My Evolution As a Cuddle Teacher (so far as of this writing)
“Hey, I’ve seen you before somewhere else but you were doing some other project for professional cuddling then. What happened?” - something I imagine a lot of people that follow me for any number of years have probably thought
I’ve been in the professional cuddling world since October 2015, and a lot has changed about how I want to show up for it.
However, what’s even more dramatic of changes is how I’ve wanted to show up as a leader and teacher in the cuddle space.
I honestly came of age through my professional cuddling journey, starting this work as a sheltered 25 year old that was pretty clueless on a lot of things (aren’t most people 25 and under?)
I went through a different directions over the years as I’ve navigated:
How I want to influence the cuddle industry
How much energy I want to put into it
How and from who I ask for help
What I want my lifestyle to look like while doing it
It hasn’t always been easy to navigate, and arguably I’m still navigating it as I’m still creating and doing my part to contribute every day.
Here’s a lengthy timeline on how it’s shifted
Three months into working (December 2015)
I had my first bad session. I talked to the owner of the cuddle agency I worked for at the time, and he said “Well that doesn’t sound too bad.” I was shook. I decided I don’t want anyone to feel like that again.
That was my turning point.
2016
January
Between dealing with a 2.5 year relationship ending and getting into a manipulative rebound relationship, I decided to throw myself into my work. I created my own system for screening clients via email, and anyone that didn’t pass that system I didn’t see. It wasn’t perfect, but about 80% of the leads I saw were decent at the end of the day. The other 20% were tolerable enough, but looking back now they wouldn’t have met my current screening methods.
June
I leave the manipulative relationship in a dramatic fashion. I don’t cuddle much this month due to the heartbreak and realizing I’ve lost a lot of myself over the past few months, but once I do I meet my first weekly client (whom I still see weekly today). I realized that there’s a lot of clients that are afraid to ask if they can come back and I start inviting them more often, thus getting a few more repeat clients here and there.
I go to the very first Skip the Small Talk, am floored at how impactful it is on me to let others talk about what they really want to talk about, and immediately after ask Ashley if she’s hiring (she wasn’t). I vow to send people to Skip the Small Talks as often as I can. This way of connecting was a foundation of how I start connecting with my clients on a deeper level.
July
I realize that I’m easily making $500/month without trying. Most of it either goes into savings or for my traveling addiction at the time. Someone I’m dating tells me about this new thing called Cuddlist, but the youtube video promoting it turns me off. I don’t like their brand. But I also don’t like this agency I’m working under, so I don’t know how to feel about where I am now.
August
I go to the Bay area to visit a friend and decide that I hate it there and don’t want to come back if I can help it (this is relevant two years from now). I attend the World Domination Summit in Portland and try to find time to go to Cuddle Up to Me and have a session while I’m there, but I get enamored with a attendee from Cologne, Germany (not his fault, it’s totally my Brooding Dependent Romantic Emotions’ fault, also known as being a 26 year old woman). I met the woman that ended up being a senior editor for The Penny Hoarder. She asked to interview me. They do, and when they ask me for advice for their readers on how to get started, I freeze. I wasn’t a fan of my agency and I couldn’t bring myself to refer them, so I don’t mention their name.
September
I tell my parents about the article and they’re not pleased, so much so they spend 45 minutes telling me to get a grip on my life. I don’t talk to them for a month, block them on social media, and work with my life coach at the time to process this and begin transforming my relationship with them.
I get drinks with my friend Alex, a business owner and real estate investor. I complain about not knowing what to tell people ethically. He tells me I’m an idiot and I should start my own agency if my methods are better and I can teach them. I listen. The first version of Snugglewithsam.com is born with the intention of making it into an agency on Squarespace. Despite this, I haven’t entirely taken this seriously and I’m in conflict with my job’s near future prospects turning into something I actually want.
Jason Zook releases Buy My Future (now Wandering Aimfully), giving me full access to all his creations he ever made and will make for a one time price. It includes Teachery, his course software. I decide that’s where I’ll probably want to put my course when I create one eventually.
Meanwhile, I help a fellow World Domination Summit attendee Stephanie Marino with expanding her coaching by doing a session with her. When professional cuddling comes up, she notices I’m drawn to it and asks me how bad do I want my career to happen here? I paused, but then the words came out effortlessly: “I want it more than I can breathe.”
A mission was born.
October
The article gets released, and nearly 300 people fill out the form to become a professional cuddler. I’m floored and freak out, so I shut the form down so people can’t fill it out anymore.
I don’t know what to do with the 300 people that are waiting to hear from me. I hire my first assistant to try to help me, not entirely sure what I want help with.
I’m still working fulltime, and I fly to Michigan to interview with their office in hopes of transferring to that office. The 300 applications take the backburner.
2017
January
I’m told when I return from a personal trip to Berlin that I won’t be transferred to the Michigan office. I decide to put my 4 weeks notice in and think about other jobs halfheartedly, but I know what I’m really going to do: I’m driving this agency forward somehow. I talk to Samantha Hess and feel like I’m not good enough to do this yet compared to her, and I unconsciously shield myself from others in the industry. I’m scared of the idea of not making enough money. I meet Ronnie Deaver, a marketing friend of a friend, and he guides me through a bunch of different ideas and our marketing friendship starts.
February
I take pictures of myself for my site with a partner I was seeing, Ronnie starts giving me advice on forming another site with Wordpress. My last day at my job is celebrated morning to midnight. The reality of doing this work fulltime sets in along with all the changes I’ll need to make to survive.
April
I meet a persistent woman out in NYC, Amy, who decided she likes my brand of cuddling over a few others she’s seen on the internet. I’m floored and decide to start with her, start with NYC, and begin with advertising her. I write up an entire manual that I then share and verbally teach her from. I get my Reiki Level 1 attunement done. I realize I hate Wordpress and Ronnie refers someone to me to make it. She drops out a week before I’m supposed to launch the new site. I find another designer that’s more expensive but gets it done.
Meanwhile, Side Hustle School Podcast releases a podcast about me and my site traffic and applications for cuddlers spike again.
May
I scrap the agency name, Snuggle with a Pro, realizing I hate the name and I don’t like the site we created, and instead I add Amy to my Snugglewithsam.com site. She gets a few leads here and there, but nothing too big. But she has her first session. Yay! Also, after several attempts to try to join a BNI chapter locally, I get turned down, but have productive meetings with a photographer that writes and article about me in the Scout Somerville and a videographer that wanted to strike a deal with training videos and the likes. I lose contact with both of them shortly after.
July
I go broke. I start working as a babysitter, housecleaner, Lyft driver… anything to help me stay afloat. I do “coffee talks” with anyone that’s willing to talk to me for a half hour in exchange for a suggested donation of $20. I somehow manage to pay all my bills by the end of the month.
August
I go to Circling for Healers by the Connection Institute, and I get invited to train under Peter Benjamin around circling due to the powerful and unique way I share the impact of the people around me. We start a friendship too since we’re both entrepreneurs with massive growth mindsets. He starts saying this particular month that he wants to collaborate with me on training cuddlers. He says this for months before an opportunity arises.
I go on a road trip and add my friend Kat to my site after she does an overnight with someone I did an overnight with while I was away. Now I have two cuddlers on my site and one of them I can refer clients to.
October
I quit babysitting because I realize that even though it’s steady income, I don’t have the energy to grow my personal practice or what I want to create for other cuddlers. I decide to update the manual and turn it into a course. I also decide that running an agency is going to take so much work that I’m not willing to do. I don’t want that lifestyle. I’ve also virtually stopped advertising for Kat and Amy because I’m not actually sure what I’m supposed to do.
December
I meet up with my friend Ann for coffee and she helps me with making my screening calls more into sales discovery calls. I still use a lot of the words that she helped me create in that hour long coffee talk about sales with cuddling.
My friend Hillary and I decide to do a 24-hour challenge to bang out our online courses. I do it and prep my not-very-captive audience of 300 or so a week before I do the challenge. I create my first course, “Snuggle Safety: Personal Protocols” and it’s completely based on my experiences with working at the agency. One person bought it. I realize that I don’t have enough for my assistant to do even though I’ve had her for a year, so I let her go and decide to take on tasks myself.
I also go to NYC for a weekend and basically live at a coworking space. I meet my business coach in person and she helps me form my first prepaid cuddle packages, based similarly to how she sells her coaching. This creates both income stability and some scary down-to-the-wire moments for me later down the line.
2018
January
The agency sees my course and isn’t happy since I reference them briefly as not really training me. Eventually they try to do business with me and what I know about professional cuddling in a profit-share model for training their cuddlers, but I’m not confident in their follow-through. Ronnie helps me think through this as he thinks that buying the agency would be a great investment and we could easily turn their image around and save myself years of work since they already have a captive audience, and this has me reconsidering owning an agency.
They try to strike a deal with me to help them with onboarding their own cuddlers since I seem passionate about training people, so I start looking into licensing my training. After speaking with them and learning about how they are operating now I decide not to go through with it. With that, I get removed from the agency site, but not before learning what’s considered their most profitable cities.
Once this settles down, Ronnie instead helps me set up my first Google Ads campaign to my site to get more of my own clients. The leads coming into my site go from 1-2 every other month to 3-5 a month.
March
I’ve stopped all my side gigs for the most part (mostly because my friend Ann in insurance told me to stop because I didn’t have the right insurance to do Lyft or delivery driving) and focused on running my business. The idea of Touring across the country is in my head and I want to consider teaching people live around the country. I commit to it, start planning it out, and telling everyone I’ll be away June through September.
Meanwhile, I heard about CuddleXpo and Peter and I apply as co-speakers as we’ve wanted to create something together for a while. We get in, and when the event organizers see my site I get invited to work on the Standard Code of Ethics for Professional Cuddlers. I think about making a membership community for cuddlers.
April
SESTA/FOSTA goes into effect. I find out months later that this negatively affected many other cuddlers, some losing as much as 80% of their business overnight because they relied on Craigslist ads (something I decided not to do). My Google ads aren’t performing well anymore because of SESTA/FOSTA’s oversensoring, so I take them down. Still, the number of leads I got through my site went UP. I find out that people are beginning to find me organically when they search “Professional Cuddler Boston”
Despite this, I almost can’t pay rent the day before it’s due to a client last minute deciding not to renew their prepaid package with me. I make up for it by reaching out to every old client I can think of and get a prepaid overnight and some other sessions scheduled on my books, including one that evening. It’s both scary and exhilarating, but I decided I never want to be in that position again if I can help it.
May
GDPR happens, making it really hard to navigate if I can even keep that long list of email subscribers that signed up to hear from me nearly a year ago that I almost never reach out to unless I’m selling something, and that’s when it hits me that keeping that long list of unresponsive subscribers was nothing but a vanity metric. I decide to just delete the entire list, but not before inviting them to join a new list. I create my first free PDF guide, “What it Takes to Be a Great Professional Snuggler,” something I feel confident I know a lot about. I get five people to sign up, but notice a small trickle build up over the next few months.
June
I leave to go on Tour across the country! I realize quickly in NYC that maybe just running an event in each city for training cuddlers isn’t something I’m actually qualified to do or even have the reach to fill those events in each city on such short notice. My coach recommends switching to market research for the rest of the trip: instead of trying to teach everyone formally, meet with current cuddlers and learn about them. Learn about the area and the market by seeing clients. I sign up for a few cuddle sites where I can change my location quickly.
Also, some random person from Sweden visiting NYC apparently heard of me and was mildly excited to realize she knew me from the internet. I start to realize that I have no idea how far my reach has been so far.
July
I meet Madelon Guinazzo and Marcia Baczynski for the first time when they put on a two-day workshop called “Asking for What You Want.” I get a chance to talk to Madelon on my journey through professional cuddling and find out her start for one-on-one cuddle sessions is very similar to my own, and I learn about how Adam helped her create Cuddlist. She invites me to join Cuddlist, and I hesitate and tell her that I’m also creating training for cuddlers and don’t want a conflict of interests. She sees no problem, so I join.
One night Kat is doing an overnight with someone I’ve worked with before and she calls me and tells me she found a GoPro in their bathroom. I walk her through how to handle this artfully and safely. I decide that even for a few people, I don’t want to be other people’s safety check in person anymore. I reach out to the client directly the next day to try to clear the air, but he seems shook. I try reaching out a few times in future months with no response.
August
I finally realize what I want to do when I’m in Austin while talking to Allyssa from The Cuddle Companion: I want to make a space for experienced cuddlers. I’m realizing I’m enjoying talking to other cuddlers that already made the leap and are struggling. The idea for a membership community was there before, but now I think I want to make a directory for experienced cuddlers. I start mapping out what that might look like. I also finish Cuddlist’s training program and get listed on their site.
September
I’m burnt out from Tour, so I don’t do a whole lot this month very well.
At the end of the month, I go to CuddleXpo with Peter and have a grand time. This is bascially me coming out of the cuddle community at large because despite all the work I tried to do I felt like I was a nobody for the most part.
Peter and I present on “Connecting While Cuddling: Bringing Your Authentic Self to Clients” and we get five star ratings across the board for it. Peter decides right then and there to start offering a webinar follow-up series, and I tell him we don’t have somewhere to send people. He’s not worried, I’m like “Oh no, if we have their attention we need to collect their info then and there.” I go upstairs to our hotel room for twenty minutes to whip up a landing page so people can sign up for the webinar. I’m suddenly very aware of how much random marketing know-how I’ve collected that is now very relevant to what I do.
I’m realizing that despite the many qualified practitioners around me, nobody seems to have a strong handle on how to grow their practice reliably, except for Marcia. I start listening to her and diving into more resources post-conference.
October
Peter and I run the webinar series over a few weeks and begin thinking about a project to sell and teach. We come up with “Cuddle with Your Whole Self: The Art of Being With.” I love the content and we get three students to dive deep with for a three month period starting in January. Fei Wyatt invites me to be a presenter for an advanced class for cuddlers in LA for February
November
Amy reaches out and officially asks to be taken off the site as she wants to stop doing cuddling. Considering I hadn’t really sent her much in the way of leads for a long while, I don’t blame her. I feel relieved that I’m no longer responsible for two people working directly under me.
I take “Snuggle Safety: Personal Protocols” down after realizing how rudimentary and inaccurate it is and update it for the first version of “Sam’s Snuggle School". I realize that I’ve been emailing my list regularly when I get nearly 30 sales from the course. Woo!
2019
January
I tear my ACL and Fei tells me the advanced class for cuddlers has been cancelled anyways due to low signups, so I’m able to get a refund on my tickets due to the injury at least. I can’t work and I’m sad and nervous about finances since I don’t have disability insurance (note: GET IT), but I continue emailing my list roughly once a week as much as possible with teachings.
February
I start getting coaching clients! At this point I’ve only done one-off sessions and didn’t feel compelled to put together packages for people before then, but this made a difference. I feel a little better about finances while I can’t work cuddling and I feel good pouring into my students.
March
I have my surgery. I don’t know how I feel about going back. I start implementing new strategies to make my life easier so I’m not overwhelmed. I join a free Mastermind that my friend Jasmine at Tange Wellness made (and we still meet today!). I rename “Connection Community” to “Find a Cuddler” but still do virtually nothing. I’m still building my list and tell not only my current clients I’m coming back but the many leads I’ve collected over the three months I couldn’t work that I’ll be able to soon.
I fill my April calendar to a decent-ish size considering that I’m still not able to work for about 2.5 days a week due to traveling for physical therapy to my parents.
May
I’m doing well and traveling back and forth between Philly, and I get certified through Cuddlist. I start learning a lot more about the sex work industry via Reddit and a few friends, thus learning not just how to better not be confused as a sex worker but also to begin stepping away from using even innocuous terms that sex workers use in their profession (p.s. incall and outcall are terms used in sex work and I’m trying to say that less often these days, although the cuddle industry uses it a lot)
June thru September
I’ve made more money these months than I had all of the previous year. I’m floored and confused and try to start tracking why that might be. A scandal happens in the professional cuddling world and I notice that the markets in professional cuddling are shifting. I decide to take down Snuggle School and update it completely as I want to have better info.
July
I hire an assistant! Lucy was my intern and is now my Business Development Assistant :) This time I feel like I know exactly what to have her do
September
I start collecting info from other cuddlers about their cuddle practices for Find a Cuddler— their best clients, what they want moving forward, how big of a practice, what they think is getting in the way, etc. Wheels are turning. I really do want to help cuddlers in the field already a lot.
December
My coach tells me to turn Snuggle School into a new, high end group coaching course. I’ve never made something like that before but I have a lot of ideas of what I want to teach that have helped me, so I start making an outline for if I were to try to go fulltime again with the knowledge I have now. I say “screw it” and release Find a Cuddler in its imperfect form and charge no one for a listing, although they do need to have their own cuddle website. I only release to the U.S for this right now because adding other countries’ maps means paying more money and this project isn’t making any yet. I resolve to pick this project up more at the end of the year.
2020
January
I start accepting applications for Snuggle School: All Access. Students in Snuggle School get as much of me as I can give them. I want to make sure they have a complete system, and I know it’ll get better and update and change over time so I’m ready to do the work to do that. I interview a lot of people and learn that there’s a lot of people that have been watching me for a long time and been inspired or learning from me. This boosts my ego a bit.
February
I rescinded my old idea with “Snuggle Safety: Personal Protocols” around people needing to pay for all my methods and decide that as long as people are able to just sign up on a cuddle platform and start doing professional cuddling without any training that I feel better having some kind of training available for free so they can, bare minimum, protect themselves. As a response to this new idea, I create my first webinar, “What to Look For When Screening Your Clients" after seeing a few cuddlers complaining about clients they saw.
Despite all of this, someone called me an antifeminist, predatory and evil person for offering Snuggle School: All Access for a cost. I’m hurt, but I don’t feel personally offended by it.
It’s been a journey, and it continues to grow every day. I can’t wait to keep going and sharing more of my thoughts and evolutions over time :)
Want to hear about more of it as it grows? Want to learn more for your own sake?