Episode Details

You built something people love. Running the business of it is a different problem entirely.

Dani Donovan is the creator of The Anti-Planner, a self-published ADHD productivity workbook that generated over $1 million in its first year and has now sold more than 115,000 copies with a 4.9-star rating. She built it without a business plan, without onboarding documents, and without a team that had done any of this before.

In this conversation, Dani explains how a single ADHD comic from 2018 nearly never got posted, how a business coach’s field guide exercise became the product she actually needed, and what happened when she had to tell 28,000 pre-order customers their books were running late.

We also get into the part nobody warns you about: what hiring looks like when there are no SOPs, no infrastructure, and no clear handoff between the creative work and the operational side of the business.

This is a conversation about the hidden cost of scaling creative ADHD-led businesses — and why building the thing is often easier than building the systems around it.

What We Cover:

• How Dani designed The Anti-Planner around what she actually used instead of what productivity systems were “supposed” to look like
• Why she turned down traditional publishing and protected creative control over the product
• The pre-order strategy that generated 42,000 orders across two launches
• What happened when she had to email 28,000 customers about delayed orders — and why almost nobody asked for refunds
• Why scaling an ADHD-led business gets operationally difficult long before it looks successful from the outside

Connect with Dani Donovan:

• Website: https://anti-planner.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danidonovan
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@danidonovan

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