Alex Hormozi Mastermind May (1-Day Recordings)

Why don't we start with Jennifer? You're going first.

>> I will go. Um.

>> Wow.

>> I know.

>> Jennifer, my name is Jennifer Gizzy. I do a couple things, but I'm an influencer by business, um, interior design and DIY, but I started a school community to teach people the business of influencing. So, um, started that on May 1st. So, that is what I do because of the school games. I saw the competition and I was like, it's time.

>> And then the number one thing that I want to do today is I mean kind of what we've already been doing the last couple days is just like there's just so many smart people in this room and I think we all are so diverse too and have so many different like types of businesses and different skill sets. So it's been really cool to connect with everybody and like take everything I can to try to go back to my community and just make it as often as possible.

>> Sweet. And if you guys have the three, I'll just turn this if you guys had it because I don't want this to to lead you astray. If you need it, I'll bring it back up for a visual cue. But if you have the homework, just do the one that you prepared.

>> Are we doing partners?

>> Yeah. This is Brandy. She's my right-hand everything. So I literally wrote her on I think April 30th and I'm like, "So there's this school games and this is what we're doing starting tomorrow. Like get ready."

>> And we did crushed it.

>> So do all the tech business side. So I love it.

>> I'm Ryan. How's it going everybody? Um, I'm in the real estate investing space. Uh, started a business lending money for real estate, doing transactional lending. Super super niche thing as you guys have all learned through this week. Um, so I started a business, did that, saw some videos, was like, how do I monetize this and win the school games? So, I just started teaching my business to other people. So, it's just me doing my thing by myself right now. Um, but yeah, I basically teach people conceptually how to generate the leads to do what I do and then how to fulfill the process on the back end. I hold their hand. So 5xed my income in my business through teaching them how to bring me leads basically. So that's what I do. Um what I want to get out of this weekend is figure out how to take something that's so niche, at least in my mind like this and continue to scale it properly and also how to get help because I'm lonely.

All right, cool. Well, nice everybody. My name is Jack. So, I do AI automations. I help people learn how to leverage AI, cool automations, either like increase their business, make money, or just kind of level up. There are like three things I'd like to get out today. Uh, starting big picture, I would like to understand what the gold standard for a school community is like, you know, in terms of like churn, retention, what's the maximum sustainable size? basically what is the Captain America of school community? Uh, you can you get lifetime members? That sort of stuff. And then on the growth fund, so we've got 1500 members. My vision is to get to 10,000. At what point do we bring in a secondary acquisition channel? When do we look at ads? When do we start to stack up different things? So we've been very laser focused on just one channel. And then thirdly, we don't have a free community and we also don't have a high ticket offer. So I guess my question is should we consider the free community and if we do the high ticket offer what might that look like and what proportional focus should that be?

>> Sorry, just taking the notes.

>> All right.

>> Awesome.

>> My name is Adam Pierce. I'm the operator for AI Automations. A month ago Jack said, "Do you want to quit your corporate job, become an operator, and work as an intern for me?" And I said, "Hell yeah." So here we are. Um, my objective today, I want to just stabilize the group. So, look at ways to drive engagement. What does good engagement look like as well? What are the metrics to look out for? And also, we we're really confident in our strategy, but we might have some holes in our vessel. We'd like to see if we've got some blind spots so we can plug them today. And um, yeah, what Jack said about vertically integrating. We have one committee that's a low ticket. Do we need high? Do we need free? And see if we need to vertically integrate the crew.

All right, welcome.

>> Uh, I'm Lucas. Hey guys, very excited to be here. I won as an affiliate and I come from like crypto and social media background, but uh, yeah, just super excited to be here, learn from everyone, be a fly on the wall and yeah, absorb as much as possible.

>> Super cool. Well, thank you for promoting school. Hi, I'm Bella. I helped our YouTube launch community book calls through our free community and I also have a free women's self-improvement community. Today I'm looking I'm starting a high ticket glove offer. So I kind of want to see how I can go for my free community and starting my high ticket offer.

>> Awesome.

>> All right.

>> Uh, I'm Kai. Our community is a YouTube launch and we help business owners get clients through YouTube organic. The main thing I want to get out of this event is just clarity on like the exact avatar that's purpose to our business. Um, and one thing I like doing for fun is throwing cards at banana. Daniel unsuccessful.

>> Rock on.

>> Awesome. Hi guys, my name is Harut. I am the business partner with Kai. Um,

>> Do I see you on the lives all the time?

>> Yeah. Yeah. At one time you were like, "You better be making money cuz you're always here."

>> He's always smiling.

>> Now he's here.

>> Good.

>> So the main thing that we want to get out of this is just exactly as Kai said, the avatar, which is we have some people that have like a large audience and they need help with monetizing and we have people that um want to grow an audience and monetize. So kind of how we prioritize the avatar. Um, and yeah, for fun I love to play soccer or football for for the rest of the world. U spend some quality time with my family and watch for most videos.

>> Awesome. My name is Al. Um, I'm a school specialist at Max Premium. This basically I help people from the free community towards the B community and we're helping school communities either start, build or scale. Um, and of things I'm curious about today is first of all a little bit about time management. Um, you both are very keen on like 12-hour work days and I'm curious um how you make room for like um like mindfulness, walking um development and all these things. I get the part that you told us about like the builder blocks and the man blocks.

>> Yeah.

>> Super cool. Helped me a lot. But I'm curious to dive deeper in that. Um, and secondly, I'm also curious about your opinion on ch kids. Actually,

>> On what?

>> With children.

>> Children.

>> Yeah.

>> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

>> They're required for humans.

>> Sure.

>> Is it they're required for humanity?

>> Yeah.

>> Well, the reason why is because you always say that you want to die with nothing to give. And I'm curious to if you have children, you also give something basically and they can give more.

>> Sure.

>> So I'm curious to what topic.

>> That'll definitely be our the last third because all the guys how are how these days end up going. The end is like why are we here?

>> Perfect.

>> I'll put time management children.

>> All right. Well, hey everyone. I'm Miles. I'm also a school specialist for Max and we help people with school which is cool. So um the main thing I want to get out of this is maybe learning how we can fix churn. That's uh that's probably a popular one.

>> Churn is on the all-time greatest hits.

>> Yep.

>> Hi everyone. My name is Dylan, uh school specialist at Max Premium and community manager as well. Um, basically I think the one thing I wanted to know from this event is just how to time management, but added on is more of like keeping personal relationships as well as kind of like diving into like working in your business all the time, but also making sure your your personal life still is attended to as well.

>> But why have one, you know?

>> I agree. Yeah.

>> Um, and yeah, just for fun, I just like to visit my parents and uh go to the gym.

>> Sweet. Well, thank you.

>> My name is Max. Nice to meet you all. Um,

>> Welcome back.

>> Sorry.

>> Welcome back as a both as a affiliate winner and a uh creator winner. It's pretty cool.

>> Yeah.

>> I am very curious to hear about everybody's like traffic strategies and conversion and retention. I'm also very curious to hear if there are any like like upcoming school features that maybe we can start planning to know more about. Um, but really like retention is the big thing for us.

>> Retention.

>> Yeah, that is a big problem I think for a lot of school communities. So like would be interesting to hear if people have like creative ways not only in school but maybe like maybe licensing or using other stuff to fix it. Yeah.

>> All right. Awesome. I think out of respect, I'll let Sena do the intros and then tip it back on to me. Definitely. This is my brother Ali Raz. We're with Attention Academy. We teach people what I like to say we teach people how to create content that sells on short format content. And I think the biggest value that I would get my main question would be with the refinement of a high ticket offer specifically catered to obviously the leverages that I believe we possess. I think most of our questions would be related to this. If I could just add to that Alex as well. Um, I'm in charge of community management. So specific strategies to optimize the community experience we got three I might add. My brother and I are very different in our characteristics. We like we make a great team because we're so different. And you made a video just recently that the maker manager that probably caused us from not wanting to kill each other for like the next year. So it was amazing. Good. And yeah, I guess maybe just going upon that like the nuances of working in a maker manager role.

Um, my name's David. I might look like it, but I'm not the third bearded brother over here. Uh,

>> You do look like it.

>> All four of us.

>> Yeah. Um, we teach people how to build personal brands on Tik Tok and Instagram with short porn, Mino and I. Um, and I think what I want to get out of this is more of a broader strategy kind of when is it time to get cash flow and when is it time to stack goodwill and take a step back on your business offerings. Good. Yeah.

>> Uh, hi, my name is Mino. Uh, I partner with Dobby on Overnight Celebrity System and I personally help creators blow up their Instagram and Tik Tok personal brands. And the main thing I guess I want to get out of today is I have a low ticket community with like 300 people at $59 a month. And I guess just like how I can turn how I can scale low ticket towards like a larger to like a thousand or like even more people.

>> Awesome. I've lost my voice but hi my name is Fun. I run international hustlers and we help international students land their first job in the UK and that to within uh 90 days and it's a big problem in the UK. 93% of international students that graduate um they don't get a job and they go back home after spending 30 to 50k. So I solved that problem. In terms of what I want out of this event, I want to learn three things. The first is how to hire a players. Second is how to reduce churn. And the third is to make money through affiliates. So, I've had a deep chat with Max and I have a free 5-day course that's blown up and I've got no software in there. So, I'm missing on like 30 to 50k per month in affiliate uh money, right? And for fun, I love cycling. I'm going to be traveling the world now.

>> For what was the first? I got churn. I got affiliates and what was the other one?

>> Hiring a players, reducing churn and making money through affiliates. And for fun, I like to cycle when we traveling and also sometimes and a lot of the times watch Alex's YouTube videos.

>> For dinner.

>> You're uh you're in the one of the ads that I just made.

>> Oh, really?

>> And then then I I use you as the last case study.

>> Fun name.

>> It's a great name. That's why I was like, give me one of the good names.

>> I think Kai, you're in there. I got you in there. I was like, it's an easy one.

>> Is that the crazy one?

>> Jennifer was uh was less different than Farhune. Slightly.

>> For whoon stood out a lot.

>> Is it Gizzy or Jizzy?

>> Gizzy.

>> Okay. I just figured out because I was like, is that what would have stood out too?

>> Yeah.

>> Um,

>> Go for it.

>> Hi everybody. Uh, my name is Ahmed and I'm with Peroon at International Hustlers. I'm his childhood friend from way back when. I'm also the head of uh service delivery and coaching. So after we make the sales, guess what? I've got to do all the work her delivery.

>> So um,

>> Guess what? Um, so especially after what I want to get out today uh because we sold a lot because the school games now we got to deliver on all our promises. So what could be the best what could be the most effective way operationally to deliver on time without getting any complaints. Phil. Um, and number two, I would love to know uh great sales techniques to sell high ticket offers. Um, especially while gaining trust and you know um avoiding their skepticism on high ticket offers. And last but not least, how can we improve either on through personal development or learning more skills to increasingly improve as an entrepreneur with time and what I do for fun. Um, we've been on a no carb diet now. So, that's pretty fun. We're just eating a lot of meat and avocados, so that's fun. Uh, we travel a lot uh together. And uh, yeah, we're we're watching a lot of Samozi's videos for dinner.

>> That's fun. Is that all you eat?

>> For dinner?

>> Just videos. Yeah. That leaves you wanting a little bit more.

>> And shout out to Ahmed. He just he also did sales on top of service delivery. So, he's been like a SAR A player something more.

>> The best partner. Just you do it. I'll take credit and we'll just No, I do that with Laya. That's our setup. I was like, you do the work, I take the credit. That's our division. So, I'm dismissed. Congrats. Well, welcome. My name is Victor. I'm the CEO of anime anime shreds. We help people live a healthier lifestyle through biohacking and made some amazing workout routines. What I want to get here is a little bit more information on retention, maybe some benchmarks on what's what's usual for that. Uh, a little bit more information on your scaling strategy by using influencers and then maybe a little bit of data on some previous school communities on their experience with running paid traffic to a regular like about us page versus us building out our own click funnels page because that's kind of the route that I'm going for just because I think it's going to convert a lot better.

>> Yeah, my name is Nate. Um, he said what we do. Um, that being said, I could elaborate on top of that. We are in the business of waking people up. Um, and we are using school as a proxy or a safe haven or an ecosystem within ecosystems for people. Yeah. And that being said, what I want to learn open book notebook.

>> I'm Sailor. I help manage the anime shreds community and I'd love to learn more about just ways to improve members experience and reduce churn as well and then also open book here to learn what's worked best for all you guys and get some new ideas on what we can do to make ours better.

Can I add something that?

>> Yeah, go for it.

So, I think my biggest question, I think we had this conversation a lot was kind of where like focused content and so obviously I have two very different businesses. And so, it's like having two um Instagram pages. You know, Instagram is kind of what I specialize in, but it's like do you keep doing this one piece of content and then throw this in even though it doesn't line up with it, right? You know, how do you reach your ideal audience if you have two completely different ideal audiences or do you just make the switch?

>> So, that's a that's a good one. I actually just made a video about this. Hasn't been published.

>> It just it's like in the next day or two.

>> There was something I I think that you had had some other content and then you switched to just business. Like you had something recently talking about

>> Switch to the style.

>> I went back to just business.

>> Right? Well, yeah. So, you were doing other things and you made a switch and I think that's mine are just so different.

>> The the tradition you're walking through is when I owned a gym and then helped gym owners. Like I had weight loss customers and I had gym owners. Like that's the switch. Like I I get where you're at. We had this Jennifer and I had a long conversation about this last night.

>> Million dollar question.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I love my followup is kind of the same thing with going niche to broad.

>> Which is hers is I mean we we basically talked about the same thing. I'm trying to figure out how to take my thing that I feel like is totally different.

>> So niche it's different than her.

>> Totally different.

>> Because of

>> It's the same business. You're just trying to like change your messaging a little bit so you can appeal to a broader audience. She's literally going from do you want to decorate your home to do you want to make money on Instagram. Those are different people. Your subset superset. She's in an entirely different circle.

>> Okay.

>> Um, okay, cool. So, lots of things to go over. I know you were taking some notes. Do you want to I mean, churn seems like a big one. Churn slash experience and engagement. Um, benchmarks was mentioned. I think that might be uh cool for a lot of people um to break into. So, I say we just start with churn.

>> Um,

>> Let's get out of the way.

>> Let's just do that. Just wasting days. Just knock them out.

>> Don't do it. Just focus on business.

>> Yeah, you're good, man. I'm just Do you want to do churn? You guys want to talk about that first? Turn and engagement.

>> That's a big one.

>> All right, cool. So, I will put that over here. Churn. So, um I've uh I've done a poor job of this. And so, before I dive in, uh congratulations for being here. I'm not a big preamble person, but um this is something like I forgot my wife's birthday. She wasn't upset about it because I also forgot my own. And so I was like, I like me and so it's not a, you know, function of how much I like you if I remember your birthday. And so I I tend to not be very good at celebrating like things. Um, and so congratulations on getting here. There's I know a gazillion people who compete literally every month by nature of being in on school and you guys were the top ones. And so uh congrats. I know a lot of you I mean who here was like I'm going to win this month?

>> Right? So no one here was like oh it just happened by mistake like you guys did this on purpose. And so I sent you a message first.

>> No, I saw I saw it. Yeah, you guys. Uh, so extra kudos. And um, today's about you guys. And so that's why we start with what you guys want rather than having like these are the things that we're going to go over and I get on stage and present some stuff because it's we try to make it makeshift. Um, have you guys everyone here watched at least one of the other school days?

>> Okay, sweet. Then you guys at least get a vibe for how this is going to go. Um, but one thing that we're working on is that we would like um I know that sometimes for some of you, not all of you, but it's like intimidating to be here both with one another and this is a new environment, etc. We try and do this icebreaker to just we're all humans. We all eat. It's fine. We're all going to die. So, not a big deal. Um, but so that you guys can talk to each other about what's going well because a lot of you guys are doing something really well and sometimes what feels normal to you is exceptional to somebody else in terms of why I think benchmarks will be cool. Uh, because some of you guys will have really good uh, you know, about page conversion and some of you guys have really dog [ __ ] about page conversion and some of you guys have pretty pretty decent churn and some of you guys have horrible churn. Um, and so leveraging the same way you do in your communities like this community in IRL uh, to solve problems is what we're hoping for. What's up, Winter? Or you were just like,

>> "Okay, you were like, I love this point." And I was like, "All right, well, that works." Yeah.

>> All right. So, let's um let's go with churn, engagement, retention.

>> We've been looking into this a lot more recently, too.

>> Do you want to you want to kick off and then we'll turn it over?

>> Yeah. So, some of the things we've learned is the the nature of the school games isn't the best for churn because we get everyone to go as hard as humanly possible for one month and then the next month they're like exhausted and don't and don't promote and then obviously some people cancel because you pushed it real hard and then because you're not promoting in the second month and that number goes down in total it it feels bad, right? So, like that definitely makes things worse. The fact that everyone just goes real hard for one month to win the school games and then the second month comes. Um, cuz usually you're promoting consistently each month and that helps keep things going up, right? But we just do this like binge and then it drops a bit and then people kind of figure it out. But there has been communities that have won the school games and then continued to build MR. Like I think Daddy Wellness is an interesting one actually. I think he's tripled his MR he got since winning the school games.

>> I think Max has continued to grow his MR since winning the school games. So a lot of people I swear all they wanted to do was win the school games and then they're like, "All right, I want it." Um, and maybe they their offer was more.

>> Yeah. You got.

>> Where's Where's your status icon?

>> It vanished.

>> Um, so yeah, some people continue to build art like on top of what they built during the school games and some people don't. Um, but I just wanted to start with that because that definitely makes the experience of churn kind of rough I think and it's something we should think about moving forward.

>> Um, well it's like if you do three months of promotion in one month in terms of like your effort then you're going to get three months of churn the next month even if you do a 1x effort. So you still like have two times or three times more churn than you normally would. So dis like if you go up 300 and then normally you would and you normally go up 100, you're still going to have this feeling of a net like 200 loss even though if you did this and then had your steady growth, it just disproportionately manifests.

>> Yeah. And then in terms of like metrics, I think bad is like 30%. or more. Um, churn average is around 20 and good would be 10 or less, right?

>> Um,

>> Sam, are those benchmarks across the board in terms of price of the group or do you see different numbers at like the thousand point versus 20 or 30?

>> So, I'm just sharing this at like platformwide. Okay.

>> Obviously, it varies by price. So, clearly the cheaper the group, the higher the retention, right? Um, we see that like for sure, but it's not. What's interesting is there's some kind of sweet spot in between like it's a steep drop off after 250 actually, but you can still have decentish retention up to 250. Um, but the ones that have the absolute highest retention, they're like $8 to $15. They're in that Netflix range. I think there's a reason why Netflix and everything costs around that, right? Um, some of those have amazing retention like like down I think the best ones we've seen honestly two or 3% churn. Yeah. Um, but you know there they didn't do a launch and I think the best one we have is this guy called Samuel Herps Art School. I don't know if you've seen it. He just teaches people how to paint. It's so wholesome. And like he came from Patreon. He never did a launch. And so PE the price is so fair. And it's I think he still has like at month six he still has something like 90% of his customers which is insane. But he's not making insane money. So you know these things kind of.

>> I mean, but the proof of concept is there. Yeah.

>> Sam, on that point, I know a lot of like direct consumer like subscription businesses if they're good at like 5 to 10% churn rate. One of my wonders is direction travel. We want to kind of become a little bit more SAS. Do you think that the nature of in a community means that you are going to have higher churn rate versus like a traditional like SAS model and Alex or Sam on that but.

>> Yeah, I don't think you're going to get below 10 really like cuz this is a consumer thing and it's content right like I think it's possible but for most people I think if you've got I think I think most people if they got till close to 10. That would probably be all right, right? Um, cuz how much how many months are you going to retain if you're if you're at 10? I can't do the compounding math in my head, but it's got to be.

>> 10% is 10 10 months.

>> Yeah. So, you take your price and you multiply it by 10. That's probably your LTV.

>> We have less than five.

>> Less than 5% June.

>> I did no promotion this year and we've lost a lot. 4%. How many months in are you one? Right.

>> This is our second month and it's a high it's what 3.95.

>> We're at 495. Yeah. You like no chart.

>> And you you calculate your churn.

>> Yeah. It's 4%.

>> Nice.

>> But that's all I've done. But that's all I've done this month. I did zero promotion. I've done zero sales. All I've done is just learn the community.

>> Share.

>> I mean, it is it is month two. like I was looking further out. Um, so that's why I didn't I mean I'm sharing kind of like the global big numbers and then there's outliers for sure and that's who we should learn from the people who are beating the average, right?

>> Um,

>> Can I toss something out there just in terms of so if you're thinking um because everything that in in in businesses comes down to cactb like that is fundamentally like the the economic unit of business the arbitrage that exists that makes money. And so the reason for continuity in general, and I like I know this is going to sound like regressive, but I think it's a point worth making is that if your LTV, let's say it's $100 a month and you have a 10-month average, you have a $1,000 LTV, the idea of doing continuity or the subscription model that we're talking about here, is that if you got on the phone or you presented your offer to a hundred people and for one person it was $1,000 upfront and for the other people it was $100 a month, you would be able to convert three to four times as many of those people at uh at $100 a month versus the $1,000 upfront. And so the reason for continuity is that you can get the LTV of a onetime purchase, but you get the conversion of the lower ticket. Like that is where continuity does really well. where continuity does not do well is if you have really high churn like super high churn like bad smiley face uh because then you don't get the like it it ends up being one of these uh uh balance points balance beams between conversion and LTV and so the benefit of continuity is that you have a lower price so you ha so that you can have higher conversion versus and and more convenient conversion mechanisms if you're selling a thousand bucks usually have to do it over the phone or via webinar or some sort of longer sales method whereas $99 a month you can probably blow traffic to it and you can have a more automated selling system. And so I just state that as the like, oh yeah, why do we even do this to begin with? Like that's why.

>> Yeah. Um, I'll share a few more things on it and then we can each each person can share like more specifically what they're doing and how it's working. But I'll just share like from the platform side first. So those are some rough benchmarks. Um, and we're going to be we've actually got some features that ship early next week, like Monday, Tuesday, that will help with this a lot. Um, one of them is the ability to unlock courses with time. So, it's we just call it time unlock courses, right? So, you could unlock one like one course at month two, one course at month three. So, it kind of rewards loyalty. That's just a basic mechanism I think that will will help people a lot because remember you can also use courses to unlock calls. So maybe you get a call once you last for 3 months. Um, things like that.

>> Or an event.

>> Yeah. So that that'll ship on like that ships on Monday. Um, yeah, I've got it on my computer if you want to see it at lunch. I mean, it we've already built it. We just don't ship on Fridays.

>> Fair enough.

>> Because there's no one around to fix it if it breaks. Yeah. Um, and the second one is where or we made a lot of improvements to the cancel page. It's too easy to cancel because I compared it to Netflix and Spotify and everything else, right? And so we made it a bit harder to cancel without it being like scummy. Um, and we also were did some special thing on it where a common pattern we're seeing is people do like a a launch offer or for like founding members. This this is a really good promotion strategy by the way. Um, and I think you were the first one to really make a big deal out of it. You you said if you join before this date, you're going to get access for like 11 bucks, right? That's what you you said.

>> Uh, so I kind of like gified it. If you study game theory in community, it goes hand inand if you can create the right ambiance and environment for people. That being said, what I did do was I realized momentum in terms of organic views into certain platforms. And then what I did was I rewarded because I understood who had seen me for how long. And those people got in early bird access. And I told them it was a dollar. Then we raised at 11 then 22. Everybody knew that the price was going up. The loyal people got rewarded. the unloyal, not really, or unaware people got in at a more expensive price. And then the people that have cheaper prices are not going to leave because they realize the price is up.

>> And if the value is there, they will stay. So when it comes to metrics to a business in terms of liquidity, I would highly suggest and recommend understanding truly and if you can't deduct it yourself, understand from other people in the environment what the worth of the product is, right? And I would handicap or do a bonus of 75% off for the first two people, 50% off for the first two people. And it's up to you guys. like maybe $1, $11, $22 doesn't work for you, right? And I think that it's key to come in with a student's mentality of understanding uh business and sharing information, but also not, oh, he did a dollar, I'm going to do a dollar. No, like find what works for you, but understand what the value is, right? And then the people that are locked in, you can choose the number, stay there. We have a high percentage at 11 and a high percentage at 22 because we're going to raise it to 33, right? And the people at no, no. And all this was organic traffic. It was us just pushing it and people DMing me all the time. Nay, what product? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. No nothing. No nothing. Value value. Valley value. V value. When are you going to launch the dojo? Value value. V value. School games. Everybody's wait. Oh, you did. Oh, school. There you go. You created an ecosystem. I understood there's an ecosystem. I We can talk about the search engine aspect. That That's what I texted you person. Yeah, with school. But yeah, so it's basically value, guys. It's very simple.

>> Alex, can I ask a follow up on that? So, I think in last week's like school meet up, you kind of floated almost the opposite idea of having a one-time purchase or basically month one is up here and then you downell them and it's really easy for them to stay. So, we kind of have these competing concepts of starting really cheap and starting expensive and then going down to mitigate churn. So, can you talk about I guess what's the use case for each of those?

So, both of them fundamentally so if you zoom out it's like what's the principle behind either of them that work which is that if you start really low and then the price goes up then the people it it does two things one is it drives urgency in the short term and it drives retention in the long term for people who who come in up to that point after that point it gets more difficult to convert unless you continue to repeat the cycle right.

>> You're saying it's for newer members after that it's more t because now they they see I miss exactly right so so you have to recreate that you know and Then there's and you probably have to do it asmmptoically I would imagine. So it's so you know he he went for you know 22x his price over the first however long but he's not 22xing it again. It's going to go up by 50% and then maybe it'll go up by 20 you know whatever. um the big headlong tail strategy which is what I would talk about as one of the things that's um that the one-time course purchase is now enabled which I think is in my opinion if I were to if I were to try and play the games now with the tools that are available that would be the strategy I would employ which is um because everything that I think about is like how can I how can I cover the cost of acquisition as fast as humanly possible and ideally make a profit in the acquisition and then toss people into my recurring which is just all profit um on the back end. And so it's like if I can break even or make money on the front end and then everything else is gravy, then I can just run this thing to the moon, which kind of covers some of y'all's questions about scaling. And so, um, it's like that's where I'm willing to do unscalable things for one time.

>> And so the one-time offer just it just I like it a lot because you spend more because you only have to acquire somebody once. So you only do the unscalable thing once and then you keep them forever on the thing that you can do at scale where you have lots of people at scale. Um, and so that that's why I tend to like that. But it also basically works off the same principle, which is that there's an arbitrage between like, I paid $1,000 and now I'm in here. I'm not going to cancel my $50 a month thing. I paid a,000 bucks.

>> They want to feel like staying is a good deal.

>> Well, it's not cost fallacy.

>> You're just you're just harnessing just a psychological fallacy.

>> Like fundamentally, they can't get the $1,000 back. And so $50 more dollars is still $50 more, but it's like but I spent a,000. And ideally the the reason I like big head long tail is that a new customer costs more for several reasons. One is you have to acquire them. But the other is that you have to onboard them. You like they don't know what they're doing. They're fail, you know, flailing around in the group like what is going on? And so you have to deploy more resources in order to get them taught or indoctrinated in how how this is how we do things here, right? And so there's a justifiable reason for why I am charging you more to bring you in. And so we put someone through an onboarding experience which normally you have to do at cost. But if they pay more for the first month or they do some sort of one-time purchase in addition to that, you cover the cost of delivery, you cover the cost of acquisition to turn them into a very sticky recurring customer that won't cancel. And so that's how that's how I see that model working out.

>> So are we able to use that one-time course purchase to do that right now? And basically even if we're not like can we use the one-time course purchase to be that onboarding and go from 149 to 999 or No.

>> Not yet.

>> Okay.

>> Right. But in terms of how I so there's two ways you can think about this or probably more than two ways but I will talk about two ways. So so one is that you just you have the low ticket price point whatever and then with that you include the call or some sort of thing that's less scalable that call you then sell onto a one-time higher more expensive thing which you can facilitate through the group. And so imagine somebody comes in and you could do this with free or you could do this with paid. It works the same way. And so someone comes in for the I just say $99 a month thing. They come in and then you get on the phone with them that's included in there. They get a onetime onboarding call, whatever. On the onboarding call, you sell them on your $1,000 three call thing or five call thing or whatever. You can just share a screen with them. They click the purchase button, their credit cards already on file. It's one click and then boom, they now have access to that thing. And so you can still basically keep the entire transaction on school in one place. You don't have to keep track of anything else. It's just the boom. Like that's how I would structure it in terms of like that's the that's the mechanistically cleanest way to do it.

>> So it's like a two-step thing right now basically. But I in the future potentially there will be a setup fee style, right?

>> Or first hire month or something like that. The the other way to do it, this would be if you have like a free and paid.

>> So the free group can still come with the the call, the onboarding, whatever. You put the one-time purchase inside of the free group. They purchase inside of the free group and then they go into the recurring on your paid group.

>> Does that make sense?

>> Yeah. So that would that would utilize a two group structure.

>> But how do you prevent people from joining the paid group?

>> Wait, hold on. I want to I I didn't even finish.

>> Yeah.

>> Like we have more insurance stuff.

>> Um, so I was saying that like if you start with a lower price and then you have a higher price. Um, the cancel page takes advantage of that. Uh, so it basically says you paid it's like warning. It's like you paid $10. The new price is like 20. Are you sure you want to cancel you? If you come back again, you'll have to pay 20. And it's it's a real we designed it in a way that's really nice. It's like hard to say, "Yes, I want to give this up." Um, so we've optimized the product in the cancel page to take advantage of people that start with a lower price and then have a a higher one later. I don't think that means you start with the price you want and then you raise it. I think it means you end where you want your price to be and you start lower, right? And so that gives you natural scarcity for your launch because you're like for there's a special offer for founding members which is everyone who joins before this date. Your the normal price is going to be like 20 bucks or 100 bucks on this date at this time. But anyone that joins before then is going to get it for half price, right? Um, and you could also throw in a bonus for them like an exclusive call or something. I think that's a great launch strategy because it gives you natural scarcity and it's also a great retention strategy because it's harder to cancel when the price has gone up and the cancel page really uses it. Uh, we're also letting you put a video on the cancel page if you want. Um,

>> Is that already rolled out?

>> Is that already rolled out?

>> That will be live like probably Tuesday, Wednesday and time unlock course is Monday. I can show you guys this stuff at lunch if you want on my computer because it we already built it. Um, but we and we're going to continuously run experiments at that cancel page to just make sure that we optimize uh churn.

>> Will we when you roll that out, will we have the ability to like preview that or do we need to like I've never seen the cancel page. I don't know what it looks like.

>> I can't cancel all my own stuff.

>> I mean, just join a dollar group honestly. like there's a few of them and just have a look. Yeah.

>> I'm gonna I'm gonna raise somebody's churn and they're jumping in.

>> I've got a group that's a dollar and I don't care. Um, it's called Dollar Club.

>> Yeah, it's what I use for testing. Um, so we're we're making those changes. So just so you're aware of those. I think unlocking content over time or unlocking calls over time and then having a higher price and then with that cancel page I think that'll reduce churn a lot. But then I think the biggest thing that's going to reduce churn is annual.

>> Yeah.

>> Yes.

>> So we'll give you the option to charge monthly or annual.

>> Will that be will that roll at the same time as the um higher first month? Well, right now I'm saying the that higher first month is just facilitated through the onetime course purchase feature. That's how I'm saying it.

>> But eventually it will be rolled as an actual.

>> Same as the road map.

>> I think annual's better. Honestly, that one's hard a hard concept to grasp like when you're trying to communicate that to people. Aza tried it recently and it didn't really work well. He told me um that experiment really backfired. Um, and so he decided that it's best to just offer monthly and annual and if we can come up with a way first of all we need to just give you the ability to charge annual right and

Then, if you can stack if annual's at a discount and you get something extra for joining it, then I think that that'll improve your LTV, right? It'll improve your cash collected up front. It should also reduce churn. Um, it's not always the case, but I'm pretty sure in most cases offering annual seems to reduce churn by up to like 50% because the people are just more committed. Um, I don't know if that's going to be true for you guys. We'll see.

But that's pretty much covers everything in terms of the platform and the structure, right? Uh, then it's up to you guys with content and things, how you have it, how you deliver the experience of being in your group, and how you... We should really learn from you what you're doing to get 4% churn. Um, yeah, I just wanted to update you from the platform side. We're going to do these things so you know what's coming and you know that we're actually focusing on it.

Yeah, annual is going to be really big for everyone because even if like 10 to 15% of people take the annual, it'll double your cash upfront and reduce churn just by having the option. So like everybody can benefit from that. Um, these were these are metrics from ProfitWell that has like 14,000 subscriptions, uh, which is, this is 14,000 just like of all sorts of like from ButcherBox to whatever. Um, but people who go on monthly on average across all subscriptions turn at 10.7%. People go on quarterly on average turn at 5%. And people who go annual on average, this again, across all theirs, now that includes people that like we're in content, so we're going to have higher churn, right, than something that's not that or just SAS because they have a lot of SAS platforms, but annual is 2%. And this is extrapolated from annual back out to monthly. So I think I want to say, um, I want to say 3% churn is somewhere in the neighborhood of like 70% annual retention. It's like 73, uh, because you just compound it throughout the year. Um, and so 2% is probably over 80% annual retention, um, at that point. Again, this is across like software platforms and everything else. But I just think that the numbers matter less than the relationship between the numbers based on the billing cadence. So the more frequently you bill, the billing frequency is directly correlated with churn. There we go.

The main thing is just time unlock courses on Monday, like the new cancel it flow on, um, Tuesday. Wednesday, you can put a video on it. If you start with a lower price, have a higher price later, it will help you with retention. And then we'll add annual, um, and we'll give you some churn metrics. Um, we've got them and I've been looking at them. That's how I know about all this, but to give them to you guys in your dashboard is is the next step. Um, so that you can you can tweak everything. And then I, and then yeah, like we do affiliates and we optimize that about page so it converts fine, and then you'll make a lot more money.

When we went into it, like the engagement like went through the roof, like it was ridiculous. So, cuz we're AI, we led that into the level system. And so level one's like a fax machine, and I launched a campaign that said, "No fax machine left behind." So level two unlock software stuff, like that. When we looked at our churn, one of the observations we made was the fact that most people that churn are level ones that haven't made a post and haven't interacted. So one of my questions I guess for the group, Alex and Sam, is what are those, like, I guess pre-lag factors you may see from somebody who might churn so we can kind of like think about that in the way that we manage community and lead it?

Well, it sounds like you know more about that than me right now because I've, I've just been looking at, uh, everything millions of people and I've just been looking very far out, but then, you know, I plan to go in further. Um, so why don't you guys, you guys have probably noticed things like the people that churn, have you looked at and the people that stick? I guess comparing those, if you look at your stickiest customers, the ones that have stayed the longest, and then you look at the people that churn, what are the patterns you've noticed?

I've seen some. So, the ones that attend the calls, so I do daily live Q&A calls, they stick. And the ones that attend no calls, they always turn because the call is where they get the most value.

How do you know they attended? You saw their name like Hozi seeing your your name?

I'll tell you. We ask them why do you leave when we do exit interviews or we message them and they say, "Oh, I couldn't because we help students, right? I couldn't attend the Q&A because I'm working a part-time job." Then. So whenever they have part-time jobs and they can't attend the calls, they get no value. So.

Well, that's because they feel like they're paying for something they can't use.

Exactly. They say, "I couldn't I couldn't make use of it, so I'm going to leave now. I'm going to just try apply for jobs in the night." And it depends on the community as well.

So why not do some calls like that are outside of 9 to 5?

We do them on the weekends, but then sometimes they have other stuff on the weekend or something. Yeah.

Students, right? So.

That's the 9 to 5 life. It's it's also a big thing we've seen is people really buy on to. So for example, you can either get monthly or annual. I think there's two ways to increase revenue. One is reducing churn and the other is increasing upfront cash collected. And will be will be huge because when we, we have a high ticket offer as well. When we launched that and we said, "Okay, as part of the high ticket offer, you get lifetime access to our academy." They love that. And that's what they bit like we've sold like over 10 times in the DMs like cash collected up front. Whenever my DM set would "lifetime access to academy," they would bite onto that. They would love that. So annual is as close to as we can get to that. Um, but I can see that being really big because I would would just love to get in, maximize cash collected up front because I want to get into ads as well because I now I was riding the LinkedIn wave and now LinkedIn is getting a bit inconsistent and I don't really like video content. My brother is Instagram. So ads will help. So that way I can get cash and exactly as Roji says, get cash, bump into ads, have a predictable acquisition cost and predictable LTV. That's what will help for sure.

What, what one of the other values of that? I think is like if someone makes a post and it isn't responded to within 24 hours, almost always you'll see that with like trenders and stuff. One of my theories on why the gamification works is because it adds status to the group. And we took Andrew Kirby's idea about the ring and we built custom photo avatars for our guys. So at level five, they get trailblazer avatar and it goes up. So visually you can see with the color what level they're at. And then also that's great if they get different groups, they can see it. So we found like going default to custom made quite a big difference actually. People really get they're right behind that. They found it really valuable. Goose has something.

Yeah, that's really good, by the way. You should take note of that. Yeah, build some people, build some celebrities up in the community that aren't you. Like, we've got that going in the games now and in school community. I don't know if you've noticed it, but it's so much easier for me. Like, I don't, that's why we're shipping so many things so fast because I can just focus on that. Um, and it makes it feel more like a community because so and so's there. Um, and doing the podcast has been another way to do that. It's not about me or Horoszi, it's about the people in the community, right? Um, so building them up, I think, cuz then when someone comes in and they see that if they put in the work and they keep showing up, they could be like that, then they want that. Um, so I think that's a really good way to to just think about your community. Build up other people that aren't you and give them the, it's like the carrot in the stick thing. If someone does a shitty post, you got to delete the post and you got to message them and say, "Don't do that." But if someone does something good, like congratulate them. Pin it, even if it's really good.

Pens a big deal.

Pens big deal. Um, give them like give them like some status, build them up. Um, and that that'll help. The other thing I noticed, all the groups that have the highest retention, the creator has the fire streak emoji. So like that's kind of obvious that the the creator shows up daily. Um, which was interesting.

I mean, that sounds obvious, but great.

Yeah. People who are in the community, people feel that they're in the community.

There's got to be something we can do with that streak for your members, too.

Yeah.

Dude, can they get it? Is that only for creators?

It's anyone on can get the.

Yeah.

You have to pay, bro.

For like the verification like IGF.

Why? No, I was thinking about that this cuz that rolled out last week or two weeks ago, right? The the pirate because when I saw it, I I thought, you know what? I need to I need to incentivize. Like nobody nobody in my group knows about school, right? They just know about me. I know about school.

So, they don't know like they I have all these emojis next to me, the little crown or whatever. They don't know what that means. Like I don't want them to know what that means, really. Um, but once I can incentivize like, "Hey guys, there's this it's it's basically like what you were saying, right? There's this fire emoji thing or you know, whatever." Um, and it just symbolizes that you're get it done, right? And I would love if I like, like unlocking something if you have a 30-day streak.

One of the previous winners is having group calls only with fire emoji people.

Yeah. People are doing cool stuff like offering cash prizes for people that get the fire emoji.

I've done that. Well, not for that, but I'll be like, "Hey, if you give me an answer to this question, I'll send you 20." And I've done that and they've loved it. And they would make force on it. I got through 21.

You got group chats because communication cadence is one to all or one to one. So I could not agree more with Goose. So we launch competition teams. So Bob turns up, Bob really loves automations, but now Bob knows Sar, Sally, he knows Sarah, he knows Ben. She's got three friends in the group and I think all four of them are less likely to leave. But we're having to take those chats over to WhatsApp. I would love to have a thread section. And we were talking about this, Adam and I, whether we can little group chat breakouts so we don't have to take them off platform. And I think my theory is that would really help us with churn massively.

Because we have like accountability partners taking them off platform into WhatsApp.

Yeah, we've had it like that all the time, WhatsApp group.

You guys mean like the DMs but like a group chat section just as many connect like I'm trying to pluck as many like connection points within the group as we can possibly get private but in school. So we're not taking them off platform because we have so much activity on WhatsApp now for our competition that's running. We'd like to keep that in in the platform if we can.

Do you facilitate that the WhatsApp or you just say, "Hey, go."

No. So, they're going to Discord, they're going to WhatsApp. They're coordinating that. We've got like 30 teams in the competition. We try. We do have an AI wizard WhatsApp chat. They unlock at level six. It's quite cool. But like, yeah, we just we facilitate some of it, but not all.

We have that too. And I act, you know, they they all have to do it on their own. It's like, okay, meet with your partner in whatever way you can.

So, when you unlock at level six, there's just a link to the WhatsApp and they go straight in. So, just a course that unlocks at level six. They eat it. They love it. They love it. It's a great chat.

Goose, are you offsite for your for the Rainbow Games? Do they have an offsite group chat or do you do it in threads?

Very good.

Yeah, it's tricky like doing group chats because the group is kind of like a group chat and the more you segment, the more places you create for people to engage, the less engaging the community will be. Um.

I mean, we might end up adding it, but I don't think we'll do it this year. It just seems risky and low priority compared to the things we just spoke about. Like, cuz we can for sure reduce churn without doing group chats. If that's what you if that's why you want it, I'm pretty sure these other methods will be more effective.

Yeah. I I guess I'm just trying to maximize the service area of their engagement. And I think there'll be like little breakout groups of I'm in real estate in Arizona. Let's get the five guys out of this 1500 person group. We're all like redhot real estate. Um, and like we subscribe to philosophy that we want as little engagement off platform as humanly possible. And some of it's going to happen anyway. My comment would be why not just do it on platform. Um, I I guess you'd have to test it to see if it's worth it or not, but.

It's less a churn piece and more an engagement piece.

Yeah.

So, we want to keep people in the group, but give them an instar experience. It's just an engagement piece more than anything.

Yeah, that's different. And I'm kind of like all right with that one. Right. But the group chat thing, it's it's tricky. Like I mean no one caught this one, but like with Facebook, do you Facebook DMs for up until 2016 were one-on-one only. Then they rolled out Messenger in 16 and made it group chats possible. Posts and comments died. Facebook died when they opened up group chat. Many people deleted the app and just had the message app. So like it definitely just all moves there.

Yeah.

Right. Like.

Because if you create and this happens in Discord too, like it even happens on school communities. If you have a free community and then you make a paid one, and obviously your super fans join the paid one, you just took your most engaged people out. What do you think is going to happen to this one? Cuz you keep moving your engaged people out. All you've got left is the people that aren't engaged.

Maybe it's not. I mean, I just don't a group chat dial something but a thread on a topic kind of like Slack by a little bit.

And it has a defined expiry date of X. So, for instance, we do our our competition over a 30 to 45 day period. We thread it out for 45 days and it kind of expires. So, it's not going there to die, but we can kind of get maybe best of both worlds with it. Because I I know there's a lot of startups in that space that are doing it along those lines because of there's exact complaints like conversations just go forever there or whatever. So.

But do you guys personally hate group chats?

Yeah, it's spamming.

I [ __ ] hate being.

I do. Yeah.

I [ __ ] hate.

That was the other reason why we didn't do it. I'm like.

Alert alert stimulus stimulus.

Damn it.

Well, are you Jack? Are you kind of saying like sections of the school community for different topics like within AI automations there might be like a real estate hub?

Yeah. So dish was make your first AI dollar like with AI and for that we pub them into groups of three and four and so we just wanted them to have that com. So they're doing it in like WhatsApp chats but I I just think as a concept there's lots of like interesting stuff that that you could do with it. So there could be many things we create breakouts for. Maybe real estate owners Arizona or people who want to start an AI business that live in the UK or whatever. Like it's just like how do they how do they combine together and do a OnePlus 1 is three if the only way they can communicate is just on a thread or in DMs unless we just do the WhatsApp route. You know that's real niche down because I was thinking more like a sub channel that's open to everyone in the community just about specific topics. Well, we can already do that.

Okay.

Yeah. I mean, this is a tough choice, which is why I just keep delaying it. No, because sometimes it goes away. Honestly, we hear about group chats less and less the longer we don't do it.

Can I say something?

Yeah.

This just a hypothesis based off game theory connection, right? Like having so access is not connection. So, if I access you, right, and I text you, regardless of how I'm trying to convey the information, I'm sending you a text. You can absorb that information however you want. Now, if you and I are having a conversation, right, especially if you can see my face, it goes from information to actual connection. I really like the feature on X of live calls, like just shoot talking different, you got different lobbies always on. Uh, for example, for me, how to get uh clean bulking, how to shred, diet.

Are you talking about like voice rooms?

Yeah. Where people could, they don't have to like, okay, I camera lighting. Okay, do I look good? Yeah, I look good. Okay, ready, roll. Let's do a zoom. No, just have it like there. A lot of people can hop on. You be like.

Just voice though.

Voice, just voice. Super chill.

See that? That I'm down.

People love that cuz it's like they're talking with you like you're there. It's not a text. And you keep them in the platform.

Yeah, that would be at the top of the feed. I was thinking it would show the profile pics of the people that are in the room. There's just one.

And you can pin people just click it and then blip you're in.

That's tasty.

LinkedIn has that.

Like like huddles on Slack. Have you seen that?

Yeah. Or LinkedIn LinkedIn has live calls as well. You can join them and start speaking.

That I'm down to do because some people just want to like talk, right?

They're driving. They can't put their phone like but they can talk. They can hear like.

And it doesn't it doesn't kill or cannibalize posts. And I think that's the main thing. Like that's why to be fair y'all's communities and if you look at the school games community it's like it's really rich. I mean I think the quality of the posts in the school games community is really good. Like I I read them. I'm like oh this is interesting. Like you're like I read them all the time.

Um, so yeah, I mean that's the that's the big threat of doing it is would we would we sacrifice that for all the engagement side of the community? And then you've got the spam and like.

Yeah, then you got that.

Spam is out of control on platforms like Discord and stuff because anyone any bot or can just make a group and like you don't even see that group right.

And it's it's so complicated. Um, but I'm down to do voice that that I think will do for sure. I haven't figured out either.

We've so we use for all our coaching calls and on boarding is Zoom. Like I've integrated that and now there's Zoomuler which is like a calendar version of Zoom. So like we actually for our onboarding it's smaller. So there's like five. So I know who attends. Like if somebody doesn't show up, we actually call them out that they didn't show up for the onboarding. So it could be a way that you do groups and it integrates through the calendar. So.

Oh, so to know attendance rate to to have awareness of who's attending and who's not.

Well, yeah. Cuz if they don't, cuz we have like select numbers and there's 130 women in the group. So if they don't attend, that means so and so can attend because they limit it to like four people for like a small group. So if someone doesn't show up, I'm like I go I go for them.

Oh wow. So this is probably why you have high retention.

We added I listened to one of the one days probably a week in and I was like I literally DM'd her like we're starting onboarding like tomorrow.

So you break your group into.

Like it's five plus Jennifer.

Into smaller groups.

Yeah. Like.

And then they meet on what frequency?

They just do it that first month. So I can like so I tell them they have to attend so many group calls first and then so then I'm sure they're like overwhelmed because you know we were getting a lot of overwhelm and they're like there's so much and then I break them down and I say okay there's going to be four maybe five people on a call and then I can individually talk to each of them for like 10 minutes so then I know their individual struggles so then when they get on the group call I have like some type of context instead of just like wait why are you here? You know what I like I've already they've already been able to like talk to me for 10 minutes and tell talk me through their problems and sol you know I don't give them everything in 10 minutes but at least there's like a relationship and there's a context so that we get on these big group calls and then I can be like oh yeah I remember like let's you know did you do this or what what had happened with this so there's like that individual which again is that scalable.

Is there fluctuating meeting flow though like if you had five people join in a week you just have one zoom but if you have five.

So, we don't say you you're going to get it this week. We just say, "Hey, as you see the meeting times come up, sign up for one. They're limited to four. So, hop on as soon as you see them." And so, they know that they when they see it, they have to sign up and then, you know, Brandy threatens all if you don't show up, get another one.

I got full mob. No, the um I think the thing is they have to attend. We have a start here course inside of our courses. So, it's our first kickoff call that we recorded plus like a post that they have to do things. And then we did a nail your niche workshop because it's social media influencers. So they need to know what their niche is before they come in. I don't want to do a small group with them until they've gone through a few things because then it's just like wait, you know what I mean? Like I make them go through a few things and then they get like that access to me. Again, it's not one-on-one, but I've it it helped immediately with like overwhelm and like the questions on the group calls got better, you know, cuz the the first few group calls I was like, "Okay, this is all over the place." So I just needed like this kind of first.

So I wonder if the general pattern is if people attend calls they're less likely to turn.

For sure for us.

Yeah. Anybody that's attended.

Sam, I can add to that as well. We calculated our churn and I do an onboarding similar to you guys and uh compared to the data it showed that the people that were onboarded churn was split in half.

Yeah. So.

Was that a one-on-one call?

Yeah. Correct.

Yeah. So that's only possible with high higher ticket. Right. Like.

I did it. I regret it, but I did it. I did a hundred something one-on- ones.

That's fun, man.

It was brutal.

But you know what? Like, you learn so much from that. Like, you you'll never regret talking to your customers.

No, I know. I mean, I know.

What's your price point?

It was 149.

Yeah. Well, I guess when you're starting, you got to do stuff like that.

I had no idea that many people would sign up. So, it was like it happened and I was like, "Oh, this was I didn't didn't know this."

Is your attention good?

Yeah.

Okay.

But that four or five people that allows them to get to know each other, too. Them to get to know their other like then when they see other people they connect with them more too. And so that's the feedback we got is like oh this was so cool to get to know like these other three four people. So even though they're only getting their talk time for 10 minutes they're getting to benefit from the other three or four people in this like really small intimate setting and it just sets them up for again just more connection kind of like what Nate said like that connection is key. I strongly recommend semi I mean I come from fitness I always say like semi-private but that's like semi-private sessions but like we we've proven this at least in the fitness world which is that if someone comes in and you have like a group training business which fundamentally is a coaching business one to many like it's the same exact business um if you have a like a six week onboarding period where they do one-on-one or semi-private before they go into the group the churn is is phenomenally lower like it's not even close and to your point um I mean I never recommend 101 cuz it's it's super diff it's very unscalable. um semi is it's like you can get you know six times the leverage for yourself and even at even at 20 bucks you know even at 20 bucks a month you can do you know two group onboardings and I mean again I'm a I'm a big advocate of just you know the four-letter word work but um like if you do two onboarding calls a day and that drops your churn by you know 75% then that means that you spend an hour a day to 4x your LTV that feels worth it to me um but I tend to do that kind of stuff.

It's kind of because the people that kind of got on boarded together might like each other in the community. I mean, if if you think about you as one, I would get up to six is what I would do. Um, if I if I put a number and that's 60 minutes, 10 minutes a person and they do benefit like one hour one-on-one in I think a lot of ways is less valuable than one hour one six because you're going to get so because one people are super nervous especially if you're a guru they're going to like [ __ ] their pants and so at least this kind of like distributes the the pants [ __ ] mode a little bit. It's true. They I mean they will um but that way it's like they're going to listen to everybody else's questions be like I didn't even think about that cuz my brain's not working right now. Um and so they get to benefit from everyone else. They get to meet other people. They'll be like, "Oh my god, that was awesome." Whatever. Now they have friends and they know you. And then when you get on the group call, if you I'm telling you, I do this a lot. It's really obsessive, but like our team memorizes every single person's name who's going to walk through the door and there's a hundred people and everybody in the company knows every single person's name. And that happens twice a month. And so like if you if you call someone's name out, they're like, "Holy [ __ ] she remembered my name." It's a tin like it's huge.

Get DMs like, "Oh, thank you so much for the call out. That was amazing." Like it's like they're like it's it's huge.

Oh yeah. And they they will notice when you like their post or comments, too. By the way, if you're the Have you noticed that?

I've noticed when you like mine. Yeah.

I see it like.

Once a month or something. And I check Instagram and people put it in their stories.

Oh yeah.

And I'm like, oh, people care when I click like and I'm going to.

Sam was like.

I'm going to do I'm going to do that a lot more.

I literally did that.

You put it in your story when I like those people.

There you go. No, but it matters.

Yeah, but I did not know that. So, you know, just you being active and liking and saying, "Awesome. Congrats. Nice work." look like it makes a big difference. Yeah.

So yeah, I mean I think we we I'm glad you watched that one because the onboarding is the So if you think about what we were talking about in terms of decrease turn, there's structural things that we can do from a platform perspective. Then there's kind of quote best practices which you do within the platform, right? Like as as what you actually do from a work perspective. So onboarding is like probably the single greatest thing that you can do immediate benefit all around the board. It also produces upsell opportunity. There's lots of things that come from that. They create cohorts, whatever. Um you mentioned activation and so um we I look at this stuff a lot with the companies that we have in the portfolio. Like you want to identify like the one to three things and usually it's it's surprisingly few things that separate the people who stick from the people who don't and getting laser clear on what that is and then all of the onboarding then orients them to whatever the activation point is. And so it could be.

Yeah. Can we talk about that? Like cuz I'm really curious. It seems like you guys have you understand what someone who churns looks like and what someone who sticks looks like.

Other than attending a call. Attending a call seems to be like one part of activation, right? But what what else do people that stick look like? What what kind of actions do they take?

I think you have to understand that when you launch something, you're going to have a vertical of people staring and trying to meddle, right? I call them the vultures into the ecosystem, what you're creating. Now, they're vultures. They're students. There's people that are curious. And you can realize real quick, somebody who come the first thing I had was the guy who was shit-talking me on social media pitching people on school. What the [ __ ] Like, that was the first thing that came to my mind. I'm like, what the heck? So the following is what I would suggest is people that come in there because you have a certain personality, a certain way of living. Those people that like that, those are the ones that stay. The people that you talk to, that you like, that you engage, that you shout out, that you pin, that you're like, "Oh, I remember you from XYZ." And you bring it up because it's things that you actually remember in the calls. Those are the people that stick.

But you have to also take into account like people are going to come in there just to try to get all the thing and resell the information. Like you have to understand that you have all kinds of people coming into the platform. So if you drop 20% 10% it doesn't matter. You don't know what kind of person is there. I had tons of resell people. That's why we didn't post anything for a couple days.

We posted he's like, "Okay, welcome." And then everybody's like, "What the [ __ ] is going on here?" We a lot of people like getting all everyone out 100%.

Same drill, different platform. Also, apart from just somebody being like level one churning more often than somebody at level four, I've also noticed that like people that are in at a lower price point than the current price just stay because they think that they're getting a good deal because they're in.

So people that post or comments seem to stick more.

Yeah. Like but I go through churn every single day in the morning. It's like mostly like level one, level two, and like I barely get like a level three, level four in there. It's always people that just came in and there might be right after like the first month basically.

That they will leave and if they're in here for at least two months or two.

So equal opposite approach to this is thinking okay so if I wanted to guarantee that someone would cancel I prevent them from posting commenting connecting with somebody I would do all of these things. So it's like the the opposite of that would be like how many people turn at level four?

Yeah. Not that many.

And so then the objective of onboarding in the first 30 days is how do I get someone as quickly as possible to level four? And then that becomes the problem that you solve and then that's what you orient all the activities towards. And so I just put this up. Who asked about Avatar? Those Kai you guys asked about avatar. And so when we think about um increasing LTV um part of that's you know churn uh you know is obviously a big factor of that but who you pick is also a big part of that. And so I separate this into two things which is demographics which is who are they? So, age, gender, profession, um where they live, like maybe I mean that's those are the usually the big ones. Age, gender, profession is is pretty strong. And if you want you can add a uh what's their pain, what's their passion, what's their what's the problem they're trying to solve, right? And then there's the activities, which is okay, now that I have the right person, what are the things that this type of person does that if they do them, it increases likely they stay. And so the this is how this is how we approach it um from a turn perspective because if we find out that we put uh 100 people in and 20 people never leave and those 20 people look demographics different than the 80% then we change our messaging we change our offer to better cater to that demographic. And so you were asking the question about you said one of your big things so maybe this will just solve it for Kai but for other people here too. Um, like in the very beginning of gym launch uh we you know I had personal trainers who were interested in making more money. I had health club owners who are interested in making more money. I had studio owners which is slightly different. That's like yoga, pilates, spin. And then we had uh micro gym owners that did like fitness like lifting weights and trying to just basically aesthetic before and after facilities. I served none of the other ones and just that uh demographic because I saw that these people were worth five times more to me than the other customers. And so while the remainder of the market was like, I need to widen and I need to go broader, we got narrower and we made more money because I got to spend all of them for this particular avatar and my profit was absurd. And so if you're like, okay, I've got the people who want to start a YouTube channel and and scale and then I've got somebody who already's halfway there. I'll bet you the halfway there people are way more valuable to you and probably far more successful.

Definitely. Yeah. That's why we're targeting people that have 10,000 subscribers already now.

I think that's a good idea.

Yeah, the big problem was just saying yes to everybody. And that's one of the [ __ ] up things about the school games run.

So yeah, saying no is something we're going to start doing. And then also just like in the in like the VSSL where we get people to book a call, it's just like don't don't book a call if you don't have all of these things. And the main thing is just 10,000 subscribers. Like I got a message today saying hey like you haven't given me any of the things you promised. I looked at his YouTube channel. The last video he posted was five [ __ ] months ago.

Yeah.

Piece of [ __ ].

[ __ ] that.

Yeah. No, but to your point though, um, and so what happens is like first we realized that all of these other who's didn't matter. And then once we got into micro gyms, we still figured out even further from there. We did 8020, you know, a regression again. And the top 20% were people who had uh at least one employee. They had a signed lease that was built out for the location and at least 30 members. And so if they had those three things, then we knew that we could get them this result. And so usually it's one to three things in terms of an avatar. Like you want to have as few as possible that are the the cleanest purest thing. Like if it's just guys who like an anime or whatever and are here, then it's like great, these two things creates my ven diagram. These are my people. And then.

And you have to say no.

Like you can't just say it and then still sell people. And so I mean this is fundamentally what a SQL is a sales qualified lead or an MQL marketing qualified lead is like sales people aren't allowed to sell non-MQLs. So you can't get like if if it's like hey I sold this person. It's like they don't qualify. Why did you sell them? Like getting someone to say yes is not hard if you know how to sell. But like once you have that great power comes the responsibility being like this is not for us. This is not for you because it'll kill your turn. It'll kill your reputation and does all the because that guy's going to be like Kai sucks. And in the short term, you haven't sold that many people, so it doesn't matter. But when you do this for 10 years, it really matters. And so you want to get those people out on the front end, so they never even have the opportunity to turn or charge back or whatever. So that's the demo part, which everybody here look at the top 20% of the most active users you have. Look at what makes them different from everyone else in terms of what they look like, where they're from, what their age is, their gender, profession. And you can chunk up profession. And it could just be like they have a job like like you can you can chunk up or chunk down in terms of how how specific you want to be. And then with the activities is okay this is who they are. What did they do? And so rather than like think of like energy vibe whatever just like what did they do? What can we observe that they did because then we can get them get new people like them to also do it. Does that make sense? Because even the outcomes of like well I have to get them to make a sale. Well a sale is an outcome not what they not an activity right? And so it's like what are the things that led to the sale? If we know that people who make a sale in their first seven days are, you know, five times less likely to turn, for example, that was one of ours with Gym Wash. Um, so we're like, okay, well, what what creates a sale? And so we're like, okay, how can we remove all the friction points from getting somebody their first sale? And so, okay, so we created a play specifically for getting people the first sale so that we get them to the activation point so that then they would stick. Does that make sense?

Alex, do do you think that sits on a continuum like how far down the wedge you get? Like S made a good example about Netflix for instance like that's quite broad. I think about my group it's $50 and we have like so many beautiful people in our group but like if you ask them hey why are you here? We give them like five options and we almost have like an even split. So we have some people who are multi-million dollar business owners that want to have to progress others want to make the first money others want incredible network. One of my I guess questions is is this effectively functioning as a free feeder group and my specific well our specificity comes with a high ticket offer or like I mean how because I'm I'm really passionate about technology and helping people with AI and the automation and it's almost like I'm just showing you incredible things we can do and if that resonates with your particular goals come and join us like one of my thoughts if I go really niche in it um my total serviceable market will shrink massively but do I do that at high ticket because that's like do you know what I'm saying it's like.

Well for the high ticket you can absolutely Absolutely. But so if your big group has let's say a hundred colors in it and you can service 20 of those colors, then the high ticket like the high ticket becomes the upsell, but you'll make a huge amount of money on the high ticket and then you'll think, huh, how could I make my other thing more efficient and just get a dispro? So how can I I'd rather have a group that has 30 people that are the 30 colors I can serve rather than 100 with 20.

Cool. Yeah.

Does that make sense?

Yeah. Like fundamentally everything just comes down to LTB to CAC which is like how cheaply can I get customers and and how can I send like and how can I then jack LTV up as much as possible. So when you go broad CAC drops but so does LTV and so it's a relationship between both of those that creates the profitability of the business. And I think a lot of people go broad too early um because you know the amount of times I've had someone be like I'm at 100 grand a month. I think I've tapped my market. I'm like, "Bro,".

Yeah.

I'm like, "It's a$10 billion industry."

Gosh. Yeah.

Like, just this niche is a 10 billion. Like, I do chiropractors. I think I should do local businesses. I'm like, chiropractors six billion a year. Like, you're make 20 grand a month. Like, what the [ __ ] are we talking about? It's like you just don't run good ads, which is a sep separate problem, but we can solve that, right? So, hopefully that gave a little bit of color there. But yeah, these are the two things in terms of um if you're looking at who like obviously we have all the structural things that we just went over. But all the this is the this is the the inside the platform stuff that we would do when we buy companies to like this is probably one of the highest ROI things I do in every company. I do the first thing I do when I buy is I look at all their customers. I say and I got this from Vista if you know who Vista is. Vista private equity hundred billion dollar thing and I talked to their head of pricing and packaging and he was like do you know how we win? I was like how? He's like this is what we do. We take all their customers. He said, "We try to know their customers better than they do." That's.

It. He's like, "And then we find the channels where those customers come from. We cut the rest of the channels and we 5x that channel." So if these customers were worth five times more than everybody else, and then we just fill up our existing infrastructure capacity so that we don't actually have to incur more cost for the business, and we get, you know, there's one unit's 20%, we add the other four 20% units, but these are worth 5x, then we 5x the company, and that was their whole thesis.

Yeah. So we don't have the data yet because we started with it one month ago.

Sure. So from just your thoughts, if we say someone that has, in our case, 10k subs and makes 10k a month, because we want to sell high ticket, we think it would be better to say we only work with YouTubers that have 10k subs, make 10k a month, and want to get to 50k a month. It would be better than just 10k.

Yeah. And what will end up happening is that if you only service those people, right now your price, your pricing is trying, you're trying to serve like four different avatars. So you're trying to, you're kind of like, uh, this, everyone can kind of do this one, right? But if you're servicing this specific customer, then your price will reflect that premium of being niched down and more specific because you can, in a very real way, provide more value to that person. If you only serve that specific avatar, I'll bet you could provide a lot more value and then you can charge appropriately.

And just before they get 10K, do you send them to a free group that you upsell them once they get there, or do you just say no and that's it? Most people come from the free group already.

And it's fine for people like, again, if you have a free group, it doesn't cost you a lot of operational drag in order to get that. But still, how you promote the free group would still, you'd still want to bring in the right type of people with the messaging you have for whatever the the the name of the group is and with the, you know, the promise of the group.

Right. So you just never talk, like you wouldn't do case studies on zero to whatever because that's going to attract all the people at zero.

And it's interesting for people like that have not of many uh subscribers, not of many people inside of the community when they are ready to make that to do that exercise. It's like a 100 members, like 20 members.

When are they ready to look at this? You mean if they have paid or free?

Uh, just, I mean, free.

Free stuff because you don't know anything. Yeah. Because you haven't asked them to do anything besides just try something. Yeah. Um, you could look at who's most engaged, but that could still be kind of like, you could have, sometimes like really, you know, good business owners aren't the most engaged, but they have the most spending power. So, that can be a little deceiving. But once you make the ask, then I would look at the people who, it's, it's just fractal. It's 80/20. You just look at the top 20%, see what they did.

Okay. In the beginning though, to your point, you say yes to everybody in the beginning. That's normal. So, it's not like you did anything wrong. You say yes to a lot of people because if you found out, you're like, "Dude, I can crush it for these 0 to 10k people." Then, wow, that's an amazing market. And there's a zillion times more of those, and then you go for that. But if you know you're like, no, I'm better at these people, that's who you serve. I just, I, I zero in on where can I provide the the most disproportionate value, like who can I do that for, and I build the business around that.

So you start by accepting anybody to like find who's the perfect, and then when you're ready, once you have some some paid guys, you you zero in on that one.

Yeah. Yeah, you think of it like a like a pinball machine where you're like, you're like bumpers on, like you, you zero in on it like this. It's not like you're going to guess on the first shot because you have no idea when you start. So, do you do anything wrong? Anybody who's watching, did anything wrong?

Can I ask something really quickly? So, I've had this dilemma. So, I've helped people get jobs since, for context. I get graduates their first job. So, I've helped people get jobs in sales, marketing, legal, operations, um, you know, manufacturing, engineering, entry-level jobs. And there's two candidates I had, one from Russia, um, and one from Bangladesh. And they both got two jobs each, leg in, in the legal field. And because it was compliance roles, and I've worked in a KYC compliance role in fintech, and I really enjoyed that process of helping them with the case studies and the interviews. And it happened back to back. But then if I go for just legal graduates looking for a legal analyst to compliance analyst roles, that market is so tiny. But I know I could crush.

Yeah. So I have that dilemma where is that too narrow? I'm a huge believer of like one product, one avatar, one channel, but that might be too narrow. There might be like, I don't know, a thousand legal graduates who are also immigrants that can charge really high.

Number of customers times LTV. So if you have fewer customers, LTV should go up if you're going to narrow down.

Interesting. Could it be like instead of, like Aerotech, which is one of the largest recruiting firms in the US, it's privately held. Let's say like $25 billion company, something like that. Um, and they started just doing, um, they had like two roles they sourced for, and they did that all the way to like a billion in sales a year. So like, it's like legal is also a massive industry.

Yeah. Cuz I just got them legal roles. So this is legal roles in the UK only for immigrants.

Yeah. You just have to adjust the pricing accordingly.

Oh, okay. Because so you went through the offers book, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So you know the niche example that I give. So, it's like,

I'm watching YouTube videos, not the book, but I got your point out.

Okay. Yeah, you should read the book. The book's the best.

I should read the book. I spent 2,000 hours on the book. So, like, it's more than I've spent on YouTube. Um, but like, there's an example that I give where you have time management for, if I have a generic time management course, it's not, I can charge $19 for it. If I can do a time management for salespeople, you could immediately see that being a $200 thing. If I do time management for outbound salespeople, it's not like a $2,000 thing. If I do time management for outbound salespeople who do garden and power tools, then this is like a $10,000 thing. Like, think about how you'd see like, if I like, "Hey guys, if you're an outbound, you know, garden, uh, you do power tools and garden stuff and you do, you're an outbound sales rep. I can help you, you know, double your productivity." I know exactly what that guy makes. He's making $200,000 a year. He's making 5 to 10k a sale.

So, for him, if I get him like one more sale a month, he 10xes his money. It might be the same material. It's just going to be applied to a more specific avatar. So, in a very real way, they will get more value from it. And you, you that gets conferred back to the price because it increases their perceived, it decreases the risk. It increases the perceived likelihood that they're going to achieve what what you promise. Because if I'm a garden and power tools sales rep and this guy is selling to garden and power tools sales reps, I'm going to be pretty sure that he's going to be able to help me do what I what I want to do. And so this is where I think a lot of people get tripped up. It's like, well, if I niche down, then there's no one to sell to. It's like, yeah, 10x your price.

And then expand. Yeah. Then you then you say, "Okay, besides power tools and garden, is there another adjacent?" It's like, "Actually, lawn care is one that I can, I can throw on there, right?" You know what I mean? Like you just, you start. I mean, that's what Facebook did. Started with college students. Well, college students are only this. It's like, yeah, but eventually you scan out. But it's just easier to solve a very specific pro. It's easier to narrow the problem and narrow the person that you're solving it for, especially when you're small on the infrastructure.

Yeah. As you have more infrastructure, you can get, you can have multiple more specialized solutions, but most people like to 10, 10 million a year easily in just focus.

Yeah. On. Make sense. Yeah. You bet.

You think Farhune could do 10M with just international students in the UK getting legal jobs?

Sure. Yeah. He just sets the price appropriately. How the numbers work. So 5K per student.

So I mean, 5K to me is low. If you're like, if you're helping someone get, go from not making any money to getting a legal job that pays what?

40k, 45k, like 60k USD.

Okay. I thought it was higher than that.

That's UK salaries are really bad.

Okay. Got it. No, I thought this was like 150,000 a year type job. So it's not, they're not lawyers.

No, this is, so this is people because it's really hard to get like an SQS solicitor job in the UK. This is legal analyst jobs that they can work for two years and then they qualify for Clifford Chance.

How many people do that every year?

Sorry. How many people do that every year?

I don't know the numbers. It's going to be how many people go for those jobs or how many jobs?

How many people? So, how many graduates who qualify for your service?

So, 700,000 international students graduate every.

Dude, that's so many people.

But then less than that, thousand micro gyms.

Period. Not every year. Period.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And we do a lot more than a million a month. Edible.

Yeah. You're going to narrow it down more. 700,000.

But all of them are legal though. That's every degree.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Understood. Less than 1% would be legal. Yeah. So that's what, 7,000.

Yeah. Or even less than that.

Okay. 7,000. So you have 7,000 potential customers a year.

Um, every year.

Yeah. It's every year, right? They they renew, they refresh, right? They spawn. There's new. They spawn. They spawn. There's 7,000 new spawns per year.

Yeah. Well, again, so reverse engineering this, call it 10k, you need a thousand sales.

So getting, you know, one out of seven to to to buy from you. That feels a little bit of a stretch. Um, and especially given I thought I thought they were getting like $150,000 a year job, not like a 40 or 50,000. Um, so then so so think you can just chunk, right? So it's just legal. So a chunked up version would be professional services. So it might be like, okay, there's legal and then you said sales and like basically it might be two or three of these roles.

Yeah. To get big enough market size.

Exactly. You just chunk it up a little bit.

Just a bit. Yeah, that makes complete sense.

Yeah. That would definitely help. Cheers.

Yeah, you bet. Okay. Um, so we were talking about churn. We talked about structural stuff. I would like to know, so you you I think the the status changing thing at different different levels and then unlocking uh some really sexy things. So you guys know that level threes or level fours don't churn. So it's like how do I put so much [ __ ] at level three that they feel stupid?

One guy who's got 2% churn has lifetime free membership at level seven, which is.

We do have level eight. Yeah, the it's a good point actually because the purpose I think of a lifetime m eight isn't actually for the level fours, five or sixes. It's for the level ones who think it's possible because they don't know. I mean, we'd love to give free to everybody, but they don't know how difficult it is to get to level eight. But it's achievable if you're like engaged enough. And one of the things we try to do is like value stack level two. So, you unlock $1,600 worth of software as soon as you get to level two. And to get there, you just have to do an intro post. One of the things that Adam learned from is a hams group is like on the intro, we used to have it on like one thread, but it's not really conducive for good conversations because it gets like a thousand things long. So, we created a specific tab for that. And then what you find is engagement just goes through the roof because you can say, "Oh, dude, I know that guy. I do a similar thing in some area." And so we just try to all we ever try to do is get them to level two or once they have an intro, they've had like five or six connections with different people and then they're more likely to go on journeys for like a high level.

I do know that level three something happens at level three. I don't know what it is, but they don't churn as much and they tend to stick longer.

Yeah. Um, so if you can get them to level two and three, get as many people to two and three as possible, and then having something strong at seven or eight.

I think those are the levels.

Yeah, those are the levels you want to look at. Seven and eight. Eight is very hard.

I think we only have one person at eight in school community.

No, it's this guy Ryan. Who's has 18 hours a day screen time for for six months? I need to do a health check on that young guy, actually. Yeah, look, he's doing great. He still hasn't earned free school yet, though.

So, yeah, eight is hard. Um, too hard, but seven is. We've got a hand. We let people come to our office when they hit level seven.

Yeah, that's awesome. Visit visit school HQ.

We've got three level sevens within about two months. I think that's normal. We one of the metrics we track is number of fax machines. So, our level one, we're about 54% on that. I don't know if we know the average statistic for level one's not.

Pretty good. I mean, I can pull it, but I don't know it off by hat. That's like school's around for like six months or well obviously longer, but like what we're talking about with that window, but eventually like a year or two years down the line, like people are going to reach that. So you're kind of just incentivizing them to churn eventually, right? Or maybe it's just like, it's okay for those people to do it, but it's increasing.

Sorry, what are you talking about? Like eventually, like a year or two from now, like when people, like we will get more level eights and level sevens, right? Like it will be more common because they've been around that long. So like if you give, if you give away like a free subscription is what.

Yeah, yeah, sorry. I just don't think many people are going to hit eight. Seven, sure, but eight is hard.

But you've earned it. Like the amount of value you had to add to get trouble eight is insane. We have 0% it's just a carrier. The amount, yeah.

You have no one at eight, right? Like.

No one. Cuz I think it's harder to get from seven to eight than it is to go from 0 to 7.

It is. It's way harder.

Yeah. So, it's it's insanely hard.

It's like not even close. You, you, you've earned it because I felt you probably yourself precipitated 10, 20, 30 memberships just by engagement and value gaming system. So, it's definitely worth it. I think so. Defining this into activities like we were talking about earlier is so if level three is the the point where people like they're in. I was thinking, I mean, I was thinking the anime shows because you guys thinking in terms of quests and stuff. But it's like, okay, there are, it takes 22 things for someone to actually get to level three or whatever. Like actually just itemizing what would someone act, what would someone have to do in order to get to level three and just be like, this is your, this is the plan. Has anyone turned posting off until you get to level two? Did you see that feature?

Yeah, no one's turned it on. I've seen it.

I've seen it. But yeah, the whole point of our onboarding calls are to get them to level two and three. So, we would we definitely need it on for level ones.

So, we want them to get that win in the first week, get to level three and build their first automation. That's like our goal for every member in the first week.

We found that really helps the ch. You can get to level three in a week, right?

Oh, yeah. In a day.

Oh, no. You can get there like in in a couple of hours.

Then I think then I feel like if that, if you know that no one really turns at level three and it's always ones and twos, then like to me that is the onboarding. Like if if we're just seeing this across across all these different communities, that that.

You have to turn them from passive to active. Like they've done something. Like, yeah.

Do, do you guys think about school and draw some queries to like Reddit? Because I, I was thinking like there, there are some similarities, right? But in Reddit, you have your lurkers who will sign on every. Yeah. But they will never comment and never engage.

That's just true of the internet.

Most of the internet just watches.

Yeah. Um, the bigger the community, the more watchers there are, lurkers. But in small communities, they are the most active because it's more intimate.

Yeah. Yeah. Getting more people to be active is, we're we're all about that. So if you think of anything.

Does anyone here give visible status symbols to people that either get to a level or accomplish something?

You mean other than just like the number level? And.

So like, so my, my whole, the short version of what I do is I, I teach people how to go lend money and make money, right? So like, whoever gets a deal, I pin them at the top. I usually do a Zoom about the deal, like where it came from, how that, you know, whatever. Gets everybody stoked. But I want something that's like, you know, they get the crown, right? And then when they're talking, it's like, "Oh, that's the dude that got a deal. I should talk to that guy."

Like, it's familiar with your community. So, I think you guys kind of like, the best thing I've heard so far is like, give them a custom profile picture, something with a ring around it that's golden or or something. But I didn't know if anybody had.

The the branding for our levels is also reflected in the custom avatar they get. So, we literally make a transparent background. We put them against it so they're visible. I would love to lean on what Reddit does with custom flares for communities so we can bleed our personality and our energy into like it. So like, yeah, you know, the thumbs up and thumbs down quite like unique to each community. Like that would be an extra level custom. I think that'd be quite cool for us to have cuz that's I, I know, I know that there is in my industry there's people that would like stick around just from those status symbols because it's some cuz like my number one engaged dude, love him to death, but he hasn't done anything. He's too engaged, right? And I have to talk to him and say, "Hey, like stop posting and go do the work." Right? But there's other dudes that are way way less engaged. Well, the reason why they're so less engaged is because they're doing the thing, right? And so I'd love to put crowns on their head like, "Hey, I know you don't know homeboy. The reason you don't know him is cuz he's out there making money." And and I want to elevate him in a way where you can see that. We can, we just give out custom roles kind of like Discord has. Like we have that in our crypto community where we give out custom roles. So it's like this guy's a gem hunter, this guy's something else. And then their their their name has a special color so that, oh, this guy's an authority, he has a green green username.

Just like some sort of customization because I, I can tell you not to not to bash, but Facebook is horrible with it. So like if you put top contributor on Facebook, I found that it ends up just being everybody and so it's like congratulations for being a human.

But if it's something that you can like either do through levels or even manually, like my group's smaller than some of you guys, so I would do it manually, like with the avatars, but I just, yeah, the status, like I came from a group where I got elevated with that style thing and I, it felt really good.

Don't we have the levels?

But but but levels you can't give out manually. People have to earn them. So like let's say this guy makes like 100, like I don't know, some ridiculous amount of money and you have like a bisop offer. This guy may not be a level 10, but you want to sh, like, hey, this guy's a boss. You want to give him that that boss role so everyone knows, oh, this guy made.

But only internally like for that community. So.

Things that happen school that give someone status.

Yeah. And again, the people in my group at least like they know nothing about school. They just came for me. The thing I'm concerned about is there's it might just get too cluttered because there's already the number, right? The level, and then the creators have the different statuses, right? The emojis.

Like.

The same as you've been doing for the creators with the emojis, but then like maybe for.

Within the within the community.

It's almost like a limit like you can only get one emoji. So you don't like you don't turn into goose, right? Where everything is, there's 300 emojis on everything. But it could be like, it's almost like the levels, but just in a different, more personalized sense, you know? So like Ryan's community does, you know, dollar signs, whereas their community does like the dojo things that you guys throw out for emojis. Like it's a different vibe that's custom to us.

I think maybe the cleanest way to do it is just the color of the name.

Yeah, that would that would that would be perfect.

Color the name.

Discord Discord does color and then you can do custom emojis as well. So it's like for us in our crypto group.

Emojis can get out of control though.

But colors, color is perfect because everyone's like, "Oh, this guy's this, this guy's yellow. This guy's the executive. This guy's green. This guy's a gem hunter."

Yeah. There could be an easy first step, like a lower lower barrier to enter. Give them like a gold username or something instead.

Or what if we just use the levels and you could just grant them or something like.

Yeah. I just, I'm thinking not on a level perspective. Yeah, but I don't want to have too many systems, you know, like.

No, yeah, I get it.

Yeah. It would be nice to have like an onboarding like video as well. I know that you talked about that before.

Kind of like the counseling, but.

Like you have an onboarding that explains everything, like like the confetti video popup. Yeah, like right when you join the group. That'd be cool.

Yeah, I forgot about that one. All right.

That was from the first one. Yeah, you came back just to say that. Yeah, he's like, mission accomplished.

But also, Alex, what what do you think about like the forever free? Like, do you like what do you think about that?

I like the carrot. I mean, if it's at eight, like the question is so fun. Like, the nice thing is that there's a math equation for it, so it's solvable, which is just, do I get more people to stay by having this carrot than I lose by the person who gets to that carrot and no longer pays? And I would wager that, especially if it's eight, you'll probably make more money because it's so hard to get to level eight. And if it even, I mean, if it gets people, if it got everybody to stay one more month, you would more than make up the money from the.

Got this guy had one person who got lifetime and 2% churn.

So like, I'm not saying doing this will make your churn 2%, but churn, if you can decrease churn, it's worth a lot of money, probably more than you would give out in free memberships.

You could get a yearly package for free. Like you get it one year. Doesn't have to be forever. I wonder if you could just do free months or something, but maybe that's not strong enough.

I don't think it sounds cool. Doesn't sound as cool. I think it also depends on the size of the group. Like if you've got 50 people versus 1,500.

The levels are completely different.

Would you guys do it for school? If you're level eight.

What? A level eight, they get score for free.

Well, it's kind of different because we're not like running one community. Like I mean, we have the games, we have school community, but honestly, we have too much engagement. We're not looking to incentivize it. There's 100,000 people in there for God's sake. So like we don't want to get more people to post. Um, if we did, then we might do that. Yeah.

And do you think that Riot, for example, helps people stay more school start?

What do you think?

I think maybe. Yeah. Yeah, I'd say so. Having hardcore people that are fully obsessed, I think, helps build a a culture or a community. Like, you know, there's the extreme people in there. Um, I think he helps. Yeah, I talk to him quite a lot.

The gift's hilarious.

Yeah. Gift's hilarious.

Yeah. Yeah. It's funny in that. Yeah.

So, so, so Sam and Alex, we to zoom out. We think about communities over 10 years, for example. Do do we know like anything about the future of people in paid communities that says actually there are people that will both hang around for like 10 years? Cuz I'd much prefer to have people that are here. Like I know people go on to different things eventually, but like what's like the feature of groups over a really long period of time? Like are you going to get people that are lifers or is there a natural cycle of like a Netflix, you have it for a year and a half, you flirt away, maybe go check out Disney Plus, and then you flirt back on over. Like what about like long long long-term like engagement grid?

In, um, quantum, like this master one I had, I had some people pay 36 grand a year for eight years. Two of them. Um, one of them is still Alberto, he's still around using my stuff. Um, he was like high on, he's quite high on the leaderboards actually.

Yeah, so he's still around. Um, so he's at more than 10 years with me. And I think some people stick and some people don't. But you, it takes time for you to understand the people that are real close. Uh, I think small high ticket communities like masterminds can have a lot of longevity.

Right. Um, cuz I had 100 people paying 36 grand a year. I think that's like one of the best communities you can have, by the way. Like, uh, it was, it was only a hundred people. It was small. We met in person. I knew everyone personally, and it, it ran smoothly for a long time.

What was revenue retention on that like annually?

We didn't even calculate it because we only did full pays.

Right. And because we kept it at 100, we always had a waiting list. So provided if some people left, and we had enough on the waiting list, I didn't care. And so it worked really well.

It's never not at 100 and you didn't need to promote it.

Well, sometimes I had to send an email.

Like maybe five a year.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, but that was about it.

Yeah. H. Got it. But who ended up in that was everyone who had my biggest fans who had bought from me since the beginning because I used to, I started selling things at like 500 bucks, like one-off courses, like a long time ago. And then, you know, I as I got better, I started charging higher prices and offering more intimate things, and people just came with me on that journey. And if you help them in the higher ticket thing and they make more, then you can charge for something even higher ticket, and then you help them make more. Then you eventually get to the mastermind. My mastermind started at 12 grand a year. It went 12, 18, 24, 36, and then I just held it at 36. But instead of offering split monthly payments, I just made it annual, um, and then capped it at 100. And that was, I swear that would be, that's the easiest money. Like the, I, I could have run that business on four or five hours a week, and the costs in that for like 3.6 million in revenue, our cost would have been 3400 grand. Um, that would be the ultimate lifestyle business.

What's the key value differentiator between like say a mastermind you ran versus like a school community? You know, like what are the big differences? What's that?

Live events. We got everyone together in person, like three times a year. That's it. Like they knew another event was coming, and we got to hang out together, and they got results. Like, and and no one was allowed to join unless they were making at least 20 grand a month. So that there was a high barrier to entry because I didn't want some noob like panicking at the live event because I'm like, it ruins the whole experience for me and everyone else. Everyone's like, "Am I in the right place for this dude's freaking out? He can't pay his rent."

Do you do things in between those live events?

Pardon? Yeah. Did you do.

I did a weekly Q&A call, one a week, and I alternated it. I did one in the morning and then one in the afternoon each week to cover the international time zones. Um, but I only did one a week. It was on Zoom, and I recorded it and posted the recording. And then we did events every 90 days. They were three-day events in person, and I recorded those too and posted the recordings. The recordings are super important because when people are like deciding to buy, they will strategically buy just before the next event. But if you have recordings, they'll just buy anytime. And then if people miss the live events and there's no recordings, they get that feeling like they're not getting what they're paying for. So that also helps too. It also allows people to catch up real fast. You get someone to join, they watch the last event, and they're onboarded. Bam. Now they're up to speed. And that was it. It was in a school community. It had a weekly Q&A call with recordings, a three-day event every 90 days with recordings. And that was it. 36 grand, 100 people.

And Alberto, that stayed for eight years, he only watched the recordings, right? He didn't even join many live events. He said.

In the end, he was definitely at a lot of live events. But towards the end, he would just catch the recordings. That that was the interesting thing about recordings. I swore I called these people sleepers. I was like, I'm sure that guy's going to cancel the next year. Never does. Like, why the [ __ ] are some people, I never see them on the Q&A. I never see them in the community. They don't come to the events, but they keep renewing at 36 grand. They were all watching the recordings.

The recordings are super valuable.

And they got their nuggets.

10 times more people watch Mosy's weekly call recording than attend live. 10. 10 times.

I'm amazed by that. As a side note. The recordings are really important. It's like a private podcast. People just want to keep up with their community, right? And like someone generally asked the question they've got. It works quite well.

I want to highlight two things that Sam was saying. One is that you'll notice that the delivery of it was super simple. And so it's easy to like, if it's just because basically we have always, we, I mean, I think I speak for most of us, like we have this insecurity of like, I want to make sure I'm providing enough value. But this is what we do all day, every day, full-time. And the customer has like their own life. And if our full-time effort is way too overwhelming for them, and so often times it's how, how easily, how easy is it for you to explain the offer you have, and also how easy is it for them to actually consume the offer you have. And so it's like, I mean, if you even think about the school games, it's like we have one call a week, we have this thing that downloads once a month, and then there's the, there's the 48 minute step-by-step instruction, you know, how to start the school games thing.

And I know I look forward to it. Like I know when those one day come come out, and I like I binge it.

Okay, that's awesome. So good to know. But like that's it. But like simple delivery, like that's it. And then, um, I would say that the second part is the who is that like you couldn't you couldn't join if you were, you know, making, you had zero subscribers and you had posted in 5 months, right? So it's like making sure that you pick the right who. And for the, and the thing is, the more qualified the the customer, the less they actually ask of you. I mean, this has just been, I mean, everyone's seen this. Like they don't ask for a lot because people who have more skills can get more value from less, right? If you have no skills, you can give someone all the value in the world, but they can't even read. So, okay, now where do we go? Right? Like the, the more skills you have, the more value you can get from anything.

I think in this industry, working up to the high ticket mastermind like that is the ultimate thing to get to. It's so easy to run. Like, you know, there was maybe three new posts a day in the community. Like, forget moderating and stuff, it's just chill. Yeah. And I would rock up to the events and I would say, "I'm not gonna give you some lecture. I have nothing prepared." Um, I would say, "We're here to help you get what you want. Like, what problems do you guys have?" And we just go around the room and every, and it would be people would tell me afterwards, they'd be like, I'm in these other masterminds and it's just the speaker circuit, the same speakers getting invited to give the same keynote presentation up on a stage with an AV system, and everyone's just sitting there taking notes, confused because everyone's offering conflicting information, and it's like a concert instead of people actually connecting with each other. And I noticed a lot of guys in my mastermind thought they needed to put on this luxury event. I had a food truck turn up. It cost like a,000 bucks to cater, and I did it at my office. Um, so I didn't even have to book a hotel. People don't care about the frills and the fanciness. Um, they just, I, the way I thought about it is, these, if they make more money than they pay me, they'll stay.

Yeah. And that was basically true. Um, and it's very important who quality control. That was the other thing I learned. I, you know, sales guys would twist some people's arms to let people in, and one of those people would do a panic thing at the event, like about not paying rent or just some crazy [ __ ]. Um, and then that would create churn. And it wasn't worth it. Like this one person ruined it. And plus, I started to hate it. So I'd be like, "Oh, I've got that call coming up. I'm going to see that [ __ ] guy's face." Like, so then I got more ruthless and I was like, I'd just say to I was like, "That guy and that guy, refund them. Get them the [ __ ] out of here now." Um, and then I said, "Now you guys need approval from me in writing before you sell someone. So get someone ready to pay everything and then send me a summary. I want to know these things and I'll say approved or not because I'm like, if I don't want to do it, then it's going to suck and then the churn will be high and and all of that. Um, so in the, you're working up to a high ticket small intimate group of like people that are hardcore. That's what I used to say. It's for hardcore people. Um, people that want to nerd out about all of the details of this craft. Um, that was awesome. Honestly, like I only stopped doing that because I needed to focus on school. But what's cool is even at the end of that, I said, "Hey, I'm building this thing called school. I need some money to fund it." They gave me, they invested 5 million. Same group. So they funded school. They funded your life and school.

Yeah. So like they funded everything and now they're all on school. They're all like some of the biggest users and the biggest affiliates. So they're like still supporting me and in my life and stuff.

Like Charlie Morgan as well.

Yeah. Yeah. Charlie Morgan was one of them. Eman Gardsy's been through there. Alex Becker, like.

Andrew Garby as well.

Yeah. A lot of people I hired came from there. A lot of friends. Yeah.

I'd like to add to this, uh, center. Go for it. I was going to wait until we had the shorts offer, but I think this is applicable. Basically, um, we've had many, I would say 10, 15 verified multi-millionaires join my academy. And I just never felt like I could give them the actual like one-on-one value because it's like people who are paying like 380 a month, but who are like, that's like their like a quarter of their monthly wage, you know? So I can't like spend all the time on those bigger your figures. But when I realized that I was able to express that amount of authority to these people, I started to like shift my focus and I thought, "Okay, well, I should, it's probably better if I focus on like these bigger people." Like just two days ago or three days ago, someone I look up to, baby Fogerty, he, I don't know if you guys know him, like the founder of Udy, it's like a big Australian bad brand, like 500 million brand, he reached out to me like commending me on my videos. And I feel like, like I know that I could deliver value to people who are ahead of the game than I am, but just with their content strategy. I just need help refining what exactly that offer is. And yeah, I guess my question is just like, given the leverages that I have, how can I position myself in that way? Like, I mean, winning the school games is a, I mean, I believe like the offer is built upon like the proof you have, the authority that you can present, and you can lie and say I can do everything in the world for you, but if you don't have like the evidence to show for it, part of the evidence I have to show for it is like, it's not as much as I'd like, but I feel like people have picked up on the fact that this guy probably knows what he's talking about, just from the evidence. So what is like the highest ticket item that I could offer to these people who are looking to who are inspired by like my content strategy, my way of thinking with content, whether it's short form, it was originally just short form, but like we created a YouTube video promoting school and it got 150,000 views, and now I'm thinking maybe I could do YouTube as well. If because you guys understand the game a lot better. In what area do you believe someone could come? What's the hungriest market with content creation with acquisition for like?

Well, first off, I think you're selling from your own wallet. So, everybody who has helped me with my content makes less money than me. So, I would get out of the thought of like, I have to make more money than this person in general to help them with their content. It's like, I just wasn't doing content at all. So, I had no knowledge of it. And so, the right, the right avatar is going to be like, "Yeah, I'm happy to pay to speed up my learning curve." And fundamentally, what you're selling is time. It's like, I don't want to spend three years figuring this out if I can figure it out with you in six months. And the wealthiest people, that is always going to be the thing that they want to buy, which is time. Either pulling their results forward or just literal time saved of work that they don't have to do. And so, I, I mean, that, you know, the vectors of value, right? You've got good, fast, cheap, right? Like, you've got the value equation, and then you've got the risk associated with the purchase, which is just how likely is it that this person can help me. And so if you're, you're like, I have this community, but I help a handful of people who are, you know, really, really want to be hardcore about their content and make it as a new acquisition channel. This is a lot like what Kai's doing, um, with YouTube. Then I mean, the amount you can charge is proportional not to you, but to them. It's how much money can you make them.

Yeah, I think I know what you're saying. Like, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but you could offer like one-on-one client service to the bigger people, right? If they're interested, cuz they're probably not going to buy a lower ticket community and learn that way. They just want to pay. Do you know what I mean? But then, and then you can use the fact that you've helped these big names as leverage to get the the smaller time people to join your community because they can't pay that fee. So you're like, I'm going to teach the same things that I taught this guy who makes $500 million a year. He paid me this much money to teach him these things. I'm going to give you the same information, but it's only going to be like, how much is your thing? 200.

It started like 250. Now it's 380.

Yeah. So for 380 bucks, I'm going to give you the same thing. Do you see how that works? So you, you still get to test your methods here in a live environment so you can sharpen your skills and be more talented, and you can use their names as leverage to make this offer more valuable. And then you can juxtapose the like, or contrast the, um, the prices. You can pay this, or you can pay this, right?

One of the problems I had was because I guess it.

was with the like the acquisition of YouTube because I thought that well if I was to go down that angle, all of my YouTube videos should just be specifically catered to those people. Like all of my YouTube.

No, I don't think so because I don't think they watch YouTube or or YouTube videos about making YouTube videos, right? Like they just noticed you because you were good at YouTube. They're smart enough to see that you're just good at YouTube and that means you're good at YouTube. You don't have to also be making videos about how to be good at YouTube. Do you see what I'm saying?

So, just by targeting that like that broader community, they'd be able to see me through it.

Well, how are they finding you right now? They just see you're good at YouTube. Like Mr. Beast is good at YouTube, right? Like I think that makes sense. Yeah, you might kill it if you actually start changing your content and talking about YouTube. Yeah, because how many big YouTube channels talk about YouTube? I think Mr. Beast's Guys YouTube channel has maybe like 200k subs or something.

There are channels like that. Yeah, there's like Vid IQ. They have like 1 million subs. So, there are several ones called have Yeah, they have big channels. But they're more like creator news, not specific how to make YouTube videos, right?

Yeah. Those ones always have like less than 100.

Yeah. The more those ones don't get massive actually cuz they're too specific.

Cuz what people are actually doing is looking who's good at YouTube and looking at like what they do.

Yeah. So if I could clarify, our actual offer is to teach people how to sell products and services using short format content. And so I don't know if that specifically alters your outlook towards our strategy moving forward. We use YouTube as the main marketing channel, but our value proposition is to teach people how to create organic content to be able to sell the service.

I don't think it matters what the thing is that you're selling. It's the the mechanisms are the same. Like you if you want to work with higher ticket people that's more of a service versus but you can leverage that to sell your product at a lower ticket price right it doesn't matter what it's on or who it's for those things still work but did that actually answer your question.

Yeah, it did. Like I can give an example just to clarify like Charlie Morgan for example I feel like his videos on YouTube are catered more towards people who actually know like who are a bit more advanced.

Yeah.

Whereas my videos are catered towards I mean they're they're meant to be catered towards people who just want to create content. Like there's more of a beginner focus. At least that was what my intention was. And I just thought that the way of like acquiring the customer would change if they were higher ticket. I felt that it would mean that I would honestly I feel that it meant I would have to abandon what I'm doing right now completely or like try to systematize it and just go all in on a much higher ticket item that's specifically like targeting those people which I don't have a ton of experience in at all. So that's where my.

To be clear, you can. It's just that there's risk associated with any change and if what you're currently doing is working, then you would just do more of what you're currently doing and then allow the the siphon of people to come up the top.

Does that make sense?

How would I do that to get those?

No, like what you already have it like you have these multi-millionaire whatevers who are coming in off of just the stuff you're already making and then you just have an offer for them. I mean fundamentally that's it. It's just like you lack an offer, but you have the people there and so you can just make the offer for them and then double down on the advertising that's currently working. If you find out that 95% of your revenue is coming from this other thing, then where your attention is going to go is probably going to shift. Um, and then long term that can, you know, become its own thing. But in terms of like immediate, you just do more what you're currently doing and give an offer to those people. It just becomes a backend, becomes an ascension. It's like Sam was selling consulting.com which was you know the course for gazillions of people that were newbies but then some people did the stuff and then moved up and there was probably also some people who had businesses who bought it anyways just cuz they heard it was a good product and then just immediately ascended. Also for for content what you can do is make stuff that would be valuable for high level people too but like is doing it scale it and make it simpler like so it's available for everyone else too like Alex's stuff is valuable for people that are making millions but even a beginner can consume it so you can look at uh at least highlevel people give them the information that would be the most avail valuable for them but you kind of simplify Right. So yeah, it can also be helpful for others. That way you attract the high level people and also.

Alex, did you start off really niche or do you start off broad? Cuz aren't we supposed to start really niche and then.

Well, my first content was called my podcast called Gym Secrets.

Boom.

So yeah, I mean I'm a fan of being narrow and personally. And just on that, cuz I know for a fact that um if you go to a top 20 university in the UK, you're going to get more interviews and the more interviews you're going to get, the faster you're going to get a job. So our dilemma is I know for a fact which students are more likely to get a job. How do I narrow down like how do I say don't apply if you go to a bad university without backlash? Because then they're like, "Oh, this guy only targets like the the King's College or the Imperial College London graduates." And then I can imagine especially with South Asians, they're just going to hate.

South Asians.

So how do I avoid the hate from you just saying no to 90% of my audience? Because most of the people who are engaging with my content, they don't really go to top universities.

Sorry.

And the majority of people not afford it.

They could afford it, but they're less likely to get a job.

So I know the people who are going to get a job, which is probably 1% just be the university they went to. It is a huge factor because then better universities have higher fees. Higher fees meant they probably the parents can afford it. They also went to a good school back in India or Pakistan. So it goes a long way when if they just take out a loan just to go to a crappy university in England and there's a whole systematic problem there where like.

What about the actual skill?

So the the biggest problem is communication that they have. They can't communicate what and when they're.

So that's how you should disqualify then cuz if you say the university one it's kind of triggering and not true.

Ah.

So we should so so I say oh don't apply if you are a bad communicator or.

Or like.

If you don't have good communication skills you might not actually be able to get a job. Well, the downell there is like like go affiliate a product that helps him speak English.

That's a good product for you to sell. How to communicate to get a job.

Yeah. Dad has a joke that we should do like an accent removal class and I've been so scared of doing that. I want to.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

Really? How do I market that in a.

What do people get upset about?

Like you're saying action removal implies that your accent is bad.

Or maybe that's.

It wrong, man. Call it communication.

Yeah. Yeah.

Communication.

You want to trigger everyone?

Professional English. Professional English.

Professional English. Yeah.

And then if you speak this way, it increases the likelihood you get a job. I don't care whether you call it good or bad. It increases the likelihood that you get a job. That's it. Fight me.

Professional English communication costs.

Sure. Yeah. I I think Sam's process of just kind of breaking it down to like two steps is like you had a you had a a surface level thing, but it was actually a correlate with the real thing, which is that they don't know how to speak English that well.

That's the biggest problem.

And so then make that the thing, not the the symptom. That makes sense.

That kind of goes for like the stuff that we're talking about like when you figure out what the avatar is. It's like try and get to the root.

Because then you can actually fix it because you can't fix their university but you can fix that the fact that they don't speak English.

Right. That's available we can change.

I may um so just holistically speaking say hypothetically we've already got this existing offer and this could apply to everyone over here the high ticket item is just uh it comes back down to either decreasing the amount of time more time investment or I'd like to just get some more clarity in relation to you have the outcome. I mean, you've seen the value equation, right? So, you have their dream outcome and you need to like that's where you talk to them and say, "What do you want to have happen?" And then once you get pretty clear on what they all think they want to have happen, then that gets closer to what the promise is. And then the other three variables are how do I decrease the risk associated? How do I make it faster? And how do I make it easier? And then that's really just reverse engineering friction. What are all the things that they have to start doing that they don't want to do? What are all the things they have to stop doing that they wish they could keep doing? and let me prevent both of those things from occurring. And then how do I drag something that normally takes six months into six weeks? And can I give them milestones along the way that get them rewarded sooner so they know that they're on on the right path? Now, for a lot of those people, they're going to just want you to do a lot of the work for them. And so, you just have to do as much as possible because if they're going to pay you a big ticket amount, it's because they assume that you're going to do a certain amount of work. But I think explaining to them that they also need to learn a certain amount if they want this to be sustainable. Um, then you can include that in the offer.

Yeah. The people that have money will pay more to save time and the people that don't have money will pay time to save money.

Yeah.

So that's how the two things work. Like you can sell both and they strengthen each other in a way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You use the currency you value least. I just thought of another thing about retention that we tried ourselves with school games. So, another thing that can be helpful in the welcome video or the onboarding video, whatever you want to call it, is show people how they can save the price of your group real fast. So, you know, a dollar saved is a dollar earned, right? If your thing is a hundred bucks, find out how they can save a hundred bucks.

Yeah. Now it's free in a way that that actually worked. People, if you read the post, the comments that Horoszi said that on, people are like, "Oh, I just canceled Kajjabi and this and that. I saved $300, right?" And I checked and they're still paying school. So like it's I think that actually works. It's something real subtle actually. And yeah, there's always a way to save some money. If you look at the post did, I think it's actually pinned in the classroom of the school games in the first module. It if you just find it, you can see how he worded it. He said like download your bank statement, go through there, get rid of some things you don't need, save that. Um, that can be a quick win.

You can copy and paste it.

If you think about it, it's the quickest win you can get someone.

Yeah.

Because you actually make them that much money without them actually selling anything. And it's hard to sell something. It's easy to just cancel something.

That's actually my theory for why Dave Ramsey has been able to be a guru and never been put in the same class as gurus because no one can argue that a dollar saved is a dollar earned. And they're already making money in some way. Whereas everything that's about helping you increase how much you make. There's risk associated. You might not work. You might not learn the skill, but like if you stop spending money, you will have more left over. Like no one can argue with the claim that he has. And so I think that's how he's been able to just get as big as he has without that much hate because you can't really argue with the outcome that he has or that he promises.

One one other thing I just want to hit on with the churn um and this feels like there was very churn churn theme morning which I think is still good because it's obviously it was the most repeated thing out of everyone here. Um is that there's no silver bullets with churn. Like if I if I can tell you one thing of all the stuff that we've done with trying to tackle churn, it's it's golden BB's. It's time a bunch of little it's like the cancellation flow, adding the onboarding, doing it in cohorts, um putting the unlockables, giving people status at each level, um adding annual in for uh revenue, like all of these things. Adding a quest, for example, for the uh for how do you get someone to level three in 24 hours? It's like, okay, your quest, should you choose to accept it, is that you get to level three in the next 24 hours. And it's like, that's what you have to do. And that might be even be like it might even be able to do a 24-hour onboarding call. It's like we're going to have two calls. One now and in 24 hours I'm going to come back and you're going to be on this call and if you're not at level three I hate you. You just have a balance of shame and just like call them up. Um, but I think I mean we just that was like seven things that are all that all can materially reduce turn and a lot of them it's just like you catch people it's like one or two one or two% here one or two% here one or two% here and that's how you really reduce turn. It's not going to be like this one magic thing. Adding the lifetime for level eight, it's like that keeps another few people. And so you just chip away and just keep adding month after month after month to the average LTV and then that's how it stacks. And then on the front end, you can get more aggressive with the um acquisition.

For that kind of retention. Do you have any like benchmarks on how much you reinvest into say like a community for example like masterminds or like if it's like hiring coaches or something like is there certain benchmarks percents that you reinvest back into specifically like service delivery?

No.

I think that's the wrong way to look at it.

Like I must commit 20% of of revenue to so I'm going to hire some coaches. Like did anyone ask for that?

Right. You can make things worse by adding.

Most of the time. Like I I really if I can.

Say shake this in the camera like the I think I I think I might have told the story to a guy. Anyway, friend of mine had a $500,000 month newsletter.

Um and I got on the phone with him. I was like, "Hey, you know, what did you do to keep your, you know, newsletter turn down?" He's like, "Well, I can tell you all the things I did that didn't work." and and he's like when it turn was the lowest is when I did one Q&A call a month and I just stayed on until everyone's questions were answered and they got one really long written printed newsletter per month. That was it. And he was charging I think 400 bucks a month for his thing. He was a high level marketer and I was like okay what did you do after that? Like I went from calls once a month to calls once a week then twice a week and then I had Facebook Fridays and then I added in all these other things and everything I added churn increased. So there's there's a lot of wisdom in in deletion is like how few things do I need to provide because like fundamentally I think about like if someone just consume this one thing it pays for everything. It's like just make that one thing really [ __ ] good rather than like I have six things I now have to deliver on like if they just consumed one that was exceptional they would they would stick. Like if that newsletter that he was sending which was you know really good if any highle mark and that's demographics thing he was going to other high level marketers. So they're like if I get one thing a year from this guy I'll make more than five grand back. Like they didn't give a [ __ ].

Um, and so that, you know, that is part of it, but just to give context on like how few things are required to help me get them to their result and how do I make those more efficient, faster, easier. Like I'll tell you that gym launch in terms of the stuff that we um had people go through, I mean I think it's on its ninth or 10th um like version of it now and every version gets shorter. It's how can we have them go through less because the number one issue that people cancel from from school is overwhelm. So, it's like if that's the number one problem, then why do we solve it by giving them more overwhelm?

Like we do daily calls for free immediately when you join. Literally Monday through Saturday and then it's a live stream on Sunday. Not a ton of people join, but some people definitely do.

How many?

15 20.

Yeah, sometimes it's like 20 maybe.

Yeah, but it's not too many.

So, like would you recommend like increasing the friction for that? maybe have a level for it and have.

And you you're not recording, I'm guessing, cuz there's so many.

There we go.

And then you post the recordings.

Holy [ __ ].

How many people watch the videos?

Uh, I don't think it's a lot.

Have you looked?

No.

Look.

Yeah.

Cuz that'll probably be the giveaway, right? Because I know with ours like we get like 250ish live.

And 2 and a half thousand to 3,000 watch recording but when we had a higher frequency we got less less.

And it's got to well this is my view I I don't you I mean you could test it right but it should be consumable and like you should be able to remember the frequency like oh every Monday there's this. It's like if you like TV, you remember when your favorite show was every Tuesday or something?

Um, you know it's coming out like Game of Thrones or something.

Yeah. That's like when the next Q&A is going to drop. Oh, once a month you get the one day recordings. It's and you know you can continue to consume that and stay up to date.

Yeah.

That's my view. I mean, you should test making it. You should test for a little bit like doing one a week and recording it and making more of a big deal about the recording like the post.

Yeah, I'll nuance that. Um, because gym launch we did every day and I think we still do every day. Um, and I think it depends on what what purpose the call serves. And so if the purpose of the call is to like provide value then I think the more infrequently the better because then it's it's more distilled etc. The point for gym launch was to provide support. And so it was like basically what they what the sales team would sell was you could talk to Alex every day. And they're like really like you can talk to him every day. You can hop on the call every single day if you have a problem. So if you have a problem on Monday, you can literally get it solved the same day. And if you don't have any problem for two or three more days, no big deal. But you just know it's always there. And so people, it's like the longest you have to wait to get Alex's specific attention to your problem is 24 hours. And that's if you just figure out your problem the moment the call ends. That's what we did as well. Exactly. So, I replicated what Max did in daily Q&A calls and not exactly they're getting I I like them, but some of them I don't like. So, the ones on Friday it's really good people, but the ones on Monday are not really good people. Um, well, not that they're bad, but the questions are like very.

It's an accent thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The questions aren't the questions aren't interesting. So, do you think you recommend I do less of them, like three of them, but I give so much value. I'm on my whiteboard and I just condensed like eight years of learnings into like one or two hours.

If you're doing that then I would say go less frequently.

That's not a Q&A call.

Yeah, that's there's no Q.

That's a lecture.

Yeah, that's a Yeah.

Cuz you ask me questions.

It's just A's. No.

That's the thing. I feel like I'm repeating myself again and again every.

That's what Q&A's are. Like.

Yeah.

That'll never change by the way.

Yeah.

You're still going to tell people to like do the work.

Yeah. In 20 years.

But the voice feature would be cool for that because then you can just show up for an hour every day and you just do the voice thing and then you do the Q&A like once per week.

And you record it.

Yeah.

Yeah. I don't think there's one size fits all with what we're talking about here. Like with Horosi it's more like you get to ask Hoszi questions once a week and there's a recording. But what you might be offering is more support and people know they can get it every day. So they're kind of different. They have like little technical issues and [ __ ] like I mean because I mean with gym owners the biggest issue is they can't do technology at all and so I would have so when I had my calls I would be able to get them on the call because at least like me being the bait they would come on the call they'd ask their question but I would have my sales sales team would attend the call and I mean this is at scale I had a lot of people and then I'd have um my my tech support team would be on the call and so as soon as someone would be like hey I'm having this problem if it was a strategy or a pricing or sales thing then I would like I and solve it. But if someone's like, "Man, like I just crushed, you know, my thing and I just made 30,000 last month." I'll be like, "Woo!" And then my sales team would just ping them and upsell them like immediately. Just rip them off the call. Seriously, that's what we do.

Do you know what I would do next?

And then tech would be the same thing. Someone's like, "I'm really struggling to get this pixel." It's like, "Hey, let's solve this right now. Sarah, you on?" She's like, "Yeah." I'm like, "All right, help Dan out. Dan, hop on. I'll see you tomorrow. Let me know if it got resolved." And then that was it. And then they they were off the call. And so that way I could just like direct traffic. That's I did this because I didn't want to I didn't want to scale a big coaching team. I was like, I'll just do it. I don't care. I'm willing to do lots of pain and suffering, so it doesn't really matter. And I figure I get more reps and I get better at teaching people. And I think I did. I think it's shown what I can do now. I've just taken a shitload of Q&As's. Sorry, you were you were going to say something.

Yeah. I think for you, like I'd keep this daily support call, but maybe call it like that. And I don't think you really need to record it. First of all, see how many people are watching the recordings. But if you're pumping out recordings every day, that's overwhelming.

Should we Should we gamify that?

No. I I think don't even do recordings cuz they're support calls.

No, just like the calls in general, like the people that can show up have to be.

I would do a monthly town hall then, which is different. That one should be recorded. And that one is where you're updating your community.

Like an inner circle or whatever you do a month.

Or everything you've learned like kind of what we're doing here. Everything we learned in the past 30 days. Like all of that stuff I was talking about churn. It's because I've been looking at churn for the last 30 days.

Yeah.

So, I'm sharing everything I've learned since I was last here.

And onetime course purchase is new. And so, it's like here's a couple different ways that you can use it to, you know, boost up. It's like that's new. It wasn't here last month.

That one should be recorded and that one is the like the value thing but once a month. But then the daily things could just be support which aren't recorded. Do you know what I Maybe things could be free.

Sorry. No, no, you go.

So, I'll I'll tell you what we did in terms of the value just to give you guys some ideas is that every every other week, we would do an R&D release. Uh, which is basically like we would test one thing. So, it'd be like, we're going to test this headline change or we're going to test this about page structure. We're going to test this pricing thing or this onboarding structure with because you have all these school communities, right? So, you can run these tests. And so, and I would usually spend money because if it was like an ads test, I'd be like, "Hey guys, I dropped 50 grand across 10 locations in different markets with different ads. Um, I'm giving you the I'm giving you which ads are working and what's working right now for this particular thing." And that would be the release for that that 14-day cadence. And then the next 14 days um would be the same type of thing, but usually like a more conceptual top like one is like data that we collected that we shared. The other one was like a teaching thing. And that was the two like meaty longer I had slides I'd present whereas the daily calls were just like what do you need?

Would you still like put that behind like have that as a care?

Well, I just remembered what the dude with 2% churn does.

Um I Yeah. He does a monthly live event like not in person like online which is like where he shares a lot of stuff and then it's live, right? And he records it, but he he only gives the recording to people at level three.

Yeah. Oh, nice.

Yeah. So, he has it's like it forces people to show up live or it forces them to engage. And you want both, right?

Really good.

And he said he doesn't leave too many things unlocking at level three. It's only the latest event. So, he moves the old event out so it's always kind of like fresh and not overwhelming. Yeah, this dude's really good. German guy.

The artist.

Yeah, Hollywood, right?

Yeah. Calvin Hollywood. Yeah.

Um.

Everyone's going to join his group now for $15 a month.

He's got a lot.

He's He's figured out a lot of stuff.

And he's doing the free level eight as well in 2% churn.

Yeah.

For.

And he's at 99 a month. So like decent ticket price. Yeah. So 2% churn for context is 50x the price is what their LTV is.

Like.

So 100 bucks times 20 is a 2k LTV.

800.

And so if you think about that from a paid ads perspective, right? Because I know you run ads. It's like, well [ __ ] if I can acquire customers for $200 and I've got a 2K LTV, you can just stack.

If I may, Sam, do you have any data? Obviously, this is respected to the service offering that you're providing, but in general, just based on the data that you've seen, at what price point do people churn off? Like what's the ideal specific price points that you've kind of seen across and at what point do you see churn increasing?

Well, there's obviously like outliers, right? There's some people that have I mean the guy who has the highest price and the lowest churn was here last time. Kyle.

Oh, yeah. Does he?

Yeah.

Oh, good for him.

He's 999 and actually has churn that looks like it's 99.

Yeah. So he he's the outlier in the high ticket space. Um, but in general I would say the cheaper the price the the lower the churn. Um, eight like you know up to 15 bucks has just across the board the best retention. But the steepest drop off is after 250. So you there's still some groups that have decent retention and they're in the 100s to 250. The 999s are generally not very good, but often because they were only designed to win the school games. So like it was a like one hit wonder. Like that was your strategy.

Work honeywas. Short term.

Yeah. That's why we introduced the alltime leaderboards.

Just for you.

Yeah.

Um, you need to get your status back.

Yeah. Um, but I wouldn't look at that exclusively as why you should choose your price. You should choose your price because it makes sense, not because you think it's going to get lower churn.

That was what I was going to just It's like it so wildly depends on what you're offering.

Yeah. Some of the feedback we get is that our price is very cheap. So, we feel like value price discrepancies, right? But we we had a check. We The way we think about the price, good to get your perspective on this is like we review it monthly. We think about it every month. But since we're on this mission to 10,000, I think the number of people that pay $50 is a lot greater than if we start to to slide it up to around the $100 mark. And so we kind of are trying to sit a bit more and like just make it unbelievably epic value. But there's probably some science we could do on the graph that says, hey, actually like 67 or 87. So I don't know your thoughts on like if we're getting feedback that we're cheap, is that saying, bro, you okay, you need to sit down and just start increasing the price? Make it a revenue goal rather than a member goal.

Because you have to figure out what you're because that's you're you're trying to solve uh a member problem with a pricing thing which has nothing to do with the me like if you want to do to get 10,000 members then drop it to a buck.

Yeah.

I'm just saying if you want to play out the hypothetical extreme, right?

Sure. Sure. Sure.

So then that's not the right goal.

The way that you're trying to sol you're trying to you look at price every month because you have a 10,000 member goal. Well then drop it because you'll get the goal faster which means it's the wrong goal.

Yeah, that's very well said. Yeah, that's true.

So, maybe it's a $500,000 month goal, in which case, okay, now we can solve for $500,000 a month, which is just you look at price, you look at churn, and then you have an LTV number, and that's it. And for those of you who don't know how to do this, you divide the price by your turn equals LTV. That's it. So 10% churn on 100 bucks is $1,000 LTV.

Mhm.

And then if you want to figure out how to get to 10,000, right? Um, that's or sorry the 500,000. Then you just look at sales velocity. So that's so let's just use the thousand the the hundred bucks 10 10% churn thousand example. It means that you have to get to a point where you can sell 500 units a month. When you sell 500 units a month, you will you will stabilize and you'll plateau at 500k. That's it. Like that's the math. And it'll it'll it'll be asymptotic. it'll it'll slow your approach will slow down as you get closer to that hypothetical max. And so either and to grow past 500, you either have to increase LTV or increase sales velocity. That's it. And so the nice thing is that with a churn of 10%, it doesn't actually really matter what the churn is. You just know what LTV is and how many units of LTV you sell per month. So if you have 5% churn or 10% churn but LTV is the so if you if you cut the price from 50 to 25 and churn is um 5% at 25 and it's 10% at 50 then LTV is the same but which would you rather have? You might be able to sell twice as many units at 25. So then you'd still have a higher hypothetical max and that's how you do that.

Yeah. I I guess we're always contending with lag. Like for example, we can't ever get a firm hold on lifetime value unless you've been there for like x amount of months, right? So we're kind of I guess like there's a bit of science.

No, you can do I mean know you can extrapolate churn. So churn when you go price divided by churn is gives you a hypothetical LTV into the future.

So if you're one month in and you had 100 and you have 90 is 10% churn. You don't have to wait. You just know you have 10% churn which means customers on average based on this are worth whatever divided by 10.

Yeah. No that's true. And I think it's a really good that like you said actually member goal versus income goals it's better way to think about it because then that brings in the high ticket conversation into the frying whereas like that's just purely like.

Yeah because if 10,000 is the goal it's like making a buck.

Yeah. Hopefully get out there. Yeah.

Right. So yeah cool. All right. I think we talked about churn.

Okay. Fantastic.

Was that helpful for churn?

Yes.

Yeah. That was a pretty big bullet. I feel like there was like nine things um that were churn helpers. Should we do lunch?

Yeah. What time is it?

12:00.

D is food there.

Is food is food is there? Yeah. So food in there and then you guys can come back here, I think is what we said.

Yeah. So grab food, come back, hang. It's just like we're going to chill for a little bit and then we'll kick back off.

So we covered Avatar, too. We covered that one a little bit.

Yes. I think we should.

All right. Sweet. Um, anybody have some amazing page conversion stuff because that's pretty tactical that most people can um immediately implement and like make more money.

What why don't we start with things you've done if you've done an experiment to your about page that made more people buy like So, it was I think the third week of the school games and um you were doing a Q&A and you reviewed my about page and you literally said you should do congrats on the job. Congrats on the job like 10 times and I sent that to my head of ops and I was like hey can you do a like compile like six of my testimony videos into one. I put that on my about page. So we recorded that edit that put it on my about page and then sent an email blast out 90 minutes before the school games ended. We got like 24 25 sales to like it was only 4,000 people or so um in like 90 minutes and only like I think less than a thousand opened it.

What was the price?

The price was so we went down from 250 to 79. So it was really really cheap.

Extremely cheap but it was was it between 8:00 p.m. to so 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. or something on a Thursday in the UK. So the timing wasn't great. If we tested the same thing at 3 p.m., we would have gotten really good results. And that actually converts that like loads of um congrats on the job. We put that in our emails as well. Like if you're still unsure, watch this video. We you can see more about the people's help. So that's.

Was it the first video on the pay?

So now we've made it the first. Yeah. We used to have a VSSL, but that's the second one. And then we got um other testimonies as well on it.

Yeah. This demonstration of the result.

Yeah. Yeah. That's this is what you get if you join the community.

Yeah. Then you just click out the most, you know, exact.

Yeah.

So, if you have one, like obviously, congrats on getting the job big one. Congrats on getting your first client. Um, a recording of somebody handing off a lead to somebody else. Um, like that's like it's demonstration of the thing that you sell. Like, dude, congrats on your first 10K or first 100K in terms of subscribers. Like, there's you just want to get those moments because like fundamentally like the story is cool, but people just want to like, oh, this happened. Oh, it happened again. Oh, it happened again. Oh, it happened again. Just overwhelming social proof and you can just condense it into a super short video. So, lots of proof added to the page, increase conversions. Okay. Anything else that you guys did that was um tests? Go for it.

Yeah. Like on the last event you said you basically said, I'm paraphrasing, but you said if you do onboarding calls, you're going to like do a lot more sales. So, when I got back.

Yeah.

I was like, hm. And then all credit should go to Dan actually because he was the guy who started to message me then and we start to implement like an onboarding strategy and we went from 35 sales per week to 75 sales per week. Um, we pretty much doubled our sales.

From the free group, right?

Awesome.

You onboarded in the free group?

Yeah, we did. We call it like onboarding calls. So free onboarding calls like school onboarding calls. We show help you with school. Um, and we offer that for free and it's a 30-minute call and we it's basically what these guys are doing.

What's the structure? Is it is it one to one?

Yeah.

So you you guys one to one. How many people are in your free group? It's pretty big, right?

So how many how many one ones is that a day?

Depends how many we take. Sometimes I take 12, sometimes I take 15. Just depends.

So what's the conversion rate on the call?

Um, on average%.

Yeah, like 40 45%. Yeah, some weeks we've had like 60% on calls. Yeah, it's been pretty good.

So, this is the free group funnel.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That we should probably tell people.

Yeah.

So, I have uh you've been on my Q&A calls. Um.

So, so there's I will I will repeat this because some of you haven't seen this, but there are four ways that you can two four ways that you can increase conversion. Free to pay. All right. So, one is the onboarding call. That's that one. The second one is you have the five five videos, which means that when people go in the modules that you have, the first five is basically you're just familiar with like webinar structure, any stuff. All right, I'll give you the overview. So, there's five parts to a webinar. You're going to do a pitch. The first part is typically the origin story of you a little bit, which is a little bit of education, then mostly big opportunity that you're trying to show them. Like, here's this crazy thing that changed my life. And usually tell your story if it's selling something that you've done. The next three chunks, the meat of it is going to be usually the three biggest obstacles that are going to come up for the person. And those obstacles, at least how I think about it, tend to bucket into uh like c like circumstantial universe stuff like this is where you talk about the markets and what like anything that's like external to them. The second is other people. So what are other other people that are going to get in the way? And then the last one is their themselves like what is what's their own proficiency. So this is like uh here's the here's the charts of all the trends and this is why this is a big opportunity. Um, these are you don't need any other people you don't need permission you don't need authority like this is you can do this immediately and then in terms of skills this is where people get stuck but I won't be able to insert a reason why I won't be able to handle that. So you overcome those big three concerns they have which is other people sell and universe and then you finally give them video five which would be the call to action and the stack and the offer right and so instead of doing this one webinar you just break it into five videos that are like whatever 10 minutes 15 minutes and then you basically get them to watch a 75 minute sales video and the call to action the last video is book a call or take the next step or whatever. So on boarding quotes number one that's included. Number two is the video DSL. This is what uh Kyle Henry the guy who has the churn.

Um he does this on top which is he does one weekly webinar out of his free group and it's just a soft toss. It's just value, value, whatever. And then he says, "By the way, this is just one morsel of this massive thing that I do at my other group. And if you want more personalization, more help, go check it out." And then they just book calls directly from the webinar. And then the final one is DMs. And so I would um I would do it in this order. So first immediately put the free onboarding for your um for your free group because it's like the crazy thing that people in school I like this is me talking to everybody at home people don't get is like these are leads businesses lose their minds over getting leads and we just like get them for free and the amount of people are like I don't want to take like you don't want people pay hundreds of dollars for book scheduled calls and because school and free communities convert so well as lead magnets we just take it for granted that you're getting h Like most school communities are wildly under monetized because the creators are so afraid of like the four-letter word which is work. Um so like just the onboarding call.

For every one of these customers and you'll sell I mean you guys are selling a huge percentage but I'd be fine with you 20%.

I mean like just look so the the simple math on this is if you get you know two $4 group ads is what a lot of people are getting. They just push ads to a free group and if you can ascend.

I mean, you're sending more than you're selling half. So, you just double your free group cost, and that's your cost to acquire a customer. You sell one out of five, then you 5x your free group cost, and that's your cost to acquire a customer. My god, like, so your free group is a funnel for your paid group.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you guys set people up on school affiliates on your onboard call as well?

Yeah. Before the call as well, though, right? We have when they book the call, they have like, "Thank you for booking," and then "Start the affiliates." That's kind of like the step, which is good because you get both, which is awesome. But I, and just for everybody, if you have, because some of you guys have are like more niche, or somebody at home is watching, are more niche, you have like a couple, maybe influencer software that like you tell them to to sign up for the first month. At Gym Launch, I was like, "Hey, um, did they click, you know, all of our affiliate links in the portal?" They were like, "Yeah, they're all there." And I looked at my affiliate revenue, it was like, not a lot. I was like, "This sucks." And so I was just doing the math. So I said, "Let's just pay someone full-time to just screen share and click all of our affiliate links for all the products that we had them do." And within the first month, we had 6k at no ROI. And I covered the onboarding, and I was like, "Awesome, from here on out is just profit." And so like, it's worth taking the time to just make sure that you collect all your affiliate stuff. And some SAS products have lower churn than communities do, so like, why not get that?

Um, so onboarding, please do that. This is a one-time lift. You just do it one time, and it's done.

Do you do that?

No, we we're not doing anything with two, three, and four. Like, so you're just doing the call?

Yeah. If you only did one, just do. If you want to do two, maybe I should reorder this. Two would be this because this is really easy. Most people get really caught up and like, "How do I show?" And then they just get lost. But like, if you did one, and then two, and then three, and then...

How do they know about the call when they join the free group?

Um, like I basically take all of our, we send daily emails. So I just do value posts of that in the community and do like a Loom video. So it's like email, but it's a Loom video as well. And then I just pitch the call. It's emails. Um...

Who do we target as well?

Yeah, but that like value posting.

Oh, so you don't DM or anything like that?

We send like an auto DM to that as well.

Get them to get on the call.

My my initial DM when somebody joins the free community is like, "Hey, welcome to the community. If you haven't yet done so, like, book an onboarding call. We can basically help you figure out how you want to align yourself with School."

Yeah.

Got it.

Oh, that's simple.

How do you, how do you guys align pushing affiliates versus pushing your upsell? So, like, if if you... The main, the main thing we want to push is...

Yeah. The main thing we want to push is Max Premium. But like...

So when do you decide?

The affiliate will just naturally happen anyway.

Right? But so like, for me, I have some good affiliates, but it doesn't pay as well as getting them into my group, obviously.

Yeah. Yeah.

So like...

Do I push the affiliates?

You prioritize the thing that makes the most money. Like, also, if they buy your main thing, then they'll click the links and tell you like they're in.

Yeah. You don't want to waste it on like...

So then do I, do I put the affiliates softly in the free group and then push them in the paid group once I've already brought them in?

You can throw them in there. Why not?

Yeah. Yeah, they are in there. I just don't talk about them.

Yeah. It's just that when you do sell people into the matrix, you can just guarantee that they also...

Yeah. And the way we position it is that it's a value call, right? So we help them, here's how we get started with School, and then we show them what's inside of the community as well. And for example, your big thing is like the CV or the...

Yeah.

Yeah. So you could have like a CV review call, or I don't know if it's called CV.

Yeah, that's the biggest thing.

Sorry.

Yeah. CV review calls are the most, like, how does 20 people now?

Yeah.

Out of what? 230.

Yeah. Pretty high show. Every people, people like that. Like big attractive thing. Like I'll bet you. So if I were, if I were to make something like this for School, it would be an about page breakdown.

Yeah, people love that. I love that.

Everybody wants about page breakdowns.

Side note for you guys. Everybody wants a roast to their about page.

And it's also so easy to prove, like, most people are like, "My about it's like, I don't even know what this group is about." Let's start there.

What are you doing?

Yeah. Any element of social proof? There's zero promise. I don't know anything about. And so, yeah, it's not hard to increase the conversion on those things. But of all the Q&A that I've been on, um, and these days, these are the big four. So number one, do this. Number two, add the weekly webinar, which is just you doing the value for the group. You do like, this is, but this is a true weekly webinar, not a Q&A. This is like, "Let me teach you some stuff," and this is a tiny morsel of this big thing. So if you like this kind of thing, you should check out this because we can personalize it to you and then book a call. And I think having guys on the call, like, if you attend whatever that weekly webinar is, like have all the sales guys attend those calls because you guys will be able to see the chat and be like, "Oh, this guy, uh, this guy's engaged, this guy's," and then you can just siphon them off and and grab them.

Even if they don't, even if they don't book, like, "Hey, I saw that you were on the thing. Like, has anyone ever walked you through the process of, you know, actually getting the School done? Cool, because we can do it in 60 minutes."

To think weekly like that is good, like...

This is the value thing, not the daily. Like, this is...

This is presentation stuff. I'm just saying this is what Kyle does. I'm just trying to give you guys like, what, what has already worked. Can it work otherwise? Maybe. I just know that...

Onboarding calls obviously work. This works. We had Zane, Zane's entire process, uh, from last time. It's just get the five videos done and just, that's the pin post, tell people to go watch it, and then you have the DMs. And so this is the four conversion mechanisms from free to paid. I mean, you could just do one and probably be fine, but if you want to squeeze every dropout...

We're going to start the number fourth one now as well.

And we're going to leverage like ManyChat for that.

Yeah. And like have like a value PDF for like a case study or something.

Yeah. Yeah. All the guys, the DMs, they like, it's kind of like, uh, I'm sure you guys are familiar with like Sell and you know, Sell via Chat. Same thing. They just have setters, setters on there asking questions and then...

I'm not familiar. What are those things?

So, basically, you just run through a sales script.

Oh, just DM setting.

Yeah. Okay.

Yes. Exactly.

Okay. So this, so this increases conversion from paid. So from free to paid. Um, but is anyone... So this was about the about page, and this is the process inside. So anybody else have any tests they run on their about page that increase conversion they notice? Obviously, you added the highlight.

Can I add one small thing to the onboarding calls? Um, by the way, it also decreases the churn by a lot. Our normal churn was around 40%, and the churn of the onboarding calls was 27%. So by selling people into the B community, the churn lowers. That's a very...

It's like it's like an easier process, like...

People who just buy the $99 or Max Premium turn at a higher rate than people get onboarded.

Yeah. It's more like it's like more personalized, like going inside. Yeah.

Yeah.

Onboarding, onboarding is like annual. It's, it hits on both sides. You convert more and you turn less. That's great.

Cool.

We're also going to position it so that you get access to them like as a School specialist or like a mentor as well.

That's a closed thing though, right? If they buy on the call? So it's like, if they join now, then you, uh, you get one-to-one support for like lifetime with with the person who onboarded.

The urgent and the scar li in which case you just get it done. That's how it works. Okay. Anyone else? So, something that you might want to consider for highlighting the proof in your community is avoiding Loom videos. They're boring as [ __ ]. And if you really want to get people that are shocked about it, I mean, we kind of stumbled into this one, but if you have a ridiculous video, which actually the last ad that you did for your tossing names out, that one, it had a very similar flow, but if you could put some energy and time into a proper VS for your about, like the returns on is just ridiculous. We made one and never went back to it again. And it still to this day is, "Hey, I like this thing. I want to hang out with you guys." With that, so if you can like integrate, it doesn't have to be crazy as far as brand of course we beard, but something that stands out in your niche, certainly, and something that sort of illustrates a little bit of character or charm about special. Also kind of like valuing like what each thing that is inside of your community on your about page, and then having like a total price, which is your monthly fee.

You guys...

Did you have it before where you didn't have that, or have you just seen that across the...

Got it from your book. That's where I learned it.

Yeah.

We've always had it though, right? Since...

One, one of the things I would throw in that's maybe like, maybe a step before the about page is all my traffic just comes from YouTube. So I naturally integrate it. And I try to, I use my School community naturally in the video. Let me just grab this agent as head of School. Grab it. So people watching already get like a presence of what's going on. So I try to do a lot of the heavy lifting before even landing to landing page. Then there's less requisite for that to be like a 10 out of 10 because they already got a sense of what that's all...

Right. So that's, so that's the quality of the traffic. Also has a law on this.

And as well, DMs or VSSL with the scholarships and like how you position those offers.

What I did was I understood what works for my audience and discount is. And I think you guys have heard this, but discount is kind of doesn't seem high value. What I did was for students, they're used to getting scholarships. So I saw, okay, total value was £4,700 for a high ticket, but then you can get up to an 80% scholarship if you have less than 12 months left on your graduate visa and you're a really good candidate. And they love that. And in fact, I've received thank you voice notes and thank you messages because they got a scholarship. Just love it. So you can...

Just just a discount?

Which is a discount, a fancy way of saying discount, scholarship only valid for this call.

So here's, so I'm just, I'm going to say back to you. So, here's how to use that. So, let's say you've got the the $4,700 thing. You know that the price that you want to charge is a thousand bucks. And the only people that you want to sell to are the people that are your avatar that meet these three requirements. And so, all of a sudden, they're like, "Holy [ __ ], I meet the three requirements. I'm a gym owner who has 30 members and at least one employee." You're like, "If you get the gym scholarship," and then everybody who doesn't meet those probably can't afford it anyways. And so they, so it's built in. I like it.

Scholarship plays also work across industries.

Oh, really?

Have you used it before?

Oh, it's in my next book.

You can use me as an example if you want.

Scholarships are giveaways.

It's the same, same concept. Um, a different way that you can run that play is you actually give a true scholarship to one person. You get everybody to enter. This is a lead gen play. You get everyone to enter, and then you call everyone else up and say, "I'll give you 80% cost." You didn't win the full one, but you can get 80% because you have these three things.

So you get way more leads if you're giving some big giveaway. So you can give lifetime. I mean, just give something crazy away like year transformation, I think in fitness terms, but like it works.

It works really well. Even worked in the DM selling high ticket. We've done that over 10 times. Uh, $1,400 scholarship valid, and we tell them the link expires in 5 minutes. They click it. 5 days later, it goes right there. But...

We, we actually know, in my defense, we changed the price, right? So we changed the price on School.

And then obviously, we only keep it live for 5 minutes.

Which is which is true.

So if someone happens to sneak in in those five, someone else...

It happened. It happened when he was doing a CV review call, $250. We changed it to $188. Vicasi joined at $188, and then we were trying to upsell her at the accelerator now, and I said, like, "Oh, we've given, we'll give you more of a discount now because you sneaked in." But she's not converting. So we...

Call these grants.

Stocking scholarship.

Okay. Anyone else done about like anything about page related or or conversion rate related? I think those were super helpful. Um, I see this as like the quality of the traffic, like how are your, sorry, um, how you bring people in obviously matters. Um, and who you're talking to. That gets into a little, we could, we can segue traffic in a second. I want to stay on conversion for a minute.

Go for it.

Well, I'll just, it's kind of in between traffic and conversion, but for the thousand, for the $9.99 price point, every single person who gave us that much money was closed on a sales call. Like, no one saw an about page and paid the grand.

Yeah.

I did timing stuff that crushed it.

Just like raise the price after a certain amount of time, or I'll, I did, um...

Same thing as...

Founding members.

Yeah. Essentially, but I would do like, um, I would add in additions. So, I would do like, you get this thing, or this private, you know, one-on-one for lack of a better example, within X amount of time. That was how I boosted my School like when I launched.

Were you selling via call, or what were you doing?

I just made one post in my free group and pinned it. That was all I did.

Okay. But people would see that at different times and click on it, and I would change my about page with the timing and the offer. And I, I very manually live updated. So I did one of them that was the amount of people that joined, first 50. And I would literally go in every like 15 minutes and just raise like, "10 out of 50," "out of 50," and just let them. That's what I did the first two days.

Matt wants me to talk about, um, DMs. I only sold through DMs. So I didn't have a sales page. I didn't have anything. All I did was DMs. Didn't have the link anywhere public of a municipal page, so no one really met it. But again, at that higher price, I mean, I was doing 400, but I feel like...

Just Instagram DMs?

Just Instagram DMs. So I didn't have any other funnel or anything.

But like Jennifer herself talked to every single lead over the course of like a couple of weeks.

Which is also why I think the back to the retention, I do think that's why that's so good is because I had personal conversations with every single person in our group before they even joined. It was just head down for the month. Like I could, it's not sustainable. Like I couldn't do that again, like month after month. There are plenty of people who do this for an exchange of money.

Oh, you mean like for me?

Yeah.

I could try to find those people. That's probably next.

Super, super bag of napkin. Like, how many messages back and forth did it take for you to close the...

I wouldn't. I had a rule where I would not send the offer before I had like six questions.

Wow.

Unless someone was like, I mean, very rarely, you know, if someone was just like, "I've already seen it. I know. Just let me like, where's the link?" And but I didn't send the link out. I didn't post it on my Instagram, nothing. So I wanted to make sure they're a good fit. I mean, I turned people down too.

Okay.

So...

Six questions, not many questions.

Okay. But was that inbound me conversations, or like you reaching out to people?

So, because I have a larger audience, I was able to say like, "Hey guys, you know, my content is not business content. It's not what my School community is." And so I had to be a little more strategic with it. So I'd be like, "Hey, you know, you, you guys have seen me evolve. You've been here a while, whatever. I'm starting to coach this. I'm starting to community. If you want to learn more about it, you know, reply 'coach,' right?" And I didn't use an automation, but it allowed me to filter my DMs, find that word 'coach,' and then start having conversations with them. So they were warm. Um, and it was just time-consuming. So I think the hardest part of it was the organization of the DMs, right? And so, we used actually, we used ManyChat's organization system and tags feature, which was game-changing. I couldn't have done it without that. So you're in ManyChat doing the messaging, right?

No, no, ManyChat didn't do the message, but I used their filter. I used their filter tag feature. So within ManyChat, you can go to...

It's on the app, right? It's on the ManyChat app.

Um, on the desktop. Desktop, because it's easier.

So you log into ManyChat on the... And we didn't use this part of ManyChat for, I mean, we've been using ManyChat for over a year. So we found this feature as we were doing this. I was trying to keep it up with it manually like on my phone, and there was just no way. So we found a way to add tags. So if someone would come in and work at 'coach,' I would immediately tag. I do have someone doing that. They would tag them with, "Hey, coaching." So then when I would sit down at my computer, I would filter, okay, everyone that's tagged 'coach,' I would just go in and start having conversations. And then once I'd sent the offer, I would tag them with something else. So then I would sit down and go, okay, everyone I've sent the offer to who hasn't paid yet, I would go in and repeat that conver, you know, basically have another set of conversations. And then once they were paid, I would tag them 'paid' and then move them to 'closed.' But I would literally use that Mini, like that's just what I did for four, six hours a day.

Did you send any resources and stuff like? No. Have you thought about doing that? So you start a conversation like, "Hey, check out this resource," and then...

No, we have paid resources.

It was just like, "Hey, what, what, like, why did you, what are you looking to learn? Like, how can I help? Like, tell me about your business. Tell me about you, what you want to to learn, you know, because they already knew me, right? They already, they've seen me. They knew who I was. And so I was able to just say, "Hey, you know, what are you looking for? What are your goals? You know, let me see if I can help." So it was kind of like, "Let me see if I can help." Okay. Oh, you have an idea for, you know, being an influencer because that's what I'm coaching, or are you already an influencer? Okay. Well, what are you struggling with, you know? So I would just start identifying their problem, and then I would base my com. So that's why I didn't want to use a DM like an automation because everyone had a different problem. Like some people were starting from zero, like, "Hey, I want to be an influencer. Can you help me start? Is this for me if I don't have an audience?" And then I had the influencer with three or 400,000 people that's like, "I've been doing this for five years. I'm not making any money. Like, what am I doing wrong?" Right? So those are two very different people. I can't have the same automation.

The worst combination. Sorry.

With them.

All your sales stood up.

Every, like, 100% of my sales were that way.

And how much did you make in the games from doing that?

Well, what counted in the games? I had, I primed everyone, and I sold over almost $7,000 MR before 2 PM.

So that was disappointing, um, to say the least. I sent Alex a message. I was like, "Please tell me this is wrong." And then I was like, an hour later, I'm like, "Screw it. That was attention to detail. My fault. I'm going to win anyway."

So then, um, but yeah, so I think $50,000.

I knew you'd love that. You like what the...

I think it's even more powerful than onboarding calls, actually. The, the DMs, the conversion was through the roof because I could, I could figure out if they were like, so quick.

Like, there's a lot of people that I wouldn't, I wouldn't entertain six questions with because it's just, it wasn't worth my time.

We have like three qualifying questions that we start with that our VA would do before I got elevated to Jennifer. So it's...

So there is a VA?

Yeah.

She would just do the... Now I knew when we started that wasn't there. She would just tag them.

I was, I was the VA until we...

Yeah.

What were the three qualifying questions?

Um, we would say their name. We always go in and find if their name isn't on the profile. So we actually greet them. And then we would...

So that's not really a question, but...

Sorry, three steps. It's technical.

Um, and then we would ask, "What makes you know, like, what makes you reach out?"

Um, and if you're Wayne, do you already have an Instagram business or a profile? Because that's what our focus is. So...

Are you wanting to grow an Instagram business, or do you, are you, you know, are you already monetizing? So I kind of like immediately to figure out where they are.

Because they're canned response inside of...

Who are you? Why are you here? Are you this or this?

What are you wanting? Yeah.

Yeah. The, the script for what you're looking at, it's, it's a closed framework. It's clarify whether they're like the problem experience, explain what concerns, reinforce the decision, and follow that DM.

Yeah. Well, I mean, that the S is where she presents the offer, and then E is explaining ways or concerns around the offer, and they close. The R is basically going into...

If, if you were going to do that same process, but instead of sending them a link to buy something for $400, it would be book a call. Is the S selling the call or selling the high ticket?

Yeah, you would sell the call. It would be a shorter like, "Yeah, I think you're a good fit. Let's hop on. Let's hop on a call."

And then they say, "Oh, I'm just worried blah, blah," and you explain away the concerns, and then let's get back on the call. That's hard. Okay.

I feel like conversion on a call would be better than having to like convert on an actual sale.

Well, I'm thinking for a thousand bucks or two or three thousand bucks.

Is it hard to get people on your call?

I didn't work. You have to do it halfway through.

Halfway through get them going for...

I want to sell you on a weight loss. I'm going to sell you six weeks. In week three, you don't wait till week six because they're, they're now, they've completed the cycle to open another buying cycle.

I want, they haven't, they haven't fully finished yet. They're still like in it. You're like, "You want to keep this party going, right?" They're like, "Yeah, I want to keep you." Like, I've seen this across every single [ __ ] company. It has never not been true. In my experience, I've never had this not beow. Everybody waits to the end, does not close. Like that company that I was saying that does 2 million a week. We upsell them after they just bought immediately. They buy $2,000 more thing, and then we do a goal setting call and sell $8,000 thing immediately.

What type of business is that?

It's, it's an author thing. It's a publishing thing.

Is it because they're already like in that buying state?

You want to go run a marathon as soon as you buy shoes. What else do you want to buy? You want to buy a shirt? You want to buy, you want to buy a little thing for your arms, your iPod? Like you buy. You get to, you get in these mini buying windows. You make the shift, you're like, "Oh, this window is what I want to do."

Yeah.

And you're going to buy a bunch of [ __ ] that you might as well buy from it.

And all, and the upsell is just more of that thing you just bought.

And then...

It's just the thing you just bought. I either increase the likelihood that you're going to get there, or I'm going to make it easier for you, or make it faster, or free.

Okay.

So, I just sold you on this concept. Great. Now you're in. Congratulations. You are now an author. You're a publisher. You're an Instagram influencer. Whatever. You're on that path. Question now is, how quickly do you want to get there and how likely do you want to commit? Because if you go on your own, you absolutely can do it. You have all the tools, but if you're with me, then I can help you go around the potholes. There's a really good epiphany bridge for this, which is, have you ever seen The Amazing Race? Most people were like, "No." They've heard of it. Maybe it's a TV show, um, for millennials. Anyways, uh, and they actually had, there was a couple on there that won six times in a row. Had to change the rules because they had an unfair advantage. You know what that unfair advantage was? But whenever they into a new city, they would immediately find a local and they put the local in the back seat, and then that person would tell them exactly where they needed to go. And so right now, I can give you the map and you can get where you're trying to go. But if you have the guys, you'll get there.

Okay.

And so then at the end of the engagement, when they do finally wrap up, do you...

Do you sell people more stuff, or do you just get the testimonial and get a referral and call it a day? So, there's the immediate upsell, there's the halfway point upsell, and then there's the last chance upsell. So, the last chance upsell is what you do at the end. I mean, by all means, take another whack, right? But you're going to get the majority of the sales in the first.

And then at the end, it's just, "Okay, since you did so well, like, who do you know who needs this too?" And you get a nice testimonial, you call it a day.

You probably won't even get one. They're already done. You said you won't get one.

If they, if they, if they didn't take either of the upsells earlier on, and they're at the very end, and they choose not to buy, they're not like, they're on other...

Well, what if you just did a good job with your service and they don't want anymore?

I know. You still get a testimonial, right?

You can try.

Okay.

You'll get more from the first two buckets.

Okay. So, it's, it's kind of like, they've seen a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel, but they're not there yet.

You want progress. The first sign of progress. That's the upsell.

And, and get a testimonial, too? Or...

You can around the progress if you want, but I'd rather upsell them than get the big testimonial.

Okay.

Because the first thing is usually like, there's, I mean, it's great, but the, the big crazy come from the most specialized service that you guys offer. Almost always the best customers have the biggest results. You can still use that to sell the product. I mean, we use School winners to advertise School games. Same concept.

Yeah.

Absolute winners because everyone has survivor. They're like, "Oh...

All right. Um, conversions. Did anyone do anything to their their pages?

Okay. I see a resistance factor, not a thing that actually does it. A lot of people are still write down the methodology of that they're what they do, like, "Oh, we have one mastermind a week," and this and that, and they do like a listical stuff instead of actually talk about transformation. And yeah, that's, I see that everywhere. Talk about pages all the time.

So, really interesting on this. The more advanced your person, the more you actually can say features because they already translate the features and the benefits for themselves. The more primitive, or the more basic your audience is, the more you do the translation for them in the copy. So like, I know what a mastermind is, and so someone's like, "A mastermind," so you can connect them. Like, I get, I know what a mastermind is, fine, right? Like, I'm more advanced in that market. If you're selling to more beginners, then you talk about the benefits of that, and ideally the benefits of the benefits. So it's like, okay, you're going to get this network. What's the benefit of a network? It's going to, when you're stuck, you're have someone you can immediately reach out to, so you can get unstuck, so you just get your goal out. Oh, that's the benefit of a network. So you just do two, two, the benefit makes much better.

What did you just say was the benefit of the network?

Is that when you get stuck, reach out to that, like that's how it works. So like, if I say, "Hey, I have a meal plan," don't give a [ __ ]. What it really is, is that you know what you're eating for dinner tonight. So, would you, would you, with that being said, would you oppose to the listicles even for if you're a more advanced client, that or ideal client, or do you just go for the benefit of the benefit over that? What would you say is a hierarchy of...

You can do, you do mastermind-dash-and-then, okay.

But that's just an interesting finding I've had from like a script, like for sales script. You don't have to spend a huge amount of time. A more advanced person, they usually just want the data and they want to understand what they're, if they bought something like this before, then they're already have notions, and so they're going to use that frecon.

Another thing is the scarcity and urgency, right? And you should tell them about what you did as well. You didn't, like, you bundled the scarcity and urgency with your scholarship, right?

When you're holding.

Yeah, I know. So in a bad...

In a, sorry, he's, so, so in a nutshell, it's not just, um, the scholarship, it's also, yeah, there's a scholarship, but also there's only valid for if it's on a call. Ahmed and I've done some as well. This will only be on the call. And if it's over the DMs, well, these scholarships will probably go by tonight. Um, and then also another one that we did, which I learned from Ted, was actually, um, and it's actually worked really for like, really low ticket, like $79 or so, like, um, "Oh, here's the link, by the way, but we've also sent it to five other people." And to be very honest, it's a miracle if it works. That converts so well. And it's true. We did send it to five. We actually sent it to loads of people. Um, and it would work, it would work. It's a miracle if this link works. That's so really good offer with a lot of scarcity, a lot of urgency. Um, and also follow-ups as well. So some people that just ghost you, would send me a message saying, "Hey, just buy the way. We're down to our last two scholarships. And we really don't want you to miss out. Here's a link. Let me know if it doesn't work. I can speak to the team to send you a new link or something like that." That converts well. Um, so yeah, over the DM. So DMs and, you know, Jennifer is crushing me as well. It's more so just about most people will just kind of like ghost you. Just keep following up with them, question mark or GIF, and then they'll get back. And also, we would scroll through LinkedIn and people who are active now, we just message them. And it's speedy. People who are messaging fast, we just know, um, we can close them within the next 10 minutes or so. But it's volumes. With, I don't know what you've seen, Jennifer, but you message me loads of people. It's not just a few. It's like, you're messaging, messaging.

We would have, I would do canned responses that are just, you know, obviously a lot of it wasn't canned, but I knew at least at the beginning it could just be canned. So I would have those canned within MiniChat and just go through and just do all that and then wait till them to respond and then just, I would sit there for maybe, you know, chunks of time.

Got it. Would you tag them like when they're...

Yeah, depending on what process, what stage they were at.

Yeah, that's where you ended.

If I could be in that mode of like, whatever I was answering, like whatever stage. And so I felt like that was also more efficient. Like, I'm, I'm in a closing mindset. And so I would like go to everyone that I felt like was at more at that point and just start having conversations with them, see who was answering at that point, and then, um, but yeah, the following up, I think that was the biggest mindset thing was like, "Okay, well, if they're not responding, they're not interested." That's like not the case. No, they're just, they forgot about that since...

They forgot, and they're like, "Oh, thank you for following up. I'm so, you know," and and so it took a quite a few of those conversations for my mindset to change, were like, "Oh, I'm not bothering them." Like, they reached out, right? They said they wanted this, and so I'm going, you know, keep...

They should be grateful they're getting messages from you.

I forget that people think that bothers.

Yeah, they're not.

I say the same to my students at...

It, I think that's a mindset thing. I think everyone thinks that. Another thing that's worked for us really well is what we do is it depends on your niche, but the truth is, our niche students, immigrant students, they don't have money. So we got to be very selective with where we invest our time. So before we even start DMing them, we send them a form. "Hey, just to see if we're a right fit, please can you fill out this form?" And it's kind of that, but we just get that in a form on Airtable. And then we have a question, it should be better, but why right now is, "How much are you willing and able to invest upfront to land a UK job and get PR in the UK?" And then we have, "I don't have any money to invest," "0 to 50 pounds," it's terrible, I know, "50 to 100," "100 to 500," and then, um, "I think, um, thousand," like "500 plus," or so.

Well, you need the answer.

Sorry. And if they say, "I don't have money, any money to invest," we've just seen it's probably, we need to reform the question. They're like, super hard to convert. Yeah. But then it's also, I've heard people say, I've heard people say that we should change that and say, "How much are you willing to invest?" and leave that as like free text instead of like just drop down. So whenever they say 50 to 100, they they usually convert really well. I don't know the numbers to our low ticket, just monthly, uh, community. So we're only DMing people who actually have said on the form that they have money to invest. So we reinforce that as well. "Oh, from the form, we see you've got this to invest."

Yeah.

It works.

If you were saying that people who answer this question don't buy, that means it's an effective story question. It's identifying people who don't buy. So that's great. You just don't talk.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, we again, like I've seen this across, like, you can just toss them out. Like that goes for everybody. Someone says, "I'm not willing to invest money in myself," then you just say, "Good luck with that. Just don't take..."

Free community. Now we send them the free community.

Sure.

We missed out a lot. Yeah. Do that.

Then you got nerds here.

Yeah. The other one, um, that we saw was, um, uh, if you're able to get started on this, whatever your goal is, um, how soon would you want to start, which is, you know, "Today," "ASAP," "Tomorrow," "Next week," and then, uh, you know, "Later than that." Um, if the first two answers are where all your sales come from, like, "I start next week," they're they're not deprived.

Wow.

And so you can just add that as a safety question for for leads. Yeah.

So, just a show of hands real quick. I want to run through this. So, who, who did DMs to sell? You guys did DMs, you did DMs, you did DMs. Okay. Were you only DMs, or you DM to call?

DM. Yeah.

Okay. So, you did. Okay.

Also, DMs, closing calls. Another thing that we did, and I've done this a lot, and then I trained Emma trusted, like even before closing call, we'll call them up and be like, "By the way, we see you've booked an onboarding call." Which by the way, in the email, there should be a VSS. We don't say VSSL. There should be an introductory video waiting. So there's a VSS. So we would say, "There would be..."

There would be...

There would be a a video about the accelerator. Make sure you watch it so that you can save yourself time on the call and we can like, uh, make sure that call is all about you and your specific problems. And then...

There would be like, 50, 60% of the times they would watch it. But when they wouldn't, first question we ask, "Oh, by the way, um, have you actually watched the video?" And if they say no, okay, let's do this. "How about you go watch the video now? Six minutes. I'll go grab some water. My throat is sore." And they come back. "Oh, yeah, it was a great video." They're pumped up.

That's how you do it.

If someone hasn't watched it, you say, "Oh, no worries. I got to grab..."

I'm not going to repeat myself.

"I'll put it on right now. I'll be back in six minutes."

Also, I just wanted to add a little detail to that about the School page. So, they only see the School page until the offer is made and they're ready to be onboarded. That's when we send send the link to School by changing the price for the high ticket offer.

I'm sorry.

So we, we send them after the vehicle's done, the offer is made, and they're ready to onboard. That's when we go back to School, change the pricing for the high ticket offer, and then we send them the schooling. Say it's going to expire in 5 minutes. It's just for you.

Oh, so is this how you guys set up, got people different prices for different levels?

Different price. We have loads of low ticket. Majority is low ticket, but obviously...

It's one community.

And it's one community because the difference is the high ticket people, they get also DFY, so they get CV, cover letter, LinkedIn profile optimized, they get LinkedIn pre, all of that done for you. That's high ticket, but they also get all the low ticket.

You process it?

We process it through community. We're not doing it anymore. That's why MR is less because it just takes what, two weeks or so to arrive. So now we're doing bank transfer. Um, but that was for obviously for School games. Um, but actually School games is amazing because it forced us to think of a high ticket, which didn't stress me out, cuz we had, we would have hit 100k a month in March. But that was, we call Academy 2.0, you know, which is coaches then offering weekly catchups, and then they turned from weekly to daily, and I had to manage coaches, and I don't want to be managing coaches. I'd rather work on the business. So now we've got a product called the Accelerator, which we've sold over 10 times over the DMs. It's 2K, and it's literally their CV, their cover letter, LinkedIn, everything they need to land interviews.

I think one of the really genius things that the link on the page will only be there for five minutes. I think that's...

Yeah, that works really well. Yeah.

And that's how you've been able to get both processes through the same. That's actually really...

Yeah.

Thank you.

I like that.

We got that through, like, even I didn't come up with that. We got that through a DM setter who went through Basting Slots program.

And he came up with, he was just telling me, "Hey, how about we do this?" And I'm like, "Hm, interesting." So he'd have the DM setting knowledge, and I've been in this niche for a year and a half. So I was like, doing this for a year, making two to three K a month.

So...

What was the training he went through?

He went through Basting appointment setter program. It's really good.

It's appointmentsetter.com.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Solid. So I've hired another person from that program in Pakistan. And Pakistan is really poor, so average way is $200 a month. He's paying a grand a month to stay in the Bastian Sauce continuation program. And he joined what yesterday, and he's already set an appointment that we closed $1,400.

First day.

It's a great program.

I highly recommend it, highly. That's where I would find this person on this recording.

Yeah, stop paying me. Yeah. Yeah. You're affiliate.

Yeah. I mean, there's probably there's probably a community on school that... Yeah, there's Bassin Stall has one.

Oh, does he?

He does. He does. He has one. He's an investor in school. He used to work with S. Yeah.

Oh, he was part of mastermind as well. Anybody else have about page? [Laughter]

Done. We uh just like we recently just made like a new VSSO because originally we actually were just talking about school, but then we actually remade the one and it was actually just sharing our screen and showing the community and actually showing the classroom stuff instead of just talking about it so people can actually like see it for the first time. Um, I think that did pretty well.

Yeah. And a very simple like Google doc just like, "Here's what you get, here's where you should join," etc. And we also use that VSSO for version.

Yeah. And way shorter.

Ads. Yeah.

The other one was like 45 minutes and this one is...

Yeah. We went from like a 50-minute VSSL to like a six-minute VSSO and it's been like way better.

Yeah. Many VSSL front end.

Yeah. So like if you if you're if it's a low ticket purchase or it's a you're selling a call, like you can usually get away with it in five or six minutes. Like it doesn't take a huge amount. They just want to know like, what is this? How does it work? Like, what am I going to get? Okay. Yeah, this sounds good. Like, what proof is there that I should believe you? Like, it doesn't need to be over. Okay.

Um, all right. So that was conversion stuff. Anybody have other tricks in their sleeves that are falling out for conversion?

Something cool I want to talk about is uh actually the school stories interview with Matthew. I think it's also heavily undervalued um from the perspective of the uh community managers because I didn't realize it until I actually tracked it and asked my clients, but we had quite a few people join who just really liked the story and it it might have to do with just the structure of the questions that he asked. They listen to the story, they listen to what the community is about, they really liked it. And so the lifetime value thus far has been over $11,000 generated just from that interview. And that was just straight through school. No promotion or anything. But I feel like a lot of those interviews can be used and mine uh specifically could just easily be used as a sort of like low pressure VSSL in a way, something that's like a freebie for the community, something that's promoted more and because it obviously converts really well.

Yeah. Our number one performing ad right now of all time is a podcast. It's like...

Beautiful.

So yeah, I mean, I think um there are people who actually just do paid podcast and basically like turn it into a PSL. They just like, "So what are some of the major issues people have?" "Well, you know, you wouldn't..." "How do you help people overcome that?" "Well, it's crazy."

Three things. Yeah, there's one coming.

The first thing is value. The...

$50k. I'll do my best.

Uh, traffic wise, so where did you guys uh actually, if you're good with it, why don't we just go around the room real quick just because I think it'd be helpful. You got your traffic from Instagram, right? Where did you get your traffic from?

Instagram.

Okay. Would you have a following there?

Tiny. DM everybody. 200 people. No, I didn't even DM. I just would post on my stories and do lead magnets to the free group.

So, people just respond to the stories?

Yeah. Yeah. Or just click the link to join the free group from...

And then you sold from the free group?

I just made one post. Yeah. I just pinned a post.

And that's how that was. What was the price group?

$12, $129, $149, $179 as the month went on.

Okay. Got it. Cool. So, Instagram stories, lead magnet, free group, and then you nurtured that group?

I would do like polls and quizzes to see what people were looking for and I would find whatever the top one was each week and I would do do a Zoom and then I would just make a post like once a day on my story with the link and just say I'm doing the Zoom. I'm not going to record it. The only way to get to it is to click this link and that was it.

Jack, what you doing?

For me, only YouTube.

Oh, you?

YouTube straight to paid. It's like more like a pancake than funnel, I guess.

What would you say?

More like a pancake than a than a funnel.

Okay.

Yeah. Right. What do you guys...

Uh, Matthew helped me come up with the offer and then he wrote uh referred a few people to me for free and one of them was Ted Carr. Ted Carr and I did a few webinars together as like an affiliate deal.

Oh, cool. Um, and then a lot of it, most of it was just school. So, activity in school. People would join my free community and then upsell them for there. Yeah.

So, school was one of your major traffic sources?

Yeah. That was I mean, that was the goose method.

Yeah. The zero outside school method.

Sweet. Cool. No, that that counts. I mean, I think as the games continue, I mean, school has millions of users and it's coming. It's growing really quickly. Um, that will increasingly be I think the case. People...

What you guys have?

Um, mix of Instagram Reels and YouTube, but mainly cold like ads to the free group and then nurture the free and then a little bit of school as well. I would say on the...

So, what's your cost per um free group ad?

We had it down at around $2, but that got rejected because I talked about money, I guess, too much, and Meta didn't like that. And now it's up to... Then we had it around $2 again, but very broad like Europe and North America and Australia and New Zealand. But now we're only targeting like the top countries. So it's around $3.50 now. I think.

$3.50. Yeah.

What percentage of free group ads you convert?

I don't know. But the the quality of the calls are a lot better. Yeah. And um, we convert a lot better as well. So we...

You have to know that number though.

What was the question?

Percentage of free group that you convert because that gives you C. Well, we get back into it. How many? You said 75 a week. Is that what you said?

75 sales per week on average. Yeah.

Okay. So that's um so 300 a month, right? So 300. So you're doing 10 sales, 10 sales a day?

Approximately. Yes.

Okay. So then how many free people do you add per month on average?

We add I would say per day like 80 to like 120 people to the free group. Every 10%?

It's probably a bit more.

Yeah. Might just...

I would say 100. Some days it's 200, but let's say 100, 100 to 150.

Let's just call it 4,500 for the month and you convert 300. So you're at 7.5%?

Yeah, that sounds about right. That's just that's just also like the uh if you see the free group total to the base group, it's also around 7.5%.

What, 55k to 800?

Yeah.

So what was the percentage you said?

It was 55,000 people in our free group and 800 in our paid.

Yeah. So...

That's about right. Yeah, it's about $7.

But half that is...

I think I think I was saying that in terms of ads like total Instagram and YouTube, that's why.

Oh yeah, in total. Yeah, that's right. So in ads...

Because ads is like 80 to 120, then organically is like the rest.

Yeah. So 4,500 a month is...

Yeah.

Okay. Because I think the big number, there's all these other things that go into that one. But if you sell 300 out of 4,500...

You're selling 6.7. So what do you spend as per month? Um, around how much do you spend now? Like $750 per day, maybe.

Yeah. $750, $800 bucks a day.

Okay. So you spend $24,000 a month and $24,000 gets you 300, right?

$80, 32 and a half th...

All right. So, so if it was $24,000 um...

A month,

then you're paying $80 bucks per sale.

Yeah. Yeah.

Our targeting ad is like $60 per second. Yeah. But that makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. Cool. Yeah. So, if you're paying $80 and then So, I wanted to get deep on this. I think it's really valuable for everybody and for people watching at home. Um, the group is how much?

$125. Yeah.

Yes. So, you're $125. And what's churn?

It's... Hello. Uh, that's I want to say 40, 40%.

Okay. So $129, $4... $322. So you're still at you're still at 4:1 LTV. So that's kind of okay. Um, I mean, to boost, I think purchases might be really a game changer.

Like annual, you mean?

Or like like annual? Not annual, just like including some one-time unscalable thing on the front end for people like, yeah, for an extra $200 bucks, we'll set a middle school like we do and and like it just has to be like you do it in 60 minutes so it's really clear that we're not like going to build you a business, we're going to like get your page set up and link to your thing like you'll be able to make money on this by the end of the call. That's a very clear thing that you can deliver on and you can charge one or $200 bucks and that might be able to like frontload more of the cash. You'll probably also decrease.

Yeah, we really want that's our pure focus now. We just want to keep it.

Yes. I mean, you're still at 4 to 1, which is not bad. I mean, so that's that's that's good. And if you're at $129, it cost you $80, you're still positive on the acquisition. And within 30 days, you get two transactions, $250 off of you have to pay a credit card off like not not the worst.

Yeah.

Okay. Does that help?

Okay. Cool. But yeah, I would I would be I mean obviously I would do all the insurance stuff that we talked about, but adding in that one-time purchase, I think especially because you guys do the free indep.

So the so the one-time purchase would just be like a $7 buck bucket, three calls or something if you want if you want to do that, or it could be a it could be an additional training, it could be a virtual event that you hold once a month and you just buck you know, throw everyone in there. It's an easy deliverable. Um, you could have it just be like like set like we'll say 12 minutes for...

If we're if we're $125 for our paid, what would you recommend that be for the one-time and the free?

What makes what if they be better? Like increase the price and then do the deliverables that you're just...

I mean, you're not hear any any issues from me. Like $500. Like I I would price whatever you think you can sell that. But if you can do that, you can like if you $500, I'll bet you your turn because you get someone to pay $500, you deliver something that now they're like, "Oh, I'm on school," or whatever, and they all use your thing. So you click the affiliate link to make sure that they so it gets attributed to you, so you get $40 a month. It's coming from that for sure. And then you still get a couple months on the on the on the other side. But if your if your onboarding call can generate that kind of cash up front, then you can still I mean, do the insurance stuff first because that's just you're never going to lose money. But I think that would be strong.

Thank you.

So where were you guys getting? So you guys were...

Not only YouTube, but also TikTok as well. So TikTok to funnel traffic into...

You a million on TikTok that we said?

I've got a million.

Got it.

Got it. But following count isn't important on TikTok. It doesn't...

All our acquisition st one is two YouTube videos.

I have to preface that he spent probably a month trying to refine the thumbnail and the hook. Like if you spend the majority of your time trying to formulate donuts by surprises, you're perfecting a a fantastic YouTube video. Yeah. Are you guys just running one creative as you had?

Uh, it depends if it's cold or retargeting.

Yeah, but not a lot of.

Yeah, we're testing out a few of them. Yeah, like three, four.

So, you got most of your sales from the YouTube video you made about how you know how to make short?

Correct. Yeah.

And what we're looking for is like when I'm looking at a creative, I'm trying to think of it as a series. So, like what's a series potential of the creative? Can you rehash the same thumbnail concept over and over again?

Yes, I mean, you can look at mine and they're not that dissimilar. I mean, we just figured out like big face with like less than four words, pretty much always like a middle of the road, like not going to not going to suck uh thumb for us at least. Make sure the four words are different or add to the headline or not repetitive. Your earlier videos, you would you would say Alexi $hundred million dollar.

You don't do that?

I still do. I've shortened it. So now we're getting this super tactical YouTube stuff, but um, we've gotten the intro down. So now what we do is we put my name. This is like this is just like we're doing this now. Um, his name is lower third and I just say over $200 million a year. I can say my name. So we just cut just make it shorter and then it displays on the screen that way they can see it. Um, and then I move into it.

But that takes two seconds and then I can move into which I think is still important. But you guys converted via phone?

No, we in terms of right to the about page.

Okay. Got it. You straight to the about page. You guys did. Where was your traffic? How'd you convert? So, um, people either it was kind of I'd say two-thirds business owners and then one-third just like college kids or people who wanted to build a personal brand. A lot came from Mino's following. Mino makes content specifically about how to be a creator. Some came from masterminds that I've been in, personal network, Twitter, a little bit from my TikTok following. It was a janky. We We get it to to sit at this table right now.

We pulled it off. But...

It it's not...

There's not a clear. All right, let's pour a little more gasoline here. Actually, there is. Well, we would just do more of what we got from you.

Yeah, my... So, probably like 30 people joined, like 20 something people joined from my Instagram stories of 68 members.

So, it was like Instagram story, the many chat just straight up sent them a calendar with me, like a link. They just like book here.

And then you just close them?

No, no closer. And then if they booked the call, then I got on the sales call and closed them.

Cool.

Yeah.

What was the closure?

High. I mean, so far turned on the jets at the end. I took 21 sales calls in two days or I took 30 sales calls. It...

It was very tough between us.

We were going to be second.

I closed 21 in the last two days of 30. So the close rate was net overall probably about 60%.

Awesome. Been watching your videos.

So we had mostly LinkedIn.

Yeah.

Then Instagram. Within Instagram, we had Reels and then stories. Story stories crossed for low ticket, but for high ticket it was Reels and then DM and then book call or cold call.

Interesting. So Reels is where you got your...

Yeah. So Reels literally we do a testimonial video where it would be like like this, got one guy would say, "I'm not landing any interviews," and then I give them value on that. Um, and then it's CTA to join the academy. Where I'm literally they're looking, "Oh, wow," like for speaking to student giving value and then the DMs we get them to join or it'll be like, "Congrats on the job," type Reel and then comment "Academy," "Last five spots left," or whatever DMs and then, you know, form cold call or discovery call and then close. Um, but for high ticket, mostly what we've seen is most people that come into the high ticket, they would come from LinkedIn, LinkedIn DMs, and then forum um calls, discovery.

People a lot of people would be that $500, sorry $100 and you send them the link to the...

Most, I don't have any money to invest from Instagram.

And then they're out.

For the $50 to $100 people, you sent them to the about page or someone said they $500?

We still have to, what we saw, sorry to go you off there, and the the thing was, even with people that put $50 to $100 and even though $79 after the scholarship, we still had to incorporate scarcity and urgency. So even for $79, we're like, "The link expires in five minutes, only last spots left." So it was like we had to push really hard. Obviously, because I want to be here. Um, but yeah, like we use scarcity for everything.

You should push hard. Even next month.

Next month, the goal is 100K. Next month I'm moving back home. 100K. I've told my parents is, you know, trying to convince him.

I should say that actually. Yeah. But my parents think I'm crazy anyway. So, you know, and but one thing I want to add as well is um the way I joined Max is I actually saw his masterclass on school. So I was acquired through school and I saw that in January and I just saw two to three hours of it like 2x and I was like, "Damn, I already had worked with debt to set up my community." I was like, "Wow, I wouldn't have gone into debt if I saw this masterclass. I would have followed the steps." And then come May when school games came, I wanted to win the school games. And then I was speaking to a few coaches. I someone pitched me 10K. Another guy pitched me 5K. I was like, "I'm not paying that. I can execute. I'm just going to get like trying to join a community where I can uh, you know, get the most bang for my buck." And then lo and behold, Saw Match Premium joined. I joined the Q&A call, completely hijacked it. "Hey, this is my offer." And I I literally like every three days I show up and I come with this energy and like Max would give me feedback. Matt was like, "Man, you should do daily Q&A calls. Um, this is what I'm doing." I got that advice. Next day I we implemented it and we started marketing that in my in the DMs on stories and then that's we started crushing and then we started going on. So we didn't even have like a school game strategy until the ninth. And the ninth was like, "Okay, everyone in the company, we need to now start uh becoming top 10." Our first goal was road. I have those Google docs. I can share with you. Road to 40k, win school games. And then where were we at? 25k like May 15th, like not 40k. We changed, revised it. I think 65k. Then we were on route to 65k. We revised it to 80k. So we didn't hit that. We had 65k. Um, but yeah, literally in a nutshell, that really like you don't even need. If you're watching back home, whatever, you don't need co-coaches are helpful, but if you actually even join a community like Max's and take the advice and run with it, you can still get results. And I even like the advice you gave as well, you know, it's actually funny when you during that Q&A when you gave he spent 10 minutes reviewing my about page. I don't know if Andrew told you, I was in the toilet. So, we were in WeWork at like 10 p.m. about to get kicked kicked out in a WeWork in London and I was in the toilet and you were reviewing the page and I came back and I was like...

I was Alex is doing the video. I was like, "What?" And I missed it. I had to watch the recording.

Yeah, it's crazy.

The bedet on one thing. So, LinkedIn strategy, how did you? Was it cold or what was it?

So, preface, right. So I went from um debt like I took 10 loan, took a loan out to work with Ted to my first one was $18K USD cuz I had 25K followers on LinkedIn. So yes, I had a head start, but I built that over a year. So my audience, my my strategy was literally what Alex says, value, value. I never asked anything, but I was running a company before this where I was helping them land jobs successfully. So I was like, "I want to blow up. I want to have good service. I will help you get a job and I'll charge you nothing and you only pay me after you land a job from your salary." So, it's a win-win. That way, I got the best students job. So I was just marketing to get the best leads. And then when I launched a community, I had an audience that loved me.

Yeah.

Um, and so did...

You give the people the 25,000 who were following you?

Oh, no, no. I did I did both. So, I would what I did was I would combine success stories and value.

So, here's how Maria got a job.

Maria's from Mexico. And then these five steps and each step is like...

A lot of value. I'd read the post 10 times and think, "How can I condense as much value in as little amount of words as possible?" Each line, one to two lines each per paragraph. And then CTA with like a freebie. From freebie, send them a freebie. And then ask them...

Freebie was a DM?

The freebie was a CV or a cover letter.

The call to action on the post was to DM?

The call to action was to comment.

And then because LinkedIn really likes comments. So what I do, what I did was I for every comment, manually. So there's no many channel LinkedIn I have, but manually, they would comment "CV." I'd say, "DM me, Maria, and I'll send you the CV." Then they DM me, Maria. And we even cross-check. If they don't comment, we ask them, "Hey, can you please go and comment so I can send you the free?" So it was in in a nutshell, I said a lot there. LinkedIn post with value, comment X or whatever for the freebie, and then reply to that comment saying, "DM me Y and I'll send you the freebie." They DM you, you send them the freebie, and then ask them, "How did you find Y?"

And then you, "Oh, so are you still struggling with your CV?" Yeah.

So post, comment, you respond to the comment with telling them. So you get two comments from each person. You and them.

Shows engagement and then you push it. Yeah.

And how did you do viral post?

So viral post, what I would do is I do like a big big promise.

Like, and there were honestly...

Like, how did you do it? Right. What you talked about yesterday?

Oh, how do I do it as well? So it would be a...

How did you find viral ideas?

Who I copied. I copied other like there is one creator has 260k. What I do now is I've done like 60 million views in a year. I don't know why I don't have blue badge on LinkedIn. That's not the story, but should get it very soon. But what I do is I look at like really good creators and ruthlessly I go to their best performing posts which my audience can resonate with. I copy them word for word, paste them on a Google doc and then literally tweak every like mini paragraph and change it for my niche. That's literally what I do. And I've done like whenever I've done that with this one guy, Toby, I always cross 100K. And 100 is like obviously small for YouTube and Instagram, but LinkedIn is big because the quality of the leads is really high. People send me like like essays why they love my content. For there's three reasons why I love your content. First, second, third. Best regards, Aisha. Like really high quality leads. So that's how I copy. But another point on like with LinkedIn, if you don't like making content, I hated making videos and I really liked writing. So as soon as I started writing on LinkedIn, I started blowing up because I enjoyed it. So the with with our YouTube as well, 90% of the value is the offer. With LinkedIn, it's just a hook. So I would say literally like this is one of my best performing posts. Here's how Maria got a job and got promoted. So sorry, he's Maria got a job in eight days and got promoted within three months. Um, and in between I also say, "Here's an international student." So, "International student got a job in eight days and promoted in three months." That or like, "Here's how Arty got a visa sponsor job in less than 90 days," with a really good picture always as well. And then value in the post for everyone who's back home who's, you know, not trying to be on camera. So, obviously, you can partner with somebody who already has an audience, but if you're like, you know, I just really like writing.

Um...

I mean, we personally have seen a ton of growth on LinkedIn. Yeah. So, we're like we've never been hotter on LinkedIn than we are like right now. So, look at what we're doing in the last quarter.

Yeah.

Um...

But you get a ton of like the the followers are worth a lot more so far at this point. And...

Yeah.

I think LinkedIn has something like 100 million monthly active users.

Uh, and so sorry, uh, 300 billion monthly active users and um, 100 million daily. Um, Instagram has two billion monthly active users. And so like every follower is like worth six and a half Instagram for like an equivalent. So if you get, you know, 5,000 followers, it's actually like having 30,000 followers. And I bet from buying power, it's even more.

Yeah. Well, I've got 48k now. So I'm worth 300k.

If I was on Instagram. But I was also going to say with um with LinkedIn, they're going to launch and you probably know this, they're going to launch short-form very soon and obviously you're going to crush there. But I've my short-form will crush that I'm doing on Instagram, crush on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is if you don't want to make videos, if you just want to copyright, it's the best platform.

X is also really good. I mean, X is the platform I spend the most time on. X is really if you're...

And I think the quality, I would say like LinkedIn is number one. Twitter X is probably number two in terms of quality at least.

Yeah, I think we I should double down on LinkedIn. I've got this whole um formal of not growing on Instagram. It's just LinkedIn.

Yeah.

Alex, does um for for you and Ila, is LinkedIn sourcing talent for acquisition.com? Are you getting? Because in my mind, that's a lot of people that are in nine-to-fives or I could be wrong, but is that...

We get LinkedIn for us, the biggest. Yeah, we get deal flow from LinkedIn. I mean, the highest like we get deal flow from LinkedIn. So LinkedIn's actually very valuable for me.

Um, and talent flow. Okay. And you're able to track when you when a new acquisition.com company comes to the table, you're able to sort of see where that person's touched base with you.

Deals a year. We do it too.

Two deals a year.

Yeah. We haven't even done a deal.

Okay. Wow.

Yeah.

Okay.

It's not a diversity strategy.

Yeah.

Put all the eggs in...

Or Ben. Okay.

That's the difficulty with what I do. I don't I don't need more deals. So, it just like doesn't make complete sense and if it doesn't like I can just keep living and keep...

Yeah. Okay.

Yes, sir. Um...

Yeah. What was your real traffic strategy? I I didn't even know what the traffic strategy was.

Okay. To be 100% honest, uh, it's a long story. I can tell you the whole story another time, but The condensed version is there was certain strategies in terms of S-curve of adoption on certain niches. Uh, the IP I have, Anime Shreds, was purchased three years ago. So the intention was there. The IP was collected. Now it was time to sow. Most people want to reap. They don't want to sow. So just sowing social media. And if you'll see uh all you have to do is go back and my brother Luke, he has some vlogs. They're pretty cool. Um, but there's a lot of anime in it. Anime, anime. I had Anime Shreds already.

Yeah.

Never pushed it once.

Yeah.

Once it's just anime, anime, anime because I resonate with it, not cuz like, "Oh, that's what I resonate with."

That being said, Luke launched Capital Club. It went really well. Uh, that being said, I wanted to give it some time, like a little breather, because I don't want to, "Oh, Capital Club, Anime Shreds, boom, boom, everybody's like, 'What the what do I do?'"

Yeah. Uh, that being said, I was looking for a proxy in terms of ecosystems and not social media. So when I stumbled upon school, I talked with a few friends that are in the like pretty high up in ClickFunnels. And I asked him, uh, "Yo, what do you think about school?" Because I don't like Discord at all, especially. He he's all about like the security aspect. And I just like Discord is just back to what I was saying before is text, not that really social aspect. Be 100% honest, I've always been pushing, she knows very well, dojo, dojo mode, just creating what I believe is the most optimal path in terms of your fitness. Not the right path, just my path. That being said, I just like one day I'm like, "Hey guys, I'm in school." And I already had all the videos. I had all the resources, but I just let see, okay, how many people are coming in? And based off of that, that's the strategy of how we leaked the the content information. But it was...

All natural.

What platforms? Instagram for me personally and then basically so it's it's a strategy of how do you and you know it very well because how do you portray or give information whether it's motivation, whether it's action step or value in different platforms with different verticals or different angles because you can't do the same post for Instagram, the same post for Twitter and copy paste the same thing, you have to switch it up. So I posted on everything that I had. I didn't pay a dollar. Like I had people DM me, bro, I didn't answer one DM him like at all.

Direct on the stories.

Direct on stories. And then once on stories and it was getting traction, Luke started being like, "Hey guys, this Anime Shreds is pretty cool because him and I have been working on this for a long time."

Um, that being said, it was just organic. Okay.

Yeah.

So that was it.

Yeah. Pushing everything organically.

But building an audience and value like we've been dropping value for years.

How was that dollar counter when you launched it?

What did that kaching sound?

We we I muted that. I was even paying attention. I don't care, dude. I've been through the whole Shopify. Ding, ding, ding, ding.

You see at first I was curious how fast it was going when you launched cuz it...

I wasn't paying attention. I was I had a million things like you you DM'd me and I'm like, "Oh, I feel like a douchebag." Cuz I didn't reply and then I saw your text. That being said, I want to address something. Uh, when I entered on school, I love the ecosystem. I love the layout like I told you before. But to somebody who's a bot, right, in terms and not bot like in a mean sense cuz you can unbot yourself. You just have to do like right energy inputs and cleanse your body. That being said, regardless, it's like social media. You're used to browsing. It's like the same like repetitive dumbass motion, right? And it's like like you're just being you don't know what's going to come next basically, right? You just and ad no ad. Here's like an ecosystem. You control it. You just make sure it's a panacea for everybody. Have a good time and I'm like, "Okay, this this is where where I'm gonna do it." And they just I'm like, "Hey guys, I'm here." And I told everybody, "I'm gonna raise the price. I know what the value is at." And then just raise the price. No gimmicks, nothing. It's like the people have been loyal knew like, "Oh, yo, he just launched." And they kind of just like...

Yeah.

I remember it went pretty crazy.

It went pretty crazy.

Yeah, we were shot up on...

Yeah, you can you can talk if you want.

We weren't even tracking the the the sales. We were just focused on building out the...

Back end.

The whole back end for like the first week. Yeah, literally didn't even look, didn't even look at the sales.

I kept saying one thing. He's like, "No, no, no, no. Get back to phase one."

Focus, focus.

This phase three, four, five. I'm like, "Okay, fair."

I remember that day we get so many support tickets. I was like, "What's that unit?" Jesus. He was like actually like 10, 10, 20 per hour every hour.

Can can I just jump in off for a point about it? So, we've just been on the table so many like amazing acquisition channels. Not trying to shiny object syndrome, but we've been I've been ruthless on one channel and I sort of like launched the whole I I launched my school as I I built this. I won't. So I don't have a pre-existing audience. When is like the right time to step over to LinkedIn because I know for sure there are so many people on LinkedIn on Instagram, all these different platforms. I don't want to like bifurcate my focus.

Is is it like a case of just scaling the team to do that? Is it like a certain MR? Like how do you know when to step over and actually bring a second channel on? It's tough, man. Um, I usually like people. I mean, what's revenue now?

Uh, like 70.

Yeah. I mean, I would stay focused on what you're currently doing. Um, the only times where like, so I would say there's two paths that you can go. So path one is that you just run paid ads and that would scale you like most people like you're probably five like most people probably 5x their income who have warm traffic by just running ads. Uh, because you know so many more people aren't subscribed to you but know who you are, recognize your stuff.

Um, so like we get like 600 million impressions per quarter like what we do and so but like I only have like I don't know eight or nine million subscribers across all platforms. So it's a it's a huge percentage of people who see my I think we I just saw that I think it's like 94% of people who see my content aren't subscribed. And so that means that like that's 20 times 20 times the audience that's not subscribed that can recognize my face as who I am than who are subscribers. And so when I run ads, it's all warm. Like everything's warm. And so you have a way bigger audience than you know, but if you just do organic, then you're limited. And the more you write hook in the organic, the less good it is. And so it's this constant like battle of agreement zone, giving, and asking. But if you run ads, once you do have an organic following, like I think that is the that is the infinite money glitch that exists right now with social media. It's like you can just absolutely print.

For a while because as long as you're basically think this way, as long as your organic is growing at a faster rate than what you ask from the ads, you can basically have continuous acquisition from a warm audience at scale. That's...

Got it. Yeah. But you would you say that like I guess like an ideal scenario, you do start to stack the platforms organically. What what's your like if you start say you started community, you did like one platform called LinkedIn, Instagram, what would be your threshold you'd look do platform domination, hopify first, ads, then when would be...

I think it's whenever you can do the other platform and not have it from the first one.

That's really what matters because the moment it detracts from the first one, it's not worth it because you're going to lose like you're going to lose your...

That's what I did actually. Um, so I don't I hate video making video. I just like making stories and I've got two brothers. So this guy's crushing on Cube. So he can say yes, two times worth 100k plus. My other brother in Pakistan, he was he's already done a course on...

Actual brother.

So this is my actual brother.

Same mother, different mother.

Yeah. But then I've got another brother who was who did a course on how to actually grow through Instagram Reels.

And I hate making video content. So I was like, "Hey, do you want to do my Reels?" Like, "Yeah, sure." So he took me from zero to 10K in like two months. And then he would and whenever we get someone an interview or a job or any success story, he would put it on the story with a call to action to DM Academy and then join. So that's what I did. So either you learn...

Yourself. They have to be niche expert of one platform. That You need new brother for each niche.

But jokes apart, you can get someone that could make Reels or like on Fiverr or something. It's as long as it's cheaper to do than actually the money you make.

Makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, it's just it's it's a focus. I mean, like we're obviously on every platform, but um, we started more or less that way. Um, at least when I was like, "All right, I'm actually going to make content for real." But I I but I lost money, you know what I mean? For a long time, just I spent 100 grand a month for like the for the organic team to just run that content.

For brand Alex, because obviously you're so active on YouTube, like one of part of me wonders is like if someone watches Ano's videos 40 minutes on YouTube, they're invested and their like trust of you goes through the roof, right? But like I guess like on Instagram or TikTok, they're like the 30-second little little jabs almost peppery sort of stuff. How do you hold that? I mean like I guess like you and...

More YouTube. Like right now, we have it's actually almost apples to apples. I have like 2.5 on YouTube and I have 2.7 on on Instagram, I think. Um, and 65% of all my traffic comes from YouTube. And that means that the other 30 something percent comes from Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok.

That's everything else.

You know, Snapchat, Snapchat, YouTube, and podcast. I think are the most...

Podcast.

Because if you think about how much time you spend with a YouTuber or a podcaster.

Yeah, the relationship is way stronger.

YouTube. I mean, YouTube is if if someone only had one platform to be on, it would be YouTube. Because uh, podcast has the the affinity from the audience because they spend all that time with you, but it does it's not a growth platform. Really hard to grow podcast. There's no there's really no suggesting.

Yeah, and you put on YouTube.

Right?

Which was like that was just the genius of what Joe Rogan did by accident. Like...

He put a podcast on YouTube so it got distribution through YouTube and then it just fed the other platforms.

Yeah. YouTube is king for sure.

Yeah. K.

King.

Uh, your stance on call to actions in organic versus paid. I'd just like to get some...

Yeah.

Yeah. I just wanted...

My my views on this have evolved over time. I think that you can get away with CTAs in every video as long as as long as it's integrated. Um, I mean, you think about the creators that are mega creators who have 90-second ad rates in the middle of their videos. It still still does okay. I think I mean, if you if you see my videos, like I have integrations for school and acquisition.com in almost every video and I don't think it really matters as long as because we think about the CTA for every video, right? Because what a lot of people do is they get lazy with it. They just slice in the same the same CTA, so it just becomes an app. It's like, dude, you're making the video, you can make the most most relevant integration to your thing. It's like, "Hey, I'm talking about this this thing. If you want more things like this or you want a more personalized version of this, go here and you can start for free," or whatever your lead magnet is. I think I I don't I don't see as an issue. I think when when it becomes a larger and larger percentage of the video is when it becomes an issue, but I think just directing traffic for more, you know, more or more personalized experience uh is good in general, but once you start running ads, that's where you don't have to worry about it almost nearly as much. You can just give and basically your objective on the your objective on content becomes how do I get the most warm impressions for my avatar or in my in my niche and then you just let the ads do...

And another question is just so I can validate this for our students because they're all creating like out of touch ads. Can you preface how it means like a standard dropshipping app? Like, you know how you see it's like it's not a good creative. I just want to preface how important the creative is for the guys that end up do what like when they do watch this, they understand that the most important part of this entire process is the creative. I just want to solidify that because they're creating all these out of touch ads.

Yeah. A lot of a lot of uh half you guys have organic followings of some kind. Um, you already work like you just don't know how to click the buttons and the clicking of the buttons to run ads is the easiest part. The hard part is making really good ads. Easy. You can hire a VA. You can hire I mean, you guys drop every single person.

I'm going to snip this section out and just show it to them so they understand is the most important part. So...

That's why most people can't scale to this size audience is only good.

Like if you think about Dollar Shave Club, I think those are some of the best ads. The Old Spice that...

One, those ads are so good. The people never like, somebody who never heard of Old Spice would watch that ad and be like, "Okay." And so that's like, that's what I see is like the zenith of how good it can be. And I mean, we're not there, but we try to get better. And so you guys might have seen some of the new ones we had that just came out that are like, very "rizzled." It gave me Old Spice vibes, right? We did. Again, I mean, I feel like I open this up every time, but it's just as important as like, we filmed 50 hooks for those videos and we just run 50 variations on them because the meat is going to be more or less the same.

"I had a feeling."

Yeah. Yeah. It was actually the front hook is everything. Like 80% of the go. And same thing with like YouTube videos. We really make and LinkedIn.

Yeah. I mean, we said 80% after your headline, you spend 80 cents of your dollars of your advertising dollar is only going to go to people and like, make sure it's good. Okay. So, I feel like we kind of touched on traffic more that everybody had different strategies. Um, obviously, a lot of you pretty much went to DM call. So, call seem to be pretty much across the board except for Maxel, which I think is strong.

Alex, I was just going to say, I have an idea, but your thoughts on it, which is like, we don't need a VSSL for YouTube because the trust is higher because they spent like an hour with you. Is that essentially, am I right in saying that? Because we don't, we get pitched a lot of, you know, "Why don't you just send them to a webpage with a sales letter?" And I've always been like, "No, I don't think that's that required because they've already spent like an hour with you online." Whereas like, on Instagram, maybe they've seen 60 seconds, and then you need that DM to bridge. So the question is, do you agree with the statement that YouTube traffic does not require a VSSL or intermediate steps because they spend more time with you and the trust is higher?

I'll say this, if you treat warm traffic like cold traffic, you'll sell more. Okay. You decrease the likelihood they buy if you make it.

Okay. So.

You can get away with it, but it doesn't mean it's, you just can't get away with it.

Okay. So, everyone's like testing the out then. Seriously.

Yeah.

Okay. How do you split up your time in like a week between like, you're testing uh, cold like paid ads, you're also testing like testing YouTube and like short-form content? Like, how do you split up your time to film all of those in like a week or a month?

So, we film, we so for, so it's actually changed over time. And so when I first started, I did one filming every 90 days. Um, and I would do a hundred shorts in one day and that was it. And then the team would repurpose those shorts slightly differently across platforms. And that was it. It was, you know, every 90 days I did 100, so I had one every day that could go out, um, across every platform. Uh, then we went from one every 90 days to, uh, every month, then we did every other week, uh, to film out more stuff. And that was, every other week is what I did for pretty much all last year. Um, we just recently with the back to business kind of tweak in our content. Um, we're now doing like a daily, like first thing in the morning that I do. So if you see my Instagram Lives, I know you've seen those. Um, those lives become YouTube videos. They just edit a little bit. Um, but that's that's more or less what we do. And then, um, I just realized that at a certain point, I'm fresher on like hour one and two than I am on my like seventh hour of making videos. And so it's a little bit, it's a little bit more challenging because I'm doing it every day or every other day. Um, but I think the output, the quality of the output is higher.

Does it take away from your focus on like other parts of the business or is like, how do you?

So, I have my maker days and my manager days. Mondays is when I do all my, all my meetings. And if I do have to have a meeting that I have to book, it starts at the end of the day. So I had a meeting yesterday, the day before, and it was from 4 to 5. So I still have all day until I have that meeting. But my mornings for me is when I'm the most creative and I have the most energy. And so I'll kind of write down the bullets of the things that I want, stories, examples, analogies, whatever. And then Daniel texts me every morning at like 6:00 or 6:30 and he's like, "I'm ready to go whenever you want to come down." So then I finish my stuff, I come down and we roll. And then, um, if Michael's here, he'll have usually another video that he'll pull from like, "Hey, I've seen you tweeting a lot about this topic. I took the top 20 tweets that you have around this. Do you think we can make a video around it?" So then he'll kind of like beef out an outline using those tweets and some stories because he's consumed all my stuff and so he knows like what stories might be relevant that I can tie in. So then we pull it up on a screen and then I go through and I have my bullets there that I that I can talk to.

Yeah. But that's, I mean, fundamentally the idea of this is the guys will pull shorts from this. Um, but I think I answer this way because like, there's stages. When I started, I just did. And then when I was like, "Okay, I'm going to start making content." Shorts were just becoming a thing. So I'm like, "All right, let's just make a lot of these." And so I made a bunch of shorts and I started doing three videos a week with a vendor and I just did those as webcams, which you guys know. I was like, I'd rather just get it out and then just get kind of like train the muscle. Um, but I tend to hire vendors first with the intention of replacing them. And I tell them that, like, I'm hiring you for speed right now. Uh, and then my goal is to learn what you know and then eventually be better than you at this. And then.

Gotcha.

Yeah. It just, it just phases. I like trying to go to like, what we're doing now would be really hard. Even if I started three years ago with the skills that I had then, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't do what I'm doing now because I just wasn't ready. I, I had too many, I still have too many other things on my plate. So over that time period, I've been able to clear out more and more stuff from my plate. Um, you know, install operators and businesses, install leaders, things like that so that this business can continue to run, uh, and grow without my like direct intervention. So I used to be on like every call.

I don't, I don't have any like calls with any of the portfolio companies because we have a whole team that runs the portfolio.

So a lot of your time these days goes into content.

Yeah. And, um, and just like the high decisions that happen, which is interesting because like the, like the, the more important the decision, like the less often it has to be made. So, it's incredibly important, but not timely.

Do you approve your content?

Sorry.

Do you approve your content?

The, the rule overall is if it's me, I'm fine with it. Like unless I explicitly say like, "Don't include this," or like, we had like, everything's fair game. And a lot of you guys have issues with captions and stuff like, "Oh man, they send these words." If it's written, it's for me. And so the way that we get around that is like, Twitter has been my number one biggest have for content that no one copies for whatever reason. But all my captions are tweets. So my team just searches whatever the reel is about. They just look at my Twitter, just grab a tweet and they just make that the caption. I agree with that. I wrote. And so like that's that's how everything, like all my LinkedIn stuff is either transcriptions that have been taken from my pod and then obviously condensed and edited down, but they're my words and my ideas, or they're a combination of like four or five tweets put together on a single topic. But it's always my words. And so that's that's how we've been able to kind of scale across platform is that we just, no one posts anything that's not me. So I remember, I think I heard Gary say this like seven years ago. He just said, like, "I'm fine if it's me." And I just saying that I was like, "Okay, I'm just going to take that as my perspective." Like, the camera's on me. You can use whatever you want as, you know, making good content, but you can use whatever.

And, and just out of curiosity, how do you get from not knowing all of this to where you are now?

Not knowing?

So obviously, I don't know all of the stuff that a lot of you know. So was it masterminds or mentors?

Vendors. That's what I heard. That's how, that's how I went to every platform.

By vendor, you mean like an agent?

Agencies. I just went to agencies and I, I, so I mean, Sam interviewed 600 people before he found Daniel. Um, I, if I want to go learn a new platform, I'll get on the phone with 20 agencies and I'll be like, "What do you think I should do for X?" And then they'll give me their theory. And then I'll talk to the next guy. I'll talk to the next guy. And then just from those calls, I have a much better, like, a much better idea. And you'll, after 20 calls, you're like, "Oh, these 18 had no [ __ ] clue what they're talking about. These guys did know their stuff." And so I'll just say, "Okay, here's what I'd like to do. I'll work with you. I'll use your system and I'll do this. Like, has to be on brand for me, but I'll do this for this period of time." My goal is to replace you, but I'll be upfront about it. And so afterwards, if I do replace you, I'll do a consult back period where I'll pay you the same amount or half the amount that, just to make sure we don't get stuck on something. And then after we're good, you succeeded, we're happy, and then we start learning. Basically, we try and learn everything they know. And then once it's like replicated, reiterate. So like, we try and do everything they do to their system, learn the five years that they put into this, learn it in six months, and then we're like, "Okay, well, we can use our brains too. Maybe we can learn more than that."

We just try. We start.

And then it's in-house.

Yeah. So we're in-house on every platform. Um.

Yeah, on every platform.

Uh, not Facebook, I think.

Oh, yeah.

Facebook.

Cut that out. Cut that out. Cut that out.

What's that? If you were going to start on YouTube from scratch, what would be like a, just a basic, like, here's a 60-second elevator pitch on how to start?

I mean, it's really just have a topic that's interesting and get to the point. Like the top videos I have, I start making my points by second one. It's like, it takes me a minute and a half to.

Like, we're about to experiment. We're gonna try this like this week. Um, where the headline is basically, I'm going to assume the headline of the video is the first thing that someone heard, and then the video is going to start as like, "So, number one," and just like, as though that we just went right into it because like, if you look at video retention on YouTube for the guys who do YouTube, like, you lose everyone in the first 30 seconds.

Everyone.

Yeah.

So if you can keep like 70% of your audience by second 30, you're going to have a murdering video. You get 80, it's going to be a million video just at second 30. So everything is about those 30 seconds.

But would you hire, like you said, would you hire an agent starting out, like trying to do your own?

I mean, I had it and he was immediate.

But like, he was better than me knowing nothing. And for me, it was really, I know I'm paying someone. So I was like, "All right, I'm going to make sure I make these videos." And so he was like, "Three videos a week." And I was like, "All right, three videos a week." So I set up my, like, "All right, what are we talking about today? All right, let's talk about, you know, let's talk about whatever." So, get into it. And then once my team could, you know, could beat his team, then we let him go. And then we're like, "All right, how do we do better than this?" And we just kept leveling up. The big difference though for everybody here, because no one here is an entertainer, is just understanding that like, entertainment and education are completely different.

Like, they're completely different. I, I've talked to all the big entertaining guys and the stuff that they have given me, and I'm pretty good at executing. Like, it does not apply. So, it's just different. The point of entertainment is to get someone to consume the entertainment. The point of education is to change their behavior. There's a different objective. And so there, there's like lots of whisp and, you know, crazy things that they want to just keep people like glued like this. But, um, the content itself can be rewarding if it actually teaches someone that isn't, at least in my opinion. And I, I'm okay with lower views. Like right now, my videos are getting lower average views than they were before. But my book sales have doubled. The amount of business owners that have gone to acquisition.com is double, even though my view count is lower. So I'm like, you just have to, like, why do I make videos? I make videos going to business owners. So if I just get, I can go punch a random person on the street and get 10 million views. It's not going to build my brand. And so like building hard, building a brand is.

Who are some educational YouTubers you've like studied or talked to that have helped?

Not many.

Classic. There's one. There's one.

Avat, one of your brothers. Um, what's his name? Wally.

Abdal.

No, not.

Ali Abdal is really good. Oh, Hamza.

There's this guy. He's an educator out of India. He does, um.

He's got like 20 million plus subs across like five different channels and he teaches like, it's like calculus.

Account, physics. It's not that, but I love it.

Yeah. But like these guys, massive. And I, like, I watched the videos and it was just like.

"How to do this calculus thing," and it was like a whiteboard and a dude.

Oh, is it a physics guy? He.

Yeah, physics wallet. There you go.

Physics wallet. Yeah, I've heard of that.

And so he has like calculus wallet, physics wallet, like he has all of them. And so basically, seeing how low production his stuff was, but how expert of a teacher he was, really shifted my perspective around what high-quality educational content is. And his, his view counter, I mean, he has like 5, 10, 20 million view videos, uh, around calculus. And there's no Lamborghini getting crushed. It's just teaching. So I was like, I just need to be really clear about what I'm promising and being as ruthless as I am with my word decision to to make sure that value per second.

When you jump right in on your new videos, are, how, where are you going to put your cred? I know you said you're going to put it on the screen too. You're just going to weave it like 5 seconds in, 10 seconds in, or something?

Yeah. Or it'll be a lower third. We're experimenting with that. Like, let the lower third edify me as I'm continuing because people can take in two things. They can listen and see the lower third. So that's, that'll save us, you know, three, four seconds.

This is like, we're like three, four seconds. Like, it makes a difference. It's actually like, really wild.

There's one thing that I've learned. It's also, uh, I'd like to get you to vouch for this potentially. It's, uh, to to reduce the caloric load when someone's consuming content, uh, even from an educational standpoint. Um, I was creating educational videos and it's just to be able to simplify the messaging. So I'll tell you, um, a cool thing with with educational content. So you want one point. Like this video will do way better with 10 examples. Do much better than 10 points. And I think that's what you're talking about, the floor book. It's like, you just want, it's like, here's the main point of this video, and then you just give anecdotes, analogies, visuals that all reinforce that point, rather than like, here's 10 individual points or 10 steps. It's just, it's just in my, my experience. Now, you can still say it's 10 steps. I don't, that part doesn't matter. But what it actually is, um, are really examples of the core point.

Is the EVOS different for short-form because it's hard to explain like almost anything on short-form as opposed to just like.

It's harder.

Yeah. So, so despite the book, "Don't Make Me Think" in psychology and like, do, if you had a hit list of things from an educational perspective on a YouTube video, you have to hit in the first three and 30 seconds, what would you say? So if you speak to Mr. Beast or say like, confirm the thumbnail, right? But like, education-wise, like what are the things that you think I have?

So, I think confirming the thumbnail. So, that whole ism that comes from the the entertainer world is about increasing the likelihood that what they click on is what they want. That's what I think is really like, that's the, that's the principle behind it, right? And so from an educational perspective, we confirm or increase the likelihood that they're going to get what they want by edifying ourselves and by giving them a plan. So for us, at our big three is proof, promise, plan. We try to cover that in the first 30 seconds. So what's the promise? What's the plan? How does proof that what I have is actually going to help you? And that, that order, we don't have a definitive. You have some bangers that are promise, here's proof that I can help you, here's the plan. Sometimes it's promise, plan.

So for instance, for me doing automations, if I say we can create articles in your tone of voice automatically, behind me you see a system, simple, that shows the proof of that happening, even though it's not knowledge. Do you, um, I guess do you try to deliver a value bomb as soon as possible? Like, in other words, give them something that's like, "I didn't know that."

And we'll order the points so that the thing that we think is the most like belief-shifting or most like novel. So we just had videos like "13 Years of Business Advice." I think, um, the last one was actually the one that we put first, which was "Sell the Rich." That was the last point I made in the video. They're like, "That's really interesting. Let's leave with that one."

Yeah. So, if you're doing like a couple deals a year with acquisition.com and theoretically you have not infinite deal flow, but there's a lot of business owners that want to get bought by you. Why invest so much time in content if you already have such great deal flow?

Also, grow.

Okay. How many years from now will we see them? The end of the first phase? By the end of.

H, how many phases are we cooking?

Lord of the Rings Chronicles.

Definitely like having a big personal brand with a lot of trust with a lot of business owners is a very valuable thing. And so I like building that. I see that as building an asset which you can do whatever you want with. And I believe that future me will have even more insight as to what.

Okay, I add one little question as well on your focus, which I love, by the way, but you just don't edify advance my target avatar. Get out of here. What do you think about the trust-building bit though, where like you see Alex like in the gym with the, like, do you find there's a place for that on YouTube, even if it's like, like a 5% 10% of your content?

I hear what you're saying. So basically, so I had to answer this question because people like, "I thought you said the niche was everything about you." Like, Joe Rogan isn't. So also Rogan is everyone, right? And so I think like this. So if I have, go. So if I say I'm gonna make content about marriage, right? That is people are going to go click that are people who want marriage advice. People who want marriage advice is not a huge overlap with business owners. Not really. It'll get lots of views because there's a lot more people than who are married than who have businesses. But if I make it a business concept, concept, and then I mention marriage, then everybody who's a business owner is going to watch it. And then the people who are married are also going to get a secondary benefit from it. And so I'm not like, the Mosy Meals video was a lot of fun, uh, but was not a good video for me to make. And so because it was just about fitness and food, which is dumb for me. Not dumb in general, but like fitness.

But entertaining.

But entertaining.

It's entertaining. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we'll try and do it. Um, but.

Which means like, the people watch this want more videos like this, and more videos like this is not what I want to make.

You, you kind of weave homoisms.

Yes.

To lead them into.

Yes. So the business first, business first, everything else that like is part of me will come out. And I don't, I really don't think you have to do it on purpose.

100%.

Yeah. It'll just come out like a riff. It's going to come out like the, the whole "never scoop dessert" thing. Did you know that? Like, I, it was just, it was a joke because I come from the fitness space. I was like, "Never skip dessert." And like, it just went [ __ ] nuts until I guess I'll just keep treating this, whatever. And then like, calves stuff, it's like, I actually really did train calves every day for 10 years.

So.

It's true.

Yeah.

I just want you.

That was it.

Yeah. I mean, that's a good lie. Breaking down that misconception that like your relationship-building content has to be separate media. It's.

This whole, like, the five pillars of.

Just make stuff the average wants. The other stuff will come.

Yeah.

And the stuff, and the thing is, the stuff that comes out, the audience will tell you what they're interested in. You might be like, "This is my pillar." They're like, "We don't give a [ __ ]." You know, but they will say, like, "Your cat's funny," whatever. And then that becomes part of your kind of like lore. It has, it gets built in.

And just add something. I did something similar. So what I did was I told my audience I'm going to Vegas so that I can learn from millionaires how to help you land your dream job faster. And they loved it. Like, I think 20, 30 people messaged me on on different platforms, school, Instagram, "Congrats on Vegas. Hope you enjoy. Ask her this question." And although it's like, it's indirectly related, I'm going to make my business better, but they loved it. So that's whenever I'm making a post, I have a tendency to talk about business, although I'm still like a noob relative to where I was six months ago or friends who are, you know, at 10K or so. So I have that urge, but I'm like, "No, I have 48,000 followers on LinkedIn, and they all want one thing: that's a job or their employer to sponsor them their job, 100K minimum, both in terms of monthly revenue and followers." So I fight that urge consistently. Sorry.

Yeah. No, but I, I used to want fame six months ago, but then I realized, actually, with money, you can buy fame because you can buy ads.

So money is the north star. Once you have money, you can buy everything. Ads.

Yeah. For $50 million, you can celebrate. Sorry.

Cost $50 million, like a deedless celebrity. We're.

There. Wait.

How does that work?

How, how do you pay $50 million? What does that mean? You.

Just give the one person, make me famous.

So the way, so the way that I, in that stat, is, um, is two, two things. One is looking at political campaigns for presidents, um, and how much they spent earlier on in the campaign where everybody knows who the candidates are. I was like, "Okay, that's a pretty good proxy. A lot of people know who all the candidates are, how much they spent earlier on." Um, so that's one. The other is I was like, "What movies came out that were big hits where the person who was the main character was unknown prior to the movie?" And so I just looked at the budgets of those films and then like, before the movie and after the movie, they went from zero to A-list was like $50 million is about how much it costs to get the impressions to be a slow.

But they also have the skill of acting.

They also can act.

I mean, you also have to be interested. But, but like, in terms of the cost of the media to get everyone to know who you are, that you can get everyone out there to know who you are, but then it's like, how do you compound it from there? That's going to come down to you. But it costs that much.

Right?

So that's just like a fun, fun.

The movie budget or the advertising budget for the movie?

Okay.

$50 million is everything, right? It's, it's shooting, editing, production, whatever.

Million media in spent.

Yeah.

Like, what you pay for billboards and Facebook ads and YouTube ads and everything.

Everything.

Yeah.

I mean, A-list. I'm not saying like for someone to recognize you on the street. I'm saying like, everyone recognized.

That's what I see as is everyone recognized.

Did you personally ever have a desire to become famous?

No.

Still don't. Big. It's, it has more pros than it has cons. What's the biggest con?

I mean, I can't go out without being disturbed. Um, when I walk on the street, I get stopped five to 10 times. Um, for pictures and whatnot. And like, for every single person, it's that one time for that one person. And it's like their whole life, like they're going to judge me for the rest of their lives on that one conversation. And I might be like, not. Um, I can't go to public gyms because I can't go out without getting interrupted again. For all, like, all those reasons. Um, person who takes a picture of me and runs ahead. So that's why like, every, everything that I've ever bought, those companies claim that the reason the guy now is because I bought a water cup from them. Um, so like, I can't opt into people's funnels because I just want to see stuff. I can't buy products. I can't attend the master, like, I'd love to attend this stuff for people who are like, just down, like some content mastermind, but like, if I should have attended, like, it would be about me.

Have you tried like a mask?

Sorry. Have you tried like a mask?

It's irreversible.

One of, like, if you can't go, you can't get unpaid.

So.

Are you in rooms where you're a nobody?

Are you in rooms where you're. That's who I am.

No, but just where you're at the bottom of the turbo bowl.

Um, I try. Okay.

It's hard.

Yeah.

Those guys are getting better. They're being like, "So, Illuminati meeting."

No, I mean, I have one meeting that's coming up that I've organized that I'll have like six guys that are all billionaires there that are all just friends of mine. I was like, "Hey, let's see if we can try and hang out." It's like months from now. And I'm sure people will get, you know, one or two of them will get busy because [ __ ] happens. Yeah. Um, but most of the friends, the true friends that I have, aren't local. They're, you know, they're very successful and they're super busy. And we have an understanding that when we text, we treat it like an email. And I many times don't get responses for a few days, and they don't get responses from me. We're just like, it's cool. Like, this isn't like the quote that I heard for the first time from busy people get busy people. And, and I think every single one of them is like, "We're good." And so we don't talk super frequently, but when we do, it's always great. It's high value.

Yeah.

It's just, I will say that the higher up the ladder you go, the thinner the air.

Everyone at the top does know each other.

Well, you made a piece of content where you said, in general, you can access people within a 10x of your, is it income or net worth, would you say?

So, like, do you, for you, kind of at the point where you can access, are there people that you cannot, you can't get in touch with? You can't DM them, but like, if you really wanted to.

If I really wanted to, yes. I probably have multiple people who are one degree separated from him, but like, what do I have? Like, I'm not going to get, I'm not going to try and get, I'm not going to try and make that connection unless I know I have something that I can give.

So you're, you're waiting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Unless I have something to offer, why would I, why would I bother them? I would just be another thing that I hate.

Yeah.

It sucks. But if, if you're in your 30s and you're already kind of breathing that air, like, what's the.

Billion dollar area.

You're not a hundred billion dollar.

No, I know. But you're the, it seems like the runway is pretty, you know what I mean? Like, is you just expecting it to get lonelier in the air to get thinner?

Yeah, I think it's okay.

Okay. That's fine. I mean, I, it's an irate thing is like, I think your awareness of what you tolerate goes down, and the people that you surround yourself, the, the bar that you have for them goes up. And so like, for me, I, I realized lately, and I had this conversation about friends of like, I care that someone is making progress at a very fast rate more than I care where they're at. Absolutely. So like, nothing drives me more insane than like a friend who's stagnated. You call them in six months, and they got the same problem.

Right? And then I don't call them again.

Okay.

But I'm ruthless that way. Some people aren't. And that, like, people have strong views on it, and that's fine. It's just like, this is how, this is how I live my life. You don't have to live.

Yeah.

I just want all the people that I associate with to make me better. And a lot of people have different skills, you know, like, there's friends of mine that are private equity that have tons of deal knowledge. So like, I'm looking into, "Hey, what do you think of this cause?" Like, they have, they have more deal reps than time, maybe 30, 30-ish private equity deals. It's not a huge amount for some guys who've been doing it for 40 years. But some of them, I had a friend of mine who's single billionaire, not multi, just single, um, and and she, uh, he was like, "I'm, I'm making content. I've already told the story." But he's like, "I'm making content." And so he helps me on some like real estate stuff. Um, but I was like, "Yeah, here, try, try doing this with your Instagram." And so he was like, "Oh, thanks." And so like, I had value there, even though that wasn't. And this is to your point of like, how do I add value to these, you know, these super rich people? It's like, well, you're still better at them.

For some things, right?

I mean, fun. I think that's what school's based on is that everyone has some skills that they're better at than other people, and they can teach them.

Yeah.

And how do you find what value to provide? Or how do you find like someone that's 10x better than you? How do you find their biggest pain point at right now?

I, so I'm not like proactively trying to Elon, just for context, using as an example, but like, I, I've never proactively networked. Like, unless like the, the time where it's more relevant for me is like, "Hey, we're going to go switch vendors to this massive company. Um, let me go see who the CEO is and I can just DM the CEO." And a lot of times, believe it or not, the CEO already follows me. And so I can just be like, "Hey man, love your, love your product. It's awesome. Super excited. We're shifting the whole company over." That would be it. And that's me giving because I'm like, literally giving a business. And then I'm a customer now. And so they'll message me back and be like, "Oh [ __ ], I'll put one of my best teams on. Make sure." It's like, "Great."

Yeah.

And then, and then at that point, if there's something that emerges like, "Dude, I love what you're doing with this. I actually listen to your podcast." I was like, "You guys saw the Harley from Shopify company." He's like, "Dude, I listen to your podcast all the time." I was like, "No [ __ ]." Right. And he was like, "I almost connect." So that's what, that's where the podcast came from. Oh yeah, I have an audience that's bigger than yours. I'll just do a podcast with you if you want. I'll distribute my audience. That was valuable for him.

Yeah.

And that's why it's still important for you to focus on content.

Yeah.

Having distribution is never.

So children.

We made it.

Yeah, we made it. We made it to children. Yeah, that's how we know. Okay, so I think we covered the conversion, uh, on Jacob. Yeah, Alex, very quick question on leverage. Um, so, you know, content and YouTube are very high-leverage stuff, but you've been a coach's content and YouTube automation, like Instagram, LinkedIn, they're all high-leverage stuff. But when it comes to coaching specifically, where can we find higher leverage because coaching is very low-leverage, one-on-one?

One, I mean.

You can do one-on-one, one, you know, semi-private, you can do one to many. One of the things I had written down somewhere was when you choose to have champions within the community. I think it's it's helpful to make the champion siloed. So, make them a champion about a subset of the group, not the whole group. That way, it's not like they're trying to claim claim top dog, uh, from you. It's just like, he's really good at the CV process. He's really good at the like, just basically chunk down. Yeah. What it is. And then that way, people know where to direct their questions and where you can direct them, but that person never becomes bigger than you.

Thank you. That's how you can get leverage within. I mean, that's how we're able to make J Launch into a solo company and transition it from Alex's, you know, guru business to Jim Launch, the consulting, you know, firm that now has a CRM and payment processing, you know, runs and has a supplement company.

And just on that, could we actually sell a school community? Because we, there's no other school community in our nation. We.

Actually sell a school community, but it's going to be treated like every other business. So they're still going to look at the same metrics, which is like, what's the growth rate? How do you bar customers? What's LTV? What's CAC? What's your annual revenue? Like, fundamentally, think about it like, you can sell an Amazon business, right? A business that you sell product on Amazon. You can sell a school community, which is a product on school. Like, you can sell the exact same way. It's just going to be a function of how much, how you get customers, what they're worth, how much profit you make, and again, the growth rate, how stupid they are.

Go.

Because I'm taking the Q&A calls, wouldn't they be, or we'll have to get someone to replace.

Yes. Everything that you do, over time, you have to have somebody else do. I don't think you, like, basically until you're a million a month, you just don't, like, at all, like, zero thoughts. And then like, two million a month, like, "Okay, now."

If his LinkedIn is that ever going to be exitable?

Yeah. If he's not only doing that.

Okay.

Like, and there's also, there's also different ways to exit, right? So like, you can have a majority exit. What it sounds like we're talking about. You can do a minority exit. So a lot of the influencer companies that you've seen, like Huda Beauty, The Rock, like they can do minority deals where an investor comes in with some value that's outside of this. So like, with The Rock, it's like some, like Huda, I think, um, the investors who bought the minority percentage, uh, they had distribution, Sephora, and Mac, and brick and mortar. They're like, "We'll bring this distribution to you. Uh, we'll take this percentage." So we're invested in growth. She still pushes it because she's still the majority owner, but she gets a liquidity event that you can take out. The other thing you can do is you can run a, you can take debt out on, like refinancing a house. Same thing with the business. There's value in the business and a bank will look at how reliable the cash business is against.

Again, that only really happens once you're at least a million.

Otherwise, beyond that, you're looking at credit cards. And those are usually not used for personal distribution. Those usually used for expanding business.

And when we hit a million a month, do we have to hit that for six months consistently, or is that like, first one million a month, cool, let's sell it, let's move on to the next thing?

Well, no, you, you get paid significantly more if you're consistent. And it's also because, like, again, if you hit a million a month, a process to sell a company takes six months.

So you have to keep maintaining that and growing it throughout that process. Volatility. Some businesses, the reason they get these massive headlines is because it's rare.

It's not easy to do.

You have to make an asset that somebody else can own and it will continue to.

Be a lot more scale.

But from like, the school business is that it's probably the easiest business to go and make 10, 20, 30, 50. Like, you can make it like, you have a YouTube channel. It's like a easy business. You don't have to worry about supply chain. Like, there's already a ton of leverage to your point that's already built into the model.

Yeah.

And what's the next level after school community? Is it a tech company or something in between? History.

What company?

A tech software company.

Yeah.

I mean, it couldn't be more different. Honestly.

What? Sorry.

It couldn't be more different. Sorry. It's very different. Yeah.

Oh, it's, yeah, it's almost completely opposite.

I worked in one. It's completely opposite. Yeah. Different way of thinking.

It's hard.

Yes. It's literally the opposite in terms of like, okay, you have to spend a shitload of money upfront. It takes a really long time. And to have a price point that's compelling, you have to start with really low prices. Like, it's the opposite of like a high-ticket coaching thing where you can start it tomorrow. You don't need to have any capital upfront and you can make a ton of money fast.

That is a great question there because what you're actually asking is, when do I know to do something different? Right? When have I got enough from my school community that I can go start another venture or go horizontally and enter a new niche?

I'll give you a good first goal.

Sorry.

Save a million dollars in cash after taxes.

That's the first thing.

A million in the bank.

Yes. After tax.

Until you've got that.

Like, just do that.

Because that's not even enough to start a tech company.

So like.

Or really even buy a house. So like, you may as well just do that first and be focused.

Yeah. And then your ideas seem to get bigger the more that bank balance grows.

100%.

Yeah. Take bigger risks.

Yeah. And I say that because I know like until December, my goal was what, just 2K a month. And then I had 10K month. I was like, "What's this?" And then 20K month and 30K month and 65K month and I was like, "100K a month, I don't even know. I'm impressed by it." So I can see myself. I hope I don't plateau. That's why I'm just trying to motivate myself now. Get to know that.

Yeah. So, wasn't it, didn't you send me a message after and you were like, "Do you feel just like empty now that the."

I felt super empty after.

"Post-game depression?"

It's, it's a thing.

That's why we introduced that little emoji.

Wasn't that, was that you? I think it was.

It was me. I had a call with Max as well, like a one-hour one. He was like, "It's completely normal. Come here."

Trust me, they call the post-game blues. There is a, a school community for previous game winners and it's basically like an AA support group for the first month.

They have weekly group meetings like, "Yeah, I'm struggling as well."

We are getting physical trophies made for everyone.

Let's go.

So that should help a little bit with the.

Carry it everywhere I go to feel better about my depression life.

Just put it in every piece of content.

My life sucks. So you've got something physical that you can remember.

Yeah.

I think that actually matters a lot.

Yeah.

Influencers.

How do you scale with influencers to your, to your skill, to your community?

Like, how do you, how do you.

How use those as affiliates?

Yeah. Exactly. Affiliates or ambassadors.

Well, that'll be something that's, that's on the road, obviously. Um, but you want to fundamentally, when you have affiliates, they become a second type of customer. So think about like, you, you end up having a second avatar. You have your customer that you serve, and then you have your customer that sells the stuff that you serve that you also have to serve. And so you have activation, onboarding, retention, the same metrics for an affiliate as you do for a customer. And so you might have an affiliate who starts out hot and then fizzles. And like, "Oh no, what do I do to retain affiliates?" Because you want them to continue to promote. So it's the same, it's the exact same book of problems that happens, just with another new. Um, yeah.

But are you targeting those whales first versus just some random.

I would go whales first.

Okay. It'll be more. But I will say this, you know, uh, Allen, so Prestige Labs was all affiliates. Allen was all affiliates. We had some ads, but it was mostly.

Affiliates. Um, well, actually, we ran ads to get affiliates there. That's what we was really, that was a super high-leverage thing. But, uh, yeah, that worked out great because it was like someone would pay $20,000 to white label the software and get onboarded. And then those agencies would bring their clients on, and they'd pay a thousand bucks to onboard every customer. And then we would get somewhere in the neighborhood of like 30% of the billings that they had using the software. And so even though they had churn at the customer level, the affiliate level churn was really, really low. And so then it starts, basically, start seeing affiliates as like revenue nodes and being like, "Every affiliate on average brings me..." This is when you start getting the higher volume ones. Um, it's like, "Every affiliate on average can bring me $5,000 a month who meets these, who meets these criteria." Same thing, avatar for, uh, customers. Is like the best affiliates have, you know, these things in common. And so, "Every one of these is $5,000 a month, uh, in, you know, in B2C clients that they bring me. And how much does it cost me to get an affiliate?" So, basically, you have a new LTV ratio that you build up to at the affiliate level that really is just a version of the ratio at the customer level.

And then when you're, when you're sourcing those, those affiliates, are you just making straight affiliate deals, or are you giving them some sort of other incentive to promote your product?

So, if you're doing many, if you're doing a high-volume approach, which is what I've done almost every business I've had, you just have to put a lot of thought into like, what you want the, the mousetrap to look like in terms of what the incentives are. Um, but I don't, I don't like doing a lot of one-off deals. I like to just think more about like, if they're like, "Well, I want something special." As soon as you make one consideration, then you have to like make, then everything becomes custom, and I hate that. So, it's like, "We built this way, you know, this is built to incentivize it."

Do we have an update on the, when the affiliate feature will come out for the school communities?

The affiliate feature for school, where that comes out, after free trials and annual. Yeah. You guys want that first? Yeah. I'm going to do free trials like next, then annual, then affiliates. And I want to do all of it this year as fast as possible.

Okay, cool. Awesome.

Yeah.

There's the big.

Can I ask about scaling and hiring?

Um, I would like to not be the only person left in here that doesn't have anyone helping. Don't really know about the best way to go about like.

It's a good question. Well, everyone here seems to have like solid partners, and I don't even know where I would start with that.

Community is a good place.

Right? So that, so my process, my community, I hate to use this word, but it's kind of low-level. So I've been trying to find people in there to elevate. There might be some people, but I haven't, I haven't been like, "Oh, yeah." Like, I, I just haven't had that.

It's like the first month, right?

Yeah. Month two, month three now.

So just wait. Just keep waiting.

I mean, if you're talking to all of them, you are good, which I think is not bad.

But I mean,

What are you looking for?

Help.

Yeah.

I'm just by myself.

You got some delivery time, you got, uh, sales, you got marketing, different functions of business. So, it's like, which of these is the least valuable that you need the most?

Yeah, I think all the, all the super high intensity. So, like onboarding. So, I don't do anything we talked about because I, I just, I mean, I did the best I could, but I don't do onboarding calls. I don't do any of that stuff. Um, so like that stuff that I mean, that would be the first thing is just increasing my retention and all that through other people. And then it would be the fact that like, I am not the best at pretty much anything I do. So I'd like to bring people that are the best at those things in. Like, I teach branding, and I have the smallest brand of everybody here, like by far. Um, but I teach it to the people that have a way smaller brand than me. So it's like, I'm just, I'm the guy right now until, until somebody else can come in. I think sales is probably one of the first. I mean, well, probably delivery, really. Like where you spend the most time, that the cheapest to replace is what you replace first.

And, and, and I'm still replacing from within. That's like.

I mean, you can run, I mean, you can do outbound. It's the same core, core. Like you run, you run ads, you make content, you, you do outbound. The same way you get customers. Literally the same thing. Like our, our recruiting is a really, that we do. Like each of my recruiters, they do 40 plus outbound a day to like high-value targets that we think are really good for a specific company on LinkedIn because that's where, that's where a lot of those people are. But the long-term best is referrals, but you have no people, so you can't ask them for. You probably source a low level.

I think I could. I think I just need a better, uh, after today, I should have one, but a better understanding of what that low-level rule looks like.

It's literally just looking at your time. Like, where do you spend your time? And where you spend your time that's the cheapest and the cheapest thing to replace that you don't like the most is what you give to somebody else.

Yeah. If I find, if someone can't clearly define it, you don't need to hire anyone because when you need someone, it's really obvious because you're doing it every day. It's taking up so much time. It's killing you, basically. And you're like, "This, this thing, I need someone to do it."

Yeah. I mean, when I did the one-on-one onboarding for 100 something people in two weeks, I wanted that not to be me.

And you plan to do the ongoing.

Well, I'd like to. I stopped doing it because I died.

The position then, for example, right?

Yeah. So it might be that that's sales because I think probably.

So when it comes to DMing Elon. No, I'm just kidding. Um, so with the sales on that note, uh, looks like a lot of people, even for the lower ticket groups, are are benefiting from sort of, I, I would call them mini sales calls. What would be your recommendation for the most efficient pitch to pull on the right motivator strengths? For example.

I think many of you sell a call. I mean, again, this depends on price point, but you could do. And I, I'm going to say this for the people at home who are watching, like, I started my career selling gym memberships for $99 a month, and I was like, one-on-one in person. And so like, I think a big ego around sales calls, and you have to pick one. So, you know, um.

I think VSL, six-minute VSL to call to close is a super effective method, whether you do that via, you know, stories to DM or comment to DM, and then you go to the call. It's a really, it is arguably one of the most efficient, um, conversion mechanisms.

Is there any specific structure for the pitch you recommend?

Or, I think the six thing is really just giving them clarity. So like, I don't, I would not think about trying to be like clever or salesy. It's just like, this is what it is, how it works, here's proof that it works. These are what next steps are. This is what.

And then for the call, you recommend pretty much just getting their feedback on it or or asking questions or.

Okay.

Why are you here? What's your problem? What have you tried so far? Why did that work for you?

Uh, just a general framework for increasing LTV. Uh, just to give you some context. So, inside our community, people join in. Um, we're obviously rating their content pieces. There's a section called Content Review. That's part of the long-term value proposition. There's group calls, and they've got access to the modules. Obviously, the onboarding is also a part of that process. I understand this is kind of contextual to our community, but how can you add additional LTV? I know it's a very broad question.

So, the levers are pretty straightforward. So you've got increase price, decrease costs, add cross-sales, which is selling something else. So like access the affiliate link. So that's a cross-sell. You have upsells, which is more of the bought or better of the thing you just bought. Then you have downs. Point of increase, increases your earnings per click. So that's more or less.

And getting them to buy more times, which is fundamentally research.

Cool. Thank you.

For school groups, it's just annual and lower churn, basically, or sell something in that classroom.

Yeah.

So I had a thought when you said, um, like, if the initial goal is just have like a million dollars in your bank of tax. Like, I live in Sweden. We pay a lot of tax. We pay a lot of like.

Like we have a 20% core tax, and then we have like 20% on the salary or 30% plus on the salary.

Total, just all.

On salaries, I get like 40% in my pocket if I take a salary, right? So 60% I pay to the government.

And then same here.

Yeah, but like.

Well, you pay 60%? Is that what you said you keep?

Is that the.

No, no, he pays 60. He pays.

So if 30% income and then like 30% social fees. So nobody can become rich by taking out salaries.

So you make 40, that's the total amount.

Yeah. So then it's dividends, right? But we're the only country in the entire world where we cannot take out unlimited dividends. Like, it's based on, you can only take out 50% on the salaries that you pay to Swedes.

And I don't have any, I don't hire any people in Sweden. So I'm like.

Oh, you say they like, percent of the salary of the company.

Yeah.

Like the total payroll.

Yes.

So I don't know what to do. Like, so like the people help me with the, or like with the.

With my thing, they're like, "Yeah, Max."

Yeah. They're like, "Max, you should like start hiring some people." I'm like, "Why? Like, just so that I can pay more dividends?"

The good news is that your, every country besides America, you just leave the country. You get to still be a citizen, and then you can just, the tax rate of what other country. Americans, I can move to Dubai.

And I'm still going to pay 40%.

You can, you can go to PR. I live in PR.

But PR sucks.

But is that the move? Like, my entire business is in the US. Like, everything that I do is.

I mean, if you, if you got a visa, move or whatever, you would be able to pay 37%.

For going to Dubai and pay 10%.

Yeah. Or you could pay. Yeah. Or you could move.

And stay up night. Yeah. But.

Is that the move? Like.

Dubai is how to get to close to zero. Puerto Rico is close to zero. Porto.

Bro, I would go to Dubai, stack up for two, three years, and then live where you want.

You're young.

Dubai seems to be the most common move I see.

Just buy a canoe. You go.

The hard part I heard about Dubai is the time zone, right?

Like.

And it's hot as well. And there summers, you know. I think Malta is low tax in Europe.

Yeah.

But it's like, it basically comes down to, don't live in Sweden.

Bro, you got to get out of there, bro.

60%.

Yeah, probably been saying.

What you can do is you could have, um, not getting into like complex structures, but like, if you, if you incorporate outside of your country and then you bank outside of that country, um, then nothing really ever hits the country. You just can't, you can't repatriate the dollars. So you can't take the money that you have in that entity in Malta or whatever, or the Cayman Islands. You can't take that money in, but you can continue to use that company to do whatever you want to do.

So like, you probably live off of your salary anyway. So you can pay yourself a salary as an employee of the company in a different country, and then you just keep all the money inside of that, that corporate structure. That's, I mean, that's the, the answer to that is, well, you can't. Yeah, the money has to stay there.

And then we also have this strange little rule that if you have a holding company, you can put all your money there, and then you can freeze the money for five years, and then you can get out 25%. But then you can't do any other.

The crypto, like a, so weird.

Yeah, I don't know what to do. Like, it feels like the move is just to like, like, don't live in Sweden no more.

Yeah, I mean, you're describing an issue that people fight wars over. So yeah.

They're like, work all day, and I get four months of the year.

Yeah.

Is what I get paid for.

When I get to June, it's like, oh, and I just work free for the rest of.

Yeah.

Oh, not even that.

Yeah.

Do you like it though, Sweden?

I do. Like, but I guess I'm just biased because I live there. I haven't lived any place else. So, I guess I can just live someplace else as well.

If America didn't have global taxation, I'd be far more likely. Where.

I like to buy a lot. I just don't want to exp.

And, and it takes a few years, too.

Well, you also have exit tax.

Yeah.

Which, if you don't know what that is in the US, you have to pay 20% on everything you own without having sold it.

So they would value school. They would value. They'd be like, "It's worth this. 20% of that is what you owe." I'm like, "All right, well, that's cash go to jail."

Choose your jail, basically.

Exactly.

So like, so a lot of people who, who exit in the US, it's like they do an actual exit. So they actually sell their company. So like, I could have exited when I sold Gym Launch, Allen, and Prestige, and my house. I sold everything in one year, 2021. So like, everything was, you know, money was free. I was like, "All right, I'll sell now." So like, at that point is when I sold. Like I could have been like, "I'm expatriating now," and I wouldn't have to pay again because I just paid capital gains on it. I'd already been valued and paid the taxes. But then I stacked up against. But at some point, like the, the big realization that I had, which still applies in Sweden, um, is the value of the company that you build will compound at a much faster rate. So like, right now, everyone is living on income, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's fine. But when I looked at like the richest people in the world, they all were like in California. I was like, "Wait, how does that work? It's like, if this was such a drag, then I'm not understanding this game correctly." So I was like, "Oh, the value of the asset that they're building grows at such a fast rate, and the value tax-free. You don't have wealth tax." Not sure.

Yeah, probably not. And so then you can take loans against that thing, and the loans are tax-free. And so that's where like, Elon can take a loan against his Tesla shares and buy Twitter for $44 million or billion, just takes against taxes. Makes sense. So it's like, that's how that's how the, they quote exit the tax system. It's like, you, you minimize, in some ways, you start trying to minimize your distributions and just keep reinvesting in the business, so the business explodes in value, but you're not paying tax on the value of the business. And then you can take loans against the value of the business. That's the bigger.

Yeah, maybe.

Less geographic question, and less kind of tactical with school, but more just philosophical. I think between the business partners and the operators, like most people in this room are between 10 and 100k personal income.

Yeah.

So like, you've met, both of you have met like countless entrepreneurs that are where we're at. What's like the right way to play the game? I know there's not one right way, but like, what are the bonehead moves that people make at this stage of entrepreneurship? And then like, the winners and the guys that remind you of yourself, etc. Like, what are they doing right where we're at on the gift board?

You want to take first?

Yeah. Right. Um, well, they don't stop.

Yeah.

Like, that's probably the number one thing you notice is people just stop. Or they get, they get, they just stop, or they're inconsistent, or they get distracted. Is huge. Like, it's unbelievable how often people get distracted by like, you know, AI, or crypto, or NFTs, or like all of these new hot things. I mean, there's nothing wrong with any of those things if that's your focus and you stick to it. But it's the people, the people that get screwed are the ones that are always switching and never actually build a like a name for themselves in something or build up a good reputation. Um, so that reputation is important right now.

Goodwill.

Yeah. Because just lasting is the ultimate thing. Cuz if you've been, if someone sees that you've been doing the same thing for like 10 years and you've always made money, then like in 10 years, you're, you're the winner because no one else is probably, everyone else probably switched things or given up. So like, you just win by lasting. Um, the other one is passion. I think like, if people see that you actually like it, like it's not a drag, you can tell. I can always tell the people that are doing something for money, and it always is obvious to me. I'm like, "Oh, that sucks." Um, but some people, you can tell they're doing it because they love it. So, if someone does something for a long time, they're consistent, and they love it, and they're passionate about it. Like, that's, those are the main things that I've noticed. Yeah.

They also just work hard. Like, you know, life gets in the way is the thing I've noticed. It's very, you've got to make many sacrifices.

And it's debatable whether that's even worth it, honestly. So like, that's why most people don't last.

So like, you, you have to make many sacrifices, and yeah, most people aren't willing to do that. So that's why you've got to love it a lot.

And then maybe keep expenses low when you're, or not.

Oh yeah, those, those are the stupid. So I was saying yes, there.

The things people do that win is that the things people lose on is they get distracted, or they have lifestyle creep.

Yeah.

So I've seen so many friends, they start making some money, and I see they've got a new car, and I see they've got this like new apartment. I'm like, "Oh god." Um, they're broke like in a few months, or really stressed, right? Um, and that's when they make all the bad choices because they need to pay the rent, they need to do this, that. So you can, you can sense the energy like in their videos or whatever, because you can tell, "Oh, they're just doing this 'cause they need to to pay for their expenses." Um, so keeping your expenses low and having a lot of savings is that buys you a lot of. That's why I'd say having cash in the bank and low personal burn is the key because then you can think long term, and nothing stresses you out because you're all good. Like, you can, that's how you can have fun. So because you don't need it to work, right? And you can think longer term. Um, and I think to stay motivated, you have to continuously fall in love with the thing over again.

So, you might fall out of love with it, and you have to like ask yourself why, and restructure your relationship with it. So, like, cut all the things that you don't like, and find a way that you could just do the things you do like about this thing so that you can keep your relationship with it.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's kind of like you have lifestyle, but you also have like, you know, Jeff Bezos talks about there's overhead with everything. So he says every job is overhead. There's things you don't like about whatever you do every day.

Yeah.

Like, to Sam's point, you don't want overhead where a greater and greater percentage of your day is stuck doing things in the business that you don't like doing. And so it's being mindful of that. Like, "Okay, how do I, what are the things that I do like doing in the business?" And so it's, it's continuously kind of like, you analyze price every month. It's like, you kind of analyze your time every month and think, "Are the, I'm doing more of the things I don't like than the things I like that I should do more of?" Um, but I, I am, I recently, I made a really long video about this yesterday, coming up. Um, but like, I was trying to find focus. What's focus, right?

Um, and what's commitment? So commitment, as I define it, conversations is the elimination of alternatives. Like when you get married, you eliminate alternatives. Like that's what commitment is. So defining that term is helpful for me. You can measure focus by the number, quality of things you say no to. So it's not like, "Are you focused or not?" How focused are you? Like, how many things you say no to.

Yeah.

Yeah. Distracted.

Yeah. And like, like the most extreme version of focus is someone who says no to literally everything, except for one thing. That is a very focused person.

And so first, you think about that in business, but it's also, it goes into like relationships, kids, marriage, whatever. Like, it's all the things that you choose to say no to. I'm not saying it's good or bad. Focus. And so like, the, if somebody's incredibly focused and does it for a very long time, it's very unlikely that they won't.

But like, time is the ultimate enemy or ally of the entrepreneur. It just depends on whether you make it your enemy or your.

Yeah, business. So you can just wait.

Yeah. So don't stay in the game and spend.

The other thing I've noticed is it's just raw hours. So like, you know, when the best way I can think about it is how they train pilots. You have to clock so many hours like over mountainous terrain, over ocean, over all of these things, and that's how you get your pilot's license, and then your commercial one, right? I swear it's the same thing. Like, when I look at my co-founder Daniel, who's our CTO, he's like the genius behind the code. He codes for like 17 hours a day, seven days a week for 20 years.

Wow.

And that's why he's good. He's because he's just done it so much. And the only way he's able to do it that much is 'cause he absolutely loves it. He loves it.

Yeah.

That's like 10,000 hours times 10.

Yeah. 10,000 hours is just like, you're an amateur software engineer.

Um, yeah, that's that's like, okay, maybe you, you're a junior or something. Yeah.

Wow.

So, I was think, this is super tactical that we talked about I think two or three ago, but I, I did a presentation on this again. I've got all these presentations that are like in the backlog right now. Um, but I had to give this presentation at Gym Con, which is for Gym Launch, for all the gym owners and whatnot. And it was targeted for because most gym owners make between 10 and 100,000 a month, kind of area. Um, and I was like, "You need to do this stuff. You need to spend four hours a day promoting the business." And that goes for everyone here. Like, when you're a small business, the number one thing, the biggest standard you have is obscurity. So it's not your market's too small. It's like, "They don't even know you're there." And so you need to spend four hours a day. And when you spend four hours a day doing your thing, look at that. You made more money. But then the question is, "Okay, well, the school games are over. You still four hours a day. If you did, it would grow faster. For sure." And, and the people, and the people that that will crush, they just, they go, "How do I do eight hours a day and do that and like grow my growth rate?" But the tabulation of replacing four massive costs in your life, uh, equates to 96 hours a month of productive time. And so you can only make this trade one time in your life. And so that's getting somebody to clean your clothing, so do laundry for you and put, you know, fold stuff. That's someone cleaning your house. That's someone making your food for you. Um, that's, if you want $700 a month, you can have a driver with Uber and whatever, and then you can just drive wherever you want. So you get like, I do a lot of my tweets because I have a driver, and so he just drives me to work and so to and fro. That's when I do a lot of my tweets and I prep for the day. Um, and so it's not, it's not that much money. Um, I'm missing one big one. Food is a big one. Food's massive. Cleaning's massive. And yeah, it costs $2,200 a month. And it's like, "Man, I really wish I were more productive." It's like, "I can never buy that time back now. The time I have to buy is way more expensive." It's like, if you were the most, like, everybody here is the most productive employee now. Like, you were the most productive person in your business. Yeah.

And if you had the most productive employee, you could spend $2,200 a month, you raise 50% more out of them, would you?

It's more than I didn't put in 96 hours of deboard last month. That's that's a lot of focused work.

Yeah. So the average American spends, I mean, I had all the stats, but it's like 13 hours a week like prepping, cleaning, grocery shopping, food-related stuff. And then there's another X hours a week that's related to cleaning, food, cleaning their house, cleaning their clothing, like cleaning-related stuff. Um, and so you can just get away with, you want, if you want to spend a little bit more, you can spend five grand a month and just get a house manager, house, clean your house if you want. But like, such an insane ROI that you only get to do once. And so I've seen people who are like making 50 grand a month take home, and they're still like buying their groceries and stuff.

Yeah.

Unless you like buying groceries, but like otherwise, like go spend that time, you know, working.

And echo point, like almost every person that I know who just murders, like they work all the time.

Yeah. Yeah. And they love it.

There's aspects I don't love every day. There's tons of every day.

Like, I love my goals a lot, and I like my goals more than I like most people, and I like what I'm about to do.

Sam, if I may, uh, how do you balance passion and the right opportunities and the right market? So at what point do you position a compromise to say, "Okay, I'm going to sacrifice portion of my passion regarding something to go inside a market which is more hungry or to chase an opportunity which might be more lucrative?"

H, I'm not sure. I, I would always start with the passion, but then not ignore the market need and the, the financial piece because you won't be having fun if you can't pay your bills or if everyone says, "I don't want this." Like, so that'll quickly ruin the buzz. So like, all of those things have to line up to actually enjoy it. It's when people love the thing you made, they pay you money for it, and then you can pay for your bills, which makes you want to keep doing it because it all kind of fits. So, I think all those pieces need to be there, honestly. And I think that's honestly the most important thing is making sure you don't fall out of love with it because I don't think most businesses fail. I think they just fade.

Yeah, really good.

So, and they fade because the founder just stops showing up or caring. And then no one else in the company's going to care if the founder doesn't care. The customers aren't going to care. Like, it all falls apart when, you know, when your relationship with it does. So the moment I notice myself feeling negative about a person or anything related to it, I, I fix that right away because that's the biggest risk in a way.

What are some ways that you felt like that creeping in and then like.

Well, a bad customer in the mastermind was kind of like, that would fully rig doing that mastermind, right? Or if I have to show up to a Q&A and I think that they could be there, and I'm going to see their face, and I'm going to be pissed off.

Yeah. Like that. Just thinking about that days before the call. It's not even, it's like before you know it, you're worrying about this person's face all week, right? And then you're like, "What the [ __ ] am I doing? Let's just refund them." Like,

So getting that person out, or like.

Team. Yeah. Oh my god, that one can be. Yeah, if someone pisses you off in your team, like that's a real problem that you need to fix because you've got to enjoy doing it. Or if there's something about the work, like I never really enjoyed making videos, but I had to make content to grow. And it took me a long time to figure it out until I figured out like I could partner with people. So there is a solution to all of the things, actually. The things I would regret the most is just grinding away doing it anyway, right? Because it never really works properly because you don't want to do it, and you're not very consistent in it because you don't want to do it, but you think you have to do it. So you feel very depressed, but you could have found a solution.

What are your, like favorite parts of the business now that I guess you like optimize for time-wise?

Working on the product, working with the engineers, talking to the customers about the product. That's it.

Hey Sam, when you had to kick some somebody out of mastermind or whatever when they sucked, did you just say, "I'm kicking you out and refunding you"?

Because you suck.

Because you suck. All.

Whoever sold the minutes, the bot, right?

But I'm, I'm trying to get tactical to my school. Like, so I had somebody last week that I.

You're ready. Look at him. I, I immediately knew that this person, I was like, "I don't want them here."

But I didn't know if it was acceptable to just boot them and refund them.

Just kick them.

Bro, we boot people all the time.

All day, bro.

All day.

I, my fear, I know fears aren't always valid, but my fear is that then they'll just flip on me or, you know, go tell everyone else that they hate me and whatever.

You have to be careful how you do it because it could blow up into an even bigger problem, right? So like.

Warning first might be good. Like, if it can be solved by just sending them a DM. Like, some people piss me off with their posts. I just say that. I'm like, "Dude, your posts are pissing me off." That's honestly what I say. You just, you'd be amazed at how. And then they're like, "Oh my god, I'm sorry. I'll stop." So, like, sometimes that's all you need to do. You don't need to boot them. Um, but yeah, if someone repeat offends, okay, dude, you did it again. Like, that's, that would be my second.

Why?

And then if it happens again, okay, [ __ ] you. Like, I'm not going to say that, but I'll just pick then.

Yeah.

I received these from you.

Have I sent you a stop?

Is it.

Have I sent you a DM before?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Twice, actually.

What did I say? I'm curious.

Yeah. Yeah. Literally what you just said, like, uh, like, "Don't, don't make these posts in the in the community."

What were these posts? What were they?

It was in the school community, and I think it was too too personal and not enough tailored to school itself, and you obviously wanted to have like product feedback in there and everything, especially like three, four months ago.

So now that he's here, can he reset to zero, or is he still on number three? I'm.

Getting nervous. Well, I adjust my posts accordingly. So now it's more school-tailored, and I'm not getting any messages anymore. Yeah, it should be good.

Well, how we do it in school community is like somebody creates a post and we delete it, we just like say, "Your post has been moderated because you like because X, Y, and Z." So we like tell them that. That's like step one, right? And if they repeatedly do it, we look at their like activity and stuff like that and how they're showing up, and if it's like real serious, we just tell them the reason and we just kick them in the mouth. But it's like, it's very rare. We try to really like communicate with them, and like most people really understand it. They're like, "Oh, I'm sorry." So we just communicate and we usually give a reason, um, so they can improve.

How many moderators do we have.

In school community? Just one per 100,000.

What?

Yeah.

Alice, can I ask a question on your four hours? Do you, do you see that as price admission, entrepreneur tax, in addition to everything else? So for instance, if you're doing like YouTube videos, you do the ideation, your thumbnails, does that count towards your four hours?

Like promotion, you let people know your stuff.

Okay, cool. And do you have a, I suppose like a specific question, but do you see that as like every day that's paid? Not like an average, like 12 hours versus.

Oh, I mean, sure. I mean, I tend to be fresher if I do, you know, four hours, five times. But I mean, if you're like in the flow, you're like, "Oh, this cool."

It's just when you're small, you have to advertise the time because you have no leverage. You don't have enough money. So you have to put a lot of effort into spreading the word. And you have to keep that effort as customers come in because you need to keep the flow going so you can figure out why your thing sucks. And so you have to keep advertising even though people are like, "This thing's not that good." And you're like, "I know." Keep telling people about it so that you get more flow through the machine and fix it and keep tweaking it.

But the objective at the beginning is to is to make the product better. You advertise that you have real people testing the product on. And then once the product does sing and people are stoked and start stacking, then you start promoting more. I think one of the issues that happens for a lot of smaller businesses is like they, they start advertising some, they make some money, and they're like, "Oh, I'll advertise more to make more money." Eventually, they quickly cap out because they didn't fix the product. So, it's good that you're focusing on things like that.

Alex, you recently made a video regarding hate, and I'm sure many people are have dealt with, yeah, say hypothetic callouts and all that kind of stuff. I'm sure many people here could probably resonate with that. Uh, what's your outlook in relation?

I ignore.

I, I ignore unless it's someone who's bigger, in which case I make them look.

You make them look big.

And you do that by joking. So like, we have a saying which is "rush the shooter." So there was a tweet somebody, I can't remember someone. So I was like, they were like, "This guy's terrible." And my response to the comment was, "God, horrible." And then like, but 99 seconds, like a paint almost exclusively comes from below anyways, and these people have no reach. So who cares? Like, it costs effort to advertise. And so like, I don't, I don't, I don't like the saying. I think it's actually tweeted this this morning, um, uh, "There's no such thing as bad publicity" is a half-truth. Like, some publicity is better than no publicity. Like, if you go viral, if you're the hawk to a girl, like, it's not necessarily good publicity, but it's better than her being in obscurity.

But things better than bad publicity would be that amount of publicity for something. So it's like, ideally, you want good publicity. But isn't as bad, I think, as just being completely in the dark. But fundamentally, I just think that like, we're on a big ball floating in space, and like some other monkey. I just truly just deep, I just listen to what the customer said, because they, if they're giving you negative feedback, you want to listen to that. But you just, you just consume that and ignore everything else.

Yeah. Like competitors, like I think you're saying calls like someone just like calling you out to bash you rather than like feedback.

Yeah. But if you just look at that, then you don't. Because otherwise, if you don't look at anything, I think you have this craving to know like what people think about what you're doing, and then you look at what the, what people are saying over here. But that's not really accurate. But if you just look at what your customers are saying, and you talk to your customers, that that's all you really need to do, I think.

Thank you. Uh, I had a question for Sam, Alex. Um, so essentially you were talking about passion, right? Um, enjoying the work. So starting out, I think everybody has to put in that legwork and just do it, even even if you don't like it. So what's better and what's more lasting? Working out of stress of getting it done, or working out of passion?

Um, well, passion obviously, right? But sometimes you, even there can be something stressful about the thing you're passionate about, right?

So just to add to that, like, you know, um, sales is cool, but sales to win the school games, that was stress, and that's what got all the sales for us. But in order for us to simulate that level of urgency, in that there's been a massive dip in terms, we won something, but now do we like out of passion or out of st? Because that, that, that stress got us the return, but passion.

So, was it fun? Like, yeah, it was stressful, but was the result fun?

The result. Yeah.

You know, we're here because of the stress. So, it's.

Exactly.

So, it's kind of part of the same thing if you think about it, right? Like, some problems are stressful, but solving them means that you satisfy your customers, and then everyone loves you, and that's fun. And then you make more money, which is fun.

So then you can go on vacation.

So like, it's all part of the same thing. Yeah.

No, I got, I got my answer just by saying it. Thank you. I was, I was just thinking that.

Three months ago, you're at City Bank in a job you hated. This is way better, my friend.

Yeah. I think a lot of people like spend a lot of time trying to think about that stuff, and I spend so little. I mean, I don't know if you're like, I'm never actively thinking about that stuff. I don't know. I think, I mean, it's like just a higher chunked up goals. Like I like this big thing that I want to accomplish, and then like, kind of whatever it takes to get there. And in some ways, I think you can find joy and suffering because it's like, in like a sick way, like no one else would.

I think what I would find fun about that is I'm going to find out a way to get this result without doing this. Like, that's the real.

That's how I found him and Jo.

That's true. Like, that, that was the solution. But now he's got the problem.

I was doing the high cyber things. I was like doing all the marketing. Like, what, even with Instagram, I was telling my brother with the hooks and stuff, and he was doing like the more creative. So I was like, "This hook, this caption." Um, and I did the email marketing. I learned that from, I copied that from Max's email, to be honest. Um, and then LinkedIn, I would look at other bigger creators, copy that. And Instagram, my brother would do like the, the tacky music and like the, the textbook with the caption. I would help him with, um, and that's how I got loads and loads of leads. And we sifted through the ones I actually have money to invest and then like get him to cold call. So I was just, my literal job was to like, speak to everyone in the team, motivate them. No, we had to do this. It was 10 p.m. I think two or three days before the school games was about to end. And he was like super tired. He was working since 8, 9:00 a.m. I woke up super early as well. And 9:00 p.m. I was like, "Look, we've got these 15 leads that we haven't cold called up. You need to cold call them. I'm cold call them now. We'll close them tomorrow." And he's like, "No, I'm going." I was like, "Do it. Don't, don't be a [insert bad word there]. You need to do it." And he cold called everyone up whilst I was writing LinkedIn posts for the next day. And that next day he did like 12 calls and he closed eight of them. We made like 8K and then we were.

Kind of fun.

Exactly. So I was super, whilst he was doing the calls, I was calling up my other DM. I was like, "No, we need to get these leads." So my whole goal was just motivate the team. That's all I did, right? And that's my super. I've learned this like, I really, I can get someone to take action. That's my students as well. Like, I send them voice notes. "You're being weak. You're not doing the work. Do the work, and you'll get the results."

One of the values we've got in our company is actually a question. How can I make this fun?

So, and we actually use it all the time. So, like, if something sucks, we think that there's some kind of intelligence to you feeling like it sucks, like maybe it's not the best way to do it. So you should pause and be like, "How would this look if it was fun?" And that's been, that's how we've had a lot of breakthroughs, honestly.

Same outcome, different process.

Well, we're like, "All right, we need this outcome." Well, sometimes you don't actually. Sometimes you're like, "We need this outcome." Then you're like, "Actually, no, we don't. What are we doing? Let's not do this." So, right? Because you don't even need to do it at all. But if you really do need the outcome, how could we do this in a way that's fun, right?

Like, just that question has been very helpful.

That's actually really funny. So when I went down the whole gamification like branding thing, I went down like a five-hour rabbit hole just.

Because I thought it was fun, and part of me was kind of like, "Is this really the best thing?" But actually, in terms of like, impact on community, it was insane. I think like, when you do something fun, it really like, brings out the massive value. So we're trying to follow that curiosity a little bit more.

Well, we've said it over the last couple of weeks that I was helping you just for fun, and he said, "Hey, do you want to just get paid for it?"

Yeah. Good job. Like, doesn't this feel this whole experience that we do for free? And it had all this whole run-up has not felt like work at all. 100%.

Yeah, that's a super cool value. What other failures from school?

Um, the first one's just goal-driven. The second one is more with less, because most people believe that more you need more. So a lot of people have this first instinct like, "We need to hire more people." I'm like, "No, you don't." Like, I mean, recently we let go of four people, and we move five times faster. So like, we've just seen again and again and again that more people doesn't mean you're faster. It often means you're slower. Um, and so just constantly reminding people about that. Um, or like, you know, early on, a lot of people thought we needed to raise a lot of money because that's what everyone else is doing. But a lot of our competitors have raised a lot of money. Like Kajjabi has like 600 employees. They raised $500 million, and they still don't seem to be able to do it. So like, if that, if more with more was true, like we would be getting our ARS kicked, but it's right. We've got 28 people. Um, so that's the second one.

The third one is, you remember Wicked? The third one. Yeah. Is to have empathy to users, like to feel the pain.

Yeah. Feel their pain.

Yeah. Um, so the, so the problem was, we like, we had a lot of engineers, and like, they kind of were not getting some of the problems in the box, and we always needed to report them. So that was a, and like, they just didn't get it. They just didn't like feel the pain. So the support team and the ops team, we needed to relay that. But we started to do this 100 bucks, like they just give them some like incentive to start using the product more, and that what helped. And also, we implemented that that value to like, if it's a problem, like it doesn't matter if it's like late or whatever, just like fix it because people are suffering. User empathy, but mostly came about because an engineer might make the code perfect, but that might take longer, and there's a customer suffering. For example, if there's spam, right? And the solution, hours matter here because if we get the solution shipped, then the spam stops. But if they're going to take an extra week to make the code pretty, is that the right tradeoff, right? Probably not. Um, so that's why we came up with that one. Like, you should always ask, "Why are we doing this?" and like, understand the context from the users' point of view. Um, so there was, yeah, there was goal-driven, more with less, user empathy, and how can I make this fun? Is there one more?

Yeah, there is. Uh, find the right balance. Find the right.

And quality.

Between speed and quality.

Yeah. That's the last one.

You find that it's always these trade-off choices. And the thing that I've noticed that humans are really bad at is that they think in binary terms. So like, the two opposing forces are like speed and quality. That's what everyone thinks. So, we can take a long time and make it perfect, or we can do it fast and scrappy. But these two things are always in tension with each other. We need it to, we need to do it fast, and we need it to be high quality. That's actually possible.

Yes.

Right. But that, and that's what we've continuously tried to like, get everyone to to understand, um, like how to make those trade-off choices. Yeah.

And and like, and like, we really try. I really love the example with the follow button. Maybe you can tell that.

Oh, yeah. Okay.

Um, yeah. So the, and by the way, if you're trying to put values or whatever into your company, they're like meaningless unless they actually emerge from real examples. Um, so like, when we were getting attacked with like these spammer people, they were going for the follow button, and they were just following everyone because it would send an email and a notification. And so like, they would just try to come in and just follow everyone. Um, and I was like, "Holy [ __ ] this is getting out of hand." Um, and then I went to the engineering team and I was like, "How long will it take for you to put a rate limit on this follow button?" So like, rate limited, like only 10 a day or something. They were like, "Oh, maybe a week." And I was like, "We don't have a week." Um, so then I said, "Okay, how about what if we just deleted it from the UI?" Oh, that's one line of code. So I was like, "Delete it, and then then build the rate limit, and then let's turn it back on." And that solved it perfectly. Right. So you're looking for like these these balances. Yeah. This might not be relevant to what you guys are doing, but um, it, so pretty much what you're trying to do is like, like either shrink the scope or like change the scope or like try to solve it with a different solution. Like if if you're like, "This one will take 20 hours," how you can find something else that will only take like two hours and that gets the same results. So, um, there's not always just one solution, right? Because there's churn, like list out everything and like, really think through it.

Yeah. Have you seen that one in the school games when you go to like, create a group now, and it's it shows this wobbling treasure chest? So, I didn't actually tell the team to do that, but because one of our like values was "How can I make this fun?" they animated it to wobble, and they made hormosi pop out of it. When I saw it, I cracked up laughing, and I was like, "This is amazing. We're doing this." Um, and then like, we did that cat, and a lot of thing, a lot of good things came from that. Like, have you seen those calendar templates, like calendar event things? We give you some templates now.

Like coffee hour.

Have you seen those? Some of those are like, have made material impacts to the business, and they're like, they came from trying to make it fun.

Um. Yeah.

Oh, beautiful to see that the core values of school really flow to the company. That's good.

We only defined them like, honestly, like.

What a month ago?

Oh, wow. Really? Because we had problems. We had problems, and we had to let go of some people and state our values.

So, had you look be values before that or like, did you just?

Kind of, but like, you know, they didn't feel genuine.

Uhhuh.

Yeah. It didn't really feel like they were our own, and we didn't really go out of our way to communicate them. That's why I think they need to emerge from problems. Like, once you have some stories of doing things one way, like deleting that follow button, and stories of doing it the wrong way, then you're like, "We want this way." And how, what, what value is that? And then, then when you tell the team the values, you you give them examples. And then now we're using it for hiring. So we walk people through it when we hire them. And then that's what we, the managers use for their one-on-ones. Like, we make sure everyone is aligning with these things. Um, it's been really useful, and that's all just in the last month. You might have noticed we've been shipping things a lot faster.

Yeah. Yeah. Especially the new based stuff.

I think we're moving it like, four or five times faster.

With four less people.

Shows you the cost of cancer. There were real problems with like, some things like the, just the team and the culture, like, you know, you got to be, you've always got to be careful with that.

Well, thank you for.

Sam. What actually changed when you said four people left, and then you're now we five times faster? What changed when they left? What were they actually doing that slower?

They weren't doing those values. So like, they, it's like they did not believe that if they were making things go slower, because they were trying to make things high quality, but we didn't even think that it was higher quality. Like, yeah, so they didn't, it's just fundamentally, they didn't believe that it was possible to make to do something fast and high quality.

That's what I'm struggling with my team. They think, not everyone, but sometimes pushback is speed equals low quality. I think no, speed gets the best quality because you only think of what matters at 3 p.m. 5 hours before 5 hours left in the school games. We needed like, I think a few thousand dollars to catch up, and I thought of more than that to get to number two. We still didn't, we still kept our top three because Sky was catching up. So I thought of, I had one hour of deep work, and I thought of, "How do I get the most attention in the shortest amount of time possible?" So I thought of email marketing, forun, Instagram stories, younger brother, no, off LinkedIn post, me, AMD, cold calls. And I literally, I thought of one who does what, and I delegated that on an emergency meeting, and everyone executed, and we ended at top three. And that's literal proof of speed equals high quality. But how do I convey that in a non-dictatorial way to my team? Because some, there's sometimes where it also does affect quality, but I think in most instances, speed equals higher quality because, cuz I'm struggling, I claim that to them that's really equals quality.

Yours is in a different context. So ours is in like building coding. So in that context, I don't know, maybe that's just goal-driven more than speed versus quality. Honestly, you did whatever it takes to hit that goal.

Yeah.

Right. That I would say that aligns more with that than speed versus quality.

Sorry, don't know what you mean. Well, you did anything you could to get the goal.

Yeah.

There was no quality measure for what you did.

It wasn't speed versus quality. It was when you said this objective, and so like, you making a rail like the was better or worse. It was just that you needed to get it done, which saying it's more driven, more driven in that particular example. We don't need nuance on on which value.

I wouldn't worry about the values. We we define them after five years.

Okay. Like.

The primary goal is making money, surviving right now.

Yeah. And that stuff will come.

Values matter when you have a a third tier of infrastructure.

Because when it's you and everyone, the values are you. Like, what you value is what everyone will immediately know because you make it apparent because you talk to everyone. It's when there's another layer underneath that also not everyone has direct contact with you, which is why you have to translate the essence of you into these are our decision-making criteria so that you can scale decision-making throughout the organization. So that like, if you think about each of the the values that Sam was outlining, he's giving a context to make a decision. And so like, that's where values shine. That's why they have to be true and not just like, you know, platitude. It's, do you know what our three are?

Can you repeat the question?

What are our three values?

Oh, unappealable candor, competitive greatness, and uneasable candor.

You mix two together.

Unbeatable character.

Competitive greatness.

And then third one.

Yeah. Sincere.

So there's only three. And usually it's, want to make sure everyone actually knows. It's not like people. It's just that like, we only have three, and so you just have to stick to these things. And for us, like, we sell these. I never want someone to not know what they are or how we roll. It's like, competitive is that you're like, and sometimes the the values are similar across companies, different words. Like goal-driven would be probably the equivalent of competitive. Is that when your best is needed, your best is eliminated. Um, and people who love a hard challenge, that's what we want. So, um, that's one. S. And that means that like, what you want to say is whatever you say behind someone's back, you just say to them so that they can get better or they can get out. And then unutual character is on and off the field, which is that we want you to be the type of person that we want to associate with on and off the field, which means that something had nothing to do with cont.

And did you set up these values at the beginning of like, you know, a handful of times that we had large teams and whatnot? So, we're like, what were the values that we had at launch? We had five. We're like, what of these things would not apply for this business? Because it's not like we fundamentally changed in terms of how we do business, but the business itself would change if we went from like Rolls-Royce will never have a speed over quality, uh, value because quality is their their whole, their whole mantra, right? And having scarcity doesn't hurt them. And so, a lot of times the val has to be on two hypothetical ideals. Where do we justice and mercy? Where will we lean?

And so most people have like, on these continuums, do lean in one, you know, one direction or another.

You want to let you want to let people know if you make a decision, this is where we screw in this gray area where both answers are right. It's right to say we want equality. It's right to say we want it fast. And ideally, is there a solution that we can come up that would be amazing, because then you avoid decision.

What's your favorite way to, or I guess the best way to fire people without it being a negative experience?

Okay.

Question is, it don't freak out at you. I would say, seance, like really, like, I mean, we give three months, which is very generous, but to get it, they have to sign a separation agreement.

Which means they're not allowed to speak negatively about the company, like they or sue or anything. So it's, it makes it easier to do. Plus, in this industry that I'm in, you need a good reputation. If you get a reputation for like, cutting good engineers, because like, whenever we're letting people go, they're still great engineers. They've come from like, NASA or Coinbase or Facebook or something. So like, if that, and it's a small community, if they start sharing that like, "We fired them and didn't give them severance," like, no one's going to want to work here. So we use severance to make it easier for us. We also contain their negativity, like they're not allowed to say anything. Um, and it's also just, it, it's a better experience for them. Um, but I don't, I would always offer some form of severance unless you're completely broke. Um, you know, the big companies offer a lot more than that, by the way. Like, that's normal. Three months is considered like generous, but less than that, you're starting to be stingy. But if you've got contractors, I mean, I don't know. I've always just looked after people. You want pe, if if you're going to, your reputation of being on your team is going to be really important. So if even the people you fired can't really say bad things about you, then yeah. I think Airbnb did this really well when they had during co, their revenue got cut in half overnight, basically, and they had to let go of thousands of people. But the way they did it made it actually, they got free marketing from the way they did it. Everyone wanted to work at Airbnb because of how they, how well they laid off thousands of people. Do you know what I mean? You've got to, cuz what they did is they gave them severance, and then they also spun up a team to help find them jobs. So they were like, "We've got talented people. If anyone's hiring, talk to our recruiters, and we will help matchmake all of these people we're letting go." Um, that would be my advice, because otherwise, yeah, you don't want you don't want people hating you and spreading bad things about you.

Yeah.