A

My name is Alex Ramosi and this is Scale or fail.

B

Hi, Mim.

A

What's up? You ready? So tell me about the business.

B

I help people make stickers. For the last 12 months, I made 1.1 million Australian, which roughly works out to be about 800k. So I've made multiple seven figures over the past 10 years altogether, but hit my first seven figure year, which is very exciting. So profit is around the 30 to 30, 25% mark. And my goal for the next three years is to reach 3 million USD per year.

A

How do you make money?

B

I make money with low ticket digital products. So all of my teaching is online and my main membership is secret sticker society. Currently the rates are US$27 per month or 270 per year and then loads of other low ticket digital products that can be interchanged from for upsells. I have really good upsell game, so that's great.

A

Okay. This is a lot of stuff though. So.

B

Yeah. How many funnels is this over the last 10 years? I would be embarrassed to tell you. How many funnels?

A

How many funnels are you running right now?

B

So right now with the main membership with secret sticker society, the main funnel is a live paid bootcamp that I launch three times per year.

A

But the main thing is it's secret, secret society. You've got a bunch of upsells in the funnel to offset CAC to the greatest degree possible.

B

Yeah.

A

You go to the launch and then you sell secret secret society in the back.

B

That's right.

A

Okay. Got it.

B

Yeah.

A

What are the numbers you got for acquisition? Okay. The live paid launches. $10. Is it? The ticket's 10 bucks?

B

That's right.

A

So there's no free.

B

No free.

A

So it's paid. Okay. Yeah. Paid challenges cost you $37 to get it.

B

Yes.

A

You have a 22% conversion rate on into the membership of people who buy a ticket.

B

That's right.

A

That's huge.

B

Yeah, I'm really happy with that.

A

What's Aova?

B

It would be about $36.

A

So you're almost breaking even some of the events.

B

I am slightly in the red, but by the end of the event, I'm always profitable. And then two of the bootcamps that I've ran, I've been profitable from day one. So I've been up. They're my favorite ones.

A

Okay. All right. What do you think's stopping you right now?

B

I feel that if I could get more people into the challenge, I feel so strong now that I have that strong conversion of bringing people In I know what to do. It's really quite tried and tested. If I could get a higher volume of people into the boot camp, I'm safe to convert them. So that has been something that has definitely held me back. And then as you know, I know that I have not reached the cap in any way of being able to lower that cpa. So I think that even just making the switch with the past launch of pushing the annual membership doubled the average order value. So that made a huge difference, way bigger than I thought it would.

A

And an instant step one, add the annual, make that the only offer available. I want to be clear, the only offer available is the annual with the bonuses.

B

Okay, so annual only at the next launch. Yes, someone wise told me to do that and I did it and it worked. Shocker. Yeah.

A

Yeah, we'll probably do some more stuff there too.

B

Yeah, great.

A

Okay, so why is scaling this important to you? Why not just make money and just chill where you're at?

B

Well, I really want to be able to pay off my home loan. I'm married, I've got two kids. Ten years ago, when I set the business up, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Thankfully, 10 years on, all is really well now, which is great, but at the time, which was obviously a very dark period of my life, I set the business up really as a creative project to do something just for me to take my mind off it. And little did I know that 10 years on I I'd be teaching 20,000 plus crafters to make stickers. I mix corporate so completely different to what I'd done before. But what this has left me with is a really strong desire to be able to set my family up financially. I'm here to be open and to learn and I will implement on everything that I'm told to do. I'm a really good student, verging on being a bit of a teacher's pet. Like I will just do anything that you know, that you know more than me on this. And I constantly tell myself that I only know what I.

A

You know more about stickers than I do, that's for sure.

B

Well, not for long because can you

A

pull the numbers slide back up real quick? So you're making about over 500 ish in profit. Right. So you're very profitable. Correct. Why don't you spend up to $100 CPA?

B

See, this is part of the reason I'm here because I often finish a launch thinking I should have spent more, why didn't I spend more and then I'll go into the next launch. Again with that same. I'll cap my ad spend at a certain amount for no good reason.

A

So what do you. What do you cap your CPA at?

B

Normally, I don't even. Well, I have capped the CPA, but the CPA has gone as high as maybe 50. I'm not a cautious spender, but for some reason, that's what I've done.

A

You are here.

B

Yeah.

A

Cool. Let's rock. Let's do this. Just so I'm clear, on the delivery side, if you double the amount of customers you have, does it break anything?

B

No.

A

Okay, so this is a pure demand issue, which is nice. I think I'm going to go. I'm going to kind of break this into final offer, and then we'll go traffic. Because I don't think there's really much else for your specific business that we need to talk about.

B

Yeah.

A

Okay. So number one, I guess, on the traffic side from a spend is how much did you spend last.

B

Last launch, I only spent about 16k. The event went really well. It was not my biggest event, but it was so profitable. So.

A

Okay.

B

Yeah. Happy. Just didn't have enough time to be able.

A

You just needed more ramp.

B

Yeah.

A

So when you said you didn't have enough time to spend more, what do you mean by that? Because, like, I spent 500,000 a day at the end of my launch. What. What. What made you.

B

This is where my. My own limitation with meta ads comes into play. So. What. The way that I like to normally do my launches, which I know is much earlier than many others. I launched four weeks out, so. Four weeks out. Oh, cool. With a. Like a smaller spend, you know, the testing, seeing what works. And I didn't. I didn't feel like I had the Runway to be able to do that. I guess it was a bit of mindset stuff, too, of, like, being way more conservative than I normally would. But I remember feeling I wasn't happy enough with cpa.

A

Okay.

B

To keep spending.

A

Okay. So. Okay, so I'm going to. I'm going to walk through spend cadence.

B

Yeah.

A

Okay. And so the way that I do this, I put about 5%, 5, maybe 10% max of my spend goes in that first week. And the only purpose is to test creative, right?

B

Yeah.

A

Then once we have our creative, the next two weeks are pretty much flat. Now, we scale it up, obviously, but then we try and spend as much as possible. Like, I mean, if we could spend 75%, I would. It just. It's just challenging.

B

Yeah. Yeah.

A

Right. Like, call it 60 to 70% is in this week. And then we're. We're in this. Call it, you know, 15%, you know, maybe 10% here and then 15% here. And so even here, this is where you're probably going to be at 50% is like literally in the last three days right now. That's the cadence of spending. Now from an amount of spending perspective, we do have a decision which is like, let's obviously be willing to spend more. All right. But in order to do that, I think there's two things we have to do beforehand. One is we have to fix offer. But I also want to approach this from a creative perspective. So how many pieces of creative are you making right now for a launch?

B

This is my weak spot for sure. Creatives last launch, I think I started with a hook test in that first week with two images and two videos. This time there'll be a few more. What are you thinking? Hundreds. We won't be talking hundreds.

A

We have to. How many stickers do people make?

B

Oh, thousands.

A

Right, so let's just make it stickers. Right.

B

Previously has not been anywhere near 100.

A

Okay, so. So let's just. Just to make this easier for you. Okay. Are you familiar with AI stuff or are you like more versed in that? Okay, so there's no reason why you shouldn't have a ton of stick static ads because these take two seconds to make. So from a statics perspective, I would look at a couple different sources because I want for sure we can make some and we're gonna make a bunch of them with AI and all that kind of stuff.

B

Yeah.

A

But I think if you can take from your group. How many screenshots can I take from the group?

B

Oh, so many.

A

Right?

B

Yeah.

A

These are all ads. Right. And then you add your little highlights to them to your. To the people in your group. Do you have people who post videos inside the group of them, like making their first. Okay, so no one does no video.

B

Ugc.

A

Interesting.

B

Yeah.

A

You want to incentivize people to tried before.

B

And I don't know whether it's the demographic or perhaps I didn't set them up for success. Okay, probably both.

A

Okay, well, they know how to use a phone for sure.

B

Yeah.

A

Right. So I would, I would have a super secret sticker set, SSS set.

B

Right.

A

Which they can unlock.

B

Yeah.

A

If they show themselves making a sticker.

B

Right. Okay.

A

That's it.

B

Yeah, I love it.

A

That's it. And then I would use that as my activation for everyone.

B

Yeah.

A

Which is that everyone in your first seven days I need you to make a sticker.

B

I really like that because that's great for onboarding too. Awesome. Quick win.

A

So it's a quick win. But then every single customer makes you an ad. Then around and around we go. And so if you have 200 customers for every launch on the low side, that's 200 ads.

B

I wish I fell off that.

A

Well, there you go. We're here. And then do people post images of the stickers they make?

B

Oh yeah. There's no stopping them.

A

Right. So then sticker images. I think you'll be surprised that some of these will. Will actually turn into like what kind of sticker? Like that's the weirdest sticker I've ever seen. It's like great. And then so I think sticker ads will lend themselves really well. So we have our static ads. We were videos. This will get more people to do it. We can put that in the activation sequence in the first seven days. Great, Love that. What touch points do you have with your customers?

B

The only live delivery that I do where I am connecting is join these boot camps because they're. The classes are pre recorded but I go live every day and I also invite my all lives.

A

I just want you to clip because you're already doing it.

B

I've got so many previous ones, so just clip them.

A

And these can both go as organic

B

and paid like Q and A or just the small.

A

Exactly. The quick tips. Exactly. And then for you specifically. So all of this is just stuff that's happening that we need to capture. Yeah. But you specifically, I would say like I would want you to make 20 ads times four.

B

Yeah.

A

So like 80 ads that are just you. But I want the four to be different backgrounds and settings. So take your highest converting ads of all time over the last however many campaigns you've done. Put all 20 in here.

B

Yeah.

A

Do one of each of them in four different settings, different T shirt, different background, different whatever.

B

Right.

A

And they'll get you kind of 80. So it's like if we're going from 4 ads to 80 ads and that's just from this and we still have all of these. The last thing that I want, I want to think about before you're. I know you have my. My ads playbook. Correct. My hooks playbook. Yes, exactly. So on the levels of awareness piece, the five levels of awareness is a framework by Eugene Schwartz where every person in a market falls into five categories. So your advertising should speak to them differently. He contends that audiences go from the bottom, which is the warmest and smallest group to the top, which is the coldest and largest For Mim's business. In order to continue to scale her ads, she needs to target more pain or problem aware audiences rather than product or offer aware audiences. To make sure that you don't get caught in, like, when you scale it up, you scale up your ads, they don't perform like they'll stop performing as well. Now, there's always going to be some rise that goes up when you spend more. That's normal. But if all of a sudden it triples or something like that, typically it's because you have ads that are only really targeted at a very specific audience. Basically, it's like they're product aware or offer aware, but we need to be have people who are like, more pain aware. So some hooks that you want to experiment with are going to be more pain driven. So, like, are you bored? Do you not know what to do? Like, you would know the pains better than me, but like, those are the pains that I would use as my hooks more than some of these bottom funnel. It's good to have offers and talk about the bootcamp and all that stuff. Like that's. That's here, right? That's going to be here. But if we want them to scale, you're going to. You'll probably need to have some hooks that are up here.

B

Yeah. Okay.

A

And that'll allow you to really open up the targeting.

B

I love that.

A

Okay, now this is the cadence side. And so let's call this as number three, which is the hooks. All right. And I'll say number four is the decision, which is that I want to challenge you to be willing to do 100 cac. All right. That's my challenge.

B

Honestly, I feel like there's no challenge because I'll just do it. Now, I never go into my launch capping my total ad spend if the ads are performing as I want them to. And I just think I haven't been anywhere near enough aware of this before preparing for, you know, so now I know my numbers more than before.

A

In the first month you made it back. No big deal.

B

And I'll stop kicking myself every time. Yes, the launch finishes.

A

Yes. I have two. Two things because you already have a model that works. Well, the last thing I want to do is break everything. All right, but you got this last time. What was the painful offer specifically that you added?

B

Oh, when we spoke before, you'd said sell only annual and really don't some monthly at all.

A

So then what percentage of people took pay 10.

B

It went from being normally. It's like a 5 to 15% or 10% normally take annual. And then previously when I switched to pitching, really annual, it went to 30%.

A

Okay.

B

So that's why we had that 91.

A

So you got 30%. Okay. I think that on your launch checkout page, let's say you've got your. You've got your annual and you've got your monthly.

B

Right.

A

These are the two options. I still think that there should be a bump here, like after they select.

B

There is a bump right now, but it's only to my $47 course, which is a little bit like. You like this stuff. Here's some more.

A

How does that do?

B

That does 30%.

A

That's pretty good. So the sticker paper is one that I would put. Because if they need this to do the thing, then it's like we might as well just give it to them. Give it to.

B

Don't mind the exact stuff.

A

This is my whole kit. So just. Let's just call this the bundle. Right. If we can make this the physical bundle.

B

Yeah.

A

You might be able to get. Get away with like $99 on something like this. And it's going to super high margin. Right? Right. No, no. But in the US Though, it'll be more slower.

B

In the US it's way better. So. For sure.

A

Yeah. Which if you wanted to be wild with it, you just put this in here. So if you buy the monthly. And so then what happens is we can actually make this a bit of a false offer. Meaning like a decoy. Kind of. So it's like if we make this 149 or let's just. Let's just go crazy. All right, let's say this is 149 for my full physical bundle. You'd say. But hey, guys, if you're gonna. If you do the annual, I'll throw the 149 in.

B

I like that. Loads.

A

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is what I'm saying with the. I want a physical product premium for annual because we. Your. Your LTVs are already around 300. So I don't. I was thinking, because if it was much lower, I'd say, okay, maybe we can lower the annual and we'll get more takers. But if that's not the case and we know that they have to have this.

B

Yeah.

A

In order to do the thing.

B

Definitely.

A

So if they're like, well, I'm going to have to buy this either way, I might as well get all the bonuses and get the stuff I need to do the thing.

B

And they're committing to annual. It's like they're making a decision to commit to the hobby for a year

A

because your cost on this is going to be like 10 maybe, plus another $10 in shipping, who cares? But that might all of a sudden take you to 50% here. And that'd be big, right?

B

One to.

A

Yes. Okay. So the big decision that I have is this. This would be a higher risk test. But this is like one that I would strongly consider.

B

I'm not always the best.

A

Okay. Which is I would rather just not mention the monthly at all.

B

Yeah.

A

Sell the annual, put the offer in there.

B

Yeah.

A

And then after the launch is over, when you close your cart, then run everyone else to your monthly that doesn't have the bonuses because then you can do a mop up camp because you still get plenty on that. But this will. Because like if you're doing, you're doing a full five day thing, you can sell a 300 ticket. And so people are just taking the cheaper one because you're offering the cheaper one. Right. My goal here was how can I get that spend number? How do you feel comfortable if you knew all of a sudden your AOV is $300, so maybe conversion cuts in half. But you are at a $300 level of confidence.

B

Yeah.

A

Because now you're. Now if you're at 150 in the first 30 days and you're like, I'm fine, I can spend more of this spending.

B

Yeah. Cool.

A

So I had a wild. Two wild ideas. Right. Wild idea number one is let's just sell the annual, put this in there. And I think if we add this to that and make that the full offer. Yeah, I think that'll do. Well, the second wild idea that I had and again, this is wild. This is wild is that we position the boot camp as a seven day trial of your $27 membership that goes

B

even without you saying anymore. It goes so well because the whole point of it is supposed to be like a teaser, a taster of. This is what you get if you were a member.

A

Yeah. Because then you've automatically converted 100% of your traffic instead of 22.

B

So they're signing up for the continuity and they have to.

A

And it's free. Yeah. And then you're running a seven day or five day, whatever that, you know, whatever you want. But then your whole thing is pushing to annual.

B

Yes. Yeah.

A

So you have 100% conversion and then you push everybody to annual.

B

Yeah.

A

That's my. That's my wild test.

B

I really like it. I guess my. I worry that then I'm going to get to the challenge end after a couple of weeks and 30 days end and people leave.

A

Well, they will. But this is such a good onboarding too. Like the seven day challenge is also just onboarding for all the members.

B

Yeah. I love, I love a test.

A

You could arguably test both at the same time, which I'm not always the biggest fan of because if we look at the math. Right. Let's just do the math. So let's say you've got a hundred people who, who buy your thing, right? Yeah. They buy the boot camp. Right. Where you know that we're going to have 22 of them who are going to have a lifetime gross profit of 300. Right. So we have whatever that is, 6,600 that's coming in from these people Right now on the front end, it's costing you $3,700, right?

B

Yeah.

A

So you get these people.

B

Right? Yeah.

A

And this is the issue from a cash perspective. Correct. That's the problem.

B

Yeah.

A

Now you said that you get $91 now.

B

Yeah.

A

Yeah. That $91 is only on the buyers. Correct. It's not on these people.

B

Yeah.

A

Okay.

B

That's only on the 22.

A

That's the issue.

B

Yeah.

A

So this is the real problem. Yeah. So where this work gets more interesting is like let's say that you spend $3,700 to get 150. You make $3,500, whatever.

B

Right. Which could be it.

A

So then that would mean you have $200 to acquire 22 customers is what the net net actually works out to.

B

Yeah.

A

So that LTB deck is crazy.

B

It's like I built my list for free.

A

Yeah. You spent 200 to make 6,600. That's great. So the idea with the trial would be if we had those same hundred people. But let's say the trial conversion at the end was it'll probably be closer to like 55%. Like especially if you do like a five day thing like this and all of a sudden you're at 55 people and they have the same 300 LTV. Now that doesn't include the fact that we're going to get annuals. But even if no one bought annual and we just had the 300, now we're at, you know, 15 or 16 5. And so we would. You'd actually make up for the money that you didn't make on the front. Now obviously we still have upsells. We should still do that.

B

Yeah.

A

But I'm saying even if you had no upsells.

B

Yes.

A

And you just had this.

B

Yeah.

A

You would make more because here, all in, you're at, you know, 90, whatever that is. You know, 11 or 10,000 is what you're making here versus 16. So you get like a 50, 60 lift. So that would be like. That would be the play if it was trial, But I think you can go trial and then upsell tools. Right. Upsell the stuff they're gonna need for the challenge. Right. And then you'll still be able to get some cash from all those people and you can make it a $1 trial. So you wouldn't. So you have a working card or whatever. I would not introduce this. I would do this first.

B

Yeah, I think so too. Okay, cool.

A

Do this first.

B

I'm up for a challenge, but that feels.

A

Yeah, yeah. That's very manageable. Yeah, yeah. So this is. I'd say test B. I see that.

B

This is test A. I have so much confidence that doing this alone is going to hugely change the outcome of the event in terms of members and profit. And then I feel like that's like the explode step.

A

Yes. And you can say this. You only get all the tools if you buy the manual during the event, right?

B

Yeah.

A

Because it costs me a lot of money and I got to ship it and I gotta figure all this stuff out. So I can only do it for the people now.

B

Yeah. I really like that.

A

I feel good about it.

B

I feel good about it too.

A

We have a simple plan. A simple plan. This is the spend cadence we follow. I know it works very well. We're going to do it way more creative this next round.

B

Yeah, we are.

A

Right. You're going to create more organic as well, which is going to feed the list too. We're going to have more pain based hooks so we can go a little bit up funnel.

B

Yeah.

A

We're going to increase our spinning capacity from a CAC perspective.

B

Right? Yeah.

A

And the test that we're going to run on the next one is this one.

B

Yeah.

A

And if that works, then all the game is going to be is how do I make 800 ads and spend $100,000 on my next launch?

B

Done.

A

All right, let's see where you're at in the scaling roadmap. Okay. Yes. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So how many employees do you have right now? Like two.

B

Okay. One's my husband.

A

Let's see here. Your revenue is a little bit higher than your headcount would suggest. So you're probably more on this side than you are here. And so what we're doing is if we're walking through this, we're going annual, we're adding the stuff to price to a better person. We're making all this extra content to make better free stuff. And also V2 of this test is actually just running the trial as the front end offer. We're making more creative to boost the

B

volume a little bit more.

A

Yeah. Also as a side note, I don't know if you're already doing this, but I would make sure that you optimize your campaigns around purchases if you're not already doing it.

B

I always do, just in case I have to.

A

Yeah. And then the one thing that I didn't see on your numbers, but I would like to get TO is just EPCs, so earnings per click. And I think you'll sleep better knowing that you are doing fine.

B

That's it. You just giving me this is enough. And so the more I know, the better I'll be with that. Yeah.

A

One thing that I did miss is I think we should consider when you're making these ads, you said you had hook variations.

B

Yes.

A

I would experiment with different callouts for avatars. So, like in the leaf book, we talked about callouts.

B

I've done that only to. Only in a limited way, literally separating mothers and grandmothers. But I haven't really done a great job.

A

I would go underneath of. I would go more subspecific. But, like, the game is now a game of a hundred pawns and no oceans. Like you're. You're draining a hundred pounds of audiences.

B

Right.

A

To get your scale. More than trying to advertise to the

B

ocean, to the world.

A

Right, Right. Like you're running two ads and trying to convert, but you're trying to cover everyone with the same messaging.

B

It's. It's true.

A

Right. And so if you want to get the scale, you have to go down, which is counterintuitive.

B

No. I like that.

A

Cool.

B

That's easily done, too.

A

All right. Rock and roll. This was scale or fail. See you next time.