They Banned My $35K/Month Page So I Started a Business
Chris Koerner's Facebook page got banned and killed his $35K monthly revenue. He launched a new business in real time using his email list, testing two price points ($47 and $97) with A/B tests. Within hours he made $1,300 and eventually hit $30-40K profit.
Chapters
All right, so I was out on a run with my dog. It was freaking freezing cold. He wasn't walking. I had to pick him up and I got a business idea. So I literally turned around, came in, I hit record. Look, I'm still wearing my gloves. I'm still sweating, still glistening, 'cause I wanna tell you about this business idea and I'm gonna launch this business over the course of this video in front of you. And I can almost guarantee you it's gonna be a 6-figure business by the end of today or maybe tomorrow at the worst. Okay, here's how my week went. I posted this video right here. Most of you saw it about making $35,000 a month on Facebook. I was elated. It was the most viral video I've ever posted. And then boom, Facebook bans me. You don't believe me? Here's proof. All right, we removed your page. Look at that, removed. I try to post, it won't let me. You've been temporarily blocked, yada, yada, yada. I'm neutered, I can't do anything here. And then when I go to my emails, you can see I've been sharing all these emails back and forth with Meta and Instagram and Facebook Ads. I'm like hedging all my bets here. On the right, I'm sending them screenshots. I'm actively working this. It's been extremely stressful. A lot of phone calls with people overseas that can barely understand me. They don't give a crap about me. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year disappeared overnight. And I need this to pay my content team. I have a big content team. This is not like 100% profit business. There are real costs that go into this. They banned me. Why? They said intellectual property infringement. False. Not true. Absolutely not. They won't reinstate me. So immediately, six figures of income to me, to my family disappears Overnight. Overnight. And it had to have been because of that video, because I also posted that video to Facebook. Hours later, banned, which I don't understand because Facebook wants creators to make money on their platform because then they make money. I don't get it, but that income disappeared. So I was in a pretty dark spot. I'm thinking, how can I do this? How can I make lemonade out of lemons? And I'm on this walk and then I think, oh my gosh, I got it. I got it. I can launch a business off of Facebook banning me and I'm going to hit record on my screen because I've always wanted to do this. I've always wanted to literally hit record on my screen. I got to take these gloves off. And launch a business so you guys could watch how my brain works, how I think through it. This is not planned. There's no audience plans. I haven't done anything. There's no LLC. I don't have a domain name, none of this, but I'm going to launch a business, send an email with a link to pay, and I will have revenue by the end of this video. And then between the time it takes for this video to get edited and go live, I will post an update at the end of my revenue at that point. And I just know it's going to be impressive. So my gloves are off literally, and I'm going to launch a business. This is going to be very meta, no pun intended. I hate you, Meta. This is going to be a very meta video because it's going to be a video about content, but it is content about making money with content. You're going to love it. I'm going to share my screen and just talk through everything I'm doing and seeing and thinking. Now, anytime anyone starts a business, you need to go to your unfair advantage. Everyone has an unfair advantage. Maybe it's a rich uncle, maybe it's your job history. You have a unique insight into the lawn care business, right? Because you worked on a lawn care crew. It doesn't matter. I don't care if it was a low-paying job or a high-paying job. We all have an unfair advantage. We all have an interesting insight site background experience that we can leverage. Okay? So one of my unfair advantages is that I have a newsletter and I want to use that newsletter to sell to. Now, if you're bummed out 'cause you don't have a newsletter, I've posted 4 or 5 videos, like tactical beginner-level tutorials, soup to nuts about exactly how to start a newsletter with no experience and very little money. I'll link all of those in the show notes so you don't have to go search for 'em. Okay? So don't be discouraged if you don't have a newsletter 'cause 99% of people don't have a newsletter. That's fine. And you don't have to have a newsletter to start this business either. But this is my unfair advantage, so I'm gonna leverage it. So I'm gonna go to my newsletter and I host it on Beehive. I love Beehive. I talk about 'em a lot, yada yada. And I'm gonna make a segment. Now this is a sub-segment of my newsletter based on some filters that I set. Maybe I only want people in South America. Maybe I only want people that are 30 to 80 years old. Doesn't matter. I'll show you exactly how I make my segment. So we go to audience segments, create segment. I'm gonna call it all active because I want to export all of my active newsletter subscribers. So, so I'm gonna say attribute, email exists. All right, so they're on my list, okay? And then I'm gonna click filter by active subscribers. So I'm gonna make a segment of every single subscriber I have that has not unsubscribed from me ever. Boom. Now another way to do this is just go to settings, export data, and click export all basic subscribers. It'll take a couple minutes and I'm good. Oh, and I gotta do this. I gotta do the watch test. Ah, dang it. My watch is still on my run because I have another 6.5-mile loop to do. So phone test. It's 11:38. You see that? 11:38 in the morning on a Saturday. I want you to see how long it takes to get to revenue. Okay, so I have my newsletter exported. I'm going to paste it into Google Sheets because I prefer working with Google Sheets than Excel. Boom. There they are. Got it. Now, very important. I want to randomize them. I'm going to use a formula called RAND. Equals RAND open parentheses, close parentheses, hit enter, and then we're going to click the checkmark. Now the most important thing is we're going to filter them, boom, and we're going to sort A to Z or Z to A, doesn't matter. This perfectly randomizes my list. Otherwise, if I'm going to send an email to a sample of them, I don't want to only send an email to the top ones because that might be my oldest subscribers and the sample size will be skewed because maybe they're more loyal to me or vice versa. So I want to perfectly randomize this list because what I'm about to do is what's called an A/B test or a split test. I'm gonna sell a thing for a price point and I don't know what the perfect price point is yet. So I'm gonna take a sample of my entire email list and launch, not just like test, but launch the business with a Stripe link to pay, uh, at one price to sample A and then at another price to sample B. And I could do C, D, E, F, I could do 10 different price points to 10 different lists, but the 80/20 rule applies. The midwit meme also applies, right? Everyone on this side is saying, oh, I'm going to email my list. And everyone, all the geniuses, all the Jedis on that side are saying, let's A/B test A, B, C, D through Z, and we'll sub-segment by categories, and then we'll find the derivative and run a Monte Carlo analysis. No, no, no, we want to be the guy in the middle who's just like, let's just find the 80/20 of this. Let's just find the, you know, the best bang for your buck, the best value for our time. So I'm just going to do 2 price points. So I've randomized the list. Now that I've done that, I can just delete the column. All I have are raw emails here. Now I only want to sample less than 10% of my list because I don't wanna waste a lower than necessary price point on too big of my list. And so I need a big enough sample size to know if my data's good, but not so big to where I leave money on the table. And I'll crunch all the exact numbers as soon as I get a chance to think for a moment. Okay, so I just deleted about 92% of my list. Okay, so now we have two sheets, two lists, 2 price points. Okay. So I'm going to download CSV. Sheet 1 is test A, and then I'm going to go over to sheet 2, file, download CSV, sheet 2. Okay. Now I have my test list. Now I got to go to Stripe, which is like the world's biggest payment processor. And I have to create a Stripe link so people can actually pay me. So we're going to go here. We're going to go payment links. I'm gonna click create payment link. But now I just realized I have to have a name. I have to have a name for this. I didn't get that far when I was on my walk. I thought, I thought about the email strategy and then at the end of my walk I was like, oh my gosh, I should record this. I should launch this while I record this and vice versa. So I sprinted home, but I haven't even got to the name yet. You don't need a name to launch a business, believe it or not, but I just thought of the best name. All right, now story time. So I was 23. I'd been married for 2 years. My wife and I got married when we were 21 and 22 and she was pregnant and I was in class at the University of Alabama trying trying to learn and I was distracted. I had these MacBooks in front of me and I just could not pay attention about mitochondria. I didn't care. I was researching business ideas. And someone said to me like, Chris, you might have ADHD. And you guys are watching this, you're like, uh, duh. And so I wanted help. Like I wanted to get good grades. I wanted to provide for my family. So I went and saw a psychiatrist. I got tested. I went through all these tests. And at the end of it, she gave me like this 8-page report and it said a lot of things. The, Gist of it was, you don't have ADHD. What you do have are delusions of grandeur. And this frustrates people in your life because you think that you're going to have a better life than your loved ones think for you. And I was like, could you say anything more offensive than that? I was, I was like hurt. I was mad. I was angry. But really what it did was put a chip on my shoulder. I'm like, how do you know if I have delusions of grandeur if I haven't even lived my life yet? I'm 23. Who knows what I'm going to do? I have plans of grandeur. Okay, I have plans of grandeur. Who says? Like, tell me that when I'm 80 and my life's almost over, right? And so I've just always thought of that. Plans of grandeur. Plans of grandeur is not a great word from a branding perspective because it's hard to spell. It's got like a French vibe, but I don't care. I'm not trying to fully optimize this as a brand. Like, I just want to launch because if I go hire a branding agency or really like do a survey of my friends, like, what do you think it is? What? That's friction. That's time. That's lack of momentum. Time kills all deals. Lack of momentum kills all deals. Friction kills all deals, all businesses, all startups, right? So I just want to launch. I want revenue. That's what I preach, right? You guys have heard me say that. Get your first customer as soon as possible. I want to get my first customer within an hour because I showed my— it was 11:38, now it's 11:48. Okay, so you can see in the timestamp of this video, we're not editing a lot out here. There it is. Look a little closer. So plans of grandeur. And then I just thought right here as I'm making this Stripe link, like, Is that domain name available? Now I own like 200 domain names. I have a problem. It's an addiction, I admit. But if they're $11, whatever, what's one more domain name? So I'm gonna go to Namecheap and see if that domain name is available. So by the way, Namecheap is not working in my browser, so I have to open Chrome. So I gotta share my entire screen. So I go to Namecheap. By the way, I kind of hate GoDaddy, so don't use GoDaddy. This is not an ad for Namecheap, but it's who I use. I've used Dynadot. They're great as well. But Namecheap is my favorite. Okay, so I'm logged in. Search for your next domain. Plans of Grandeur. Plans of Grandeur.com. I don't know why it's in Canadian. US dollars. Boom. $11.28 a year. We're going to add it to cart. We're going to buy it. That's the name of this. Because if you want to make content on the internet, you probably don't want to be famous, right? I don't want to be famous. I didn't want to be famous. I never have. But you just have a dream for yourself. You have a desire. You have a motivation. You have plans. Of grandeur, of being better than you are today. And everyone should, everyone should have plans of grandeur. And they may start as delusions, at least to the people around you, but who cares? So I'm gonna buy this domain name. There it is. Pay now. Boom, boom, boom. Okay, the domain name is mine. Now I know what to title the Stripe link. Cool. Click manage, yada, yada, yada. And I'm not gonna do anything with the website yet. I just wanted to own the domain name before I publish this video because then one of y'all would steal it. All right, I'm back on the Stripe payment link page. I guess before I create a payment link, I'm getting ahead of myself. I need to create a product to sell, and then I need to attach that product to the payment link. So, plans of grandeur. So I want this email to be a presale for the full launch, and I want the presale to be at a steep 50-plus percent discount because that works. It's proven to work, right? People want to feel like they're getting a deal, and they want to get it, and they will get a deal because I actually will increase the price on launch day. So I wanna make sure that people have a no-brainer offer on their hands, that they feel special, et cetera. So now I'm just like trying to decide what do I want to actually price this at? I think I want this to be pretty dang cheap, like way cheaper than I think it should be. So we're gonna test $47 one time and $97 one time. That's gonna be our A/B test. And if I send both of those identical emails, it's the same email, same subject, same wording, same everything. The only thing that's different is the payment link with the price, right? If I send that same email to the same amount of people, which do I sell more of? Now, surely I will sell more of the cheaper one, obviously, but what will my conversion rate be? Because if my conversion rate on the expensive one is 1% and on the cheap one, which is half as expensive, is 1.5%, then I might as well sell the more expensive one because my break-even is 2%. Selling a $50 product at a 2% conversion rate to a limited email list is the same amount of money net to me as selling a $100 product at a 1% conversion rate. So any percentage points over 1%, if the $50 product is 2%, this is all hypothetical, is a win to me, is a net win to me. So I'm gonna test both. So we'll do one-off, $47, taxes included in the price. Electronically supplied services. Okay, we'll write a quick description, which I'll go over later. I'm gonna copy the description, $47, add product. Now I need to duplicate that product because I need to make it again for $97. 97, one-off, 97, taxes included. Cool. Same name, exact same everything. Now I go to payment links. Create payment link. I'm gonna do $47. They wanna buy one for a friend. I'm cool with that. I don't want their names. I don't want any friction, right? I already have their names. I already have their emails. The more friction you add to the checkout process, the more your conversion rate will drop. I don't care what it is you're selling. Do not add friction. Sometimes it's worth it to add friction. You want their phone number, you want their email. You think the additional friction will be worth having additional data from them. Sometimes it is. In this case, I don't think it is. All right. Create link. Now I'm just going to do it again. Boom, boom. Let them adjust quantity. $97. I'm going to add lifetime into the word so they can see, they can just be sure it is not recurring. Obviously I'm coming up with this on the fly, but I'm going to do the same thing here. Okay. Lifetime. I just want to make sure it's not recurring. Who wants another subscription, right? $47. I'm just double checking to make sure they're not recurring, cuz I'm gonna be in trouble if they are. Okay, so I have my perfectly randomized 2 email lists. I have my payment links. It is officially 11:58. I don't know why I just keep checking every 10 minutes without even realizing it. So it's been 20 minutes. Well, I guess I started 5 minutes. It's been 25 minutes and now I just need to write the email and hit send. Now that is the test email. Then I need to send the full launch email, which I'll probably do after my run. Because I still have 6.5 miles to run. Look, my watch is trying to tell me to get back out there. I need an hour or 2 or 3 to see the results of my test, but I'm going to have revenue within 5 minutes of sending that email. So we're going to launch a business in under an hour today. I promise you. A profitable business, by the way. And we're going to donate to charity too. How about that? We're going to do some good. So we're going to go back to Beehive. The best newsletter platform in the world. Okay, we're back there. Now we need to re-upload our list. So I'm gonna go to subscribers and I wanna tag the A and the B list, right? So I'm gonna go to tags, I'm gonna click new tag, and I'm gonna go POG $47. I'll make this yellow, POG Plans of Grandeur, $47. And then I'm gonna go new tag, POG 97, and I'm going to make that yellow as well. Color doesn't matter. Okay. We have two tags. Now we're going to go back to settings and we're going to go subscribers import. Now I'm not really importing these because they were already in my list and you don't have to do everything I showed you to segment a list into A/B test. You don't have to do that. Beehive will do all that automatically. I'm just kind of old school and I like doing it this way because I like being in full control of the emails that I send. A/B testing with emails is typically done with subject lines. Right? I'm not doing that. My subject lines will be the same. I want to A/B test the entire email, which I think you can do in Beehive as well, but I haven't learned it yet, so I'm not trying to learn it, right? Friction, momentum, time kills all deals, et cetera. So new subscribers import, upload CSV. I'm gonna click this. Now I'm only uploading the emails, not the first names, last names, all that. Beehive already has that. So when I uploaded an email address that's already in Beehive, it's just gonna recognize that it's already there. And nothing's gonna change. It's just gonna add that tag to it, which is all I want. So we'll do this one, doesn't matter. And then we're gonna, we don't wanna send a welcome email 'cause we've already sent them that. They're already on my list. We don't wanna add 'em to an automation, but we do want to add a subscriber tag. So we will do POG97 for this first one. Okay, import. Now we're gonna do new subscribers import, upload CSV. We're gonna go to the second one. Next, no welcome email, add tags. And we're gonna do POG47. Okay, import. Now I want to put both of these groups of people in their own segment, and I'm gonna name the segment the same thing I named the tag, POG47. I'm gonna make it dynamic, which means it will auto-update as I add new emails that have that tag. And I'm gonna go condition, attribute, attribute, go down here and we'll do subscriber tags. Includes POG 47, POG 47. I did do 47 first, right? And then only active subscribers as well, cuz you can't email people that have already unsubscribed. So POG 47 is that. Then we're gonna go create segment again. I could have duplicated it. POG 97, dynamic, define conditions, boom, attribute tag. Includes POG97. Boom. Filter by active, save segment. Now these are gonna show as zero so far because they haven't fully imported yet. And then we'll have to click these three dots and refresh, recalculate the segment so they'll pop in. But we don't wanna wait, right? We don't wanna wait. So we're gonna go to posts and we're going to write an email. So I'm just gonna duplicate one of my old emails and we're gonna go up here. Edit post. So this will be an email sending masterclass. Hopefully I don't put anything at the tops of my emails. To me, that's more friction. That's more space between the top of their email and what I want to tell them. So we hide that. We hide that. We hide the author either, even cuz they know it's me. We'll include the dynamic tag for their first name, which means if I have their first name in Beehive, then it will include their first name. But I don't wanna put a comma cuz I don't have everyone's first name. So if I put a comma, then Their email will just start with a comma and it looks weird. So as I'm doing it right here, if I don't have their first name, then their email will just start a little bit lower and no one can even tell the difference. So I'm going to delete all this old stuff and I'm going to say, I'm just coming up with this on the fly. We're not using ChatGPT. All right. So I just wrote this up. No help from AI or ChatGPT. I want this to be real from the heart, but I'll walk you through my thinking and why I did this. So I had a pretty crappy week, but I want to turn lemons into lemonade. That's kind of a hook. It's a hook and it's a retention grabber, right? Hopefully they'll want to know why it's crappy and how I'm going to turn lemons into lemonade. I posted a YouTube video that exploded. It's quickly becoming my most viral video ever. It was about exactly how I make $35K a month on Facebook. Very tactical. You guys loved it. That's why I also wrote my newsletter about it this week. Hours later, guess what happened? Meta banned my Facebook page. The reason? Copyright infringement, which is false. There was no copyright infringement. I think it was because of that video. I posted it to Facebook as well. Maybe it was dumb to do that, but I thought Meta wanted more creators. That's a day in the life of entrepreneurship, right? You are way up here and then hours later you're way down here. I'm going to put there, you're way down there. So not only do six figures of income disappear overnight, but I can't run ads nearly as effectively anymore because I needed those 1.5 million Facebook followers as data points so my ads could be profitable. So it was a devastating week, to say the least. But then on my run this morning, I had an idea. I ran home early to type this out. What if I could turn lemons into lemonade, play the David to Meta's Goliath, and maybe donate to charity as well? So here we go. I'd like to replace that missing income. I need to replace that missing income. I have a content team to pay. So here we go. I have a treasure trove of videos, spreadsheets, and docs in my Google Drive account that has never been published. I add to it weekly. I used to do one-on-one consulting for creators trying to grow big brands. My fee, $10,000 a month for 1-hour-long calls per week. This is true, by the way. 100% of this email and video is true. All of those training videos, guides, docs, and tracking spreadsheets are safely tucked in my Drive, and it's really, really good stuff. And so I'm going to sell it all for 99+ less than what it's worth. Make that bold. February 6th is when it all goes live, but right now is when the presale goes live at a 67% discount. The full price on launch day will be $291 one time. Now this is going to be the $97 test. But today the presale price to my newsletter is only $97 with this link. This is a one-time lifetime price, not monthly. Every time I record more tactical content about growing a brand, going viral, or making content, I will add it to what you already bought. I'm addicted to learning, so this content will stay fresh since algos are always changing. I will also do 12 AMAs with everyone that purchased as well. So if you ever, maybe, potentially might want to try to go viral, build a following or a brand for yourself or a business, faceless or otherwise, spending a little bit of money one time will be an insane insurance policy that lasts forever. All AMAs will be recorded in the program as well in case you miss it. Also, I'm going to add a couple intentional typos in here, not that I need to, there's probably some that I've missed, just so people see it's not AI because it's not AI. Oh, and 10% of all revenue, not profits, revenue will be publicly donated to the National Kidney Foundation because it's very near and dear to my heart. This is the video going viral that got me banned from Facebook, by the way. Still trying to get my account back, but it's not looking good. Thank you. And then I put screenshots proving that my account was actually banned. Okay, so now I need to add in the Stripe link. So we're going to go here. Now don't screw it up, Chris. Go here, edit. So I added in this to the description of the product. Why is it called Plans of Grandeur? Because one time I had a psychiatrist tell me that I had delusions of grandeur, but I knew they were plans. That's what content can do for your life. Turn your delusions into plans. Sell your story, right? That is my real story. That is a true story and I want people to know it. Okay, update product and we go to payment links. I want to look at it. Okay, so now this Stripe account is for a different business and so I want to change the business details so it doesn't say Playmakers. All right, so that's changed. I've got the $97 link right there. Boom. Awesome. Now, We'll go back here, put the link right there, that right there. And I want to bold that sentence. All right, there it is. Now it's automatically saved. Let's go back here to make sure that my subscribers are imported. Boom, there they are. Let's go back to our segments. We're going to recalculate them so they refresh and show about 10,000. Recalculate, recalculate. Okay, 9,961 because some of these emails aren't valid anymore. POG97. Okay, so they're updated. If we go back to post, new post, edit post, first name. Now I don't like that the link is all the way down here. I like to put it up there because a lot of people won't read that far, but I don't know how else to do it because they got to know what they're buying. And then I didn't want to put the video of the Facebook video ahead of this one because then it would compete with their click, right? So also didn't want to put these up there because that's more space, that's more friction. I want to put it at the end so they can see it at the end to like validate what I'm saying, but Anyway, so this is the $97 email. $97. I just want to double, triple check the link works. It's a $97 link. Okay, cool, cool, cool. Make sure that that link works. YouTube. Oh, cool, cool, cool. Okay. We want to send this only to the— here are my segments right here, right? We don't want it to be public to the web. We want my $97 people to see it also. And if you're thinking, if I end up making it $47, is that fair to the $97 people? No. So I'll just refund them half. Like I'll make it fair to everyone when it's all said and done. I can, I can just do a partial refund. All right. Subject line, shorter is always better. Always. Let's look at the time. 12:28. So what's up in an hour? This is bad. Not clickbait. Okay. Yada, yada, yada. Good subject. And it's true. Okay. It's going only to my $97 people. My watch wants me to go back out and run because it's just paused. Okay. $97, $97. We're going to preview it just to be sure. That's the awesome thing about having a newsletter is there's trust. They know I'm not going to scam them or screw them. They know they're going to get way more than what they pay for. It's hard to do that without a brand, right? Which is what I'm selling here. How to build your own brand. I do want to edit February 6th. Next, next preview schedule. Just make sure it's going to 9,600 people. Schedule, publish now. Here we go. I guess I better deliver something, huh? Also, by the way, if you're watching this, I've got a special link in the description where you can get lower price. All right, so guys, the email is sent. It is sent. Now we have to copy the email. We have to duplicate it. This is— that was the hard part. Hard part is done. We're going to click these three dots. We're going to click duplicate and we're going to click edit, edit post. We want to keep everything the exact same. This is a scientific experiment here. We want to go back here. We want to go payment links. We want to go to the $47 version. Okay. Not the $97 version. We're going to paste it, make sure it works. Plans of Grandeur, $47, $47. Cool, cool, cool. Okay. We're going to close that, close that. And all we want to change is 47 times 3 is 141. And then I'm going to change the 97 to 47 and then delete that link. And then boom, 141, 47, one-time lifetime price, not monthly, yada, yada, yada. And I don't refer to the link or the price anywhere else. Okay. Same email, different list, right? We're going to remove POG97. We don't want it to go to all free subscribers. 141, 47, 47. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Go to audience. Boom, boom, 47. Now just to be sure, I really want to make sure, I'm almost positive this won't be the case, but there's no harm in going to excluded segments and excluding the $97 people. That way they don't get it twice. Okay, this number didn't change, so I'm good, but we'll leave it there just in case. So this is only going to the $47 list. and then keeping that the same review and then email only to the $47 people, exclude the $97 people. We're going to preview it. We're going to test the link, make sure it goes to the $47 product. Cool. Cool. We're good. And now we want to send it at the same time too, because that could change a variable. So we're sending these about 2 minutes apart. Publish now. Done. All right. So 12:34, a little over an hour, guys. Sorry. But now, now's when the fun part happens. Now we get to see payments come in, hopefully. All right. So it's been a few minutes since I've sent these emails. The top one is $47. The bottom is $97. I want to open these up in separate tabs. Performance, performance. Okay. 11% open rate right off the bat. Click-through rate 1.5%. Not bad. 0.62%. Okay. Very similar. Very similar. The $97 one I sent at 12:31 and the $47 one I sent 3 minutes later at 12:34. And you can see that the click-through rate is going up as more time elapses. So if it's 1.6% for the $97 one in the first 5 minutes, that's looking pretty good. I'm, I'm not mad about that. And you can see the clicks. So about half the clicks are on the Stripe link and the other half are on the YouTube link, which makes sense. And then everything else are on like the footers to my social platforms. Boom. First sale, $97. Thank you, Nada. Who is he? NataPol4, you are my first customer ever for this business. I thank you. I love you. So you can see the time, 12:41. It took a little over an hour, guys. I'm sorry, but from the time I had the idea to the time revenue was generated, $97 in this case, it was under 2 hours. All right. Now that I know we're profitable, we're revenue positive, the National Kidney Foundation has $9.7. I'm going to go finish my run. I'll be right back and we'll see how much revenue we have then. All right guys, I finished my run, 13.1 miles. I couldn't help but peek at my Stripe account a little bit as I ran. I want to tell you how this is about to be a surprise, but I just couldn't do it. I had to peek a little bit. So let me share my screen and see what our revenue is at. This is about an hour and 20 minutes after I last recorded. So we go to Stripe. Boom, baby! $1,334 generated in about an hour and 20 minutes. So call it $1,000 an hour from sending one email. The question is, how many were $47 and how many were $97? So we got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Okay, 6 $97 payments. And then, I mean, we've had— how many have we had today? Okay, 18. No, no, no, 16. 6 $97 payments and 16 $47 payments. So roughly speaking, we're selling almost 3 times as many for half the price, which means the cheaper price is the better price because we sent the same price to the same number of people. So if we go look over at Beehive right here, this is the $47 email, 3.7% click-through rate. So 76 people clicked. On the $47 email and 62 people clicked on the $97 email. Okay. But of the 62, only 6 purchased. So 10% conversion rate on the landing page over here. And then 16 out of 76, 21%. So it's like 9 versus 21%. So that is interesting. Now there's two different numbers going on here. Everyone knew the price before they clicked. So I don't want to look at the conversion rate on the payment link site because that's not accurate. They already knew the price. They knew what they were getting. I want to look at the conversion rate from the email, from how many unique people opened the email. So we've got 16 versus 6. So on the $47 email, we had 2056. Okay, 2056, 16. Finally. So the conversion rate was 0.8% and then 0.29%. So when we double the price, our conversion rate goes from 0.8% to 0.29%. So if these numbers hold, which they might not hold, people, if people are going to spend $97, they might need to take hours or days to really think about it. So a week from now, if we don't do anything, the conversion rates could be about the same because it takes a little more time to spend a little more money. but I think it's gonna stay roughly the same and we're gonna net out ahead if we sell it for the cheaper price. But I wanna do another A/B test cuz I'm not satisfied. I'm not really happy with how long my email was. I really wanna, if I really think the $47 is superior, then I want to take the same $47 price point and send another email that's much shorter that has the price near the top and the link near the top. Much shorter story. Maybe I'll have ChatGPT help me shorten that and then I'll send that to the same amount of people and see if that's successful. Because after a few more A/B tests, I'm going to know exactly what people need, and then I'll send the right price with the right messaging to everyone on my newsletter. But for now, I need to go shower and take my oldest son to Topgolf because he's been a little neglected lately. So we'll pick this back up in a split second for your time. Okay, so it's been a few hours. You can see I'm wearing new clothes. I took a shower, I went on a date with my beautiful wife, and I'm going to check in on Stripe. Okay. So very, very surprising here. We've had 35 new customers pay today. Of those 35, 8 were the $97 and 27 were the $47. So one way to look at this is if you look at these numbers, I made about 8 cents per email subscriber on the $97 plan, and I made 27 cents per email subscriber on the $47 plan. So it's about 3.5 times more money, which is crazy. So clearly, and you might be watching this thinking, well, duh, Chris, people don't want to pay more, cheaper is better. Yes, but I'm working with a finite number of people on my email list. So it is worth testing. And honestly, I'm going to do a little more A/B testing. I want to try a shorter email and I want to try email. Maybe that'll be my next test. Maybe I'll do $47 again, because I know that's the winning price and I'll do an A/B test to the same amount of people. One email will be shorter and one email will be shorter and not say the price. I'll say it's 67% off. I'll say it's 99% cheaper than the value that's offered, but I won't say the price. So they'll have to click to see the price. So I'll see if that makes a difference and I'll use different Stripe links for both so I can track exactly how they each perform. Okay. It's been about a week and we've made thousands of dollars. Why don't we break down how many $47 ones we sold versus how many $97 ones we sold? Okay, so we're here in Stripe. Okay, we're gonna filter for $47 transactions that succeeded. There were 43 of those, which is $2,021. Now we're gonna change the filter to $97, and there were 22 of those, which is $2,134. So we made about 5% more money per person on the $97 plan. And what was really interesting to see, if you look at these dates here, February 5th, February 5th, February 5th, so like From February 2nd on, we had 10 transactions on the $97 one. What was interesting about this whole experience was that I noticed that with the more time that had elapsed, the likelihood increased of me getting a $97 sale as opposed to a $47 sale. So the people that got the $47 email, they purchased it impulsively, right? It was a lower dollar amount. They didn't have to really think about it or talk to their spouse. But for $97, Even though I never sent any follow-ups to either group, it just took them a day or a week or 5 days to think about it, to finally pull the trigger. Now there's a trade-off here. If I go with a $47 option, I will have more surface area for upsells or for referrals. Like you just have a bigger opportunity to affect more people. With the $97 option, I don't have as many people to upsell to, but I have a more serious audience, an audience that's willing to invest in creating content. And usually that also means an audience that has fewer support requests or fewer complaints, fewer refund requests. Generally speaking, there are some exceptions, better to sell a more expensive product. So I'm gonna go with $97. Now I'm gonna do another A/B test. I know I said I wouldn't, but I really want to. So we're gonna do this by taking this $97 Stripe payment link and duplicating it. And it's very important that after they submit the payment, they will be redirected to the Google Drive link. Where I'm actually hosting all this content. Now, if we want to see how many people are using each of the payment links, we go into the payment link in question and then we click Payments and Analytics. And this is what enables us to A/B test it, cuz with the $97 and $47, it was really easy to filter and see. But when they're both $97, you gotta kind of click into the payment link and look at the analytics. Okay, so now I have two identical $97 options. I want to test two different things. Now that I feel like I've landed on the right price point, I want to test a shorter email on both the A and the B version. And then on the B version, I want to test not dropping the price in the email. I want the price to be a surprise once they click on the link and get to the Stripe page, because there's what's called a sunk cost fallacy. And what that means is that if we've already clicked into something, we're more likely to just finish what we started, even if we weren't as likely to buy it without clicking. I don't know if that makes sense, but let's say you go in a casino, you start gambling, you lose a little money, and you're like, oh, I can't leave now because I've already wasted this money. Like, I gotta earn it back. Then this will have been a total waste. That's the sunk cost fallacy. And it's a fallacy. Once you invest a little time or a little money, you're more likely to double and triple down so you don't feel like that time or money or effort expended was a waste. So that also applies to internet marketing. Now, is it gonna be a big difference? No, but if it's something, then it's better than nothing. So I'm back in dHive and I'm gonna go to this email that I originally sent, the $97 version. I'm going to edit it and I just wanna shrink this email down. Okay, so the A version will be the visible price version. Okay, so it's the same email, but about half as long. Okay, there we go. Okay, so I am excluding the two lists that I emailed this first A/B test to a week ago, and I'm sending it to list A. And let's YOLO. Publish now. Okay, we're gonna duplicate that post. We're gonna click edit. We're gonna change this to invisible price. We have to change the link, of course. All right, so I'm keeping the verbiage about the same, but I'm just, I'm hiding the price. Put it there, video that got me banned. But man, I can't believe I made $4,000 from that, just selling one of the folders in my Google Drive. Okay, let's go ahead and send it. And here in a minute, we will revisit what the click-through rate was and what the purchase rate was on both of these. All right, it's been a few days and Plans of Grandeur is up to $8,300 in revenue. And almost all of that is profit because we're selling a Google Drive folder at the end of the day. But I wanted to show you my last A/B test. I promise this time. And what I've done with uploading all this content into school. When I say I, I mean my partner Kamal. So everyone wants receipts. So here is the Stripe account. We've had 111 transactions at about $80 per transaction. We've had $8,300 in revenue so far. And as promised, I donated 10% of that to the National Kidney Foundation. So I sent a Loom video of me doing that to everyone that's purchased so they can see their money is going to a good place. And Then I had Kamal, my business partner, create this Skool community because it's just, it's a lot cleaner. It's a lot easier to justify a $97 purchase if it's in a nice clean interface like Skool. So we basically downloaded all of the Google Drive content and uploaded it here into separate folders. And then you can see here the members that have joined so far. Basically, I took the 110 people that have paid. I sent them all an invite link to Skool a couple hours ago, and about a quarter of them have already joined. and then I just had Claude create a logo for me. Not the best thing in the world, but who cares? And then I made just a simple Loom video. Hey, welcome to Plans of— just showing what it looks like. I had ChatGPT generate the description and we're good. And we have a price point of $97 one time. And now I'm gonna send my last A/B test email to try and determine what the ultimate email is to invite my whole newsletter to this. So The thing I'm gonna be A/B testing on this email is email A, the short and sweet version of the email like I did last time that links to the Stripe page, the payment link, and email B will be the exact same email, but it will link to the school community. So it's gonna be interesting to see if people trust school or Stripe more. Also, the results of my last A/B test were incredibly interesting. Let me show you how that looks. If you remember, in one of them I put the price in the email, in the other one I didn't put the price in the email, and The results kind of shocked me. If we go here to our payment links, you'll see this first one was the link I put in the email where I did not tell them the price. So if we go to payments and analytics, we got $2,200 in revenue through this link, 23 sales. Okay. So 23 sales from the email where they did know the price when they were clicking. And then the email where they didn't know the price and they were clicking. We only got 11 sales, less than half, which is really surprising. And about the same number of people clicked on the email. So the conversion rate was less than half. Very, very interesting to me. Actually, I take that back. 375 views on this one. So the conversion rate's about 3% on that one. And on this one, we had 287 views. So the conversion rate was like 8 or 9%. Just crazy. So the lesson, tell them the price in the email. That's what we're going to do here. So here in Stripe, you'll see that I created two different segments, one called POG School, Plans of Grandeur, potential customers that will get the email with the school link, and then POG Stripe, the email subscribers that will get the Stripe link. So now we're simply going to go to our old announcement post. We're going to duplicate the email. That had the visible price edit. And we're going to say a POG school. Okay, so we've got to delete all these links. Boom. And then we are going to replace them with the school link right there. So my ref link. Okay, so I just swapped out the links and I kept everything else the same because this email actually converted super duper well. Now, while we wait for that to load, I'm gonna go to this payment link and I'm going to duplicate it. Update product after payment. It will send them there. Pretty link. Okay, so we're going to exclude POG A on the email. POG School. Okay, so what you're looking at here, these 4 purple rectangles are the segments of email subscribers. That I've already emailed about Plants of Grandeur, POG, right? So I'm excluding them from this one just to be sure that no one gets the same email twice. Okay, we're going to preview it, click it. Boom. Let's hit send on that bad boy. Now we're going to take that email. We're going to duplicate it. We're going to snag this payment link right here. Copy URL. We're going to go back here. Edit. Swapped it out with the Stripe links. That's it. Now we'll just go here. Pog Stripe. Boom. All right, let's see which one outperforms. Okay, this will be the second to last update. I want to show you the results from my last A/B test, and I'm done A/B testing. I am now going to announce this to the rest of my email list. So the email with the school link brought in 10 sales at $97, and the email with the Stripe link brought in 13 sales. So 30% more. Which kind of surprised me because Skool is more organized. It just has more legitimacy than a random Stripe link. But at the same time, Stripe is pretty well trusted at this point, and Skool is somewhat obscure. Also, there's a lot more friction on the Skool landing page to pay. You have to create a Skool account first, and I hate friction when it comes to trying to sell something, right? So I think that friction is ultimately what did me in because I can still automatically invite or add them to Skool after they pay on Stripe. I already have the automation set up. So for my last email, I'm pretty sure I'm just going to send the same email to everyone that hasn't already received an email about this Plans of Grandeur, but I'm only going to use the Stripe link and not the Skool link. But just to be sure, I wanted to ask Claude if that was the right decision. So I showed Claude screenshots of the A test and the B test, and I told it how many sales I got from Skool and from Stripe. Let's see what it says. It says I should pump the brakes on declaring Stripe the winner, but it says what I just said. There's less friction. So I'm going to do it. I'm going to go with Stripe. But the question is, what have my sales been so far before announcing this to my whole list? In Skool, they were $970, and in Stripe, I had 126 total payments, with most of those being at the $97 price point and the rest at $47, for a total revenue count of $10,022. That's more than I thought. So we're almost at exactly $11,000 from this launch so far. Which is basically pure profit because this is work I've already done. These are pieces of content that I've already created that just lived in my Google Drive. Not bad. So now I'm going to go in Beehive. I'm going to duplicate the Stripe email, edit it. We'll make a new payment link just for this one. Swap out the links. So it looks like about a fourth of my list has already received these A/B test emails. So theoretically, I could expect to earn at least 4 times what I've earned so far. Hopefully more because of the fact that I've been doing A/B tests to come up with the best email, the best email length, the best price point, the best link for people to pay on. Okay, here we go. I'll touch base in a few hours and tell you what the sales are. Okay. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. It's only been an hour and 19 minutes since I sent the email to the rest of my list and check out this revenue so far. Look at all of those $97 transactions and the timestamps next to them. Okay, so I sent the email at 9:18 AM. It is now 10:38 AM. And you know, it takes a minute or two for everything to go out. And 3 minutes after I sent it, I got 3 sales. 4 minutes after I sent it, I got 4 sales and then 5 and then 2 and then 2. So in the first hour and 20 minutes, I've had 125 sales at $97 per sale, which is exactly $12,125. Add that to the $11,000 that I made over these A/B tests, and I've made $23,000 almost in pure profit from launching this business that all started while I was out on a run in the middle of the cold a few weeks ago. So I'm trying to forecast out how many sales I will get in total once everyone has opened this email and decided yay or nay on buying this. So I took screenshots of the sales velocity, AKA the timestamps of when everyone's buying. Screenshot of my email. I told Claude how many people got my A/B test email and then how many people got the full launch email today. Claude says 40 to 50% of total sales happen in the first hour. It's been an hour. It says if you're at 82 sales in 40 minutes, you're probably looking at 110 to 140 by the end of hour 1, 200 by the end of the day. Long tail, total estimate, 250 to 300 sales over the next 5 days. That's $24,000 to $29,000 gross from one email. Gross, but really it's net. My only costs are the Stripe 3% transaction fees. So then about 40 minutes after that prompt right now, I just prompted it again and said, hey, here's a new screenshot. It's been 40 minutes. I am up to 125 sales. Now what do you think? And it says $22,000 to $26,000 from this email. But I'll do a follow-up email in a few days. That should bring in some more stragglers. And then I'll just work this into my email flow, my automations. I'll raise the price as promised. And I think this could bring in a few thousand per month pretty passively. Better yet, the National Kidney Foundation is going to be getting thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars from sending just a few emails. So including my A/B test emails, I generated between $30,000 and $40,000 of net profit all throughout the course of this video. I showed you how to do everything. And before you write this off and say, oh, this is easy for him, he has a big email list. No, stop. There's a lot of power in small email lists because you can connect so much more closely with your audience. Whereas the bigger your list grows, the less you're able to connect with your audience, the less relevant you are to them. I don't know if you saw this video with the founder of Beehive, but he makes $500,000 a year from a list much smaller than mine, and he only sends 1 email per week. Even if you only had 2,000 email subscribers, you can make tens of thousands of dollars plus a year. Events and high-ticket courses are the key. And yeah, high-ticket courses have a bad rap, a lot of that for good reason. But think of it this way, they only have a bad rap because so many of them don't match the value that the salesperson promises. So if you're confident in the value you're offering, then own it, own your course because you're helping people. And if they buy a course from you, they're gonna be more likely to do the thing to be successful because they consumed your content and did the thing. So stand behind your content with pride. And of course, if you wanna join Plans of Grandeur, I've got the link below in the pinned comment or the description. If you know anyone that might want to start doing content either for themselves or for their business, faceless or with their face, AI-generated or not, please share this with them and we will see you next time on the Koerner Office.
