High-Ticket Funnels vs. AI: Ben Chrzanowski's Personalized Engagement Strategy for Founders

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Terms and conditions If I wanted like a video edited, there's like thousands of AI tools that probably claim they can like edit videos effectively and I could pay like $50 per month for like 100 videos, but I'd much rather still pay like $1,000 to get my videos edited. People are still willing to pay more for an outcome and truthfully, I just don't think that will change.

Yeah. Do you think there's a quality difference? As well, because we can go fast, because we can move really fast. We can have AI do a whole bunch of things, but the quality might not always be there in terms of the humanity, right? The things that will actually reach people.

I do. I agree. I think there's 100% the quality difference with AI. We don't have like direct control over it. With a human, we could always have a conversation.

Step into the world of success with your brand amplified. The ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. I've been trying to get my next guest on the show for a few years. He didn't wait for permission. He built his first 7-figure company before he was old enough to rent a car, and since then he's been quietly building the infrastructure that makes other people's brands and businesses work. Ben, I'm so excited to have you here. You're an entrepreneur, systems operator, and honestly one of the sharper minds that I know when it comes to what's happening in the creator economy and what works for the modern small business. So I didn't even try your last name. Ben Krasnowski? Close?

Krasnowski. You got it. I'm happy to be here. It only took, uh, a year to get, get on here.

Yeah, more than a year from the time that we first met. And started talking about and trying to work together. So let's start with that origin story. You're in university, you start an IT services company, and you scaled it pretty quickly. So before we get into the after part, what was happening in your life that made you decide, hey, I'm gonna start this company even though I'm still just starting college?

You know, it's funny, entrepreneurship wasn't actually on my radar heading into college at all, nor was academia, none of it. I was strictly a baseball player. That was my plan. I was going to go pro and I was playing Division I baseball. I had a scholarship. I'm like, wow, this is amazing. Then I met some amazing entrepreneurs who started teaching me the ropes. They told me about their businesses. They gamified it for me. And of course there's a financial aspect that had really nice things. Got the campus and I'm like, okay, why don't I explore this side too? I went to an entrepreneurship meeting. I really hit it off with this one guy, Vishesh, my first business partner. Brainstorm nights, weekends. So what could we do? I'm playing baseball, going to class. Eventually we're like, okay, we don't need to have our own idea. Let's just build other people's idea. We know how to do it. Vishesh was very technical. Super talented, got super lucky, met this guy Gary. Gary wanted to rebuild his entire software product and here's our first client. And from there on was all uphill.

Wow. Amazing. But talk about baseball in all of this. You continued playing baseball. Did you have a realization that you weren't going to go pro or did you still think about that as a future possibility when, as you were still building?

So until sophomore year, I thought I was going pro. My whole life was still baseball. I was training 24/7, but I slowly realized that when, you know, the real people money started coming in, that I'm like, okay, maybe I need to shift my focus. Maybe I'm not being realistic here. And then going into junior year, that's when I kind of had that realization that I need to really go all in on the business here, stopped playing and started building.

Yeah. Well, 'cause I think a lot of athletes often have the athletic career and then they have capital to start investing in businesses and then they build up the businesses. So you decided to completely forego that career and just go straight into the business that you saw worked at that level.

I threw it down the drain, but I realized that like most of the lessons that I've learned playing the game, the early wakeups, The training, the mental strength you need to be able to stay in the game even when things are hard. It was all transferable to entrepreneurship and business. Wow.

Pretty amazing. So talk about that company, how it kept building, and then what made you walk away from it?

Yeah, so that business was TechRupt Innovations. I had amazing partners, Vishesh, Satish, Naresh. They're phenomenal, all super amazing, talented entrepreneurs. And we're just building products. It wasn't too exciting. And I was introduced to the world of influencers and the creator economy where people had the opportunity to be more creative and expressive. And I was neither of those things, but I was somehow drawn to it. But I was drawn to more of the business side. How can we empower these people? And I met a few creators, few entrepreneurs, and built some really amazing companies with them. And that's when I'm like, I need to stop the IT services and, or not go as heavy on it and focus more on the creator economy because that's truly where I believe the future is. So we started investing in creator businesses, manpower, resources, capital, and built some amazing businesses with creators.

Can you talk about any of those?

Yeah, we've built everything from coffee companies to software companies to education businesses. We made a lot of mistakes, but we also had a lot of success stories. Anika Jackson, you, we worked with you actually. That's how we were introduced here. But really, I'd say like most of my success was on the info and education side. It was less operational. It was scalable. The math really made sense to me. And I think in the long term, that's where I decided to focus my effort on.

So the Creator Venture Studio model. Yes.

Yeah. The Creator Venture Studio model. We started this model, you know, investing creator brands. Then we realized creators, if you just give them free stuff, they will take advantage and walk all over you. So we had to start charging. And when we started charging, we still had the same level of demand, which I didn't expect. And we accepted too many creators. It was, there was too much demand. And I'm 20 years old at the time, have never run a business and just signed 100 creators.

Wow. Yeah, that's a lot.

Yeah. As you can imagine, it slowly went downhill from there.

Well, I mean, it sounds like the, the first company you had the right partners, you were able to start scaling smartly and efficiently. And then this time, what do you think happened? Do you think you didn't have enough of the infrastructure and the team to implement things?

So I, I brought over my same business partners, plus I added Gavin, who was amazing, and I'm still working with him to this day. But my old business partners were fit for an IT service company and not necessarily a creative creator venture studio, right? So it's not that they were untalented or the wrong partners. It's that I didn't think critically about like, what are the pieces that are needed to build this type of business? Because just because someone's smart, it doesn't mean that they're right for a certain business or a certain job.

Yeah. And thinking about this, launching all these small businesses, trying to help all these creators, some succeeded, I'm sure some failed, but they're all lessons. How do you, at this age, you're still in college, you're still doing a whole bunch of other stuff, you're building businesses. How do you protect your psychological mindset, I guess?

Well, to be honest, a very frank answer was I was still a very social go out, party hard college kid. So the answer to that is Friday, Saturday nights, completely forget the business and have a good time. So I was almost leaving, separating my social life and the business. You know, I'd work 14, 15-hour days on the weekdays and then I'd have my nights to go forget about the business and have a good time in that college experience.

And do you think that running businesses also helped you with your coursework at the university, or was it like completely part and parcel?

I think I learned 10 times more from the business than any coursework. I wasn't a big go-to-class guy. Oh, I don't think I used to go to the first day of class and then I'd show up for exams and I would cross my fingers that I had some of the knowledge and some of it maybe I learned from business, you know, then again, it is business school, so hopefully I could learn it from business, but I ended up doing well. And I think I, to this day, like most of my lessons are 100% from that business I started.

Yeah, from trying it and doing it yourself. So talk a little bit about the next venture after you, you know, decided, oh, maybe this is not quite like, what was the breaking point when you said this is scaling too fast, I'm not ready for it, I think it's time to move on to something else?

When majority of your clients are unhappy, That's generally a good sign that something is broken and not working. So it became like a, a short period of how do I actually exit this and maintain like a reputation among the people I work with and how do I still get out on top without losing money? So luckily we had the opportunity to sell back a lot of our shares that we took in these creator businesses, a lot of the revenue splits that we did it, especially in the successful ones. So that part was solved. And the second part, honestly, took a couple of years to, you know, repair all the relationships. We, we've promised things that we never delivered on. We gave our money back, but still, that makes, uh, that's still an unsettling feeling. And I'm young and don't know exactly how to deal with it. But eventually I was able to sell all my shares in that business. Get out, clean slate. And I was pretty much sitting around for a few months and was lucky enough to meet Spencer. Spencer was building Teachly and was running one AI offer. The offer was like absolutely crushing it and he had an amazing vision to keep going after these AI education creators. And he's extremely technically invited me to join him on this journey and build Teachly. Slowly we started adding more creators on. We built a software layer underneath that. All of this is pioneered in Spencer's head. That's kind of the beauty of partners, right? The first business I was leading the entire vision. The second business I was using my complementary skillset to leads or to work on someone else's vision. Still like an active part of decision-making, but it's, it was a nice change in pace and good learning lessons. And we're running some, a lot of these AI creator offers. So a lot of people were selling AI to businesses. We were selling education on how to sell AI to businesses, which was a goldmine at the time.

Yeah. Amazing. And talk a little bit more about that because besides that, You were also, you know, I mean, I, that's when you, we reconnected, right? Talked about Teachly because I have different courses and figuring out where I want to sell them. There are tools like Kajabi, there are tools like GoHighLevel, there are tools like Circle Communities and all these other Mighty Networks, like all these other platforms. So what do you think was the big differentiator and why you were able to scale up your success so quickly with Teachly?

Yeah, we were almost funnel and agency first, right? So Spencer and myself were running all these offers by hand. So we got really good at identifying what a good funnel is. Then we reverse engineered like the tooling and our education component around that. And when we went to scale up Teachly, we used the funnels that we know how to do that we were using for other people's education businesses on our own business. And we pretty much ingrained that into our tooling to be able to succeed. We're using Webinar and VSL funnels. That was like our expertise. And we're using QuizFunnels specifically, which give you like a level of personalization in the funnel building process.

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Yeah, so what you're saying is funnels aren't dead. And video VSLs are not dead and all. So talk a little bit about that because I think, you know, people will see the shiny new object and think, oh, that's not a tactic people are using anymore, that not gonna find success. Or people, if they haven't used those techniques, may feel like not empowered, right? Or, oh, I don't know if I can do this successfully.

100%. It's more than just words on a screen. It's a complete reframing of someone's thought process and decision-making process. And it's easy to do with creators because there's a level of trust. But if you're talking about funnel building for another, for a software company, for a high-ticket service, whatever it might be, it's a little bit different. And I think like the best model arguably right now is still the webinar model, right? There's a lot of lack of trust. Out there. And especially like in funnel building and VSLs, there still can be an element of lack of trust. Like you don't talk to someone, you, these can just be random lies on the screen. This isn't a trusted source. I have no idea who's on the end of this offer. Right. But the beauty of like live selling and live social selling and specifically in a webinar space and in the webinar funnel, is you know someone's there, you're watching them talk, and throughout an hour and a half webinar, you can gain so much trust with someone that you can convince them to purchase a $7,500 offer on the back end of a, on the back of a webinar, a $10,000 offer on the back of the webinar. That's because you're reframing someone's mind the whole time. I wouldn't say it's dead. It's more just an element of how can you gain trust nowadays because There is so much saturation out there.

Yeah, there's so much saturation. There's always this shiny new object. There's a lot of people using AI to build things that they may not even be experts at. So how do you get somebody's— in this attention economy, when people are looking at things really fast, we're doom scrolling, not even watching long videos all the time, how do you capture somebody's attention for 90 minutes?

That's a good question, and it starts before the webinar. Actually begins with the paid ads we're doing. These are very direct response paid ads. Everything nowadays, as you said, it is saturated, right? So when you build an offer, now you have to build it more specialized, more localized, more niche. So we build this specifically for one type of person. There's an offer I'm working on right now in the real estate space. And our direct ad start was like, hey, are you a 25-year-old guy looking to quit their job? Okay. It's like, how do you get their attention? Oh, I'm a 25-year-old guy looking to quit my job. Oh, are you feeling X, Y, and Z? I am feeling those things. Right. So we build for a very specific audience. And then this carries throughout the entire webinar and we free, free webinar email sequences, right? Hey, do you feel this? This guy was in your position. Now this is him. You just hit him with so much propaganda before they get to the webinar. And you just constantly reframe their thoughts. Oh, you feel this way right now. You feel this way. But if you worked 5 hours a day doing this, do you think that would change? And you just keep trying to call out very specific things for a very specific persona. And if you do that throughout the entire webinar, they're more likely to stay, especially if you have engagement. Let them speak, let them comment, answer questions.

Interesting. Yeah. Well, and I, I think what we're seeing a lot of right now is people even with master's degrees, having a hard time in the workforce and having to figure out what they want to do. And so I imagine that these kind of offers are going to be even more attractive to a wider audience of people who are like, wow, instead of going into this corporate position that I can't even get because there's so much competition, I'm just going to start my own company. And I need to have people who know more about some of these things than I do to get started.

100%. It's like a distribution economy. And it's all about like, how can we distribute these offers? I think like a lot of these growth-minded people are going to be the people who have like the most success. And as far as like offers that are going to sell more, it's going to be more like business opportunity offers of how to start these businesses, right? Because you have a lot of like really creative people that are starting really creative businesses that work in this current economy. Those are going to be the people that if you can actually educate other people on how to build that type of business, they're going to have the most success.

Nice. So Teachly, you had a successful exit. I know you can't get into all the details probably, but—

Yes. No, that's all Spencer. All Spencer. That's what I'll say. But the business is still around, still running some great offers. And now I'm focusing my time really exploring a variety of different industries. I'm still working heavily in the high-ticket offer space, whether that's software, info coaching, and also the clipping space and distribution space. I find it both extremely fascinating and I'm allocating a lot of time to both of those spaces right now.

Yeah. So talk a little bit about that. What does that mean to you? What are, what are some of the trends that you're seeing and what are you seeing as opportunities for yourself or for other people in that space?

Okay. So there's two spaces. I think the one is clipping. Clipping is extremely interesting, especially for consumer brands because you can almost like reverse engineer virality, right? So with a paid ad, it shows up as a paid ad in the feed, you know, okay, I pay $7 for every 1,000 views. Now you can take that same model. You can maybe undercut your CPM a little, but you show up organically in feed and you distribute content that you know will go viral. For example, if your product's featured in a podcast clip, you can distribute that. If I had a product right now and said something clickbaity, we can distribute that. And we do that through a network. Of thousands of meme accounts, podcast accounts, movie accounts, everything. So that's extremely interesting. I think like that's the future of paid marketing on the consumer side. Then you have this software and AI side. Now this is also interesting because you see, you go on LinkedIn, you see software's dead. Oh, this AI tool's dead. This is a horrible AI tool, right? Everyone's building a new one now and you could go on Claude Code and build a new AI tool, whatever it might And in reality, like software probably won't die. AI tools won't die, but they are exactly that. They're tools, right? So I still think that there's going to be like a human element involved. And I think the companies that are going to succeed are going to be the ones that have the highest level of like human engagement and education and coaching and services. Embedded around their software or AI tool, the ones that I think there's a lot of like confusion and uncertainty in there. Like when there's so many different products and so many different things to use and everyone has different claims, everything becomes like awfully confused. So the software companies and the AI tools that are going to succeed are going to be the ones that can put a human in front of you and actually like talk and help you out, but also are the ones that are like outcome oriented and have like solutions and programs and offers that are outcome-oriented. Because at the end of the day, right now, for— if I wanted like, uh, a video edited, there's like thousands of AI tools that probably claim they can like edit videos effectively, and I could pay like $50 per month for like 100 videos. But I'd much rather still pay like $1,000 to get my videos edited. People are still willing to pay more for an outcome, and truthfully, I just don't think That will change.

Yeah. Do you think there's a quality difference as well? Because we can go fast, because we can move really fast. We can have AI do a whole bunch of things, but the quality might not always be there in terms of the humanity, right? The things that will actually reach people.

I do. I agree. I think there's 100% the quality difference with AI. We don't have like direct control over it. With a human, we could always have a conversation.

Yeah. And talk about outcome-based. So I mean, to me that when I have my PR firm and as a publicist, I know that I've been able to track interviews directly to people reaching out to a brand's website, right? Depending on the domain authority and what publication it was in. And so it was able to take PR from this thing that's just, oh, it's about building brand awareness to this is actionable sales that we're seeing. Right. So is that what you mean? Exactly. Or are there other things that you also—

100%. That's exactly kind of the, the idea behind it. You might see a software tool that helps with outreach to news outlets or media outlets, or you can talk to Anika Jackson Jackson and say, and you can say, I'll get you in 10 news outlets. It's like, which one would I rather do? I'd rather pay the guaranteed amount to know I'm getting in 10 news outlets than use this AI tool that may or may not do it. So a premium audience is always like a high-quality company, a trustworthy company, a company that's making legitimate money is always going to go with the premium. We know exactly what we're going to get outcome.

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Well, that's cool.

No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong.

So what's the problem?

That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch.

Maybe there's no catch.

That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.

Wow, you need to relax.

I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood?

I think it's laminate.

Okay, yeah, that's good. That's close enough.

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Yeah. Nice. So you have paid media, you have organic content. Talk to me about the acquisition stack right now. What are the things that you're seeing work best in between the paid, the organic content, getting people into the funnel?

100%. I think what I'm seeing on the software side is extremely fascinating. I'm actually seeing software companies that are using high-ticket funnels as their like front-end acquisition are having the most success. And the reason for this is, let's say I have an offer that's $5,000 and my software tool is $20 a month. If I spend $5,000 on paid ads and I go straight to my $20 a month software, It's going to take me a while to get my return on investment. Maybe it takes like 4 or 5 months. Maybe people churn. It depends on a variety of factors. And it's harder to communicate that like, this is just a tool. But if you sell like a high-ticket outcome-based solution to a high-ticket and you spend $5,000 and you generate like a $30, like cost per, let's say like $100 cost per call, right? Little low. Then you're getting 30 booked calls. Do you think you can close like at least $5,000 worth of calls of selling one offer of every 30 people? And the answer is like probably yes. And when that happens, now you have 29 more people who booked calls that you could downsell software to. And then you'd have a bunch of other people's information who filled out the form, but they didn't want to hop on a call that you can now market your software to for free. And let's say you close 2 of those people, then you're profitable. You made $10K, you can put the $10K back in the ads. It's a giant math equation at this point.

Yeah. Nice. So is there a specific category? I mean, you mentioned a few things that, of types of people that you're working with or types of companies, but is there one that you're seeing really perform well right now and that people are really looking for?

I'd say anything on the B2B side where companies are marketing, not necessarily business opportunity, that's more like an info term, but CRMs, marketing tools, growth tools, tools that directly help people make money. This is generally easier to run, but it could be done in like hypothetically any industry. Dating app has a dating offer, right? Okay, let's sell a high ticket like dating coach offer where we get, help you get dates and you still generate the same lead flow. So it could be done anywhere, but that, generally in the B2B space on the growth side, for sure.

Nice. And just curious, what are some of your favorite software tools to use?

That's a hard one. I like HeyReach. I like Instantly. Those are for like cold outreach. Of course, when it comes to AI tools, I'm using Claude every single day. That's it. That's what comes to mind right now.

Yeah. Well, and we don't want you to give away your entire secrets, SaaS either. So, you know, you're running, you have had a portfolio of businesses, you are working with a number of people, including working with me. So without getting into client specifics, what does your model actually look like in terms of how are you getting people into your funnel? Are you doing the same kind of ads for your own business to get, to attract customers?

So I'm not, and the reasons for that is that I only I really work with like one person a month because that's all I need. I really evaluate an opportunity by, can this make me a lot of money? And I position everything as like, we're on the same level. I will, hey, can you cover the cost for resources and let's both take the upside of this. So that's generally speaking my model. Of course, different campaigns are call for different economics, but generally speaking, I love running these info funnels, these high-ticket funnels, and I'm aligning myself with whoever I'm working with.

Yeah. Nice. So you're getting people off and running, you're getting everything set up, you're getting them to success, and then are you kind of rinse and repeat? Like we're working, we've been, you know, working on what an offer is gonna look like for a while. We're launching it, but then you'll continuously, you know, even though I'm not gonna be the new thing that you work on, whatever month is the next month, you'll still be working with, okay, now we need to do X, Y, Z to finish or to like get more people in the funnel or whatever the case may be.

100%. Once it takes a few months to get a funnel upright and in a good position. Once you have it like, hey, we know exactly if you put in X amount of dollars into this, these type of creatives, Y amount of dollars comes out. It's really like, how can we put more money in the money machine and scale this up? But to that point, it's like a lot of upfront work. It's scripting, it's funnel building, it's, you know, writing webinars, it's creating sales scripts. It's building teams. You need closers. We have funnel builders. We have editors. It's a lot of effort to get it up and running, but once it does, it's so lucrative.

Yeah. Amazing. So what is a belief that you hold about the future of the creator economy of businesses and software that you think most people would push back on?

AI is making humans more valuable. Nice. It's as simple as that. I still like to talk to people. I like to talk to you. I like to talk to everyone.

Yeah. What do you think is one of your best business decisions that you've made that you think looked wrong at the time, but then actually realized with stress testing was correct?

Well, it's a hard one. I've made so many wrong business decisions. I, I probably, I'll go back to like my first business. And I remember specifically this one time I was continuously arguing with a client. We were about to launch and I cut off the whole relationship right before launch. And I said, okay, launch it yourself. Keep your money, take it back. And I remember I got yelled at for days. I got calls, even my own business partnership. Like we did all of the hard work. To get it up and running. We, you know, we spent nights, weekends, like getting this business in a position to launch. But at the end of the day, like everyone was mad at me for a couple of days. People probably would judge that decision, but it's not worth working with people you just don't like working with.

No, that's fair.

Absolutely. It's all relationship-based.

Yeah. You know, you've learned so much and you're still really young in the business world. Where do you see yourself going next?

That's such a hard question. It's unpredictable right now. So I'd see myself right now, I'd focus in on just the skill sets that are applicable to like now's time. As far as building another product-based venture, there's more harm in working on the wrong thing than in just sitting back and focusing on what I'm good at. So I'm gonna sit back for a little, I'm gonna focus on my skill sets. Then once I see an opportunity, I'll pounce on it. I, that's how I'm thinking about it right now.

Yeah. That seems like a smart assessment. So you have enough keeping yourself busy.

It's just so uncertain right now.

Yeah. Well, what do you think there's most, the most uncertainty about? Just like what's going to end up being the AI tool or tools that actually hit and that are considered, you know, market leaders at the top?

It's like what jobs are gonna be there? What will the world look like? Who's gonna be replaced? Is anyone gonna be replaced? What are the new jobs that are gonna be created? What? Industries will rise up, right? What's going to stay? I just don't have enough clarity myself. I have takes, right? But I don't have ideas on how to solve them.

Mm-hmm. Okay. So all the questions everybody's asking themselves.

Exactly. I'm asking myself the same exact questions.

Yeah. Ben, I always ask my guests, do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family motto?

Yes. And I tell myself this, well, two, I tell myself both of these, uh, FIO, just figure it out. Whenever I like tell someone to do something, I go, and I don't know how to do it, FIO. Whenever I tell myself, like someone asked me how to do, I'm like, oh, FIO, FIO, I'll figure it out. It always figures its way out. Then the other one's like, it's only life after all. If you make a mistake, it's only life after all. I try not to put too much stress on myself. About anything.

Nice. And is that the advice that you'd give somebody who is wanting to start a business, scared to take that next step?

It's only life after all, and you only live one of it. So dive in now. You'll make mistakes, you'll fail, but at the end of the day, you'll figure it out.

Awesome. So this is, you know, a little different than a lot of the episodes that I've been doing lately, but I love that we finally got you on the show. I love what we're launching together, bringing me back a little bit to like my PR side, my brand side, but with the connection to the podcast world. So I'm really excited and we'll have to bring you back on and see what you're doing in 6 months or a year. And you know, we can use what we've built together as a case study so that— Absolutely.

Yeah. I can't wait to build it with you and we're already doing great things, so. It's gonna be a game changer.

Well, you and your team are doing amazing things, so thank you. And of course we'll have your website in the show notes that people can reach out to you. Are there any last words of wisdom that you wanna share?

Nope. Well, uh, it's only life after all, everyone. Just figure it out.

Awesome. So what's really interesting is the podcast episode that's being released right before this episode. Is about AI tools to find your, to help students and anyone really find out in this new era what we should be doing for work. What is our passion, our purpose, our skillset that will also make us money, right? And, and how do we use, and it's actually about using AI to help with some of that solution building. I think that we need to continue using these tools. They're not going away. This is the next industrial age. But piggybacking on the last episode, so call out for anybody who hasn't listened to that episode, listen to that one, come back to this one with Ben because that one is talking about the pursuit of what you should do. And this one is really talking about how you can build and how you can start thinking about building. So with that, I'll be back again with another amazing guest to share their story, their journey. Ben, thank you so much for your time today. If you're listening to this episode and you're not following us, give us a follow, subscribe, share it with a friend, give us a rating review. They all help discoverability. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.

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