Katelyn
Bourgoin

The Story

She was bankrupt. The venture-backed startup had collapsed. The glamorous "next LinkedIn for women" press coverage had faded. Katelyn Bourgoin was starting over - and this time, she was going to figure out exactly why people buy things before building anything.

That single obsession turned into Why We Buy, a twice-weekly buyer psychology newsletter that now reaches 280,000+ marketers, founders, and copywriters. It generates over $1 million a year and sells out digital products in minutes. The bankruptcy was not the end of the story. It was, in the most literal sense, the research brief.

Before the Newsletter: Three Companies and a Hard Education

By her mid-20s, Katelyn had already built and sold a restaurant consultancy. She then launched RedRiot, a branding and PR agency that won major clients - Target, Holiday Inn - and grew fast. Then came Vendeve in 2014: a peer-to-peer mentoring platform for women entrepreneurs, venture-backed, breathlessly covered by Forbes and Inc. Magazine as "the next LinkedIn for women."

The problem was retention. Users showed up but didn't stick. The product kept pivoting. Eventually Vendeve wound down, leaving Katelyn personally bankrupt - a word she uses without embarrassment because it is, she'll tell you, part of the recipe.

She spent the next few years consulting for venture-backed startups. And she noticed something strange: nearly every well-funded company she worked with had no idea why its customers actually bought from them. They had personas. They had user stories. They did not have answers to the simplest question in commerce: what triggered the purchase decision?

So she started Customer Camp, an insights consultancy. To market it, she launched a newsletter. The newsletter was supposed to be the billboard for the agency. Instead, the newsletter became the whole building.

The Trigger Moment: From Side Project to Empire

In 2021, Katelyn posted a Twitter thread: "19 different buyer psychology hacks marketers need to know." It got 6,000 likes. More than 2,400 people signed up for her email list from that single thread. Then Amanda Natividad mentioned her in a recommendation post. Ten thousand new followers in 24 hours.

She calls this "The Amanda Effect" - and it is the kind of thing that happens when the content is genuinely good. Why We Buy was not built on posting schedules and content calendars. It was built on the quality of the insight. Each issue breaks down a real psychological phenomenon - Baader-Meinhof Effect, Normalcy Bias, the Endowment Effect - and shows exactly how brands are using it right now. Readers consistently say the same thing: "I'm smarter for having read that."

That is exactly the goal. Katelyn has said explicitly that she does not want readers thinking she is smart. She wants readers thinking they are smart. That distinction is the whole product.

The Un-Ignorable Challenge: $116,000 in Six Minutes

In 2022, Katelyn co-created the Un-Ignorable Challenge with Neal O'Grady of Demand Curve - a 28-day group program for audience building. The first launch sold 127 spots in 6 minutes. A subsequent launch sold 200 spots in 6 minutes and generated $116,000. The most recent run sold out in 3 minutes.

She once made $14,950 in 57 minutes using two emails and a Google Doc. She sold 1,000+ copies of a customer interview cheatsheet with almost no marketing. These are not accidents - they are the result of applying her own frameworks to her own business. Katelyn Bourgoin studies buyer psychology for a living and then uses buyer psychology on buyers. The symmetry is deliberate.

The Psychology of the Newsletter Itself

Why We Buy publishes twice weekly - Tuesdays and Fridays. Sponsorships run at $2,500-$3,100 per slot, with 8-10 spots per month, generating roughly $25,000/month from sponsors alone. Digital products layer on top. Coaching and strategy calls layer on top of that.

The newsletter earns because it respects the reader's brain. It does not ask them to sit through a lecture. It gives them a clean psychological insight, a real-world brand example, and one thing they can try tomorrow. That's the Bourgoin formula: make the complex feel achievable, and make the achievable feel urgent.

She runs her newsletter on Kit (formerly ConvertKit), and credits Kit's Creator Network as the mechanism that freed her from needing to post to social media constantly to grow. Growth comes to her now. She describes this as getting lazier - though what she means is getting smarter about leverage.

Bankrupt to $2M: What Actually Changed

The irony of Katelyn's story is that Vendeve failed, in part, because she did not understand her users' real triggers deeply enough. The very gap she identified in every client's business was the gap she had in her own. Customer Camp and Why We Buy are, in a sense, her public processing of that lesson at scale.

She conducted 300+ customer interviews while building and pivoting Vendeve. Most founders stop at 10. The interviews did not save the company, but they built the muscle memory she now sells. When she teaches the Trigger Technique - a framework for extracting the exact moment a buyer decided to look for a solution - she is teaching from experience that cost her real money.

She is based in Atlantic Canada, married to Jason (described as "the most supportive partner I could ever ask for"), and is a self-described cheese lover. Her visual brand is purple, yellow, and lightning bolts. Her Twitter handle is @KateBour. Her glasses are part of her personal brand - she introduced herself online as "a customer discovery geek... in glasses" and has never looked back.

What She Teaches

At its core, Why We Buy is a weekly masterclass in decision-making science applied to marketing. Katelyn covers cognitive biases like the Dunning-Kruger Effect and Framing, dissects how brands like BarkBox and others trigger emotional purchase decisions, and builds frameworks that marketers can test on Monday morning.

The BarkBox story is one she tells often: she once interviewed a woman who subscribed after getting a puppy and a newborn at the same time. The real purchase trigger was "dog mom guilt" - a winter-weather emotional pressure point. BarkBox's feature-focused messaging was missing the actual driver entirely. That gap is where Katelyn lives and works.

Her educational products range from the $129 Clarity Calls Cheatsheet (sold 1,000+ copies with minimal marketing) to the $20,000+ PAINKILLER Messaging System enterprise tier. She builds products that solve specific problems in a specific timeframe - not courses, not curriculums. You don't want to understand buyer psychology. You want to understand your buyer. Tomorrow.

The Philosophy That Runs Everything

Katelyn dislikes traditional sales. She prefers to put out invitations and let people accept them. Her marketing feels like a conversation rather than a funnel. Her newsletter feels like a gift rather than a drip sequence. This is not accidental positioning - it is the application of exactly what she teaches. She builds inbound gravity instead of pushing outbound pressure.

The goal of the business, she has said, is to help marketers understand what triggers people to buy so they can market smarter. Not to be clever. Not to hack attention. To be genuinely useful to an audience that is tired of guessing.

She has appeared on 30+ podcasts. She has guest taught for SparktorO, Hotjar, Wynter, and Demand Curve. She has been featured in Forbes, Inc., USA Today, HuffPost, CBC, CTV, and Global TV. She holds a BA in English from the University of King's College. None of that is why people follow her. They follow her because she makes them smarter every Tuesday and Friday, and she does it in about eight minutes flat.