Dentistry is a hard business. Dr. Simone Ellis has made $150,000 on Kajabi by helping others learn to survive it.

Simone Ellis was seven years old when she realized she wanted to be a dentist. Her dad was the kind of guy who fixed dental issues by tying one end of a string to his tooth and the other to a doorknob—but he’d finally met a problem he couldn’t DIY. And, when the time came for his appointment, Ellis got to go with him.

“I loved it,” she gushes. “And the dentist saw this super curious kid in second grade and was like, ‘Come and take a look, come shadow me.’ And from that moment on, I knew that this was the industry I wanted to be in.”

Two decades later, she was Dr. Simone Ellis, and just one year after graduating dental school, she opened her own practice. “It was crazy,” she says. “I had no business skills, nothing. I just jumped out there—and definitely learned a lot.”

By the end of 2019, she’d generated enough business to open a second location. She had also—like many other medical professionals, around that time—started experimenting with using social media to talk about the daily ins and outs of her job. Her main platform was Instagram, and she hopped on its livestreaming function to host “Tooth Talks,” where she’d share her experiences with patients.

“Tooth Talks were a simplistic way to understand the industry without making it super complicated,” she says. “I was just playing around with different things, and that’s how I started to grow my followers.”

Then, in early 2020, two things happened: COVID struck, and George Floyd was murdered. The former resulted in lots of people actively supporting local small businesses, like Ellis’s, that were impacted by lockdowns. The latter resulted in a similar groundswell of support for Black-owned businesses. Both waves brought attention to Ellis’s videos—and her practice.

“We went viral not once, not twice, but three times on social media, and when I say viral, I mean my practice was taking in about 130 patients per month before, and we were doubling and tripling those numbers,” she says.

Doing big views on Instagram let her reach two key audiences. First, all those new patients who helped double and triple her practice’s numbers: “Social really let me give information out to people where, you know, maybe you’re nervous about dentistry, but you can find a way to relate to it and get some services done,” she says.

But second, and perhaps even more importantly, Ellis reached fellow medical professionals and aspirational business coaches. And that’s where she started to build her new long-term business. Inspired by creators like Brendan Bouchard, she decided what she wanted to do was share all the lessons she’d learned over her 15-year career as a dentist.

“My industry is really stressful. We have the number one suicide rate,” she says. “You’re absorbing a lot of energy. No one is standing outside, rushing to get to the dentist’s office. It’s not the best place for people to be. They don’t love coming. I know the struggles that my colleagues are facing. I know how uncomfortable it is to want to see yourself be successful in our industry, but for the stresses and the strain that come with it.”

After Bouchard mentioned partnering with creator commerce platform Kajabi, Ellis figured that might be a way for her to build and monetize things like courses and life coaching.

So, she sought out Kajabi, and asked to work with its team. She joined the platform as an official course creator this past April, and since then has sold more than $150,000 worth of mental health, wellness, and entrepreneurialism handbooks and masterclasses for fellow hygienists, plus one-on-one coaching. She’s also secured partnerships with brands like Colgate, Listerine, and Invisalign.

The money she’s made from content creation and Kajabi has let her step down from active dentistry; she sold both her practices and is now full-time on making content and courses.

“Kajabi made some opportunities available for me that I knew I wanted to do, and I found a great foundation for me to be able to do that,” she says. “Kajabi has also helped me because it’s allowing me to give my message out to so many people in comparison to what I think I could’ve done on my own.”

Kajabi, which was founded in 2010 by Kenny Reuter, has so far paid out over $8 billion to creators from 85 million customers. It says Ellis is particularly worth highlighting as a success story, since she was able to use its platform to grow her audience beyond just Instagram. That’s right in line with Kajabi’s recent rebrand, where a splashy ad campaign urged creators to build their audiences outside of major platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Insta.

“Don’t work for an algorithm,” one billboard read. “Work for you.”

For Ellis, Kajabi is the key to her next step as a businesswoman. “COVID taught me that you don’t want to just have your stream of income being solely in the practice. You need to diversify,” she says. “I really want to start empowering doctors to go on this platform.”

She adds, “I’m also excited about building a community. Kajabi is really working on strengthening their community platform side, so having like-minded people be around other like-minded people, to me, is gold. I went to a Kajabi event this year and just being around more creators, more innovators, inspired me and made me come back and work harder. I want to create a community like that, too.”

Kajabi is a Tubefilter partner.