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what's up guys in today's video we have Julius this is a highly highly recommended and sought after episode so I'm excited to get this one on here julius who are you uh my name is Julius i am a marketer copywriter sales guy all things how to sell to people uh right now I am working on scaling a funding brokerage uh right now I was in credit repair before that we're still doing something right there in terms of like offers that I've run my background more so is in actually working within companies so I'm really kind of new to this whole like operator thing which is why I absolutely loved your channel like I found it my business partner actually sent it to me first i was like "Yo like you need to watch this guy." And so I've been uh the one video that you had about like hiring tracking people like the KPIs all that stuff just really good because I'm new to actually operating in terms of selling I've been in SAS i was head of product um product growth for SAS company ventureback SAS company over in Europe i was in an agency i handled all the accounts did all the marketing we're managing like up to like a million dollars a month in budget there which if you know anything about Europe that's a lot over there here it's like almost nothing right but over there it's a lot um did some lead genen stuff like fractional consulting on the side uh worked in info lead genen again like every vertical like from local to final expense which for all my paper call guys I'm gonna have some sauce for you guys later uh all that stuff um coaching a lot of uh a lot of like low ticket info products so I actually started in like dating I'll get into that as well like writing copy for dating offers I was mostly front end like almost all front end so like all the copy all the ad creatives like stuff like that is the media buying as well the media buying side was more on the agency And like I just I wrote the copy and then I noticed that all the media buyers were like kind of like botching the accounts and stuff like that i was like "Yo my copy is so good uh like you guys need to push this correctly." So I just went on there and I actually learned how to do media buying just so that I could have full control over all that and I got so good I just took over from them and then that's where I actually I learned the skill set of media buying as well alongside the copy and the messaging all that stuff so rounding out had to learn how to manage and ramp a sales team which was new to me still new to me terrifying it was like I was like how I don't know how to you know but um just rounding out my skill set there and now you know operations is still like my my biggest weakness and even on Twitter I say this stuff like I know some things this is all my opinion none of this is hard truth because if there's one thing that I've learned is that there's a million ways to do something it's just the way that I've done it like everything that I talk about is the way I've done a test that's actually worked so yeah that's just about me 100% dude I say the same thing it is these are all opinions or things that we've done right that's the beauty of this is whether it worked or didn't work and I'm happy to share that uh what we're currently doing so you were the first one oh you need you need a number i'm sorry you need a number i I like wrote this down in my notes i was like wait he needs an actual number and it's so hard because I've been in so many okay for for businesses that I've been in where I've had a actual impact on the front end in terms of sales like as that I've written you know messaging that I've done or media buying that I've done the numbers around 17 million in terms of revenue generated not all me that was not all mess okay I was just a guy on the front was like actually writing the copy and all that stuff so I I know I had to give you a number and I had to like kind of like pull like I usually just pull one from somewhere random and then people hate on yeah literally yeah I'll take it I'll take 17 he fully did everything and it was a whole Yeah um All right cool you were the first one ever to put me on so context for everyone who's listening uh I had probably two 300 subscribers on and I was making a video a day i was probably 35 days into doing so and uh Julius was in my DMs on Instagram and we were going back and forth and he was asking some questions i was asking some questions and I was out on a golf course and he's like "I'm going to put you on." And I was like "I didn't even have X on my phone." And all of a sudden I'm like seeing these charts go like this i'm like "What's going and he tweeted and literally next day it's like 3,000 on YouTube 3,000 on X so forever indebted to the initial Kickstart i appreciate it but dude so welld deserved so welld deserved man genuinely like your content is insane insane so well that I appreciate that i'm going to be glazing this episode today is all about you so we're going to learn this so you pull questions i'm going to put X directly next to this right here but you have perfect 29 questions on this sheet that came from X from everyone and we're going to start on the top and then you and I'll bounce back and forth but first one that keen to hear how you approach hooks based on the awareness of the audience so hooks that convert for cold versus hooks for people in lower in the funnel so top of funnel versus bottom of funnel awareness levels how do you do it okay it's funny the question kind of answers itself a little bit if you're aware enough that based off of your based off of your marketing right now I have ran x amount through cold i'm seeing like people are coming in that are you know unaware of the problem or problem aware or something like that you have a top offunnel channel and top offunnel messaging that's like working that's converting you're kind of already halfway there because you can kind of tell based off of the split testing on the front end like where people So the way that I structure my creative tests so I have my CBR AB whatever I do and I have really good naming conventions for my actual like adsets so I will sometimes test awareness levels of the actual market that I want to go for in my cold prospect cold prospecting campaigns a lot of people do that cold prospecting campaign retargeting campaign i'm shifting away slowly but surely from retargeting campaigns because Facebook does a lot of retargeting you can like see just go through like your frequency your 7day whatever and there's ways to actually like set that up like you can see that Facebook does a lot of retargeting for you a lot of the media buyers on the ecom DTOC side of Twitter will tell you that too they've kind of stopped running retargeting campaigns and so I will split test awareness levels in my adsets for my cold prospecting so I'll go for problem unaware this is like where my indirect leads come from so like I share a lot on Twitter about like writing indirect messaging and so that's where that'll come in and then I'll have my solution aware right or perceived solution aware right and so there I'll be like very heavily mechanistic copy and then I'll have my problem aware right there there's like your everyone almost everyone operates in the problem aware space almost everyone does problem aare messaging which I think is something that needs to change which we'll get into but in terms of like the hooks there was a guy Mark uh Puscetti he has this thing called awareness positioning and I love it he's like your awareness positioning is your hook so it's like where you sit in the spectrum of like what the market is aware of in terms of your solution or their problem that is your hook right there right and so oftentimes this comes to everyone does like the desire thing right like oh want to do XYZ right and then maybe they'll add a modifier like without ABC or something like that that's like the most You hate one two three yeah yes like that's the most common type of hook that at least I see a lot of the times what I like to do my favorite kind of hook is catalyst hooks these are my favorite now and so I'm learning this a lot from affiliates affiliates are great people to swipe ads like fantastic people to swipe ads from affiliates they love their catalyst so let's say um someone in Florida let's say it's a guy running a uh I don't know let's an insurance ad right an insurance affiliate and they target by state right because the coverage so let's say it's like they're running to Florida right i live in Florida i'm going to see an ad and it says "Florid residents now have the opportunity to do whatever because of either this new law or this new tool or this new system whatever." When I was in MVA we did a lot of that right these are my favorite now because in these as a market gets like more and as an auction gets noisier and noisier everyone like people become claim resistant it's like the banner blindness right right it's like they they hear a claim they hear a thing it's like it's because people are scrolling all the time they see all these ads and so you need to even justify why the thing is happening right and so it's because of this thing right here now you can do XYZ because of this new financing plan you can get a roof for 59 bucks a month i get hit by those like every day dude right and so that's my like every day that's my new favorite kind of hook to run now and I'm testing this like aggressively across offers even the funding stuff even like the B2B stuff it works really really well yeah that's that's what I was going to ask so that works across yeah because what you said Yeah so what you said so far so I mean Yeah and again for everyone here like I this is not as much my speed i'm going to ask questions this entire time like I exist more on economics of this and understanding overall strategy than I do like hook versus like you I mean all of that but I I have a concept of this so I'll try to navigate this as best as possible but so when you're talking about those awareness levels and an example for what we see is for our low ticket right now the it's almost acting as a retargeting asset more than a cold asset and that's because the awareness level the mechanism is like in the middle right more so than it is up here it's not really like broad cold friendly to where it's the seven days in two second you know like all that kind of stuff it's not built for that um so we're going through that but question I have for this top section because yes you can test based on these three buckets of what you were saying right on awareness level but within the top how are you testing across the top section of you know what I mean like like problemishaw aware right so problem solution product how are you doing it in there on the top layer so let's say we're talking about problem aware right so let's say we have just the just the buckets that's problem aware when someone's problem aware and I'm going to get into mechanisms and I was going to leave this for later because I had a question that I wanted to talk about this but we'll I'll I'll start it here and then I'll go more in depth there uh Stefan Georgu I think he popularized the idea of the unique problem mechanism i'm pretty sure he popularized that concept i know it's been talked about before um but I'm sure that he popularized that concept and so for people who are problem aware it's very important that you tell them why they're having the problem in the first place so everyone knows like agitate the problem right you also have to explain why that problem is there and so for example you were talking about this in one of your podcasts the prebiotic ad someone mentioned I forgot who the who the guy was but you're Yeah yeah the prebiotics right and so prebiotic first of all let's say I'm let's say I'm selling like a gut health supplement okay cool unaware oh uh my gut health is a thing what's a gut health right i didn't even know that was a thing problem aware okay it's my gut health now right i know that I have a gut health problem why do I have a gut health problem what is this right then the ad goes into the VSSL goes into this thing of the prebiotic that's the solution mechanism but the problem mechanism is that you don't have this prebiotic in your system you need this thing because of and then you go into the justifier loops right right and this is where the unique problem mechanism sits your uh I don't know anything about biology i'm about to embarrass myself your gut microbiome doesn't have enough thing to feed on and so this leads to this this this this right and so if you want to that's in like a BSL or sales level you want to condense that into a hook it's very very simple you say if you've been struggling with this right you can do something here like stop doing and then perceived solutions to the thing because everyone who's in a problem aware market they've looked at other solutions right or they've heard other messages they they like think they know what to do right so the easiest simplest way to do this stop um stop doing stop taking what's a gut health supplement do I don't take supplements I don't know what's a what's a gut some like what some like gut health supplement we can stay on the we can stay on Craig Clemens it's we're down the same path here we'll stay on Yes yes yes um stop taking these supplements stop working out stop drinking water stop I don't know sleeping right like whatever people think that I don't know like whatever people think is the solution to that just like diss all of those right and then be like the actual problem is your gut doesn't have prebiotics and then you can go like write better copy for this so that your gut can do XYZ and then you can go into the solution right got it for unaware well yeah let's say unaware i feel like unaware is such like a vague thing because people are oftent times they're aware that like something's wrong i think um Albert um he he categorized this as like people have this feeling this energy that's like something's not right right and that's like usually where the unaware market sits for unaware it's the easiest thing in the world because you just tell them something that they haven't heard before it's the easiest thing in the world problem aware is I think the hardest and then solution aware is the easiest because is is easier because solution aware you just go into mechanistic copy right reason why all right as O Gilby says it right and so that's how I would structure the hooks that's the simplest way to do it if I know nothing about your offer nothing about your like your formulation that's the easiest way to do it yeah I uh only time I ever had any direct experience like real real was when uh I was doing some of Chris Reer stuff like I bought on his courses one time and they do like really really mass volume affiliate stuff um so they're like super affiliates they use YouTube ads but everything was around that hook and like basically the the shift right there and you're going pretty broad with his stuff but he crushes that so uh let's move through these because we have 29 and uh yes we're going to see where uh number two on here is if if you're trying to scale a DD DTOC high ticket brand that's in a niche that's mostly commoditized for example saunas how would you go about considering it not an impulse buy funnels positioning mechanism ads VSSL what's the overall strategy so overall strategy is how are you taking something that's commoditized like a sauna and building it out to be something that you would do you know DDC direct response with i assume is what he means by this instead of just brand yeah so one of our in terms of like actual like markups like how like the the funnel structure and the channel and then all that stuff um we had a furniture brand as a client like back in the agency um and this is going to be a very unsexy answer it was as simple as longtail Google Google uh keyword ads and then some SEO on the back end um and then we had a blog which was just like furniture styling blog so it was we just ramped up a bunch of keywords so like here's how to style XYZ here's how to do this right here's how to uh have your dream living room what your dream living room looks like right and then like we had like a bunch of inspo stuff like that it would go off to Pinterest as well because we had a social media manager would go off to Pinterest they'd create boards that backlink back right so in terms of like markups like that messaging now let's go into the messaging and that's the only experience that I have with like any high ticket ecom like I don't I don't like to touch commoditized stuff i really don't i'm selfish and I'm lazy i like to go for stuff where I have some kind of arbitrage opportunity in the demand genen that's where I like to operate um but if I was doing this in terms of messaging there's the easiest way which is just go upscale go up market right like basically 5x your price point take some really sexy pictures right like that's like literally the easiest way to do it like I've seen people do that where it's like the same literally the same exact product they just mark up the price really really beautiful branding all that stuff maybe do some influencer [ __ ] right um that's the way I've seen people do that but if you want to talk about how to sell something that's commoditized let's get This is the This is the mechanism question so this is not from me i have to make that very clear it's from a YouTube channel called Copy Squad highly recommend following them watching their video on how unique mechanisms work this does all the heavy lifting highly recommend that so in this case if I was selling something commoditized you have a few kinds of mechanisms because I want to go into the mechanism because I truly believe that this is the single most important part in copywriting that everyone neglects and I'll go into that a little bit deeper let's say I'm selling something commoditized there's a very uh there's a very famous example here from the show Mad Men they're selling cigarettes guess what very commoditized everyone's selling the same exact [ __ ] right and so Don in the show he was asking the CEO like "What's different about your thing what's different what's different like how do you how do you make this thing?" He was like "Well I mean we use the same ingredients that everyone else does the same process like everything like that." And he was like "Okay walk me through it." He's like "Oh well well we toast our cigarette our tobacco." And he's like "You toast it." I like "Yeah but everyone toast it." And he was like "Who says that they toast it?" And I was like well and so now he was like our cigarettes they're toasted that is an unspoken mechanism that is something that everyone does if you're in a commodity market it's something that is a part of everyone's process or product or service or whatever right but no one talks about it and you just highlight that and now that is your thing another example another example of this let me open up here because I had the examples written down goldplated uh detectors smoke detectors and so there was another this is from uh Joseph Sugarman so he was selling fire detectors right and the same thing like okay what does everyone what does everyone use i was like well we have a goldplated like detector and he was like does everyone else have it too like yeah does everyone talk about it no goldplated that's it's it's so stupid it's so dumb but that thing positioned them in front of everyone else in the market and now their competitors are looking at that they're like what the [ __ ] like I I'm goldplated like he's toast doesn't matter because they were first to that so if I was selling something that's commoditized let's say let's say a piece of furniture let's say it's wooden furniture wood and let's say it's high quality right what kind of grain is used in the wood what kind of what does the grain pattern look like what kind of wood are you using where's the wood from is it imported is it European these are like some things like if it's imported it's usually always perceived as a little bit higher value right like is it imported like what does it look like what do you use to assemble the thing why is it sturdy right you can look at a bunch of different things there and just look at literally what's in your process you'd be shocked at how many things that are in your process in your product in your service that you are not highlighting in your messaging and if you find that one that could be like your big idea some people call it big idea i just call it like the actual like unspoken mechanism that could absolutely change everything and now that's your positioning so that's how I would sell something commoditized like that yeah and you and so you're saying though that even though that is commoditized even though that everyone has that because you're first to market you win on it because you're first to position like that interesting yes first to position exactly correct yeah and so if you have something like let's say we do the wood grain thing like oh everyone talks about their wood grain thing or it's like um let's say it's the I don't know it's like the bolt pattern because everyone says don't sell on features everyone says this don't sell on features sell on benefits it's toasted as a feature but it positioned Lucky Strikes as like the top selling cigarette brand in the world right every like goldplated as a feature and yet it outsold every other smoke detector on the market by like 10x because they use the mechanism in the right way yeah interesting so there is a point where you do have to use your features there is a point right and so that's how I would do that right again look at everyone that's in your market do some really good like market analysis obviously make sure that you do have something unique and highlight it like really highlight it right don't just have it in your bullets in your copy under your description highlight it put it in your headline put it in your ads right that's how I would do something like that oh the sauce is going to get real number three on here that's super i'm like thinking that for our stuff and I'm sure I'll talk to you offline about this but I'm like "Oh there's some very obvious ones for our stuff." That's like oh hell um yeah um all right you talked to us about create uh creativity and ideiation in copy i read one of your landing pages a while back and that [ __ ] was good AF so your creativity and ideation process for copy okay i wish I could give I wish I could give people a structure um I really wish I could give you like a set of like like a formula checklist to go by and be like okay so this is there and this is there and this is there i don't have that a lot of this at this point is just intuition because like I've written just I've just written so many sales letters i've been in these markets like I've seen how the biggest people operate like it's just intuition at this point and like I've done so many split tests on like different structures and formulas like okay here's let's say I'm writing a brand new sales letter and let's say I'll use the business funding actually I'll dox I'll dox it i I'll dox my I'll dox my uh my my kind of like awareness positioning here and it's okay because you can copy me but you can't copy the reason why I do something so we're selling business we're selling business loans right everyone sells business business loans um I'm going to do a modifier mechanism here so I'm looking at the market what does everyone say what is everyone selling selling loans capital some smart people are selling growth capital right some some smart people position it as growth capital right and so I'm looking at this I'm like okay what do people believe what is the belief that people have about the thing that I'm selling i would start there well no start with your market research your basic market research of course first have the fundamentals but then start with what do people perceive about the thing that I'm selling right what beliefs do they have what limiting beliefs do they have about the thing right and what are the perceived solutions around the thing so everyone around business loans believes that you need a bunch of collateral right you need a perfect like credit score if you want to get like I don't know um lines of credit or like 0% interest credit cards like whatever something like that right um people believe that it's a hard process that it takes a long time right people believe all these things so okay those are all my negative beliefs around the thing okay how can I flip that and I'm going to give you an example from a sales letter that I wrote about marketing so this was in a segment targeting a niche that I had never heard of the term attraction marketing before because and so I was like looking like okay everyone's selling everyone thinks that it's hard people hate ads people do all this stuff and you try to sell Facebook advertising it doesn't work because everything's saturated everything's noisy no one's buying anymore the auctions are too expensive blah blah blah how do I flip that into a positive attraction marketing i'm not bothering people I'm attracting them right and so I wrote that sales letter it did really well i had to look at the market and like what people believe around the thing and so let's say I'm doing that for business loans okay what if there was something that where I could add some exclusivity into there where I was like hm I can get you approved for XYZ very fast the best terms right everyone says that how now how can I do that what if I told you that I'd h I had some insider relationships this is really funny because this is the this is the unspoken thing everyone does everyone does right no one's talking about it so I'm going to use this angle at from like insider reps right relationship funding right insider banking relationships okay now we're getting a little bit interesting now now it's getting saucy okay because now all of a sudden from that from that now I can paint now I can further differentiate myself i can say I'm going to get you these great terms right I'm going to get you like this great capital allocation right because I have these insider relationships and now I can go into hero's journey how did I get that right why does this matter right and I can kind of now that I just have that I can branch out and I can structure I can kind of create all these other elements in the copy yeah that's so interesting like Yeah yeah that's so interesting i mean continue but yeah continue sorry yeah yeah because copy like if you're writing a a VSSL right like or you're writing a landing page it's like all structure right like you have your open you have your lead your lead type you have like your your hero's journey you have your need problem mechanism your like solution mechanism you have your offer and you have your close right it's always easiest to go from bottom up this is something that Allan talks about a lot right i didn't even realize I was doing it was like bottom up so always close offer and heroes and then you just go up the cycle right but I found that a lot of the times if you go mechanism first the rest kind of falls into place mh because what a lot of people don't realize when they're writing copy if you sit there and you're writing a sales letter you're typing out a sales letter and like you have all these elements like you have your little check box i need to do this i need to do this i need to do this and so you write it all out and then you read it and you're like damn it's clunky this is really [ __ ] clunky why is it so clunky and it's because you have not established a series of ideas that the prospect has to agree with first right because we forget a lot of the times that copywriting is writing you have to write well and the way that you write well is by expanding on an idea and then summarizing the idea and creating an open loop to another idea right that's the way that you have to do it and if you start with the mechanism if you start with what you're doing how you're doing why you're doing it a lot of the times the rest falls into place and so to answer the question of very roundabout way that's how I get like kind of creative or idea in copy another way if you just want like really really tactical like let's say you're scripting ads like you have an ecom brand whatever and you're trying to script ads dude go into a market that's completely unrelated to your thing if you're if you're in D TOC right now and like you're in ads library and like you're looking at all these direct response offers go look at info look at info all right like open up dude open up MSNBC scroll down to the to the to to where everyone has the um uh those what are they called man um the ads there that are that are on the page yes thank you native jesus Christ all the native ads right look at those look at the headlines right look at the images look at those look at different channels right because for native they have to click like that's their whole thing is like if they have to the the headline has to be good enough for them to click through get your ideas from there like I have a massive swipe file purely from native ads right interesting and so go always like if you're just too entrenched sometimes you're just too in your thing you're too like you just need to get creative you need to like take a bird's eye view look at other niches look at other channels other channels is huge right and get some inspiration from there yeah no that's super helpful i mean sorry if I cut you off in the middle there our video gets choppy so no one knows comments because I cut you off um but no that's uh No it's all good extremely interesting because you do have a process right you do have a process and it's like it does come as intuition now for how you do it but before we get to the next one just offbeat a little bit but like where where's the highest leverage opportunity that you could be applying this cuz like again I'm not super well versed in this land but like it sounds like you really know your zone of genius in this like is it like an agora is it like uh you know one of those because it sounds like you've done a lot of things which I think like that that's kind of my model too is like I did a lot of things before we did this one big thing or whatever that's just you know big in terms of size compared to the other ones if nothing else um helped me like skill stack for sure but I definitely could have taken one further and it sounds like you're taking a lot of these like this and so is this like funding thing is that one have the return potential for you for this skill that's like really high in comparison to the other ones and like is there a higher like where's your journey looking like for that that's a good question um I think part of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it is a kind of a byproduct of my negative heristic so I've always kind of done this like like I've always been around in like every industry and just like playing around like getting a client there and then scaling one then in the agency we never niched down we had everybody like literally any do you sell something cool you're a client and the wild thing is that it worked it's the wild thing is that we actually got results and so I've been in all these different industries the reason why if you're a copyriter and you have like that skill set and that's what you want to operate in and that's the only thing that you want to operate in then yeah 100% go apply for an Agora like a copyrighting position at Agora right like work your way way up to copy chief right like maybe you can be like a CMO for like one offer right I think at a certain point I've fallen out of love with info I won't lie um part of it comes from I I had when I was doing like my freelance thing I I had a bunch of coaching clients and info clients um two years ago who are working a job now like it seems to be so much of the case like we can point to several big guys who've stayed who have longevity but like let's look at those a bit deeper Tai bro he launches 10 offers a week right like and like every every [ __ ] week it's something new he has to right like Grant oh my like Grant's is very like my god the operation he's built is insane but he has his 10x ventures he has his 10x like for the for the local stuff he has his like internal like capital raising thing like the real estate like all that stuff he he has to do a million things at once he has to do the seminars he has to do these things right and I think at this point now seeing all of this I'm looking at industries that can stand the test of time people need money and they will always need money i've seen this industry it's very unsophisticated in terms of how they generate pipeline everyone like MCA like MCA shops have floors massive floors right line of credit guys rely on referrals right if I can go in and run paid ads which I have um I was getting like $15 cost per qualified leads from business owners who are making $150,000 a month pretty solid if I have that skill set like oh okay [ __ ] all right right that's the key and that's what I that's what I've been talking about too on this like I'm going to get you to re fall in love with info because it is it's the it's the broken part of info right or not the broken part that's that's that's crude but the it's the coach to coach to coach side it's that like you do it you take your skill set and whether you call it direct response or copywriting or the the info business and coaching model in itself you can look all the way down the funnel or the whole model and if you apply it to an industry that's not internet marketing or like make money online or whatever it is so beautiful and so simple in itself right you don't have this business operation that you know funding for example that has which I'm not which there's no disc but like you know it has way more moving parts and it has like it's real business not an offer and like 99% of info businesses are offers or multiple offers that becomes a brand that has like you said all the offers versus the ones that can stand the test of time that can start maybe as info coaching and transition into something that still in itself the model is you're selling info or coaching and this is no [ __ ] on MMO this is no [ __ ] on like we're in you know I'm in talks right now of how to do this in a way that I feel is clean that's like a way to cherrypick essentially the ones that I think are like real like businesses and have opportunity like legs but you're so right like taking the skill set and applying it to a little vegan company or I use the example I hear all the time of the guy who applied the skill set to his mom who had a knitting blog or like YouTube channel and next now they've gone to this and they do like whatever I don't want to misquote but like hundreds of millions a year with this knitting thing and have an entire town that they're from in the middle of nowhere that people travel to because it's the knitting capital of the US and it's like you can take these ideas so much further and she was selling essentially there's e-com and physical products but like that was the evolution it was her talking about knitting then it was like you know like it's crazy so it's I think I think you're right i think it's the skill set and now that's what I was kind of asking is like where's the highest leverage for that skill set and it sounds like you've stacked a lot of the skills in that realm of like DR and like that game which you only get through doing it in all these different buckets but like yeah like hopefully you have and we don't have to dox your your setup with those guys but like hopefully you have a meaningful size of that because what you're doing I do is a huge lever yeah a huge lever yeah I I won't I won't go into um I won't go into specifics because that absolutely could do yeah you don't need to yeah I I I will say that we have one of the best terms with our originators in the market at least of people that I've spoken to in this industry and so we want to talk about like economics right because you love economics so tell me what you think about this um there are a few ways to to obviously to to grow the business i can cut kak in half right for example like I can like me as a marketer right i'm a marketing guy so I can cut CAC in half whatever blah blah blah if I see that in an industry like okay I have to stay within XYZ CAC and like my sales cycle is this and then blah blah blah this and so my clos rate has to be or or since I'm a brokerage and I get a commission on the allocations I can just have a 40% higher allocation as my commission than everyone else in the industry and now I have so much more to play with on the CAC side because of that and so I can kind of like not that I'm going to like mess around but I can kind of mess around and not be perfect on the acquisition side and have some some you know leeway to play with i can do that right and so that's how I've kind of played this out like if you look at a lot of MCA shops right now especially like they give their reps 50% commissions sometimes right on their 10% right 60 we don't do that i'm not going to dox exactly how much we give in like a comp plan and like in the structure like all that stuff but we don't do that right we have a model that is very very healthy for us on the P&L side and the reps love it too because they don't have to outbound dial they don't have to hear like [ __ ] you like you know blah blah blah all day right and so I can play around there and so I'm looking at that I don't know if that's the right framework I would love to hear your thoughts on that because again I'm not I'm so new to operating dude so new to operating like we scaled just like internally like we we got the funding offer to uh 50,000 just topline uh in 27 days off of like basically no ad spend like the returns were insane um but we have a couple offers I can walk I can walk us through like later I can walk us through like offer stack and like where we're liquidating like what our monetization is i can we can we can walk through that we can walk through that later but I want to hear your thoughts on that no yeah i mean I don't know enough about the space just off the rip so this is like opinion only but as long as because lead lead quality and the ease in which or the efficiency that someone can do their role it's like the path to money right it's like if you have a rep that's making 20% versus a rep like we're talking high ticket sales you have a rep like a very there's a perfect example inside the info whatever space they have mercenaries they call them so it's somebody so your normal your normal sales rep super simple and like basically classic is 10% let's just say that's like very very common in the space is 10 and then maybe like thresholds or they get up in cash collected amounts and then they reach 10 to 12% that's like around the range there are reps that are 20 25% that you hire on that you don't feed at all so they're essentially a full stack mercenary and they pull people from the CRM and this is better for guys who don't have like full machines where they have setters already doing this and all that but like like this would have been perfect for us back six months ago and I didn't even know it existed and I've talked to someone since that that was talking about this and they're like "Yeah they'll pull three five 10 deals a week depending on the warmth of the leads for sure." But like they get 20 points on that because you would have never had them or you would have hoped that they saw you know a retargeting or an email or something and pulled themselves back in but these people were able to like snipe them and full stack do it so a setter who did this is maybe gonna make three to five points but a full stack person here you're going to give them the whole pie so it's 15 20 points so in your example of as long as it as long as the volume plus like the percent maths out is really what it is to where they are making we like you know we pay above market it hurts the P&L yeah like we do that kind of in a lot of places uh we try and be competitive but like we always try and keep cost down it's that game but like if they are with the volume that they get plus the like ease of close that the math nets out to them making call it 40 grand a month because the top dogs make 500 in the space like you're all good you could give them 10% if your leads literally were just clo like you know they were CS calls where you just like signed them up right like it's it's a consumption quality game so that's my opinion is the volume plus the times the percent equals whatever they get paid as long as that math is mathing you're like in the money and it doesn't matter if it's if market's 50 and yours is 20 because if you have the hottest leads possible they're still doing the volume to where it makes sense and that's where you have to like play with comps and stuff like that in my opinion yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah makes sense okay thank you i I got into like bro just you saying that I felt like I was watching the YouTube channel like when I watch you like I have you open and I have like a notes pad like I literally got into that mode again because like the stuff I I need to learn all this stuff but that's that's good i'm okay yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah yeah there's just so much in Yeah detail and like in ink like whatever around that that's like Yeah it's very specific it's very specific to your use case and just to blanket it is maybe not a good answer but I think that that works but let's keep moving through these we got we're on only on number seven of 29 on this uh Jesus Christ where are we at this one we spend 5 to 10k a day on paid traffic what do you spend a day what's the most you've ever spent in a day before I continue this the most that I've ever spent of my own money embarrassingly low the most managed Yeah the most that I've managed The most that I've managed per day was 100,000 wow and it was not This was not like through a full calendar year it was a thing that was seasonal it was Q3 they were ramping and so they had that spend there and then your normally their thing is like anywhere between like 30 and 40 but it was 100k period they were just doing they just like spent a million bucks on R&D for a new thing and they wanted to really get it out they did their market research all that and so I was in charge of a lot of calories hammer it was it was that period of I think it was like seven days where I got maybe two hours of sleep every day and aderall wasn't enough i literally took methamphetamines to stay awake and work so like okay I have a different experience of this uh I have a bunch of different experience of this fyi for everyone but okay fair enough fair enough uh dude the most I've ever spent like you saying embarrassingly low like I've probably spent four to five grand of like my own out of whatever money that was like random testing some ecom drop ship or like affiliate link thing and then my ad down or I blow something up and then within the company well that's not true because I've actually managed spend that was up to like 25k a day for ACA like a year ago but they literally handed me everything and we're like we can't watch as many ad accounts as we have will you just like launch these and watch them and I was like yes I can do that just for fun and that was similar i was getting up at like three in the morning because the ad account was on a European time zone it was a whole thing like it was it was one of those games but yeah that's hilarious but yeah we I mean ours I think we've only max spent probably 35 40 in a day uh when we were like heavy kind of doing stuff and testing but again I'm not buying right co-founder is up to 20 wow the co-founder that's good that the co-founder was in there that's so important he's a sicko it's why we were able to do what we did early is because of visibility in copy and and like I built the funnels and stuff like that for sure like cool that's tech piece you can hire someone on Upwork for that like the messaging all the copy uh creative review he wasn't actually making them necessarily but like creative review we always outsource that and then the actual media buying he was in every course he was in every community he had done it prior in some drop ship games and made a bunch of money just like messing around and then Quinn came into this yeah he spent up to 20ish probably more for us a day every day was was when you were because you mentioned a lot on on uh on the channel that like acquisition broke at a certain period what was it when you were at at those peak spend like peak daily spend times was that when it kind of broke yeah close to I mean it was around there call it you know within a 3090 window um but also at that time we weren't spending we weren't spending so we had done at that time we had brought in basically like a lead genen media buyer to do meta and then like a YouTube person Google person to do Google and it was like okay but their contract we never really had a we never had a marketing division because we were dumb and didn't know how to like hire for manage and he did that stuff and had enough oversight that he managed that and then I do all the funnels and tech and tracking and everything so we're like why do we need somebody like we're just going to cash flow this thing and never like build it out and and then we got to a point excuse me uh we got to a point where we hired agencies we had like a like ripcord style like aggressive agency that actually did really well for us that like lives in the info coaching style space um and did well for us for a while but like it's almost like and again no [ __ ] on them like we hit some some of the higher peak months uh when they were coming in on it then it felt like they were not fully like in the accounts enough for where we were going with size and that's on us as much you know as them right where it's like we were navigating that and then we moved off that tried to go internal again basically broke hired another agency and that's when and again not on the agency but like we had hammered this funnel we had already done 20 something this year in that funnel of last year yeah and it was just kind of like it was everything right it was like the account needed to be run like info and coaching and consumption meant to be run not like ecom but then it was also that the funnel types and the acquisition methods needed to be updated we needed multi we needed different VSSLs like on front end we needed a low ticket we needed like more ecosystem on the front that we didn't have uh and it exploded and we were paying them 13% I think so we're spending a million bucks a month paying 130 grand to an agency that did everything they did all creative and buying but like it was not great and we gave I mean they gave us a lot of shots we gave them uh them a lot of shot like it was back and forth we changed everything with pixels and track and all that at the time because something broke there we had never really properly split test so we're throwing scripts on page to try and split test stuff like we introduced a lot of variables uh when things started to break that but your CPA is going like this your ad bill is going like this and your agency is a percentage across there but like you know is also climbing it's like we were burning money in every bucket you could so it was like we just pulled the rip cord did it ourselves and then since have built out these other pieces and we have like sickos for these individual but marketing team is whatever almost like two hands basically now and they are they've rebuilt the entire structure like you could say they have the same results if you look at like cost per call or whatever and cost and like volume but how it's structured and the ability for it to get the next layer of scale under this new leadership and team is like night and day night and day so that's Yeah so that's our tangent i want I wanna I want to like dive deeper into like outsourcing versus in-house but I know we can do whatever we want yeah yeah i mean we do have three hours so like we can we can we can get into 45 but I'm good yeah we can go we can go now or later i mean we're good we're good so to answer this one what he asked and then we can bounce around is if you're spending they're spending five or 10k a day and how do you handle volatility because they'll have 10 negative 10% to 50% plus i assume he's Oh yeah right there he's talking CPA models of sending to VSSs yeah yeah yeah so I'm going to actually because I asked him a bunch of questions in the Twitter thread right here i have ADHD so I need to write everything down so I'm going to open up the thread right here because I asked him a lot of questions he has his answers here so yeah so I asked him this is going to be a bit more in depth so he said his uh blended new customer rowass across uh 30 days he said um made a total [ __ ] show around 6% um don't know 6% NCOS it doesn't really so I'm not sure what he was trying to say there uh 6% NC when he's saying CPA model he's meaning let's just I mean you're going to know better than me but are we assuming he runs call it affiliate ecom or something or affiliate model where it's 100 looks like it yeah okay so he spent 100 grand and made six Yeah yeah i I that's I mean that'd be insane if you're spending 100 grand you're making six that would be crazy as [ __ ] i mean okay okay um prim's 20% so okay so the volat volatility window that he's looking at is daily um which that's kind of first thing right there so I told him that usually when you're and actually Eddie mentioned this as well um when you're looking at these this volatility on a daily basis and you can go by hourly is like you just go into the Facebook view you can see that during certain hours of the day right you get like higher OS lower R OS like more clicks less clicks like clickthrough rate can be as much as like 80% lower like during certain windows of time within the day and so if he's looking at that hourly then that's what I would look at but if I'm if I'm going to analyze performance and especially these big swings like that um he said like weekly and monthly are also volatile obviously if you consider 10% % versus 20% was like 100% swing um I would really look at what are you doing during like let's like pick a window so let's say we pick a 7-day window because daily is way too short you don't know like that's not even enough at that spend to get a statistically significant test through if you're doing like a test we launch a new creative that's just not enough right so I would pick a look back window and then be like okay this is what we did during this period from I don't know May 1st through May 8th this is what we did and so like now I'm looking at that window we launched a new creative we launched a new creative concept that was around X persona with this angle during that period and now we're seeing that our CTR let's say here because he was saying his CBR is the problem which leading indicator like I need to know those let's say like our CBR is like 20% less or whatever right doing that look back window so we need to go back and test something different that's like the number one thing which is super duper basic and like you talk about this a lot is just having visibility into what you're tracking and why you're tracking it and like understanding correlation because he literally said here the sale is in the VSSL so it's not like ecom where your creatives advertorials etc should do the heavy lifting if the sale is in the VSSL and like let's say I'm assuming he said he runs outbrain so you're doing clickbase so let's say the ad is obviously like with the with the graphic and the the headline all that stuff but let's say within your VSSL since that's your entire entire kind of like sales mechanism there is your VSSL um there's a million things to test within there treat it like a funnel right because like you have your lead type right are you going direct are you going indirect outcome based promise promise based offer based right like promo based like you do a million things there and then you have the structure of the VSSL so you should be testing those you should be testing that all the time um you had um God I'm I'm really horrible with names but he was the the branded drop shipping guy he was talking about this how he test like 20 V yeah yeah yeah 20 VSSLs or something crazy like that right within I don't know what period I forget but like he tests a bunch of VSSLs and so that's the one thing if you're seeing this volatility that's the one thing that I would look at i don't know enough about Outbrain or like any like demand based platforms to or um DSPs to to like really give you any insight onto the actual media buying yeah I've never bought media there um I'd like to talk to someone who has but I couldn't tell him like campaign structure and like blah blah blah all that stuff so I couldn't tell him there like the main thing is if you don't know what's going on within what period if you can't tell me that between May 1st and May 14th we were doing this we excluded XYZ placement on Outbrain so we weren't like showing up on these news channels and because of that I saw that while our click-through rate let's say like decreased by whatever 15% our conversion rate actually increased right because like this is just better placement better leads better traffic then like that's the first thing that I would do like first of all because the answers aren't really there like tell me what you're doing there there needs to be a structured way like just the basics like have data visibility and understand what you're doing and what you're testing yeah no I mean that makes sense yeah because when I've talked to some of these affiliate guys in lead genen in the past it's like you will have this until you crack it right and like that's what I've always heard is like you're testing these different things like you're saying and mainly if you're just running to this their offer it's like a little bit simple example but let's use like bridge page and like clickbank VSSL right it's like you can only adjust the ad i mean you're media buying land basically which is as everyone says mainly creative at this point and then you can have your lander and as long as your lander has whatever clickthrough rate within this pocket like you just kind of leave it let's just say simple and everything is over here everything is like how many different leads are you swapping and then all of a sudden you're going to get your uptick and then it's like now how many different bodies are you messing with and then your CT like until you get one that goes from five to 20 to 50 and then hovers around this 50% or whatever drops to 25 whatever the you know KPIs are but that's exactly what we've heard we we do probably 20 it's it's roughly 20 new ads a week still so not quite high like you hear you hear some people talk like way crazier but I mean for us like we have some tried and true ones that have like carried the accounts as like as the CMO says like we overuse some of them and that's probably an issue um but yeah their new generation cycle is roughly that there's like 20 okay i would say um about the creative testing thing because this is something that I'm seeing more and more people be aware of is that volume doesn't matter as much as one quality obviously because like the whole thing that we're optimizing for here with like creative testing is your hit rate right obviously it's like you want a high like the highest hit rate as possible so just just so you're like you're not wasting money on on [ __ ] ads right with Facebook specifically and I can talk to Facebook more than any other channel because like I've spent some like I've done some like PPC right in like in the actual ad account but Facebook's my baby so with Facebook they literally tell you we want breadth of creative in terms of difference in creative they need to be wildly different right so not just format not just change a hook because everyone goes hook body CTA right no and we're going to get to there's there's a question that was talking about this post um that I made uh I can't say the word that was in the first sentence of uh of of the of the post itself uh the PG all right it's the naughty word yeah it's the naughty word um creative strategist people talking about awareness levels as if that's not marketing 101 so I'm going to go through some of these things here in terms of like creative testing what you should be swinging for and how wide your swing should be just for context so number one are you separating your messaging to target different uh demographic triggers for example using traditional news sources to anchor your USM when targeting boomers so let's say you have an older audience right something that's very apparent is that they still trust traditional media sources if they're on like a certain side of the political spectrum they're usually very very very religious about that right so if it's let's say like you have the you know a bit more like right leaning whatever they love Fox right for example like as a go a bit deeper figure out what they actually love like what your buyers actually probably watch but let's say you have that so now that I know that I'm going to actually test let's say and this can get a little bit gray hat i don't know like people do it you know especially on like the the advertorials and stuff like that like they try to structure like news sites or Yahoo whatever um let's say in your ad I'm going to do a uh an AI avatar where it's a uh a news anchor and the color scheme in the background and the structure of the graphics in the background is going to look exactly like Fox News but it's not going to be the logo or anything like that right so you don't get obviously get flagged but the structure the super structure is there right and they're going to be talking about the same thing that you talk about in all your ads but you're changing that right the the the the delivery mechanism of the thing because you understand that your demographic probably trusts this delivery mechanism of a message of an idea and so you're going to try that right like this is getting like super like you know I've tested this i've tested this it works another one that I've tested really heavily is uh the other one so uh using the common en enemy when targeting uh African-Americans i'm half black so I can say this and not be racist um when you're targeting African-Americans a lot of the times we're talking about the catalyst right if there's a skin there's by the way there's a um CEOs brand that my buddy Ben showed me that uses exclusively targets African-Americans you see this in almost all of their ads it's brilliant you target the system right because this thing of oppression right of being marginalized is a huge component of that demographic of that niche of that community right and so you want to highlight that in your ad right and be like they don't want you to know this they're trying to keep this from us right this whatever thing right to keep us under then use their language obviously right so things like that when I talk about breadth let's say you have a product you have three demographics let's say it is you know um 50 plus uh conservative men and then you have African-Americans right and you have all this test those things put that in there instead of having like the same structure of ad for every single demographic every persona it's like oh I understand their desire and I understand what problem they're trying to solve no be very very diligent about that be specific go deep and that's what actually Facebook loves to see is that variance right in what kind of creative you're actually putting out there and everyone says this with format it's like oh the before and after the UGC the green screen it's not just format because Facebook is literally finding you like pockets of buyers in the ad ID itself that's why everyone talks about like copy your ad IDs copy your ad IDs because it literally understands the bucket of people who are buying the thing or engaging on the ad right and so you want to take that and you want to dial it up right and you there's ways to do this where like if you're not sure if African-Americans are like a good a good demographic that like will actually buy your product there's ways to do this cheaply like we have AI tools now right like it's not that expensive to actually roll out a test right but if you want scale true scale that's what you have to do i think you cracked that one uh for that person that's Yeah no that makes a lot of sense like our our CMO talks about that of having like because we were talking about it more so in structure on how to run these things like already doing that already doing some version of like wildly different kind of pieces but then the literal uh campaign structure of things of setting it up so they live in their own buckets so that when it goes out and finds it stays within there and then you can kind of keep that thread same thing with going multi ad account is like when you carry over and I'm kind of getting out of my lane here but I'm also like just echoing what I've heard with our structure is like they'll move stuff into a different ad account completely or test something that's like way out here and not just oh yeah this ad exact copy and asset worked and now we're going to use it over here it's like yeah that can work when you're not having an issue with performance but if you're trying to solve for that then going complete you know right side right field and doing that is is interesting so okay i think that solves that one um you have anything uh yeah i was going to say your your de your your demographic is um what's the age range that you guys target i know it's women but what's the age range 40 to 60 roughly 40 to 60 roughly and that's where like all your Okay okay so if Yeah in your specific case like you guys I know your CM knows your like your guys' customer like the back of his hand um I love huge TAM markets that's always been my thing gargantuan tam because it's easy and again I'm lazy i like to do what I you know I'm lazy i like this and so I have the flexibility to test all of these different things right but like if you're within that and you kind of already have kind of like a guideline of who buys this I would just do that do that depth just segment that portion out because I'm sure you have like African-American women who purchase this thing right like they care a lot a lot about like ancestral stuff especially the older ones especially I know me because like I got aunties right like they care a lot about like how my ancestors were doing this XYZ how they were optimizing health right and so if you just segment out your your your women into like at least just one more bucket and you can test that right and you can get like I'm telling you insane results like insane yeah yeah yeah so we're currently having a version of that when you're talking like demo of uh different brand faces that exist at different ages um just that alone and just like a different person is a different person uh so doing stuff around that that also has different storylines that has you know that all bleeds back to the same thing and the biggest thing we're like pushing to solve for now is congruency across that so example of brand face 3 being in ads that then go to brand face one being in the actual VSSL so so we like tested a ton of stuff when it comes to the actual ads and like what gets you know the metrics right here and then as they carry through it's one thing now we're going that further line and doing the throughput of a VSSL that matches uh you know messaging the emails that m like we're we're going down that um but that's interesting you say that about like you know different styles because we've gone deep in other corners of the messaging with the one and now that we have multiple it's like using those multiple so yeah that's interesting um all right so this next one on here would love to hear about your scaling strategies how to go from one to five to 10K with paid traffic and how you're structuring teams so you're not doing it yourself so what does your team structure look like at at your current setup or is probably what I uh Yeah how you're structuring teams so you're not doing everything yourself i'm doing everything myself i do absolutely everything myself so so I um yeah actually a couple days ago so we hired a web developer for a couple of our landing pages and I was so tired of going back and forth with changes i just logged into Framer and did everything myself i am the last person you want to ask about delegation leverage anything like that last person because I will do everything myself and it's horrible and it's a habit that I'm trying to break but I'm not I'm like from video editing to landing page design every time I outsource it I can do 10 times better and this is probably because again I don't have the economics to support someone who's way better than me obviously duh once we get to that point internally that can be a thing i can talk to you about the other organizations that I've worked in where obviously there were people 10 times smarter than me in their own lane i wasn't managing the team so I couldn't tell you how to structure a team um I can tell you like our managers were like you know desilo everything it was like like a big thing it's like you know like a duh like those principles but I couldn't tell you how to structure a team so yeah I think the Yeah the piece on this No it's important i think we go into that on you doing it yourself and because Yeah i mean I'm I hired a marketing tech on Friday and I have done marketing tech from day one like dude I it's a it's a skill issue that I have as very much so as well where it's like being able to do it through people hormones you had a video about this the other day is like the ultimate leverage yes there's code yes there's capital yes there's content media whatever but like when you can do it through people and then they have access to that as well right so like what your intentions or strategy or plan are having that done through people at the same or better than you level is the key there um but I think I don't know I feel like for you you're you're almost too and maybe it's because you're not loud enough about this stuff yet but like you know your [ __ ] and like you can structure there's another I talked about this on yesterday's I think pot but like my first ever internet marketing thing was uh Instagram shoutouts i bought some random course on Instagram shoutouts that then you do an opt-in page and then you selfquidate with a ClickBank offer on the back end like dumb as simple as sorry not dumb necessarily people probably crush it but like simple as can be but what I didn't realize was then I had to email the list in order to make the money on it right that was the whole point is you just mail the list you do content and then affiliate offers and like the classic give give freaking take basically in this model um and I didn't have the wherewithal to understand and I promise this loops but like the wherewithal to understand that I could have paid somebody as a percentage of and there's ways to do a deal that wasn't I need to pay a copywriter five grand a month that I did not have very clearly at the time i spent like $500 and I had like $112 in my checking account after like I I didn't have the wherewithal to understand or to have the skill or the confidence or the history or the exper maybe who is better at you at just video editing and not pay them five or 10 grand a month i talked to some of the biggest dog like that tell me the what they pay editors and stuff and because of their clout because of where these people live because of the stuff because of who they find through pockets and pockets and pockets like the person exists out there that either is the cost that is in alignment because of international talent or that you can broker a deal with as a percentage or whatever or an up to or a performance base that like your P&L can support it on day one because you have the experience and you have like the for no better word the clout like and you could do that right now yeah it's funny because I literally was that kid that was me i was the kid that other people took advantage of because I had this thing and you know XYZ and Yeah you're right yeah i you got and you got you got paid or whatever but you got you got to learn it and guess what somebody else wants to learn the other people around it and like that's the part of partners or talent or stuff that's there is like you have to almost be okay with like some of the lack of experience maybe but like the awareness that they're trying to grow to a point that they can leave but like you can use them during that that is you is a great example someone wanted to take advantage or use your skill set for what it was valued at at the time or what you valued at at the time that there knowing that you were going to go out and do your thing after like someone who had that awareness already knew that that you were going to be there for six months or a year and they were going to juice it and like their economics worked and your earning slasharning value grew and you went on to the next thing it's like that exists everywhere and I didn't notice that early and there's a time and place to hire for experience like that is something we fell short on is everyone it was everyone's PR every time we hit a new record month like it was all of our best and like now just now as of whatever 3 to six months ago we have talent that's come in that's done new like way bigger numbers and can just like plug in the systems and do this but it comes with a cost a very true cost real cost so like you got to kind of dance those games in my opinion um but yeah you're clearly at the awareness level and like the skill level in this game and cloud dude i mean you tweet and you get 50,000 on a thing like you could find somebody do your video editing and just do your video editing and drop them in a Slack channel and like help them with some little side things and just find that and like start to silo those things out and then eventually desilo them because then you're at the mercy but like you have to silo before you can des yeah very true very true yeah that's how do you how do you reconcile personally because I I I have this thing that I do and I I'm genuinely in love with what I do like it's a it's a level of obsession where I can't imagine myself doing anything else or I'd probably be like hanging from a rope right like this I found a thing that like I want to do for the rest of my life right how do you reconcile with okay outsourcing the thing that you genuinely love versus doing it but then also not having the leverage how do you kind of reconcile those two things well the easiest answer is if I mean it's completely what you you have to start with the goal because you don't need le like an artist that paints for fun and just paints and never makes money on it but literally loves it is going to do that forever and like that's fine like there doesn't have to be just because we hang out in money Twitter or wherever and it's like oh these guys make 50 million or 200 whatever it's like if that's not your game you don't have to play it like stupid games stupid prizes and like if you're going to get up to this position where you have to manage 50 people or whatever and there's ways around that too to get still get the same size but like you can design it however you want it it's like start with the goal of like do you okay cool is it some number and why is it that number because you saw it on the internet or because like you know how your life will change or how you live in whatever freedom capacity or nice [ __ ] or whatever and then is all my opinion by the way but like and like backing out of that and then knowing that once you get there how do you want to then approach it with that leverage because if you seriously are like oh I love these video editing it's like you can go real deep in anything and that doesn't necessarily mean that like you can You know the guys that are the copywriters that love it so much that now layer some AI into it but still do it to this day but instead of doing $1,000 VSSL they do 100,000 VSSL $100,000 VSSLs with 20% backs on front end and whatever like there's a monetization game that no matter how deep you go in your skill set that you can get paid for and the next layer of that skill set is yes having a team of people that do it but you're the best of copyrightiting but you have copywriters and like you still look at it you still touch it you still live in the world but you have team that does it you have leverage you have AI tools that do it you have leverage and like so it's it's again it's the dance of that game it's like if your skill set right now is vast it is vast across this direct response space like the business model could be agency performance thing but it's like and you can go real deep in that you can be one of these guys that takes 10 or 20% of revenue and do 10 million a month like that's not uncommon and like I know I know a guy does that right so like that kind of stuff and you can have such a leaning team so you're not really like a manager you hang out with your friends that like the con models aren't alignment maybe maybe it's you know truly split up in partners where like you're living the freedom thing together like I know tons of people like that and us kind of included where it's like we all win together everyone gets paid together no one person is like making you know 90% of the share and instead we all are eating from it it has to be bigger is a big thing you have three partners you have to do three times the amount of profit in order for you all to live at that whatever let's call it 100k you want to make like you got to do 300 for you all to eat like simple math but really real and like does the business model support getting to there where all your lifestyles are how you want it um but yeah dude i mean you're right there so it's all up to what you want like if you say you love the craft the question is you love the game of this craft or do you actually like clicking the keys and doing that you can do both still like again you can do it really high leverage or you can do it with team and still have leverage yeah video editing was not the best example to use in that because I I genuinely want to shoot myself no no but like the copy game the direct response game yeah like that was literally my my crux of doing the affiliate and lead genen stuff it's like I could even do the scripting and that was kind of fun for me but like not great but when it came to doing the videos and swapping hooks and swapping like files it was like not the move and then I tried to hire for it and I was like doing all this other like actual stuff and this was like a little side quest and I was like I'm not [ __ ] doing this i'm not paying someone two grand a month or whatever to like edit these videos and they're relying on me for scripts and like again the model works i know guys who do hundreds of thousands a month doing it and have one editor and they still do the media buying and it's like 90 whatever percent margin on their team and then on their actual stuff is their 25% margin on affiliate lead genen call it a day and they crank it just wasn't in the model yeah that I leaned into but like you could do that right now you could make I mean we don't have to dox that but like you could be in the hundreds a month all day you know the lead genen guys and affilate guys that do it with yes one to three offers or skew or whatever types niches and then have a media buyer and a creative and that's oversimplifying but like basically so it's funny because I I literally have offer I have about maybe 12 or 13 offers just like that structure in my DMs now because either from clients that I worked with and they know who I am and so they hit me up or like they see my content like dude like I'm doing like there's a guy that's like I'm doing 300,000 a month right now like I want to get this to the next level and like I know it like my my marketing like my cold my cold prospecting isn't isn't isn't the best my media buying is not the best i have a guy there but he's you know I want you in there i'll just give you 20% i said no you know but I I know it's there and you're in and you're you're you're right there and I mean if you see a higher upside or because that's what you're right is you're just choosing what vehicle because you have literally nine of them that you could choose right now and you have 15 of them in your DMs or whatever right like yes that's it's just whatever one so if you think that this one is the one that you can have the there's the whole game of like the cash flow game the the time for cash but then there's also the game that is this exit value and all these numbers and stuff and in 90 999% of the of our game it's like that doesn't really exist but there are ones that do you know you know you and I both know the lead genen companies that have exited that went for 50 orund and something the huge ones that went for like way big numbers but if you're talking like kind of lean teams there's ones that have gone for mid mid eight figures and if you can get a piece of that like that's a game most of what we do though is optimized for what is your time or enjoyment of that time to what dollar we're just playing a way higher stakes game than you know your $12 an hour at some you know restaurant you're doing it at upwards of you know 510k an hour depending on how in it you are yeah yeah very true yeah I agree thank you for that thank you no no i mean no no again these are all my opinions and we are so in the we're all in the trenches your perspective is invaluable genuinely well I appreciate that um all right so structuring team both of us are saying we're bad at it uh next obscure networks and channels that do well so not your normal meta somewhere with huge awareness so so large audience but how like basically how Agora's end of America is structured so what is a network or channel that is outside of meta that still has this mass approach uh no idea no clue i am I like for the literally for the past three or four years I've been exclusively meta and Google i know some guys who I talked to a little bit who like if you want to talk about like what like like ad networks like when you're saying like networks and channels like ad network like I know guys who do uh uh like TV right like I know guys who do direct mail right like I I Yeah yeah yeah um I haven't gone super deep into with them because I don't do TV and I probably that's a huge channel right um but I know it's working well for them i know guys who are on Apploving right and it's working really well for them um I think I know there's Okay if anyone knows anything about this and I'm completely bullshitting just like let me know because I might be completely wrong about this i believe from one of my friends who runs on the app loan he had there's another app network that's like kind of like this like targeted bundle of apps that is like similar to GDN so like the Google display network very similar and I think they leverage the same dist I think but it's like this targeted bucket so you can go like only games that are doing XYZ to like I don't know 5 million AUM or whatever um and like you can like do like very specific ad placements there that are very native looking those are that's something that I know and then like obviously I it's not underground like everyone knows what display is but it's still massively underutilized yeah right like like massively underutilized in the vast majority of niches like you go again go to M MSNBC click on one it's and it's always like the huge like full page VSSL with no time like it's always it's just that right like maybe some insurance stuff but like it's it's not utilized properly by most people yeah um yeah those are the only things that I could I am not an expert in this do you know I I wish I knew more people who were like deeply entrenched in No I mean we run that'd be something to talk about we run we run probably 70 80% meta now and the rest is Google almost right and branded and then there's some cold that we're trying to crack but we've never like full scaled into that um the other one like classic is just I bought a course when it was hot it was uh the Geekout guys James and someone else they had a nothing uh nothing but native I think it was called at the time and they did like a fiveday workshop that was like get the recordings and be on live and I got on that and like I literally didn't even I just didn't understand right I this is all like the journey of me just like should I try this or this or this and like our main thing was going like you know we just didn't lean into it enough at the time which I regret massively but I was just learning all these things and that's where I learned about postbacks and that's when I learned about trackers and like I didn't know that stuff existed and so like if I could pick the value I got from that it was that but those guys were crushing crushing it was all about loading in 15 landers with 15 different dynamic headlines and 50 different ad creatives and then launching them on tabula and whatever else and like people crush it in that game um I don't know how that works for info like we still don't do that to this day but like the media buyer uh gal that we had that was a lead genen one she was very heavy and spend like 2 to 500k a day crazy [ __ ] for um the I forget the title of it but it's like the the lawyer the claims that's like the long-term cases where they're getting like a ton of people um she was a media buyer for that and then she was also info buying for us which is like very different um very different but she was talking like push for example like they run all this stuff on push traffic and like I don't know that game i don't like I don't know so I don't have an answer either directly but yeah there's obviously obscure networks out there i don't And the big ones obvious if you can if you can crack them they have the the size and the scale um it's just being able to crack them with the different funnel types I would assume and obviously the creative yeah yeah i would um I guess like whoever answered that question like look into also like programmatic guys like I don't know like just do some googling there i know there's a subreddit I a few posts on there like r/p programmatic there's a lot of guys on there like maybe DM them like ask them a few questions because those guys are usually operating they they have to operate within like all of these things they're programmatic ad buyers so I guess them talk to them i have no idea i wish I knew yeah all right so ripping same uh how do you deal with weekly fluctuations specifically when dealing with CPM what does your retargeting look like for people that are more bottom of the funnel so again back to the fluctuations with stuff like CPM yeah yeah yeah yeah so CPM specifically is interesting because um I've gotten as high as when I was uh with the funding funnel when we were doing like the the 50k in 20 something days i had as high as a $230 CPM guess what it was still massively profitable so I was just like "Oh sick." And I posted the screenshot i was like "It's my CPMs." And I I just ignored it right if you have if you can't do that then I would look at CPMs are interesting from my experience this is my experience everyone looks at this stuff differently so grain of salt from my experience what I've seen I can have a very high CPM and then my lagging my lagging metrics are insane like I can have a like a 6% outbound click-through rate right and like a 23% opt-in rate on the page which is literally what we ad on the $236 uh CPM campaign or ad it was a 6% outbound click-through rate and a 23% opt-in rate not for a freebie not for a lead magnet not for a VSSL optin these were leads who wanted to book a call and then it was like a lead form and then like a book a call page our book a call rate was 95% from the lead page to the book a call page so I was essentially getting 23% book a call rate but my CPMs were 236 bucks you think I give a single [ __ ] no I don't I ignore i was like I don't care right and then I had campaigns with like a 40 a $50 CPM which is still pretty high but like it's all auction dependent um and they were getting horrible like horrible like 1% you know like out on clickthrough rate like 15% off whatever um so a lot of the times when you see a really high CPM it's because of your estimated like your E in your E there's something there you do have your your um your revenue per CPM as like an estimated thing in Facebook's like model and so it'll look at that it's like "Hey here's what we're estimating." Like your your um uh your uh quality score is super high like super high your engagement score is insane so guess what we're going to charge you more because we know you're making money right like it could be as simple as that the traditional answer is if those things are not looking good then Facebook is penalizing you for giving the audience a bad experience on their platform right they're not engaging with the ad because Facebook doesn't care about you as everyone thinks oh Facebook wants more people to spend money on more ads no no they want more people to spend more time every day on the platform and if people are not seeing engaging ads and then that's then that's not going to happen a very easy way to circumvent this is to engagement hack your ad so like everyone like people and people say this all the time is like make your ads format your ads and optimize your ads for engagement so a couple hacks with this um similar with YouTube where through plays are very important like on the organic side like on the organic side for Facebook because ads and organic run off of the same recommendation engine um so if you look at your your hold rates a very easy thing that you can do with your ads look at Tik Tok shop there was this one format where it was like "My dad is a uh top paid neurosurgeon in XYZ." And he says this and notice the chick she was like she was cutting vegetables she was doing something with her hands right she was doing something with her hands like grabbing stuff doing something like that in the background right i took that and I applied that to an ad with a UGC creator that we had that was she was already really like crushing it for us cuz she was Oh she was hot um so she was crushing it for us and so I said "Do a more native thing zoom out and I want you to do the same thing cut a cantaloupe cut a cantaloupe on your thing." And the everything else in the ad was the exact same same structure same script everything the hold rate went from we already had it was pretty decent it was like 20% went to 43% so it more than doubled just from having that and so I've learned some ad hacks hack number two if you're doing a talking face ad put some [ __ ] on your face like grab like I'm not joking grab dirt or something and smudge your face i have tested this same environment same everything dirt on your face hold rate is higher i've tested it it works i believe it i believe it there so there are these things and of course when your hold rate is higher usually you'll see your CPMs go down there are cases where it doesn't and if it still doesn't after your creative is really really good and it's engaging and you can just tell by your hook rate and your hold rate sometimes people report ads if someone reports your ads you won't be able to see it on the front end you won't be able to see it guys who have like insider rep um I'm sure you guys have like insider I don't know if we can dox this or not if if if you want to say um if you have like insider reps on Facebook there's like a dashboard that you can see where it's like actually everything that's flagged on your account and that's like kind of negative it's like in this little yellow okay sometimes if you have an insider rep like they can show you that but it's not available for us normal people right it's like only for the VIPs who have that um you can't tell if someone flagged your ad if someone flagged your ad and you notice that like for let's say I don't know a pretty long period it's an evergreen ad really stable CPMs out of nowhere just spike then someone probably reported your ad what you can do there yeah some people some people say like and I'm not entirely sure either what's kind of like what's the actual deal with that some people say it's like the ad account or or like the Facebook page is cooked right like like now you have to like test another ad account or another i I haven't had that i haven't seen that really i don't know that could be the case um but what I have seen works pretty well is that ad that has super high CPMs take it off wipe the metadata and there's there's some tools that you can use to wipe metadata y and you can do it as simple as like mirroring it and then changing the saturation after you after you wipe it so like Facebook visa as unique and just relaunch it and like for me at least like seven times out of 10 like that's worked like I if I've ever seen like that huge spike in CPMs where like for whatever reason an ad has just fatigued and I'm like I know this ad is really good and everyone's always like let Facebook decide no I I want to have some control like if that's the case then a lot of the times you can just do that and relaunch and it'll be fine again i don't know why but it just works yeah yeah i've definitely heard that and then the initial point you were saying about we have an unconventional kind of setup where a lot of our stuff is purchase optimized even though it's a call funnel just because for us for the longest time it was just so much volume that you know it's hundreds and hundreds of calls a day let's say um and we didn't have anything filtering those to what is a quality call or not especially that happens on page for like a browser event so getting a little more like technical into it how we have since changed this and we have routing that occurs and certain things fire certain things different so we can lean into the schedule world we were doing custom conversions for a long time but like to your CPM point those are those can be high for sure but like we'll have as crazy as like five times the cost per call like or more and the cost the CPA is better than anything else and it's like if you look at what that is on like cost per like the conversion rate on those calls for example like it doesn't even make sense sometimes like you're like because you know once you have a call you have a showed call then you have a closed call so you have like your 2% you're dancing of your 50% show call it and your 30% close like 15% of those blended is going to close of those calls and then you'll have some of these sets that like call it 1 1200 and it's like 100% like you have a,200 call and you have a,200 CPA and you're like what and there's like three that came through and you're like this doesn't even make sense so like we definitely danced that that's what I was talking about like the structure change like our CMO has restructured this whole thing so we have now stuff that fires on schedule that like works in a cleaner way we have stuff that's purchased because now there's more signals but CPM and like what it costs per all to say like sometimes what you're saying is like not that relevant it is not relevant if your cost per lead is $100 but you're targeting 20 if you're making 5x rorowaz on it it's like who cares if you're if you have 150 amount of leads or whatever so yeah y yeah y yeah y yeah y yeah y yeah y yeah y yeah y yeah y yeah y yeah yeah and I know this is way more relevant for for like what we do which is like lead call like there's other touch points like past that I know ecom guys like they have to be very diligent about like every single metric that goes on because they you know they just kind of have that they have to be very you know order one profitable all that stuff so I get it for the ecom guys out there like I get like your CPMs can be a massive thing that you're looking at but yeah like just look at like is your conversion rate on from that specific ad really like like really good and I I've noticed this a lot of the times they don't know they don't know so like it's it's rare that they can actually attribute back to the ad the performance very rare so if you're not doing that already please go do that because my god that's really really important if you're not and I've seen accounts like dude I've seen guys who spend so much money you'd think oh you guys have UTMs and click IDs no you don't oh okay all right maybe do that first like and they don't have it and so really like if you're not doing that then do that attribute every sale the conversion rate on all the funnels like to the ad itself please do that yeah for sure and then and our example right is then doing that at the layer of the ad so that what campaign or what optimization is that living in because that's so like we have attempted this is just so funny and I don't know how long ago this was and I refuse to say if it was recent but uh we are like looking at split tests on an opt-in page call it and one is running on schedule and one is running on purchase the purchase ones no joke can have like a 5% opt-in rate which is like the worst thing you've ever heard ever right and it's like but it doesn't matter because how it backs out into calls and purchases and it's like that's crazy to think about so you're like oh just run that traffic at something that's not gated and it's like doesn't matter right like the pockets that it can find the algorithm can find on its own is like insanity and and that's obviously like the de the default purchase event right yeah so we have moved into Yeah yeah okay okay it's really funny because I was doing the same thing where not not like purchase but I was doing submit application versus schedule and because it's a default conversion event and like with Facebook's advanced matching it makes sense it's literally find finding people who have fired that event on other people's sites and offers and so it finds people who are most likely to guess what purchase right or guess what submit application but not purchase just submit application right or just schedule and so it's really interesting i've been now which is kind of embarrassing that I haven't been doing this before but I'm now actually starting to test the optimization event itself because everyone just goes for the default but I'm now looking to actually test between purchase i'm going to be testing purchase even though it's a call booking funnel i'm going to be testing it right because I want our like main thing is Yeah yeah there's that whole game where it's like are you when you said earlier like Facebook knows how much money you're making or doesn't and you know you assume it's based on what you pass back to the pixel is them knowing right at some level um and you want that sometime like sometime you hear the people who game the system and make it so you know a purchase is passed in at $1,000 even though for you it's 5,000 so that the spread is different uh for the longest time we did custom conversions just cuz that's how it was set up and then when we did that whole switch over we went to native but I talked to guys right now that I've met through X and whatever that are like we have they basically set up call it C1 C2 C3 C4 and that's going to be your your classic like opt-in app booking purchase okay let's just use those as example those four they've set up custom one custom two three and four and they even depending on they had this entire system that cooked for 90 days prior to when that health change came and they saw increased if not you know similar if not increased performance by optimizing for those and when they lost their purchase and they lost their stuff on their pixel because where they were categorized they continued to have the same performance they were still fine and like I know I know people who got waxed by not doing anything about this and we're just like oh we're able to continue to run on whatever schedule I don't even But like I know guys that got whacked by that and cut like a third and when it was a way around it that some of these agencies or some of these guys were doing correctly who knew how to like set these up from the get and again that's not something we personally dealt with but like I had two different guys that talked to me in DMs about how they set those up and I was like interesting interesting so side tangent but yeah it's uh good on them for being um next one on here yeah good on them exactly yeah and I've also heard of horror stories of someone got assigned to it to make the change and didn't roll it out in time and then they had whatever like two days of data or I'm sorry two weeks of data and then got cooked because they didn't they weren't able to cook the pixel long enough um and then they were running basically blind that then was feeding the new ones right because it was like they didn't get the system set up in time to feed it and and and you know Yeah so yeah that's the fun of it all right down here we got is AI that's the game is AI and direct so let's just let's let's bucket this one as AI so here are your high lever zones that you use AI right now yeah so first is research so I mean if you're not already I'm sure 90% who are watching this have already used deep research either on GPT or on uh or with Google i honestly honestly now especially now I'm liking Google's deep research more like it does it's just more a bit more depth um so I'm going to open up the I'm still using the same exact deep research prompt that I me mentioned in my tweet here i think it's to this day my biggest tweet so I can share the prompt is that cool yeah 100% okay okay all right let me just find it here should have had this on before bed here okay yeah so this is uh I took a bit of this from Stephan Georgu because he he tweeted this but then I kind of added my own modifications so you want it to do if you're saying Oh my god it disappeared sorry one second you're good sorry about that man sorry i should have had this i should have seen that question here we can do the We can do that we just hit 130 so anyone who's still here can hit the 1.5 in the comments just comment one okay okay yeah yeah yeah yeah just Yes there's a perfect gap yes okay i'm going to have to Okay oh my god all right you know what i'm not even going to mess around with this anymore here's the gist of If you want to If you want I'm sure you'll link my Twitter to the in the description if you want i was going to say Twitter is that your pinned one yeah yeah yeah yeah lowkey shout out just go to my just go to my just go to my Twitter i'l