MEDSCAPE – Emergency nurse Stephanee Beggs, RN, BSN, has made more than $2 million in three years selling her hand-written guides to study for the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX).
Beggs, 28, sells one-page study sheets or bundles of sheets, sometimes with colorful drawings, conversation bubbles and underlining, that boil down concepts for particular conditions into easy-to-understand language.
The biggest seller on Beggs’ online marketplace Etsy site, RNExplained, is a bundle of study guides covering eight core nursing classes. The notes range in price from $2 to $150.
More than 70,000 customers have bought the $60 bundle, according to the website.
Beggs’ business developed in a “very unintentional” way when COVID hit with just months left in her nursing program at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles, she told Medscape Medical News.
Classes had switched to Zoom, and she had no one to study with as she prepared to take her board exams.
“The best way I know how to study is to teach things out loud. But because I had nobody to teach out loud to, I would literally teach them to the wall,” Beggs said. “I would record myself so I could play it back and teach myself these topics that were hard for me to understand.”
Just for fun, she says, she posted them on TikTok and the responses started flowing in, with followers asking where she was selling the sheets.
She now has more than 660,000 TikTok followers and 9 million likes.
Beggs said that every sheet highlights a condition, and she has made 308 of them.
Traditional classroom lessons typically teach one medical condition in 5 to 6 pages, Beggs said. “I go straight to the point … “
