Discover Marketing Secrets from the Highest-Grossing Webinar Launch in History

And this is something I've learned, Alison, that I think is the most important thing in this campaign and in all marketing that I do. And it's the following. Right? So it's like, I'm sure you've heard the quote, like, if I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first six sharpening the axe.

Yes.

And that's like an Abraham Lincoln club.

Yeah.

If you sharpen the axe, the webinar is the marketing, but the positioning and the strategy, that's the sharpening of the axe.

Welcome to the Scale or Fail show. I am your host, Alison Maslin. I am a business growth mentor and CEO of Pinnacle Global Network, where we mentor business owners around the world to grow and scale companies that change the world. And so, speaking of changing the world, my goodness, the world is changing so fast, right under our noses. And there's so much, so much incredible opportunity out there right now for innovation, for creating wealth, for being an entrepreneur. And so I'm so excited to introduce a dear friend of mine who is on the pulse of innovation and he is crushing it in the webinar space. So, Jason Fladlian, co founder and chief strategy officer of Rapid Crush Incorporated. He is known as the hundred million dollar webinar man. We might have to change that number here soon to 500 million. His pitch webinars have set records in the information, coaching, affiliate, and software space. He draws upon his eclectic background for inspiration from being a Hare Krishna monk and a rapper to becoming one of the best webinar presenters in the game. Actually, I believe he is the best webinar presenter in the game. And so, Jason, welcome.

I am so glad to be back, Alison.

I know, I know. And also for those of you that didn't see Jason on the show before, you can find that on itunes because that was an incredible episode where you really broke down actually how to lead a basic webinar. So I'm so happy you're back and I want to dive into you recently just had a launch that in one launch, you generated $57 million.

It's a big number.

That is a big freaking number. I think I'm sure you were blown away. I know everybody, we're all rooting for you and so excited about what you've created here. And you're so kind to come on here and kind of break down how you did this. But before we do that, and now that everybody's on the edge of their seat, I want to just get a little background for you because Hare Krishna rapper To be, you know, to 57 million in webinar presentations. How the heck did you make that transition?

Yeah, it's a great story, Alison. And this is actually all related. As seemingly different as those things are, there's a common thread that weaves them all together. So, in short, I'll attempt to kind of fill everybody in on that. I always was like a performer. I always was interested in music and rapping ever since I was a little kid. And growing up in a small town in Iowa didn't phase me one bit. And I was still very comfortable performing, which obviously comes in handy now on webinars and such. So I liked the music, but also didn't really have any aim and purpose in my life. I had a really challenging childhood growing up, and so I found myself, like, 20 years old, depressed, panic attacks, usually two to four to five or even more per day, and just distraught. And I still kind of wanted to do this music as my career, which seemed like a pipe dream. But a friend of mine who was a musician also kind of came back, and he traveled with the monks for a while, and he was a vegetarian, as Hare Krishnas are. And so I was like, that's interesting. Let me just. I'm always very intellectual, so I'm like, let me read up on that one day on the Internet, which is where my whole life seems to revolve around. And I came across a book that I knew was, like, this Hare Krishna book. And he had talked about it before, so I just started reading it online. And it just. There was something in it. I said, hey, try this out. And the same person, if they see benefit, they'll continue to do it, and if they don't, they'll stop. And I was at that moment in my life where I was so overwhelmed. So just. I could barely. I couldn't go outside without freaking out. So I tried it, and I started doing meditations, and I started eating healthier and cleaner, and I started feeling better, and my panic attacks went away. And my desire to, like, build something purposeful and impactful in music just went to the forefront. So I started focusing on my music career. And unfortunately, you know, the music business, there's more probably business in the music business than there is music and in entertainment. So I'm like, man, I can't get this going. No matter how hard I try, no matter what I do, I can't be successful with this. So I started studying business to try to be successful with it. Then I started studying marketing. And then what I discovered was the marketing of the thing was more interesting to me than the thing. So prior to music, there was nothing that had captivated me to create other than music. There was nothing to hold a candle to that. But this marketing stuff was super fascinating to me. So slowly but surely it started dominating more of my day to pretty soon it became almost obsessive. I'm like, I got to figure this out. And more specifically, Internet marketing, because I was always a fan of computers, was on computers since 1986 when I was three years old. And I just like computers. And so I'm like, let me figure out how to connect all these together. And that led me to essentially 2007 where I was making it. I was doing my day job and I was trying to do the music and I was trying to run everything all at the same time. Like, let me just quit this day job thing. So I started writing articles for people Online, ghostwriting for SEO, search engine optimization content back then. And that made me some good money. I was doing pretty good. I was making somewhere between like 30 to $50 an hour, depending on the gig, which was small town Iowa boy, was phenomenal to me. So then I got like the guts to want to publish a little information product on how I was doing this, because I knew other people wanted to know the process, not just how to make money doing it, but even my process for writing articles was pretty efficient. And so I published a little book for sold it for four measly dollars, took out a little space ad on a online forum for Internet marketing, and it blew up. It sold like several hundred copies almost instantaneously. Yeah. And that was a spark. I said, let me figure out things people want to know. Let me write these short little ebooks because this one was only seven pages long. Let me sell them really cheaply and let me just go out and master these skills. And I started a little publishing company. And so along the way, that's when you pick up all the other things that were happening, such as webinars and such as all these other techniques. But webinars resonated with me more than any other. And so over the years kind of perfected and essentially created a lot of the technology from selling and from structuring webinars that exists today. You know, I've trained Zoom, for example, before they went public. Right. Shortly before they went public. And some of the biggest influencers in the world on webinars. And that is kind of. That is the path that has led.

Me into where I am is so wild. I love, you know, when you have the luxury of looking back, the hindsight, right. And you see how one thing leads to another to another. Because if you hadn't had the angst when you were younger, you wouldn't have had the drive to try to figure out how to fix it. Right. If things were just kind of hunky dory and you're like, yeah, everything's fine, you wouldn't have had that longing to search. And so it's interesting how where we think something is a difficult situation, it ends up probably being the driver of everything, you know, so. So that's. And so, you know, obviously, you've been leading webinars for a long time, and I mean, I've even done some of your trainings. And. And I remember when we were. We were at Genius Network together one time, sitting down and having a conversation, and it seemed at that time that maybe webinars were going to be dying out, and we were talking about that. I don't know if you remember, but, boy, they sure have not. In fact, I think it's been the opposite.

Yeah, bad webinars are dying out. Thank God for that. About time. Yes, but if webinars are dead, I don't want to be alive, Allison, because they're working better for us than they ever have.

Yeah, well, clearly your results show the opposite. Let's talk about this launch. I really want to kind of pull it apart a little bit and. And glean some wisdom, because, holy cow, $57 million generated from this. First of all, can you talk about what the webinar was about? And then just, you know, let's look. I would love to know, you know, how this came about. How did you drive the marketing? Who were you targeting? Like, you know, I'm just going to. Why don't you just share?

We'll try to break it down because it's fascinating, and I'm still taking it all in. And so just a little bit of background. So the launch was on crypto. And I hesitate to come straight out and say that, because sometimes people hear, well, of course, you had this topic. Naturally, it would do that. Well, there's a lot of people doing crypto that aren't doing numbers like these, and these are in core sales. We're not selling, like, a fund. Like, you might hear somebody do a whole bunch of money in crypto because they're taking a percentage of funds, and the net on that is a lot smaller than the net that we get on ours. We're essentially publishing information on a specific way of trading crypto. Which I think is super conservative. It trades the volatility of crypto if we don't try to guess if the market's going up or down. And that appeals and resonates with a lot of the market that I feel is being overlooked in crypto. A lot of people want these moonshots and these mean coins. Typically younger people who, they don't care if they lose at all. They're willing to gamble, and so they'll do that. Or there's these technologists, or there are these day traders who want to stare in front of a computer for 10, 12 hours a day. But there's a whole segment of folks, the largest segment of folks is just like they might have some real estate or just like they might have some 401k or an IRA or other types of investments to round out their portfolio. They want that too, with crypto, but they're cautious, as they should be, which I think is smart. So that's the idea that that was what we were doing for the launch. Now, regardless of whether you're in a crypto space, a financial space, because we were in neither earlier last year when this started, and I'll get to that in a second, there are lessons here that I think, some of which I'm now really identifying, that we did and understood intuitively, that are universally applicable to anybody and everybody listening here. But the concept was on crypto, and here's what's cool about this. March 24th of last year, 2021, I owned exactly zero dollars and zero cents of any crypto. I didn't own bitcoin. I didn't know ether. I was happy to sit on the sidelines. And I didn't have any fear of missing out because I'm like, I don't know how to make money with this stuff. I don't want to get involved in this. I'm doing quite well. I mean, we had already set the biggest record in Internet marketing history. As an affiliate, we sold about $10 million of somebody else's product in eight days. And we were just happy promoting and doing business stuff. And we were doing very well with it. And I'd been very successful. As you said earlier, Ali, like, we got to update that. That a hundred million dollar number is about four years old. It's probably a quarter of a billion now. I kind of get to get 100 million. Just kind of quit counting. I don't know. So March 24, I knew nothing about.

Change it to a B. Yeah, that's right.

It either goes to the M. Now I need another comma, right? So March 24th, I knew nothing about crypto, didn't own any of it. March 25, I take a meeting with a gentleman named Dan Hollings. Now, I know dan Hollings since 2010. We published a product of his all the way back then. Our attitude is this, Alison, where it's like, whether I create the product, my company creates the product, whether we promote somebody else's product as an affiliate or we publish a content creator, doesn't matter to me. I just want to find a market that is being underserved or neglected, and I want to provide them with the advantage they've been seeking. That's what I want to do. So whether we create it, whether we source it, or whether we promote it as an affiliate, I'm agnostic to the whole deal. And so we were publishing all the way back in 2010. This is how I knew Dan. So Dan had came to us because Dan had just completed the most viral successful marketing campaign in the history of marketing at that time on the Internet, which was the secret, you know, the one that was on Oprah, you know, all that kind of stuff, right? So Dan was the. The Internet marketing strategist behind that. And it didn't end well. Let's just leave it at that. And which is unfortunate because what a great launch. And Dan was burned out. He was wore out. And he's like, I just want to teach, I just want to train. I don't want to get bogged down by the business stuff. So he came to us and we published him. And so we'd known Dan all the way back then. So we had this working relationship with him off and on through the years. He would come to us when he wanted us to publish certain things. He did his stuff on his own. He got back up on his feet. He started creating his own stuff again. And all stuff was Mary. And we hadn't even really talked to Dan since 2017. I think it was like the last major project that we had done with Dan. So Dan comes On this call March 25, which I get sneak attacked to because my business partner, Wilson Matos, if he would have told me, hey, listen, dude, we're going to talk to crypto, I would have took it. I wouldn't have shown up because I had at that point, Ali I had seen 100 plus crypto offers that had came across my desk because people know we are the top affiliate. We set the record and they, you know, it's like the Flatland seal of approval If I were to do a webinar on it, and I was excited about it and it had the proof that I liked related to it. They knew it could be a significant, possible, big revenue, big windfall of it. But all this stuff, 90% of it was so scammy. Like the IOCs, which nobody talks about any anymore. The Internet or the whatever, the initial coin offerings. Right. They didn't have names for rug pulls and pump and dumps back then in that space. It was not nearly as sophisticated, but I could see through it and.

Yeah. And you know, it's your reputation at stake.

Yeah. And I mean, even if it wasn't my reputation, I still wouldn't do it because it's my sleep. Right. And there was some stuff that was good I saw out there, but it didn't feel predictable. And so I was like, I don't, I don't want to put that in front of audiences either. It seems too risky. So I was done with crypto. I was tired of hearing about it, as I'm sure some people on this call are tired of hearing about it, because we all have that neighbor or that friend that just won't shut up. Everything's related to crypto, you know. So Dan gets on this call with us and Will said, come on, as a favor to me, I'm not going to tell you what it's about. If Will tells me to be somewhere, I'm going to be there. He's my right hand man. And so we get on this call and Dan shows us the system immediately. He says, this is what I've been doing for the last three years. And boom, proof, proof, proof. And he starts to explain it as he goes along and we're like, done. This has some validity to it. Let's test it. So the very next day, Will and I set it up and we both, you know, Will had owned some crypto before, but I never had. So I bought crypto that very day. We talked to him on March 25, we started utilizing his process and it worked really well for us. And so Dan had taught about eight to 12 people. I can't remember the specific number. Ad hoc, just friends of his in businesses over the years that he knew this system and now us. So we had about 10 very good case studies already. Plus Dan had made about $3 million or so over the last couple of years using this himself. But we didn't launch. And this is something I've learned, Alison, that I think is the most important thing in this campaign and in all marketing that I do. And it's the following, right? So it's like, I'm sure you've heard the quote. Like, if I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first six sharpening the ax.

Yes.

And that's like an Abraham Lincoln quote. And so, like, if you sharpen the axe, the webinar is the marketing, but the positioning and the strategy, that's the sharpening of the ax. So if you do all that before you ever sit down to write a webinar, webinars will be infinitely more powerful if you have the quote, unquote sharper axe. And so I'm confident just on the basis of what we had for results in our own experience and our endorsement, we could have done well. I think we would have sold like 15 or 20 million dollars. But I think what we did here next was the difference between, you know, a good launch in the record, because we set the record for the Internet marketing biggest launch now, not just on the affiliate side, but on the vendor side, and that's this. I immediately saw two major problems. Constraints that would limit customers who should buy this from buying this. And one of them was, well, yeah, you taught your friends, can you teach strangers? You haven't taught a single stranger yet. And even better, you've taught rich people how to make even more money, and they're friends with you. So even if it didn't work, they might lie and say it did work just because they're your buddies now. You know, Ali, I'm always thinking of the most cynical customer when I'm creating a presentation. Not the nice customer or not the reasonable customer. I'm with the customer who thinks everything is a scam. That's who I'm thinking of. That's how I want to set it up. Right.

Overcome all those objections. But how did. How did you do that? Did you go out to these people and ask them what their concerns would be?

That's a great question. Yeah. And I have found that that is a good way to start. But it's kind of like, you know, like in a relationship, if you have to always ask your partner what they want, what their needs are, instead of being in tune with them. If you just know what their needs are and take care of them, it creates a deeper bond. And so in marketing, a higher level is being able to understand what the customer wants, even if the customer can't elucidate it. And that's kind of where I play, is being able to observe into it from that and seeing things in Testing, obviously having hypothesis and testing them and validating them. But I just knew immediately that that was going to be a huge flaw, is we didn't have strangers with results. That was the first flaw. There was one other major flaw. And again, these aren't major, major flaws. We're talking, you know, 15, 20 million. Probably without them, we would have done pretty well. But I want a sharpened axe before I ever try to knock down the tree. The other problem is, since Dan had taught everybody so far for free, the actual established direct value of the information was zero dollars and zero cents.

Yeah, that's a problem.

Now we could do what most marketers do and attribute the value kind of to other things. Very. It's a. It's not a bad way of doing it, but it's not the most effective. We could say, hey, listen, you know, you put this in gold and you hold onto it for 10 years and it would have went up 0.5%. You put this in Bitcoin and hold it for 10 years and it would have went up this much. Right. This is how valuable this information of it is. But all of that is indirect. Usually that's what we got to go with. But if possible, the most powerful thing is to set up and do this ethically. I hate to say that I have to mention this ethically, but I got to say it, do this ethically. Here's the ideal position. These people over here paid a whole bunch of money for almost the same thing that you get over here for a lot less money. And that was. And I wanted to solve both of those problems at once, because that's truly efficient marketing is if you find the one thing that can solve many things. So here's how we went about. Right, we rolled out to an email group. This is where it's nice to have customers who trust you, who've been with you for a decade plus, some of which who you've made really rich or really successful. They give you the benefit of the doubt. They allow you to experiment on them. So if you don't have that yet, step one, build a business where you have that, which everybody, if you can't do that, you shouldn't be in business. So we had that and we went to an audience and I wrote an email, a very long email, and I said, listen, I did this thus far. Here's the status of how everything's working for me. Many people have done better than me. We don't know if we can teach this or not to anybody else. We don't know what that could look like. But we think this is the thing. If you're interested in more information on this, go here and join us on Discord. So Discord is essentially like Slack, where it's just a community based piece of software. We only did it because Dan already had a group there and because it was a low barrier of entry, we didn't have to build websites, web pages, we didn't have things that got in our way. So we met with Dan on March 25th and on May 2nd we sent this email out and I could show I started the system on this day. Here's how well it's doing for me thus far. If you want more information, go here. And so between May 2 and May 6, with just a handful of Discord posts, They're just essentially community postings. Dan laid a little bit of foundation and then he posted a message which I wrote which essentially went like this. We asked him three questions. We said, hey, listen, this is going to be a $10,000 program. If you want to be taught this one on one with Dan now, full disclosure, we will teach it later in a course format, in a group format, but if you want to get in right away, it's going to be 10 grand. So we asked how much beyond the 10 grand would you be willing to invest? And we put a cap up to 25,000 because we didn't want people to say, well, yeah, those people made money, they put a million dollars in. So we intentionally, again, to anticipate objections in advance, put a cap on 25,000. We also said risk tolerance between 1 and 10, 1 being the most, 10 being the least. Right. What are you? And then the last question is, if you lost all $25,000, could you continue life the same? Could you still pay the mortgage? Right. Would your kids still be able to go to school, et cetera, et cetera. Because we wanted to, we didn't want to taint the data set. What I mean by that is we didn't want people super pressured and like anxious. We wanted them to. This is a genuine experiment.

We don't know you're being total upfront here.

Exactly. And I think that's missing in marketing. This full on transparency of. We don't know if this will work. We're going to sell it later for less. Do you want to cut to the front of the line? You want to be a guinea pig? It's really expensive, but you get Dan one on one. We can see how this plays. We could only take on a few clients at a time. I Think it was like a dozen with Dan, one on one. Before we could process them out, we figured we could do it in two weeks. And then my anticipation was this, Ali. I figured that we could do. We do three rounds of these and then we would know enough to be able to move forward. What had happened is I didn't anticipate this. This is why story. This is why you should look at marketing more stories than campaigns, because stories unfold organically where campaigns typically are. I'm going to do this, then this and this. And they're much more linear. So this is a story that's occurring and we're learning as much as. As the customers are writing the story as much as we're writing the story. Right. And so we had 53 people say, I'm interested. I'm willing to pay $10,000. And we were like, crap, we can only pick like 12 of them. And six more said, I will pay more than $10,000 if I can be included in this set. And so we accommodated them, and we slept less to accommodate them. And we had 18 people that. Well. So this is already a clue. Oh, my God. This is bigger than we could have ever imagined.

Right, Right, Exactly. That's definitely a hint to when you have floodgates.

Yeah, it usually is the opposite way. You have expectations up here and reality's down here. So we already knew we had a hit on our hands. So we're like, we got to process them through real quickly and see what happens. So Dan does it in about two weeks. Two ish weeks. And every one of them are successful. Every single one of them had followed the process. Every single one of them had positive returns. Now, what we did here is in the contract because we made them all sign contracts. We had a thing in the contract which said at any point in time, whenever we wish to publicly, we can show your live status exactly as it is. All your open bots that you're running, all of the coins that you're into, that's fair game. So they had to agree to that, which they did. Because it's not our software that does this. We show how to use the software and Dan's very specific way, which is more important than any software, it's his actual setups and such. But they have a share function because they want to, like, get people to make their software viral. So there's a share function where you could show the open portfolio in real time. So they all gave us their links. So we have now 18 links. A validated third party unadulterated we can't change it, we can't obscure it, we can't mess with it. Good, bad or ugly. Here's what it is. Now we have the rights to show that.

And.

And all 18 of them are looking really good. So we didn't do any more one on ones. We anticipated, we thought we would, but we didn't. And so we sold the one on ones on May 6, we completed them and we went back to the remaining. Who was left of the 53 people minus 18. And we said, now we're going to accelerate the calendar. We're going to publish this course a lot sooner. Do you want it now? And it's going to be 2,500. And what Dan essentially taught one on one, he's now going to teach in a course in a one to many style course. And so some of them said yes, as early as May 28, June 2 is when we did the first official webinar where we sold the course to the masses. And Dan did most of that webinar. And that was fine with me. And it wasn't even that great of a webinar first, from the sense of it was like seven slides. Dan told a very abbreviated short story of how he discovered this and what it's about. And then he said, let me show you these 18 people. And then they paid 10,000. And we opened up what we called a beta launch of this course for $2,500. So there's the effect, we've solved the problem of does it work? Here's strangers from all sorts of different backgrounds, some with no trading, some with tons of trading. You know, man, woman, old, young, all that jazz. And now we sold a course. And here's what's cool about selling in beta, Alison which is not something we always do, but it lent itself well. Here we're like, we got to get this out. Because every day we don't have this in the marketplace as a day, somebody's going to get scammed by some joker selling some nonsensical crypto stuff. So there was real motivation to get it out there sooner beyond just making money selling courses. And so we positioned it as beta. We're like, we don't have a fancy members area. We don't have a slick sales page. We have seven slides on a webinar. But this thing is important. If you want to get in now, you're going to get in right away. The sooner the better, we think. And you're going to get a discount because when we launch it officially, it's we're going to spend. We're going to sell it for more than what we sold it for now. And here's what's great about this, is everybody was totally above board on that. Like, if I showed you the squeeze pages that we use, the landing pages, you would laugh because they're so simplistic. But the message is there and the positioning is there. And so we rolled out that first beta, and we only had a couple affiliates because this is how we drove all our traffic.

Right.

We didn't spend a single paid ad, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Yeah, that's insane, though, really spend anything because, I mean, we personally spend. Have spent millions of dollars on ads. So to hear that, you're just like, oh, my gosh. But I love. There's so much and I want you to keep going. But I love that the fact that, well, there was a sense of urgency, of course, and we always know that that's important. You had proof, you know, you had people that were spending more money, and then all of a sudden they're going to get it at this, like, bargain, in a sense. And you're there being totally upfront with everybody, too.

Absolutely. And we rolled it out fast, like you said, that sense of urgency. So now they're feeling like they're part of something as they see it unfold, and it's exciting and we're learning. We're like, oh, they don't understand when we say this, so we got to say it this way. And, you know, we're auditioning material because one of the things that I've done well on webinars, that has helped me a lot. So Dan would do the webinar. He would lead point on that, then I would lead point on the closed section. So Dan's content would be an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and then my closing would be two to three hours long, where I would sit there with people and help them figure out if this makes sense for them or not. And that's where I developed best, the best communication strategies that permeate everything from the email copy to the landing pages to the webinars, et cetera, et cetera. And we're able to roll it out. We told people, like, we don't know how many sessions this is going to be. We don't know how long it's going to take to teach this because it's beta. And that's not a marketing ploy. It's literally the reality of the situation. Dan did the first session on beta One. And it was too long. It was too in the weeds. So we just said, we're going to do the first section again. We threw it away. We did it again. Nobody cared. Everybody was fine with it because they knew what they were getting. This allowed us to work the kinks out. So June 2nd, we launched the first beta. We have like five affiliates. Because it's like, hey, we're doing this thing three days from now. Do you want in? You're an Amazon E commerce seller. Like, what the hell do you got to do about the crypto? Like, I don't know, but your people want to make money. Let's try it out. So we were able to pick up a few affiliates that way, which then once we closed that first beta, because it was a flash, it was a very short like this. So we did a couple partner webinars, we did an internal webinar, we closed it, then we delivered the course, and then we did another beta, too, so we could iron out some of the kinks. We learned some stuff. We rolled out it again, and we closed the course. And we should have probably launched by then, but affiliates wanted to get in on one more beta, and we're like, what the heck? This is. Allow us to build more stuff around it. So we did a beta 3. So we did beta 1 and June 2, where we opened it up for about a week, did some partner webinars, did an internal webinar, closed it July 15th with the second beta, open it up for a little over a week, did some partner webinars, closed it by beta 3, we were filling the calendar with partner webinars. We did about two weeks and then closed it. And now we were ready to officially launch.

So now and then you have longer time period now to show even more proof.

Exactly.

More data, more history.

We do. And it's funny because we still only showed those 18 people, and I probably had showed them over 100 times now since the very first time we showed them until the last car close on December, December 14, because it was just. It was a story that was so good, we knew we didn't want to mess with it. We're just like bear markets, bull markets, kangaroo markets, where it's going up and down like crazy, like it's jumping up and down. Here are the same people. Here are the same people. Why do they keep putting more money into this? Why does this thing tend to age like fine wine and get better as it goes along? It just kept unfolding and unfolding. And now we built out a proper members area. And now we were able to document every major exchange that interfaced with this software. Because now we had customers in 129 different countries out of 193. I had to look that up. I'm like, we're almost global, you know, like we are global, but we've almost got a person in every country that exists. And I learned about some new countries that I didn't know. And we're able to scale up support. We have now 52 support agents. We started with a lot. We started with like 20ish support agents, but we were able to now scale it up to 52 support agents along the way. Get paid to do this, get people excited about it. So the word of mouth was huge, the affiliates were huge. And we had brokers, meaning people that would, if they could make an affiliate deal happen, they would get 10% of the revenue of gross sales, affiliates would get 40% and then we would take the remaining. And so all of this allowed us to. When we launched, we did a pre launch finally, because before this, Allison, we never did pre launch. We just. Here's a webinar coming up on this.

Day and that was it. I followed your training. I don't ever remember the pre launch, pre, Pre beta, pre.

November 27th, we finally did a free launch and we. I wrote a little PDF and that was essentially it. We had a PDF that got people excited, that told the story and then booked them on the webinar or they could go straight and register for the webinar, depending on where the affiliate wanted to send them and when they could promote. We opened card on December 2nd, we closed it on December 14th. And so essentially from the very first course we ever sold on May 28th to the completion on December 14th, we did exactly $57,914,510. So almost actually $58 million. But that is how it played out. And I don't think there was a faster, better, more effective way we could have done it, I think in older times and how most other people would have done it, it would have took them over a year and they wouldn't have done as big of numbers because you lose that momentum of effect and that excitement in the marketplace and that kind of, that story unfolding if you get too into the weeds on like, well, what webpage should we use or what tech stack should we have? Or we got to get all of our ducks in the row. And we were able to really focus on this one thing is important or this two or three things are important. Everything else is not that important. We'll get to it. How do we enroll people now? How do we make them feel safe now? How do we empower them now? And I mean, a lot of this is 15 years in the making because a lot of these things we have worked on a smaller stage over my 15 year career and we were able to draw on all these tools in the toolkit to put them together in this. Haley's comment. Once in a lifetime deal where you have a perfect topic.

Yeah, well, I don't know that it's once in a lifetime. You might. I'm sure there's going to be something else, Jason, for sure. And there is so much out there that people are trying to get their arms around. And even during the super bowl, they're talking about crypto and everything now. So definitely, you know, going to be more of a demand. But so as you look at this. So I just breaking it down a little more and then I want to kind of look at. Okay, you know, whoever the business owners that are listening to this right now and they're like, okay, how do I take this and apply this to the webinar I'm doing? And so. But before we get to that, so you, you did all the betas. You didn't do the fancy, you know, send three videos and. Right. Like. Right. It was just, you were just real straight talk to your audience. This is what we've been testing. We, you know, we have these people we've taken through. You just kind of told the story. Really? Yeah, that. That was kind of it. And then it was just some emails to the list you already had was. And then you had affiliates.

That's right.

That was pretty much your driver.

Yep. Wait till we start actually buying traffic.

I know. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. My goodness. Well, that's so exciting. I didn't even know. I mean, I heard because you shared it in our group that we're in what was going on. I had no idea. I would have jumped in, Jason, as an affiliate, so you have to think of me next time.

But we're going to, we're going to hit you up next time for sure.

Is there anything else? Yeah. So. So how do we. Let's just transfer this over to somebody else of how they can apply this to some webinars. You know, we have finally like. And I've reached out to you some few times. For me webinars, I have always been a bit of an enigma. We've done okay, but never great. Right.

Yeah.

And people would Go, oh. They would listen and they'd go, oh, I love this. You know, but I, you know, I. I definitely got sales, but not to the degree that I felt we could. And we, you know, ad costs went up just crazy last spring with the new algorithm on Facebook, iOS and all that. So we said, okay, instead of going straight to sales page, we're going to go to. We're going to go to webinar to fill our event. And so I took From June of 2021 all the way till September, and we. I must have done 10 different webinars testing just like what you're talking about here. Like, we did one after another after another until we finally landed on one that we. I'm so excited because we knocked it out of the park. Like, you would have been so proud of me. Okay. And so since then, we have really perfected it and we've been just continuing to run it. We were doing it live every week to fill our event. Now we're returning it into webinar. And it's just people are really getting what it is to build a scalable company. Like, it's so, like, it really clicks. And I'm actually really proud of it. So I do get the tweaking and the, you know, really making sure we've got the proof behind it and all of that. That's really resonating with me. And that's how we filled this last event that we were just talking about. So it's been really successful. What do you say to those that are like that? Where do they start at this point? Are you now approaching your webinars in a different way?

I am, actually. And not me personally. I'd say I'm approaching how I instruct other people to do their webinars.

Okay.

Because a lot of what I do is I think it's unnecessary sophistication. I mean, probably it works at a certain point in time when the stage is big enough, but until then, it may be incremental at best, I think. And so I go back to my first webinar I ever did, and it went like this. It was, geez, maybe 2008, I think, is when my first real webinar was done. And I said, hey, listen, this is this new technology called a webinar. I've never used it before. It seems like there's some real good teaching application to it. I got a concept I want to teach, and instead of sitting down and writing a book about it, you know, PDF an ebook, or creating videos on it, I want to try it in this new technology. And if you're willing to show up there with me live and it could be a disaster. Hell, I don't know how it's going to play. I've never done this before. Show up with me live, we can try it out together. And then if it comes out good, I'll send you the recordings. And so that was my first webinar and there was no pressure. I didn't have to build any fancy funnels. I didn't have to, like, get a product to pitch. I didn't have to be slick about it. I just went and I led with what was in my heart, and it was really well received. People loved it. And I taught for four hours. I thought I had an hour, hour and a half material, and it was off of a mind map. It's so funny. I didn't build slides or any of stuff. Those are all barriers to entry. Could I help somebody with a problem, not have that problem by the end of the webinar? Or could I take somebody who had an obstacle that wouldn't allow them to move forward and then remove that obstacle so they could now move forward? Could I do that? Right? That's all I cared about. And so I showed up and I tried to create transformation through information. And that was the first one, and that worked well. So the second time I ever did a webinar was like, okay, I want, I want to deliver this new concept over a series of training webinars, which later we called E classes. We kind of coined that phrase. And so I sold it with a video, or not even a video written sales letter. So I didn't even use a webinar to sell the series of webinars. I just used a written thing that I was comfortable with. And I fulfilled again with webinars content in a course that now people paid for before they got it for free. If they showed up now they paid for it and then they got it. And then after that, that worked well. So I said, what if I used a webinar to sell a series of webinars? I mean, that seems to make sense. You give them a little taste. Here's what it's like, this training. Now, do you want more of that? If you do, go over here and buy this? And it was, it was lower price. It was like the first one I sold was like, I say lower price, like 200 bucks. You know, these courses, when we launched them in the product launch phase was 3,500 for this last launch that I done without A guarantee is non refundable and you had to require an NDA to sign it. Right. That's a far cry from selling a $197 thing on a webinar like I did. And so that's how I stair stepped my way up. But you think about it as it was all led from the concept of I want to create transformation for you in this area. Can I do it or not? And so people had this immediate, well, kind of anchored experience. I get on Flatland's webinars, good things happen. And I had this also equally good connection that I do. Webinars people are really happy. I mean, come on, this is a positive feedback loop. It's gonna be easier to do. And then over time I started introducing the slide decks and over time we started customizing the pages instead of using at the time GoToWebinars very ugly, very generic registration pages and their pre canned emails and all that stuff, right?

Yes.

So we stairstepped it. There wasn't as much noise back then as there is today. Not even close. It's exponentially noisier in the marketplace and every growing year it's going to become noisier and noisier and noisier. So these days with webinars, the idea is how can we cut through the noise as quickly as possible and make it as interesting as we possibly can? And my advice to most people listening out is to start small. Like don't teach a big, large concept. It's funny because it eventually worked out for you, Alison. You know, scaling your company, you can't get much bigger as a, as a general topic than that. Crypto can't get much bigger than that, right?

Yeah.

But the webinars I really nailed it with when I first started were very granular. So they drilled down. So maybe it was like, what's one issue of scaling that you see gets a lot of people and stops them from making any progress? Just one small issue.

Yeah. Which is really they're in the weeds. They're buried in their business. So they, they are the product.

So buried in your business. Right. Buried in your business Question mark. We're bringing the shovel to this webinar and we're going to unbury you so you're not end up buried alive. And that's a hook. Right. That's not going to teach you everything about scaling. It's not going to get into the minutia, but it's going to try to call out to that one specific thing that the market would get the biggest initial benefit from Hearing and then they'll want to invest in a more longer term experience. It's not the only way to do it. You can go big. There's many, many, many ways to do it. Because to me, the webinar is the most efficient communication model because I get the benefit of almost being in person. So I get that immediate feedback. I get that experience of real time happening together. It's event based, right? But it's also efficient because I don't have to get on a plane and fly somewhere. I don't have to pay a whole bunch of money to put the event on and I can test it out. I could do two webinars a day and the webinar in the evening. I could be completely different than what I learned from what I did in the morning. So it's, it's very malleable, right? So the idea for most people, it's, what's the quickest way we can get you in front of an audience to validate whether you can transform that audience or not? Because then you can do the oldest sales close that I ever developed for webinars, Allison, which went like this. I used to start every webinar the first year I did them like this. I'd say, listen, today I got two agendas. The first agenda is to show you X, right? Basically how to get you to be able to do blank by the end of the webinar. So you're here, you can't do this. At the end of the webinar, you're going to feel like you can do this. That's my first goal, is to get you to achieve this result. The second goal is to sell you a product, okay? Now, I don't want you to ever consider or buy the product from me unless I make good on my first thing to you, my first promise, the first point on my agenda, which is X. However, if I do make good on that promise, then you should feel obligated to consider what I'm going to sell you at the end of this webinar. Do we have a deal? So I would just lay it out like that, right? My two goals is X transform you in this way. And then if I do transform you, I've earned the right to attempt to sell you something. If I haven't, I haven't earned that, right? And so everybody agrees. They're like, I'm down now. It's real clear for me. I better be able to.

It's all out on the table.

Yeah, I better be able to deliver, though. It gives me A goal.

You have to step up to the plate.

I better damn step up. And if I do, my audience will love me. If I don't, my audience still loves me for the attempt. They knew where my heart was. And by the way, if I screw it up, they'll say. If I come back and say, okay, I missed the boat. Let me try it again, they'll say, all right, let's try it again. It's not fatal. It's something that they understand where you're coming from. And it's really clear at the end of the webinar because you're like, this is one piece of a bigger puzzle. I can't teach you the whole thing. And no matter how good I am in one webinar, it's impossible for me to give this all to you. But you got to think to yourself, wow, if he could do this in one webinar, what could he do? If I invested in him and took all of his resources and all of the things that he's developed that I got to pay for? Sure. But because I'm paying for them, I get more than just this information. I get other things. I get support, I get accountability. I get deliverables. I get whatever. I get things that are automated so I don't have to do it manually, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's very natural and it's very comfortable. And so that's what I would recommend most people start with, is find the transformation your audience desperately wants. I don't care how small it is, smaller the better. Give them that transformation. And now you've earned the right to say if you liked what you just experienced there. On a small scale, if you're willing to invest, I have a total holistic transformation waiting for you. And it's less the word you say at this point. It's the experience you've given them. You don't have to say anything. They said, damn, if I got this one time with you for free. Imagine what's possible if I could pay for it.

And so are you still doing that? Like that? Sort of.

I'm not anymore. Because it's like you get sophisticated, you learn all sorts of things to get more complicated with it, to go after bigger audiences where there are more, you know, sharks in the ocean, and there's more competition, there's bigger stakes, but it's a lot higher. And you can do more complexities because you iterate over time. So you're like, okay, now that I have a good flow on structure, I don't have to consciously focus on structure anymore. The webinar, I can focus on intricacy. Okay, Now I got structure and intricacy. Now I can focus more on what happens before they come to the webinar. Okay, Now I got some good operating procedures for that. Now I can focus on what comes after the webinar. Now, I could chain webinars together. And so you certainly do become more sophisticated over time. But to most people, in most markets, you're not playing on Madison Square Garden right now. You're playing in your local market. I don't mean geographically local. What I mean is it's not that big of a market, and there's nobody doing any good webinar. So in the land of the blind, the person with one eye is king or queen. They just rule the land. So that's the fastest, most efficient way to take the lead in the market. And then the minute you take the lead and it's a big enough pie, you'll get people that will copy your webinars and they will try to say the same things as you, because copying the words, that's super duper easy. And that's when you start to become more innovative to the point where they don't dare copy you. Instead, they partner with you because they're like, I could try to sell this and run up against that dude. I could ignore it and lose all the potential revenue, or I could partner with them. And so you build it up there, right? Like, I made millions of webinars just using the formula that I said there. And then after a while, it gets boring, too. So some of this stuff is just stimulation for me to innovate and try new things. And the market adapts. If they hear 50 webinars doing it the same way, then they tune it out, regardless of how good the message is. But everything old is new again. I used to teach that technique back in 2010. Everybody started doing it. They forgot to do it. Nobody does fancier medium that's coming out there instead. And it's like it's open season again for anybody who understands what I just.

Oh, my gosh. It's been a game changer for us in really going back to this and tweaking it till we really got it right and gave what they needed to hear and. And wanted to hear. And also, like, when you talk about innovating and tweaking, it's also, you know, you get a lot of people that register that. How many actually come on live?

Very few.

And. And so how do we get more people on live? You know?

Yeah. I always answered a different question, Alison, which I thought was fascinating. It's like, how do we do more with the people who showed up? Because first, let me serve those that are showing up before I start to focus on those who aren't showing up. Up. And usually we. There's more we could do to those that show up. Like, I can't tell you how many clients I've had this conversation with. We're like, jason, what if I only get six people on the webinar? I said, okay, what's the price point of your product? They say $1,000. What if you sell three of them? That's $3,000. Is that a good two hours for you or not? Right. Because you're getting paid to do market research, and you've just affected three souls. And so it's like, let's just focus on those three. If we could only sell 100 people in the next month, the thing that you sell, where will we go to find them? If we only could do a hundred? And I find that that sort of constraining in thinking is actually more empowering, because then you drill down on what really matter benefit from it. And then if we validate it on a micro scale, we can roll it out on a macro scale, because now we can then do more systematic marketing. But if I got to call people up one on one and I'm starting say, dude, I'm doing this webinar on this date, I think you'd be a right fit for it. Humor me. You don't have to buy. Just show up because somebody wants to buy. I know, and I know the math, right? If I get 10 of you on, maybe one of you will buy. So just be one of the other nine who don't buy. I just need somebody in the seat. Right? Let me start there. And then only after I've kind of really nailed that, then we look at how do we get more people to show up? Because the problem I see is sometimes people will get more people to show up, but they're less qualified, and so they actually make less money, Even though they 10x the number of people who show up.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. It is complicated. It's who is in the room?

Yes.

Who is in the room? And that was one thing, too. On this webinar that we finally landed on, it really is targeted to a business owner making at least 500k and really 7, 8 figure. And I said that right from the beginning. And even when we sold we said, you know, you cannot attend unless you're at this level. Which I think actually drove up the sales. Because the people that were the fit appreciated that because they were like, oh, good, I'm going to be in a room with people that are at my level. I mean, nothing against those that were in startup. We've all been there too. But I do think speaking specifically to them was a huge thing. Did you have you found in yours? Because one thing I noticed. And then we'll wrap up here because, like, I could talk to you all day about this. What we've noticed is a lot of our sales came in during the live. During the Q and A. Yeah. At the end.

That's why we do four hour long webinars.

Wow. Four hours.

Everybody hates to hear it, Allison, but.

Do you tell them at the beginning.

It'S going to be, oh, you don't tell them. Right? It's like you don't tell your kids, hey, when you go to the dentist, it's going to hurt really bad.

But they're so loving it. Well, that's the thing is that people then. Because we. Ours was about a 90 minute webinar, but then we stayed on for sometimes an hour and it was great. We had really lively conversation. But I did notice that's when a lot of the sales came in.

Here's where I discovered this. A long, long time ago. Again, the first year I was doing webinars, I ran out of slides. And I wasn't making a whole bunch back then. I was making maybe 150, $200,000 a year, which is actually a lot of money, but money becomes relative after a while. But back then I could kill five hours. And if I made a couple hundred bucks in that five hours, that was an acceptable trade off for me. That was a good use of time. I remember I was on this webinar one day. We only had 55 people on, but the chat was still popping, the chat was still active. I didn't have anything else to say though. But in my head I'm like, they want more. I can give them more. Ad hoc. Just off the top of my head. Let me see what happens. So I started really diving in. Like, what was going on in their head? Like, why were they still on this webinar? Had they bought? Hadn't they bought? Would anything cause them to buy? Is there anything I could say that was a close. I started to use. I say, listen, is there any way I could get you to buy this product or is your mind already made up? And it's a 100% no. I started learning those things along the way, but I chatted with them for an hour. There's 55 people on. I make two sales of a $500 product. I just made a thousand bucks for an hour. Pretty respectable amount of money back then. It was a gigantic amount of money for me.

Absolutely.

I got 45 people on the webinar now, so 10 dropped at this point in time. Could I make another sell in another hour? So I go another hour and make another 500 bucks. Is that a good amount of money? 500 bucks an hour? Hell, yeah, it is. Here's what I devalued. Here's what I understand. The real value in this, Ali, was I was learning how to communicate. I was learning how to close. I was learning how to sell by doing that. Cause I ended up doing that a couple hundred times over the next two years where I had probably a thousand hours of nothing but closing attempts, where I would be able to test things out with audiences. And you might, you know, out of context, that sounds like it's something I'm doing to them. But the reality is they felt served because they felt heard. Because every market and every person who's suffering doesn't feel heard and seen. They feel insignificant and unimportant. And that is sad. And I know what that feeling is like. And for somebody like me to take the time and drill down and if I got to go an hour or two to really break it down. Because, again, people are also not very trustworthy. They have walls around them, and they don't let people very easily through those walls because they're afraid they're going to get hurt. And so they would. I would only earn the right to really know what was on their mind after I hung in there with them for three hours. Because they're like, if I'm going to trust anybody, it's going to be this guy that won't give up on me. And so that's the real value.

Standing for them. You're standing from them. They felt your heart. And I do think that you drive a good, very good point here. I think that sometimes we get so caught up in. Am I saying it right? Am I doing it right? If you just speak from your heart and you're really present, people will sense that. They will feel it. They will really feel that you get them. And I think in marketing, that's. That's what it's all about, you know.

But it's a very specific way of them experiencing that, because you know, you could say, I care about you. Yeah, that's a word. If you can show up and for an hour you can try to understand what their world looks like. You don't even have to say I care about you. They feel it at an emotional level in their heart. You know, this is why I started closing like this, for example, Austin, you know, people would say, oh, that's a lot of money. I'd say, you know, is it really? And I try to minimize the price. And what I discovered is now it's like, yeah, it is a lot of money. That's empathy, right? Yeah. This is for you to invest in. This crypto course is $3,500. That's a lot of money. And then you got to invest in crypto. That's even more money. And that's scary. And so I would start, I have many closes around the concept of yes, that's super expensive. Because I'm not denying the reality. It is expensive. But is it worth doing or not? That's the second part that most people don't get past. And so then we analyze it because my mom said if it's worth doing, it's worth doing, even if it's hard. And so that's a close I use and I start breaking that down for them. I'm not trying to say everybody should buy, but I let everybody know that you have to decide if it makes sense to you or not. And if you get stuck in, it might, it might not. That doesn't feel comfortable, it's not good for you. And ultimately, how do you decide? You're going to need information, you're going to need insight, you're going to need criteria, you're going to need to get some finality. And that's ultimately all I give. A no to me is way better than a maybe. And so I want to either a yes or a no. I don't want a maybe. And that's one of the reasons we stay on there. Now here's what's really interesting about this too. And I know we got a wrap. Soon our webinar replays out converted our live webinars. And that's because even after hanging in there with them for four hours, even after going all that effort, people still, they need like 20 to 40 to 50 to 60 to 80 times. Unless they're just low hanging fruit, which nobody, nobody truly moves markets living off of just low hanging fruit. Right, people to make a serious, potentially life changing decision that if it's not right, it can harm them. It could harm them financially. It can harm them spiritually. They can say, oh, I failed again, which nobody likes that feeling. Right. There's a lot on the line here. And so for people to think that they can make this decision or that we think that our audience can make this decision in two hours or less, that is just fairytale. Four hours isn't enough. Six hours isn't enough. And so we. Now, I don't have the time to get into it, but there's a whole bunch of psychology and strategy around making sure that you don't butcher the replay and sacrifice too much on the point of sale. But nonetheless, the point of it is, is if you care and if you're sincerely there to help, and your audience desperately needs that help, you cannot overdo it. You have to take care of yourself. That's the limit. You will hit a point where you will become exhausted if you keep doing it. And that's when you need to go do some yoga or swing from some trapeze, maybe in your case. Right?

Yes.

That's when you need to take care of you for them. But that's the only limitation that you should be concerned about is that one otherwise, serve your pretty little heart out. And you will win the market. You will not just win it by a drag race, neck and neck photo finish. You will wallop everybody else in the market because they're too busy studying marketing technique. And, you know, they're looking at the finger when you're pointing at the moon.

Yeah. No, I love that. And I really am resonating because I just lived this. And we were doing the webinar once and twice a week live. And so I was definitely ready for the trapeze after all of this. Just myself a break. But it was wonderful because I got to build a relationship with a lot of people before they even came to the event. And I really think that made a difference. I think one other people. One other thing that is important just to note for those of you listening. You know, Jason has been practicing at this. It's not like he just went out and had a $57 million webinar. He's been practicing this for years and years and years. I have been practicing it years and years and years. And I got a long way to go to Jason, but. Which is always inspiring. But I would say that you are going to do some webinars, that you may not get some sales, but you're going to figure out what's working and not working. And so that, to me, is not a failure at all because I know a lot of people do it once or twice and they don't get the response and then they never do it again. And if I would have stopped back then, you know, when I would sell one ticket to my event or something like that, then I wouldn't have had the experience we've had in this last year. It takes time. But what better way to get in front of potentially millions and millions of people out there than the typical way that you are getting in front of people? Maybe one phone call at a time.

We did it with less than 200,000. We had 57 million with less than 200,000.

Yeah, that's.

It doesn't take much.

Yeah, that. That is incredible. Well, listen, thank you so much for sharing this and I really encourage you all to go back to my. To the itunes or wherever you listen to the scale or fail show and find the other show that Jason did with me where he actually broke down the steps of leading a webinar. Because all that is still relevant today. I really believe it. And I remember how generous you were then in sharing all the steps. So definitely go do that and that will be a good support to what you heard today. Jason, I am just so excited for you and thank you so much for sharing your heart and your wisdom with us all today. Thank you all for being here. If you have not subscribe to the Scalar fell show, what the heck are you waiting for? If you love this show, even if you kind of liked it, go ahead and give us a good review there. And until next time, get out there and elevate yourself because you are worth it. Bye, everybody.