How to Build a Million-Dollar Business With a Tiny Audience

Greetings, fuckers. I've got this client, his name is Ty Mayfield. He's a worship pastor. He sells golf gear like gloves and t-shirts. His Instagram has like 900 followers, but he's got a million-dollar business. I've got this other client, her name's Alina. She sells dog shampoo and dog detangler spray. And Alina doesn't post on social media very much. Once in a while, a few times a month, but she's got over 10,000 engaged people who love to buy her stuff. What gives? Today I'm going to walk you through our model for how we create $10,000 promotions, get any product you want to $25,000 a month, and build million-dollar businesses even if nobody knows who you are. Tiny audiences without posting a ton of stuff on social media, without living in front of a screen. There is a methodology that we use to do this, and it works across all industries. Without you having to be glued to your phone or posting a ton on social media. It flies in the face of what everybody tells you to do, but we find that it works predictably to build million-dollar businesses. Let's dive in. Now, you might have heard it said that content is king, that you should create a ton of content, that you should be on every platform, that people should find you all over the internet. And I'm here to tell you For most businesses, that's a waste of your time. Content is overrated. What you want is not to be an influencer or to be famous. You want to get paid. You want to make sales. And if that's your goal, then content isn't king. Engaged leads are king. Only purpose of creating content is to generate leads from people who might want to buy your stuff. If you want to be famous, follow somebody else. If you wanna build a million-dollar business, then there is a methodology that you can use in order to turn every view, every like into a prospect that wants to buy your stuff. People focus on views and follower count and the number of people who engage with their stuff. And it's my opinion that for most businesses, that's a waste of time. If you are in this game because you wanna make sales, then you actually don't wanna become an influencer, probably don't wanna be famous. You can't spend views and you can't put follower count in the bank. What you actually want is profitable followers. And if that's your goal, then you don't actually want views or followers. What you want is an engaged group of buyers. And if that's your goal, then content is not king. Responsive leads are king., and those two things are very different. One focuses on views and follower count and how viral a piece of content goes. The other doesn't care about any of that stuff. It just measures success on how many customers or prospective customers it creates. And if your goal is to turn this into a million-dollar business, then your focus should be on engaged leads, not on views and followers. What that means is we can create far less content. We can focus way less on being in front of our phones and posting on social media, and we can turn more of those actions into money. For example, Ty Mayfield was a worship pastor, a burned-out worship pastor who wanted to sell golf stuff, and it was just a side thing when he came into our community. And I documented his entire journey from when he ordered his first inventory of his golf gloves to when he made his first sale. And all he did was post a little bit on Instagram and generate a very small list of people who wanted to buy his stuff, about 150 people. From that tiny little audience, he launched and made his first $9,000 or $10,000 in the first month. That's a really good start. And over the next year to year and a half, he built up a compounding sales machine that now has him running a million-dollar business. Same story with Alina. Alina documented her journey on social media, built up a tiny little following, and launched her first product, which gave her her first $10,000 in sales. Good start. Then over the next 12 to 18 months, she built an engaged group of buyers that took her well beyond the first million dollars. They both built million-dollar businesses without posting a ton of content and following a few simple rules. Let me lay those out for you now. If our goal is to build a responsive list of buyers that take us to a million-dollar business, then there's 3 ideas you need to know before I show you the how of it all. The first one is called the Rule of 3. The Rule of 3 says the following. If you see someone in 3 different contexts, then you are psychologically triggered to trust. It bypasses the BS meter in your brain that says this person might try to take from me or hurt me. I like to illustrate this by thinking about it like a coworker, somebody that you see at the office every day. If you see someone only at work, then they're a coworker in your brain. If you go out and have a drink with that person after work once in a while, then it's a coworker that you go to happy hour with. But if that person also comes over to your house on Sunday to watch football, they're now a friend. They have crossed over the threshold of the BS detector, and now you have close relationship with this person. The same is true in business. If someone follows you or sees your product in 3 different contexts, then they are psychologically bonded in a way that makes them more likely to buy from you. So the Rule of 3 states that we want a prospect to see us or our product in 3 different contexts. And if we can do that, then there's a very high likelihood that they're going to become a buyer. The second big idea is something called the 7-Hour Rule. The 7-Hour Rule is based in dating psychology. A study was done to see on average how much time people needed in order to take the next step when they were dating somebody. And on average, people were willing to go home together after spending 7 hours with one another. Now, there was no difference between if that was 7 one-hour dates or if that was 2 marathon dates. If you spent 7 hours with another person, there was enough trust and bonding on average to take the next step together. So we use this rule as a guiding light in how we engage with prospects and potential customers as well. The more time someone spends with us, the more likely they are to trust us and want to buy from us. Now, spoiler alert, how many 60-second clips do you need to make for someone to spend 7 hours with you? A lot. So I tell people, maybe you don't want to do that, or at least have other parts of the system that get that person to bond with you on a deeper level so that you are not making short-form content all the time. Because nobody actually wants to do that. The third big idea that you need to know is this: all traffic goes to email. Specifically, all traffic that you generate goes to capture the lead. Meaning, I view traffic as a waste of time if I can't capture the lead. The lead meaning someone I can contact via email. SMS or whatever the new fancy marketing hack is. I still use email marketing and SMS. It's going to be around for a long, long time. Specifically, what this means is that any traffic that you generate always, always, always, always, always goes to email capture. To this day, email is still the highest converting platform for selling things on the internet. It is higher than SMS. It is higher than social media. It is higher than any other platform. So all traffic that you generate should create email signups. Now we can talk about how to do that, but the rule is if you're posting any content at all, or you're generating any traffic, or you're running any ads, always, always, always, always, always send them to an email capture first. Now I invest in e-commerce brands and I have a, a brand that I invested in that is a, a supplement company. And the, the business was doing about $1 million a year. And the way that they were generating customers was through podcast advertising. They would reach out to popular podcasts and they would send people to their Amazon listing that were ready to buy their product. It was working and they had a million dollar business. But I found out in one of our investor meetings that he was not sending the traffic to an email capture first. It's very rare for me to get angry, but I raised my voice like an angry parent and pounded on the table and said, you are being irresponsible with my investment in your company by not sending the traffic to an email capture. Now, I regret the way that I did it, but the point was made. And he reported back after a quarter that as a result of pointing all of that traffic to an email capture, their leads were up, Their sales were up. And most importantly, since they had a list of people who wanted to buy their stuff, they could promote all of their other products as well. The company doubled shortly after that meeting. This is why we always send traffic to an email capture first. So the 3 big ideas that you need to know are the Rule of 3, the Rule of 7, always send your traffic to an email capture first. Now let's go into how we use this to build a million-dollar business. Now, if you're new here, we have a 7-figure model that predictably builds million-dollar businesses. And what we do is we bring 3 areas of business together. The first is a great product, ideally a product that sells itself so we don't have to market very hard. The second is sales channels. This is Amazon or TikTok Shop or Shopify or wherever you're taking your sales. And then the third is audience. Audience is defined as a responsive group of buyers who love to buy your stuff. Now, what we're gonna go through is our model for this part of the process, meaning this is all about how we build a responsive group of buyers. If you do this, then you will satisfy this portion of the 7-figure model. You'll still need a really great product. You'll still need to be decent at managing your sales channels. But if you do only this part, you'll have a responsive group of people who love to buy from you regardless of where you are taking your sales. If you wanna see the full model of how all of this works together, then I would encourage you to check out the video that lays out the entire system. Or if you're listening to this, you can find it over at Capitalism.com/model. And that's the full video of how all of this works together. Now, the way that most people try to promote their stuff or build an audience or get customers is by following this old way of creating content and posting it on every platform. So their entire job is waking up in the morning, thinking of a piece of content to create, and then they're gonna post that on LinkedIn, and then they're gonna repurpose that and post it on Instagram, and then they're gonna find a native way to turn that into a Facebook post. And then if you're a really good marketer, then you're gonna record that in your phone and you're gonna turn that into a podcast, and maybe you'll do a video version, and that's on YouTube. And of course you gotta post the, the clips of each of those and put it on X or Twitter or whatever the hot platform is. And people do this all day long. You might have tried to experiment with this type of a model. There's a few challenges with this. First of all, it sucks. Like, it's exhausting. Nobody wants to do this. I mean, nobody actually wants to wake up in the morning and post on all these different social media platforms. I know we're supposed to do it. It's what everybody says we're supposed to do, be on every platform, build an audience, engage with all these people, and make it native to the platform. But it's freaking exhausting, and you're— you end up on your phone all the time, or you hire a social media manager whose job it is to do all of this, and they report the numbers and they show you the graphs, and you're supposed to believe them that this is working somehow and it's, it's generating customers somehow. And if not, at least it's good for brand. I don't think you need to live that life. So instead of taking piece of content and putting it on every platform and doing that all of the time. There's a different way. And this way combines all of the important rules that create hungry buyers rather than engaged social media followers. We can't eat social media followers. But if we've got hungry engaged leads who turn into buyers, now we're talking. We can take that to the bank and we can use it to build a million-dollar business. Here's what the new model looks like. If our goal is not to go viral, not to be famous, not to be an influencer, but instead to make money and get paid, then the model that we use is something called the Traffic Triangle. We call it the Traffic Triangle because there's 3 parts of the system and also because I'm in the Illuminati. And the Traffic Triangle works in the Rule of 3 and the Rule of 7 and puts all of our traffic onto an email capture. So here's how it works. In order to build up a list of engaged prospects and buyers, we first want a place of exposure. We want a place of engagement, and we want one place of conversion. Instead of trying to be on every platform, we pick one platform where we can get exposure. Now, this can be short-form content. This can be YouTube. This can be influencers. It can also just be paid ads. If you want to take the shortcut and not create any content at all, you could just run ads. The point here is to generate exposure in one place. Now, that is not enough. Most people will tell you generating exposure is not enough. It is not enough on its own. The old way of doing things gets a lot of attention, a lot of exposure, it's a lot of traffic. But it doesn't create engaged leads and it doesn't convert them. So instead of trying to get more unconverted traffic, we want to take a little bit of exposure and put it into the rest of the system that creates engaged buyers and customers that want to buy from us over and over again. We can only do that if we add in the other two parts of the triangle. So rather than trying to be on every social media platform, we take the traffic that we have from one exposure platform and we put that into engagement. What is engagement? Engagement is a place where we can interact with our prospective customers on a direct level. An easy way to do this is inside of a Facebook group. It's not my favorite, but it's an easy way to do it. Alina, who I told you about earlier, built a multimillion-dollar business and a really engaged group of followers by putting everybody into a Facebook group that was all for doodle owners. Specific breed of dog, cuz she markets to those people. Perfect strategy. This is what a lot of our clients will do in order to turn their exposure into engaged prospective buyers. They put them into a Facebook group or a Slack group or a Telegram group, some way to engage with people one-on-one. And as a result of doing so, those engaged leads become very likely buyers. The third part of the triangle is conversion, and this is always email capture. Always. Now, this is where this gets really fun. Because as you get more exposure, you get more people into your VIP group or your engaged hopper, and that is gonna put more people onto the email list. Funny thing happens as your email list grows, you send that traffic to more of the content that you do create, and the traffic triangle starts to build. When you put these 3 pieces together, they start to feed one another. So for example, if you're running a Facebook group for your engaged followers, they may make a post about how awesome your your product is or how awesome you are. Guess what that's gonna be? That's gonna be a piece of content that's going to generate more exposure, put more people into your email list and more people into your VIP group. These 3 places start to feed each other. When you have an email list, you send them to your content, your content spreads. That content spreads, attracts more people into your group and puts more people onto the email list. So we run this process of feeding these 3 places together. And you don't have to create hardly any content at all. A lot of our clients create a few pieces a week, but every single piece creates new leads and new engaged potential customers. So it's actually profitable for them to do this. That makes it sustainable. That means that they're gonna grow an audience and that audience is gonna be an engaged group of buyers that loves to buy their stuff. So how does this lead to a million-dollar business? Well, At first, this process can feel painfully slow. But here's the good news. It only takes 100 to 200 people that are in this process in order for it to be meaningful to a business. And that can be built in 30, maybe 60 days. For example, Ty, who sells golf gloves and golf shirts, built his Instagram to 400 people. That was the exposure part. Of the traffic triangle. He then used that attention to build a tiny email list of about 150 people. That was the conversion part of the traffic triangle. And then he had a VIP list for his best customers after they purchased. That was the engagement part of the traffic triangle. When he launched, he did about $10,000 in sales, which was a big deal for him. Good. It's not blowing it out of the water. It's not a bad result. It's like right where we want to be when we do a launch. And we're following this process. So after a couple months of just a few hundred people going through the Traffic Triangle, he was able to generate $10,000 in sales. It's not quite life-changing, but it's a good start to a business. And if you're already in business, this is how we turn our customers into raving fans, and this is how we get them to buy over and over and over again. This is how we generate more reviews or more pieces of goodwill from our customers that we can use in our marketing. We don't have to be on every social media platform. We have to use that exposure in order to create engaged customers and turn them into raving fans that want to buy from us again and again. And we do that through the Traffic Triangle. Now here's the other piece that nobody tells you. If you have an audience of responsive buyers, then you can use that audience to send to any sales channel or launch any product that you want. Most entrepreneurs will just obsess over what product to sell or where to sell it. But if you have the audience that buys from you, then you can launch any product that you want. And you can take that attention and you can send it to any sales channel that you want. I work with a lot of Amazon sellers who are wondering, how do I get independent of Amazon. Or I work with inventors who have great products, but they have no idea how they're gonna collect sales. The thing that ties all of that together is the responsive group of buyers, because now any product that you wanna release has a group of potential leads that want to buy that. And if you want to be independent of Amazon or TikTok or wherever you're used to getting sales, the way through is to build the audience first., and now that group will follow you to whatever sales channel you want to be on. Plus, if you promote an Amazon store to an audience, it rewards you because you're sending people to the platform. So it's going to give you free exposure. This is how all of it works together to build a million-dollar business. And again, if you want to see how this entire model works, you can find the entire system in the link around this video, or you can just go to Capitalism.com/model, and that's the video that walks you through this entire process. To illustrate this, let me just show you an example that we've been talking about. I've shared with you how Alina built a multimillion-dollar business even though she was only posting a few times a week, even a few times a month sometimes. I've got her Instagram page pulled up on my screen and you can see she's got 13,000 followers. And this serves as kind of a brochure about the product. That's how you should be treating your Instagram page. A lot of entrepreneurs will make the mistake of trying to use Instagram as a way to generate customers. It doesn't work. Okay, save yourself the headache. Don't try to convert people from social media into becoming a customer. Does not work. Why? It violates the Rule of 3 and it violates the 7-hour rule. If someone sees a short-form piece of content, they're unlikely to become a customer or even somebody who trusts you. We have to work in the other parts of the traffic triangle in order to have an engaged group of potential buyers. Alina uses her Instagram kind of as a brochure, and you can see she posts a mix of different types of content, including my favorite reviews of products. I'll tell you why that's my favorite type of content another day. Now, here's where Alina incorporates the other parts of the traffic triangle. If you go over to Alina's website and you try to purchase, you are first hit with an offer to save on your first order. That's a really good starting point to turn social media viewers into engaged leads. Anyone who opts in for something is likely to become a buyer if the offer is a first-in-line customer waiting list or a discount on your first purchase. It's a really good starting point to just put a discount in place so that anybody who opts in is a likely buyer for that product. That's what Alina is doing here. So if I were to opt in, then I would get a discount on my first order. And then to the engaged people on the email list or the engaged social media followers, there's this Facebook group. It's just called Doodwoof, a community for doodle owners. And you can see here, it's got over 10,000 members in this group. And this is where the most engaged social media followers or customers are interacting with one another, posting pieces of content about how they're using the product, or giving pieces of goodwill like customer testimonials or video reviews. Which all become really good pieces of content that Alina can use in her social media posts to generate more leads and more potential customers. This is perfect execution of the traffic triangle, and this is pretty much the exact model that we add into any business if we want to turn social media attention into engaged leads and likely buyers. And This is how we pretty much grow any business by using the traffic triangle and getting exposure, engagement, and conversions. Let me tell you a quick story to tie all this together. I had some clients who were eye doctors and they were selling a variety of different products for eye care. Names were Travis and Jenna Ziegler, and they were stuck at about $50,000 to $70,000 a month selling those products mostly on Amazon.com. Then they started the Facebook group that was just for people who are suffering with dry eye. And they put those engaged leads onto an email list so that they could launch products to them. The very next product that they launched went right to 50 sales a day at premium price points. Why were they able to do that? It wasn't because they went viral on social media. And it wasn't because the product just killed it on Amazon. It was because they had an engaged group of people who were following them inside of their engagement group. And they were on an email list ready and waiting for the next launch. They used that audience to launch additional products over a couple of years, and then they had a multimillion-dollar exit that changed their lives. This is the model that we put into any business if we want to generate high-margin customers who are repeat buyers, who talk about us and love us and come back and buy again and again. So listen, fuckers, the next time you hear someone say that content is king, You look at them and you spit at them in the face and you say, content is not king. Engaged leads are king. That is, of course, if you want to make money, if you want to build a multimillion-dollar business. And if that's your goal, then I got some resources that will help you out. A good starting point to get all of our free stuff is over at Capitalism.com/100K. That's where you'll see our model and our AI tools that'll help you figure out where you need some attention in your business in order to get to $100,000 a month. That is what we specialize in. I help entrepreneurs launch really cool brands, get to 100 sales a day, crack $100K a month, and then prepare for a life-changing exit. And the Traffic Triangle is one of the important tools that we use in order to build the audience and create a pool of potential buyers who love to buy from us again and again. And if you want some help, then I'd encourage you to go to Capitalism.com/100K and download all of our best resources. All right, my name is Ryan Daniel Moran. I invest in e-commerce brands and help entrepreneurs build million-dollar businesses. If you would like some mentorship on your journey, subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you on the next episode.