The Holistic Enchilada: a curly hair blog that earns $96K a year

The Holistic Enchilada sells curly hair care tips, product reviews, digital products and courses to people with naturally curly and wavy hair, and its founder reported $96K a year in revenue in a June 2022 Starter Story interview.

How it started

In the summer of 2017, Delilah Orpi saw a Facebook ad about starting a money-making blog. It took her almost two months to decide to act on it. She was a full-time teacher at the time, and she started the blog in August 2017 as something she did on the side with the little spare time she had. The original idea was broader than hair: she wanted to share her shift to a cleaner lifestyle using organic and natural products.

One post changed the direction. She wrote about her own curly hair routine — embracing her natural curls after a lifetime of straightening — and that post took off. In her account, the reason was straightforward: she had a solution to a problem many people had, and there was very little competition writing about it. She narrowed the blog to that niche.

From there she treated it as a skill problem rather than a talent problem. She took blogging courses covering social media, SEO, email marketing and creating digital products, paying for them with affiliate income as it came in. She also completed online training to become a Curly Hair Coach, choosing the curly hair niche because she knew it well and, at that point, posts on the topic were easy to rank. In the spring of 2020 she launched a curly hair care course along with some smaller digital products, with the stated aim of diversifying income so that algorithm changes and seasonal swings hurt less.

What it sells and how it charges

The official website, fetched on 2026-09-30, describes the offer in one line: "Get curly hair care tips to create a simple routine and have defined, healthy curls that you love." The audience is stated just as plainly on the same page: she helps "people with naturally curly and wavy hair transition to wearing their natural texture."

Most of what a new reader meets first is free. The site's navigation leads to a Curl Type Quiz, a free Master Your Curls Quick Start Guide, a Facebook group, and a large blog archive organised by topic: product reviews, the Curly Girl Method, fine curls, textures, troubleshooting, ingredients, hair colour and routines. The site also has a shop, a resources area, an Amazon storefront and a coupons and products page. The about section describes the founder as the founder of The Holistic Enchilada blog and a trained Curly Hair Consultant; the site's header introduces her as a Curly Hair Coach.

On price, the website does not publish a price list, and no pricing page was available when the site was fetched. What is known about how money is made comes from the founder's own 2022 account: she named digital products, display ads, affiliate marketing and sponsored posts as revenue sources, and described having three ebooks and one membership, with one ebook used as a tripwire discounted from $29 to $9 for 15 minutes, followed by a $5 order bump and a $9 upsell. She said she sells digital products mostly through email evergreen funnels that start with a free opt-in. Those are 2022 figures she reported herself, not current listed prices.

How it got its first customers, and what kept growth going

Early traffic did not come from search. It took a few months to get any traffic at all, and most of it came from Pinterest. Learning SEO brought more organic traffic, but she said that took over two years.

Two things did the heavy lifting after that. The first was formal SEO training: she took Stupid Simple SEO in 2019 and said her traffic shot up a few months after implementing it, and that organic traffic converted better, which is why she pushed on organic reach. The second was email. She took Email on Autopilot in 2020 and called it the biggest help in retaining readers and increasing digital product sales. In 2020 she gained 10,000 subscribers from a single opt-in — the free Quickstart Guide to Mastering Your Curls — and said it has stayed her best-performing opt-in. She sends two to three emails a week, one or two broadcasts plus one sequence, and said that sending more, as long as the content is helpful, has tracked with higher revenue.

Her summary of the whole thing is one sentence: "Learning SEO and focusing on my email list have been key."

The numbers

Every figure here is what the founder said in June 2022. It is not current revenue, and the interview itself notes that traffic and income dropped in 2021 and had stayed around the same level since.

Revenue: $96K a year, founder-reported in the June 2022 interview. In the same interview she said the site then averaged $7,000 a month, with months fluctuating between $5,000 and $8,000.
Costs and profit: expenses of about $1,500 a month, leaving profit usually between $4,000 and $6,000 a month.
Revenue mix for 2022 so far: 49% display ads, 28% affiliate income, 22% digital products, with the remainder a mix of sponsored posts and articles written for other platforms.
Team: one founder and two employees at the time of the interview. She also described a virtual assistant working about five hours a week on email, pins, SEO and admin, and said she herself worked about 15 to 20 hours a week on the blog.
Start cost: she did not state a dollar amount. She said she had no money to spend, so she bought her domain and hosting on BlueHost, installed a free theme, watched video tutorials to format the blog, and made her logo and colour palette in Canva.
Timeline: started August 2017; a few dollars of affiliate income within a few months; Mediavine by the second year; digital products launched in spring 2020.

How it compares

These benchmarks come from 1M.chat's analysis of 1,997 businesses with founder-reported revenue in Starter Story interviews from 2015 to 2026. It is a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed, not a random sample of all businesses. Within the Newsletters, blogs & media category, 162 businesses have founder-reported revenue.

Measure	Newsletters, blogs & media
Median monthly revenue	$8.5K
Share at $1M a year or more	11%
Median employees	1.0
Share started by one founder	83%

Among the 120 businesses in the category with channel information, the most common growth channels were organic social media at 68%, SEO and organic search at 62%, email and newsletters at 43%, and content marketing at 37%.

On that basis, The Holistic Enchilada's founder-reported revenue sits below the category median. Two details of this case line up with the category pattern — it was started by one founder and it leaned on SEO and email — while its reported revenue and its two-person team at interview sit differently against the medians above.

What a founder can take from it

Choose a niche that can actually be monetised. Her own advice was to pick a topic where you can make money from ads, affiliate marketing or your own products, because there are many topics you could write about that would be hard to monetise.

Publish before the design feels finished. She said the best thing you can do is start even if you don't think the blog looks perfect, and that she sees bloggers stressing over logos, home page design and colour palettes when those things don't matter.

Collect emails from day one. She did not start until 2020 and said it made a big difference to both traffic and revenue. Starting earlier removes that delay.

Budget years, not months, for SEO. Organic traffic took over two years in her account. If your plan assumes search traffic arrives in one quarter, the plan is the problem.

Spread income across more than one source, and buy advice deliberately. She added products in 2020 specifically to reduce exposure to algorithm and seasonal swings, researched courses before buying any, and hired her virtual assistant by asking her own email list who was interested.

Nothing here predicts what you will earn. It is one founder's reported numbers from one interview, set against a category sample of other founders' reported numbers.

Sources

Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure