“It feels like a separate home for just what they want: connection and a chance to ask questions and be witnessed.”
Molly Mahar · Stratejoy
At 26, Molly Mahar was working in hotels, planning conferences and weddings and selling men in suits $4.50 bottles of Coke. She had a quarter-life crisis, quit her job, sold everything she owned and went backpacking around the world. She came home wanting to be, in her words, the young, cool woman’s version of Tony Robbins. In 2009 she started Stratejoy, a women’s community for intentional living. It began as workshops in a Seattle coworking space and free talks at yoga studios, moved online through a Facebook group, and now runs on Heartbeat from Helena, Montana, where Molly lives in a Swedish church built in 1890. Every December hundreds of women go through Holiday Council, her three weeks of looking back on the year and planning the next. Many go on to Reclamation, her year of coaching. After two rebuilding years, Stratejoy is on track for $350K in 2026.
The challenge
Molly’s first online sale was Holiday Council at $49. Forty-one people bought it, which felt like a raging success after years of teaching it for free. She kept the price at $49 for years, and by about 2018, when Facebook ads still worked, around 1,300 people a year were taking it. The Facebook group was what kept people going through three weeks of workbooks and live calls.
Then 2020 and 2021 were her biggest years, with 253 women in Reclamation and Molly coaching them daily. By the end of it she and her husband were burnt out. He sold his business, she wound hers down, and they spent a year traveling with their two kids. She kept only Holiday Council going, teaching it from Chiang Mai.
During that stretch someone took over her personal Facebook account, posted explicit content so the account would be blocked, and stole the Stratejoy group while she was locked out. It took a year to get the page back. When she did, she deleted everything on it.
“I didn’t trust that our communities were safe [on Facebook].”
She came home knowing she would rebuild Stratejoy, and that she would move it off Facebook.
Why she chose Heartbeat
Business coaches had told Molly for years that she didn’t run a community, she ran a business, and should sell herself as the expert. She never bought it. In her programs the women do most of the sharing, and Molly sees her job as asking good questions and giving them the time and structure to do the work. She needed a place for those conversations that wasn’t social media, and none of the online communities she had joined felt right.
Molly runs daily calls, and half her time used to go to downloading the Zoom recording, grabbing a screenshot and posting it. On Heartbeat, event recordings post themselves, and that was what decided it.
“If you’re live, you’re live. If you’re not live, the recording’s there.”
What Stratejoy runs on Heartbeat:
- Holiday Council: the December program, with every conversation now in Heartbeat instead of a Facebook group
- Reclamation: her capped year of coaching, with its calls and sharing in one place
- Live calls with recordings: posted automatically for anyone who couldn’t make it
- Courses: her smaller courses so far, with Holiday Council moving over fully this year and Reclamation in 2027
- A heart: Stratejoy’s yellow heart has always meant “I see you, I love you,” and her members love that the app uses one
A six-figure first launch: 140 of 500 upgraded
Molly’s first launch on Heartbeat was Holiday Council. She moved its community off Facebook and brought about 500 women into Heartbeat for December and January. At the end she offered an upgrade she had never tried before: a membership at about $30 a month that members committed to for a full year, so people weren’t coming and going in the middle of the work. 140 of the 500 signed up. With Holiday Council itself bringing in about $60K, it was what she calls “definitely a six-figure launch.”
Most of her members were glad to leave Facebook. Some grumbled about another place to log in, and just as many thanked her for not making them stay.
From a $150 program to a $3,000 one
The membership worked on Heartbeat, but Molly decided the membership model wasn’t for her. She had asked members to run channels and host their own events, and it was hard to get people to keep doing unpaid work. The surveys told her it also didn’t go as deep as she liked to teach.
So she went back to Reclamation and capped it, adding coaching calls again so the conversations could go below the surface. Holiday Council, now about $150, is where everyone gathers each December. Molly calls it her cozy cave: she stops marketing for the month and spends her time online with the group. The women who want more go on to Reclamation, at about $3,000. About 700 women took Holiday Council last year, and she is aiming for 1,000 this December.
Back to $350K a year
Her peak was $350K, in 2020 and 2021, before the sabbatical. After two rebuilding years, Stratejoy is on track to get back there in 2026.
Courses next to the conversation
Molly has mixed feelings about AI as a writer who takes pride in her writing. But when she built her first course on Heartbeat, a quick lower-priced offer, Pulse made it much faster than she expected.
“I could just tell it what I wanted it to do, and it listened and did it.”
That course is why she is giving up the custom course site she built and liked. Her programs run on daily prompts, like Monday Moments and Thursday Thoughts, and it felt strange to send women to watch a lesson on one site and answer the questions on another. On Heartbeat the lesson and the prompt sit together, with everyone’s answers right underneath. Holiday Council runs fully on Heartbeat this December, and Reclamation follows in 2027.
What she tells someone thinking about moving
Molly teaches the same programs every year, so she watches closely for where people get stuck and fixes it before the next round. Her first year on Heartbeat had a learning curve, but she worked through it, and four years in her members rarely ask her for help with the platform. She hates answering customer service, so that matters to her. What surprised her most was how easy the technical setup was.
Her members now tell her how grateful they are to have a place without political ads or any ads at all, where they can ask questions and share very personal things. She says she would never go back to running Stratejoy on social media, even if it were free. Her advice for anyone moving their group over is to learn all the ways Heartbeat lets you welcome new members, something she says she didn’t pay enough attention to at first.
“Take advantage of all the onboarding.”
