EP0009 Top Of Funnel Fuel (part 1)

Freedom! You're listening to the Daily Motivation Podcast, a place to take your life to the next level, your business, your fitness, your dreams. Let's go! What up, what up? Welcome back to another episode of the Brand Builder Playlist. It's your boy Cauveé Inspiration Engineer. You already know what it is. This is where we are building personal brands for the creator economy. This is where creators become brands, brands become businesses, helping creators and entrepreneurs build brands that last, creating your category, defining your legacy. Whether you are a speaker, investor, coach, consultant, author, streamer, fill in the blank, everything in between, this place is for you. So welcome. Let me know where you are tuning in from. Let me know whether you, you are watching and checking us out or listening, depending on what platform suits your fancy. We've got a great series that I am super excited to cover because I recently stumbled upon this, and I'm 6 years into the game, folks, but this never dawned on me. Like, I don't know why. And now that I'm starting to understand and I'm seeing the trend and the pattern I was like, oh, I got to bring this to my creators and my personal brands and my brand builders out there because this is huge. So Facebook was the first platform that really brought advertising to the advertising game. For those of you that know my story, you know that I came from back in the MySpace days and ReverbNation and then started doing— when Facebook business pages first came out, I started a social media agency, if you want to call it that, helping, uh, hospita— hospitality businesses, uh, to grow their offline and online presence and get people into the restaurant, right? So really understanding the online strategies and the tactics and the things that you need to do, and then also understanding the, uh, the offline as well. But what I want to cover today is online, what I'm now noticing, because I'm seeing trends, okay? Facebook had the Pixel and the advertising, and they really kind of dominated or changed the game from Google. And we're not going to give you a whole history lesson here. I just want you guys to understand some key things. All right. And that was for the Facebook business pages. Then they allowed you to turn your personal page into more of a business-like structure, right, where now your personal page has some similar features of what used to be only for business pages. All right, now they're almost the same, but from what my marketing— my head of marketing tells me is when you run ads still through the business page, you get a lot more granular and things that you can do that your personal page cannot do. All right, so I don't know, I'm just telling you what I heard. All right, now taking that to talk about the patterns that I'm seeing On your personal page, you used to be able to publish organic content and then boost it. You always hear me say boost it, your boy boost. Well, boost it. That's what you used to be able to do, or you still can do. All right. Then when X got acquired by Elon Musk, you started watching how X, formerly known as Twitter, started to change their platform. And then X introduced their own version of advertising, okay? And now they have it to where you can boost a post, all right? LinkedIn is just entered this arena, I would say within a year. This is 2026 depending on when you are listening to this. And I've been on LinkedIn for a long time. That's where I really started building my brand organically with my, uh, connections, AKA followers. And you never were able to advertise on LinkedIn. So first LinkedIn came out with advertising where you could now advertise, and what they are offering right now— and I'm gonna say it released now even though I don't know for sure— but the reason why I say this is because it says beta in the corner, and anytime you see beta, that means they're testing things out to figure out how do we take our platform and compete with this Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook guy over here. Okay, that's what they're trying to do. And you can boost in beta. You can take your organic content, set a budget, and say, I'm going to blast this piece of content to this industry, to these job titles, to fill in the blank. And it will tell you in the top right corner, uh, how many people you are potentially going to reach. All right, and I think right now it's like $50, and you can see like over 5 days, $50 spread out over 5 days, and you can just see the different numbers within this different beta depending on when you're getting this episode. I'm sure that will change, but as of today, they're trying to get people to spend at least $50 as a default. Okay, so why is that important? Because on the last episode, we were talking about building a media machine. And with a media machine, if you are like most creators and most entrepreneurs, more than likely you are selling something that is a low ticket, which means you need volume. And today's episode, Top of Funnel Fuel Part 1, is really for my volume-based businesses. Now, you could also be a hybrid. You can have digital products like Cauveé. We have products as low as $3.99 a month all the way up to some of our 6-figure and 7-figure offers. Right? So you could still technically be both. You could be B2C, business to consumer. You can also serve businesses and be B2B, right? Again, low ticket, mid-ticket, high ticket. But what we're focused in on today, guys, is we are dialing in on volume. And majority of you guys don't understand because I didn't understand. This is how I know, and it's not because like, oh, Cauveé, you didn't understand, so everybody else didn't understand. The data shows you that people don't understand. They don't understand that for the amount of effort that goes into building— let's say whether you're a musician or whether you're selling a book or whether you're selling, I don't know, some kind of digital product around the $97 and down— you need so many different sales a month, a week, a day in order to build significant revenue as a business. So let me give you guys a shock value real quick just so that We can understand what I mean. And as I learned this, I was like, oh my goodness, like, this is what the game is. All right. So I've been in this season of my life really dialed into venture capital. All right. Majority of entrepreneurs raise money or try, right? They're trying to scale their business, grow their business. And if you are a venture capital company, meaning you want to be in venture, you want to invest in other businesses. All right, $500 million is the low ticket. $500 million is the low ticket, meaning you're just starting in venture if you got that kind of budget as a venture capital company. Okay, creators are not thinking like this. We're just not. Musicians are not thinking majority of the time at least especially when it started, people were not thinking, let me go build a label. People were thinking, let me get signed and get a record deal, which is a shitty loan, to be quite honest. It's a shitty loan. It's like $100,000, or it used to be like a 360 deal, whatever, you know, $100,000 to go toward building your record and doing all the things, and then a distribution deal and blah, but maybe $300,000 and now you own my rights and you own me and you own my image and you're doing Hollyweird shit and all kinds of nonsense that goes on in Hollywood. We ain't gonna be talking about that today. I just want you to understand it was a shitty loan. It's not a partnership. And we'll do an episode where we start talking about partnership deals and what that should really look like because now I'm thinking about, man, I should even talk about that, like when you're doing a partner deal and how that should work. But my point is is that we as creators are thinking like this. If you paint or if you're, you know, into like digital art, and a lot of us were like, let me get on— and I'm just using this as a reference, I'm not knocking the actual brand— but like a Shutterstock type of company. Or I was on, uh, TeePublic the other day and it was like, uh, you know, do this kind of deal where designers can design all this kind of merch and you get 17% of their marketplace, but they still want you to promote it. So we will be doing a Yeah, we will be doing some content around partnerships in the near future because now I want to talk about this. But the shirt, let's say it's a shirt, this is the number that I saw, so I'm going with this like I just saw it yesterday. It was a $23, uh, you know, shirt sold. You would get $4 of that if you're the designer, you're the creator. See, creators are like, yeah, like, that sounds great. All I gotta do is design it and then market it and then boom. I'm happy with my $4. Cauveé Inspiration Inspiration Inspiration was never happy with my $4, right? But I'm using this to be the example to talk about how much volume you would need to sell. A million units. You would need to help them sell a million shirts for you to make $4 million. 100,000 shirts for you to make $400,000. 10,000 shirts for you to make $40,000, right? $1,000 a month, $4,000. Like, these are real hard numbers of volume, okay? I got to a place, and this is just me, where I said I no longer want to play the volume game. And at the time, I didn't want to play the volume game because I kept hitting my head on the wall and couldn't break through the wall of volume. Right, a lot of you guys know I sold out a concert of 1,200 people when I was 18 years old. My high school made 12 grand. They were being greedy, didn't share the money with me. All right, my parents for whatever reason didn't fight to go get me none of the money. But to be 18 years old and to be a local celebrity was not only crazy, but from the standpoint of volume, been there, did that. And then once I went out on my own, even though I didn't get none of that money, I was like, well, I'll do it again. I'll do it bigger. I'll do it better. Whatever, fill in the blank. My ego was on you know, was on me, uh, I would do on average 60 tickets sold to 100 tickets sold, right? And I'm making pretty good money, but I'm basically just breaking even. And I still gotta work this job that I hate, uh, even though I loved being an enrollment counselor at the time and doing some of that. That's how I became the coach that I am today. But from the standpoint of, that wasn't what I was passionate about doing. I was passionate about entertaining. I was passionate about artistry, and I still am today. But at that time, I was getting frustrated because that was all I wanted to do as a creator, but I didn't understand what I understand now, which is volume. All right, volume. If you are in a volume-based business, you need volume-based budget. Because if you go back— and I highly encourage you guys to listen to Media Machine because we talk about it a little bit there— you have to reach enough people top of funnel and at minimum, so we know what we're talking about, 100,000 people minimum, minimum. And that really ain't enough. You really need to be in the millions of people because millions of people will get you thousands of likes and get you 200 to 400 of comments, give or take, depending that the content is good. Okay, that is really what we're looking at here. And I'm speaking to those of you that are at a place in your life where you want your creative art, you want your creative brand, you want your personal expression, you want that to be the thing that pays your bills, and you don't want to have a job, right? You don't really want to be working for somebody else or doing something else that's not the thing that makes your heart sing. I'm talking to you, majority of you, which is us are playing volume but don't know we're playing volume. And then we don't know that we need to spend how much we need to spend in order for the system to work itself out. Does that make sense? All right, that's what I'm talking about. We got to understand the volume game. And while we're talking about volume, I'm just going to take a little quick caveat. I was talking to my cousin about this just the other day, and I was like, yo, I feel like every entrepreneur and every founder needs to learn how to raise money. We need to understand, creators, we got to take it to the next level. Entrepreneurs, we got to go— we got to start understanding the game at the highest levels. Because I, I use the example of Monopoly, right? If you're playing Monopoly and your opponent knows that there's get out of jail free cards, you get 2 dice— like, you get 2 dice or a die, whatever they say— you get dice and you get to play with 2. And by playing with 2, if you roll doubles, it gives you an extra turn and all these extra things. If you're playing Monopoly and you don't know that, you've got 1 dice and you don't have any get out of jail free cards, or if you're playing Uno, you don't have any draw 4s, like, you don't know how to play. You're really not playing. And so I've gotten to a point where I feel like not only for the ecosystem of ventures, but I feel like for the ecosystem of entrepreneurs, for the ecosystem of founders, for the ecosystem of creators, it makes more sense to understand the game at the highest level because then you can play the volume that you want to play because you'll not only understand how to make yourself more money, you understand how to make your partners and your venture partners more money, and everybody's winning within the ecosystem because one of our core values is win-win-win where everybody wins. It doesn't have to be this system of this like Someone's not winning. Okay, and just a quick— like I said, I'm super passionate about it, which I'm sorry we got off the topic of Top of Funnel Fuel for a moment, but I'm just saying if everybody understands what they understand, everybody's gonna be doing much better. We're gonna be able to have much better conversations if my company wants to invest in you, right? For you to understand my needs, for you to understand how we think as investors so that you can get the budget that you need for your Top of Funnel Fuel, assuming that we want to partner with you, or whatever venture capital firm of your day when you listen to this episode, or when you see this episode. That's what we're really talking about. But it starts with understanding the system. So go back and listen to Media Machine because we talk about it in that episode, and that is going to serve you really well to really start thinking bigger and to be able to put together the formula so that you can create the type of brand you want to create. It is so important, my champions. All right, on the next episode, we will be talking about going deeper on top of funnel and fueling and what that really means to get people to go through the different levels of engagement. So if you enjoyed this episode, let me know what your biggest takeaway was. Let me know what you're vibing with, what you're thriving with. Let me know what your challenge is and where you're tuning in from. It's your boy Cauveé. I love you, I appreciate you, and until the next time, you already know what it is. Booms!