterest and YouTube and kept finding the same thing: incomplete lessons, videos that weren’t very good, no consistency, no single teacher to follow.
When she talked to other homeschooling parents, she found they were all dealing with the same thing.
She remembers thinking, “If creating homeschool art resources should be easy for anyone, it really should be easy for me. I decided that something needed to be done because if I was struggling with it, everyone else must be as well, especially non-artsy people.”
So that’s what she did.
This is the story of how Jes:
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Found her niche and made her membership even better by focusing on a specific audience
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Structured her membership to give her students the most flexibility and value
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Continues to reach new customers today
Choosing a clear niche meant greater focus
At the beginning, Jes could have decided to cast a wide net and make online art resources for everyone. But instead of going broad, she niched down and focused her business specifically on the homeschool community. This worked in her favor because she was tuned in with what her audience needed, and she knew what would land for those specific customers.
She drew on her own experience as an art teacher and homeschool educator and found her first members at homeschool expos, through word-of-mouth in homeschool groups, and by showing up in spaces where her ideal customers already spent time.
“I think that having a homeschool niche has helped a lot,” Jes explains. “It’s made the world a little bit smaller. But the homeschooling community is huge. I’m still finding my people.”
“The important thing is knowing you shouldn’t fit for everybody, but you should find the people who fit for you,” Jes says.
So when you build a product of your own, don’t be afraid to go specific.
Building a community membership on Podia
Jes runs her whole business through Podia, and she built it with simplicity in mind from the start.
At the center is her on-demand art membership, designed for homeschoolers but open to anyone looking for consistent, quality art education for kids. Her plans are simple: there’s a base membership with access to the full lesson library, and a “Plus Live” tier that adds a monthly live class where members can get together on camera, share their work, and connect with each other.
She was deliberate about making the live element optional. “I didn’t want it to be a negative thing if someone can’t make it.” Not everyone is in the same time zone, and she didn’t want the live class to feel like a requirement for getting value from the membership.
More recently, she added a lifetime option, inspired by something she experienced as a customer herself. “I actually felt inspired after I had purchased a lifetime membership for something for my own kids, and I thought, wow, this is great — I should do this as well.”
For people who aren’t sure about committing to a full membership, she also offers select lessons packaged as standalone courses, which gives families a lower-stakes way to try her teaching before going all in.
One of the most useful parts of her setup came directly from early member feedback. Because her content is so visual and project-based, people found it hard to browse the lesson library and get a quick sense of what was available. The library kept growing, which made things more challenging.
“As the materials kept building and growing, it became even more difficult to quickly find different projects. So that inspired me to create a visual catalog, a visual gallery on the website that could then link to the lesson directly.”
The result is a “Pick a Project” page, a browsable grid of project images that takes members straight into the corresponding membership content. It’s become one of her favorite parts of the experience.
Everything else runs through Podia too: her website, her email list, her campaigns, her blog, and her affiliate program. She used to stitch all of this together across separate tools and logins, but now Podia makes it easier to keep everything under one roof.
“Podia has replaced everything that I used to have to piecemeal together, and that’s the number one thing that I tell my friends — you’ve got to just streamline things. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’ve got to just find an all-in-one.”
One of her favorite features is the built-in affiliate program, which is a natural extension of what has always driven her business. “Word-of-mouth is the most valuable thing in a small business,” Jes shares, and now her happy customers can earn a commission for sharing the membership with other homeschool families.
How Jes keeps finding her people
Once you’ve gotten specific about who you serve, finding them can be a challenge for any online business. But Jes has worked out a few strategies that keep high-quality customers coming her way. Her main engine is a combination of Meta ads and email sequences.
“I’ve done Meta ads, which have brought me wonderful leads because of how much I hyper-focus my campaigns to the right demographic, the right interests,” Jes shares.
“I take a lot of time to make sure that they’re very specific, and after I reach a lead, I can run very effective email campaigns because I know what my audience is looking for. Thankfully, Podia makes it very easy to set up email campaigns.”
She knows this approach costs money, but what she gets in return is a smaller group of people who are a genuinely good fit long-term.
Then there’s TikTok, which she resisted for a long time before finally giving in about a year ago.
“I did not want to get TikTok,” she explains. “I dragged my feet, not wanting to do it, and I refused until about a year ago.” But TikTok is a visual platform, and art lessons are a visual subject area, so it made sense to try.
She started slowly and reluctantly but became a fan when the platform started bringing in customers with no ad spend attached.
“I’m so grateful to have it now, and anyone who finds me on TikTok, I didn’t even have to pay for their lead! That’s a bonus for me!”
It’s become her biggest surprise of the past year. “You never know where people will find you.”
Jes’s advice for someone just starting out
Jes has one piece of advice she comes back to for anyone at the beginning of their creative journey: don’t wait until everything is perfect.
“Just start. Get started. It is impossible to have everything perfect before you start. And you’re going to want to change things after you start, so don’t spend too much time overthinking.”
Instead, Jes suggests starting with a small group first, people who can give honest feedback while the stakes are still low.
“Start with a small beta group, give them access to your product, and then once you’ve got the kinks worked out, you can launch on a greater scale. You’ll have more confidence, and you won’t have to change things with a lot of people involved.”
Throughout all she’s built, Jes has kept her focus and priority on her students and customers. She started with a problem she experienced herself, built something for a specific person rather than everyone, and launched before she had all the answers because she knew the world needed what she had to share.
And if you’re sitting on an idea right now, wondering if the timing is right or the product is ready, she’d probably tell you the same thing she told herself: just start.
Jes Sudbrink runs Hello Homeschool Art, an on-demand art membership for homeschoolers and families. If you’d like to build a website and membership like Jes, start your 30-day free trial of Podia today.
