We spent $200k on Ads in 7 months. Here's what we learned.

The whole secret to building education products that people want is eight, nine, ten years ago, I was like, oh, I think it's going to cost me like $1,000 to learn how to do paid ads. And now I look at this and I'm like, we've spent 200 grand and we haven't even scratched the surface.

No, all it's done is show us all the things we're doing wrong. I mean, every single time I feel like I've made progress on this, I just have found out 20 things that I didn't know.

It's so painful. It's such a great mental trick. Whenever we're faced with something hard, we just look at other and go, we're building our next product.

Someone was describing it to me. It's like, yeah, you thought creating your very own money printing machine would be easy. Yeah, like that was what he said to me. I know that just the pursuit of this type of thing is making me better at all other everything, all other areas.

Yeah.

But damn, it sucks sometimes. Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour where the running joke is we are once. I can't even remember. It's been so damn long. I can't even remember exactly, exactly how to open Espresso Hour. But we were back the running months. I think seven months to the day is the last time we recorded Espresso Hour. So we're back and at it.

Before we hit record, we said, what was the last one we recorded? And we looked it up and it was seven months ago. And we said in the one seven months ago, we're going to set some goals for PGA and for ship 30 and write with AI. We were like, what are the goals? So we went, we listened back then, those were our six week goals. Turns out it took six months.

And we're still working on. We're still working on them. And I think the funniest part was in that episode. I think it was like two or three weeks between episodes before that. Or maybe it was like a month because we set some kind of goal before that and we disappeared. And in that episode, I remember us talking about anytime we set like an ambitious new thing to go and do, Espresso Hour disappears. And then this one just happened to take a lot longer. But we're back. We got some updates as we head into the end of the year. So I'm excited to get back in the lab. Yeah, clearly we're in a different space than we were. Even though it looks pretty similar to.

What we had that's the first bullet is we are not in Miami right now.

We're no longer in the shipyard. The shipyard is no longer. It played its part in a great way for about a year.

Not even, not even a year, eight months.

But we soaked a lot of juice out of that, out of that space. And now you kind of recreated this in your house. So we're in Cole's house now, not. Not the shipyard. And we're in Arizona, not Miami. So quite, quite different.

Yeah, maybe, maybe we'll build something similar here. But for now, this is, this is great. You've. You've probably seen this setting. Maybe on my YouTube channel you might see this setting in some ads that we're recording. So this has been a cool space to uplevel a lot of different things, but we'll go, we'll go through. We got a ton of different bullets to catch you up on things that we've done over the past six months.

So where you want to start here? Want to do a couple stats?

Yeah, some high level stats just to give you a sense of what we've been up to.

Well, we crossed a thousand students inside pga, so that was a big milestone for us, which was really cool. Even though we passed that one a good probably three or four months ago. Yeah, we really have to go all the way back to April to the last espresso hour, where I think we just start with this one where at this point last time we were filming, we were in the process of turning ship 30 from live to Async. So that was a sprint all the way through really the beginning of May, where we had to film 50 videos, write a ton of new content, basically repackage all ship 30 because we spent the first four months of the year without ship 30 for sale. Right.

Which was painful back then.

Very painful because we had so many people going through, start running online in our email course and just was not available. But we knew we needed to do that because. And we're kind of figuring this out now of as how much easier it is to run one business. Like as we build this Black Friday product, it's very clear that we are taking resources away from the main thing again to redirect towards this, which is fine because it's still lucrative, but that was the challenge then. We're kind of still facing it now and I think at this time next year we'll be in a better spot to like have almost a separate like team or resources to specifically create this type of content that isn't so reliant on pga because I think at that point PGA will be at a place where it's just a function of ads and new inputs on that regard. So yeah, we've really been kind of jumping around here.

Yeah, we've been. We had to go through a rotation of the business. You know, like ship 30 was the nucleus for such a long time and now PGA has eclipsed ship 30. But we had to go through a six month transition, you know, and that meant sharing resources, like having people work on both. And maybe just to explain the decision a little bit, it was really just the realization that, you know, cohorts were great. I think it was an amazing business model at the time, but the feedback loops were too long. And PGA is so instant. Now we're starting to play with ads, which makes it even more instant. Like you get signal in an hour and you're like, oh, this is working or it's not working. So it's sort of interesting. We're ending this year having fully rotated ship 30 to be the second priority and PGA to be the main priority. But then into next year, I think we want to go back to ship 30 and, and beef up some of the things there because that is such a great part of the business. We just haven't been able to prioritize it.

Yeah, it's going to be that careful balance of. I still think it's more important to try to get the cold traffic working on PGA at least to a certain level. But I feel that there's like three pieces that we need to go and build for that, which is the vsl, the retargeting. We were getting in the weeds early and so there's clearly like a lot on our minds. The big thing that, to summarize the last six months is we went from 14 to 28 team members. Yeah, I mean that's not a bullet point. We have it here as one bullet point. But we beefed up our closing team. We built an entire success department from 2 to 8 where we really doubled down on recognizing that PGA is not a marketing company, it's not a product company, it's not a sale. It's an accountability business where our entire mission now is to provide unreasonable accountability to everyone who joins over investing to the point that no other group coaching program can honestly say that they have the level of resources that we are putting into this. And that was the big focus. And so that took a long time. Yeah, going from three to seven closers took a long time. It's so funny to see that As a bullet. But those were the two departments that we needed to. It deserves its own episode, like our thought process on how to do this. But it's like this triangle of more marketing, more fulfillment, and more sales. All involve humans. All involve kind of threading the needle to. If you increase marketing, you need more sales capacity. If you increase sales capacity and more deals, you need more success capacity. So you actually have to start in reverse. You need more success capacity first, then sales capacity. And now we've done those two things. Now it's just a marketing game because we have excess capacity to grow into. And as I've been kind of learning this game a lot of people will refer to. Marketing is like marketing dials, because you're really just clicking buttons and you get 10 times as many eyeballs versus to sell 10 times as many eyeballs, you need way more people. So there's no sales dials, there's no success dials. Those are people that you have to go and train.

Yeah.

Versus. Now I feel very comfortable with you and I just soaking on just the marketing side because it's like you can just create something and then max out the capacity you currently have with it. And that's where we're going to get to.

It's been really interesting to see these components all play off of each other. And it's so funny how every stage of the business, and especially this type of business, there's always a problem, you know, so when we had, you know, two closers and we only had so many slots on the calendar or three closers, right? Marketing was bringing in so many leads that the calendar was constantly full. So closers were happy. But we were aware of the fact that we have. So we don't have enough capacity, right? And then because the closers are at such high capacity, that ends up putting burden on the success team because it's like you only have so many people to help with the fulfillment of that, right? If you hire more success people before the closers, then you're closing the same amount, but now you're paying salaries of people who are sitting there like, hey, I'm waiting for students to help coach and accountability, right? If you do the other and you hire more closers, but then the marketing isn't enough to fill the closers calendar. Well, then you have closers sitting there being like, hey, I don't have enough calls on my calendar. And so it's been so interesting growing in this way because no matter what decision you make, you are. You are faced with a different problem. And then you have to sit in that problem for two weeks, a month, three months, six months.

Yeah. The importance of communicating the full vision of all these pieces has been a big lesson over the last few months. It's like you have to very clearly communicate to the success team what's happening to the marketing team, to the sales team, the fact that we had our very first all hands this month and I was like, wow, we have 30 people on this meeting. We should probably do a better job communicating what all the others. And so we started to like open source team notes and team meetings and things like that. But all the while in doing that, we've had a handful of things that almost took so much of the bandwidth away from those core items. Number one being we held an in person team event, slash Mastermind, which ate up, like not ate up. It was definitely a great investment, but.

It was the full focus.

Right. For six weeks at least. Because we were doing PowerPoints, I wanted to do a good job on ours. We're creating like assets, venues, locking in food, all that kind of stuff that goes into it. Flights, getting people here, managing calendars around that way.

Huge open loop.

But like, even before we dive in on that, I think it's so interesting that we are able to invest the way we have in building excess capacity. Because so much of our business is built on organic. Like trying to do what we just did with a paid acquisition only is.

Such a hard, so fragile.

Right. Because you two weeks, your ad manager shuts off. Poof. Yeah, you could be as well. And so we're able to operate this from a much better way. Which is why getting it to work is going to be so fascinating. Because it's like, okay, what does having such a big organic following, interested in doing this unlock for us on the acquisition side?

Yep.

And so we're very close, but we just had to get all these other bullets seemingly out of the way. And instead of taking six weeks, it took six months.

The funniest part about this, I don't know if you, if you said this already, there's so many bullets here that this is laughable even to try and share. So anyone listening, good luck with this episode. This is us. This is us trying to make sense.

We also just recorded ads for like four hours for Black Friday. So our brains are a little bit.

So the funniest part about this is that we've spent over $200,000 on paid ads so far. And I. It's gener. I think bare minimum, it's like broke even. You know, and in some way there's been benefit of it. But what's so funny about that data point to me is I remember 8, 9, 10 years ago when I was straight out of college and I was just trying to learn like, what is a funnel? What is a newsletter? How do you build an organic following all these things? What are paid ads? And I remember back then sitting there and I had no money, I was broke and I was like, oh, I think it's gonna cost me like $1,000 to learn how to do paid ads. Cause you have to like run it. And now I look at this and I'm like, we've spent 200 grand and we haven't even scratched the surface.

No. All it's done is show us all the things we're doing wrong. Yeah. And I had to. So, like, part of this was we were running paid traffic to our email course and that wasn't a fast enough feedback loop. So we spent a bunch of money on too slow a feedback loop. I had to reallocate that to a tighter feedback loop and spend five times as much just to get enough data. Where now I go, oh, I'm like at this weird middle ground where I am debating just shutting off what we have because I know there's like five things that will improve the profit, profitability of that once we get it.

And we don't have the bandwidth.

We don't have the bandwidth because we're doing Black Friday, which is kind of the, the main thing we've been working on today, which was filming a bunch of the ads and the thing you've been hands down on, heads down on for the last three or four weeks on just creating our newsletter product. So it's so, so many different bullet points looking at this. But after Black Friday and after this product is live, I feel like our next three to six months is extremely clear on getting one thing to work while doing nothing else new.

Yeah.

And is just figuring out how to profitably acquire someone who's never seen us before. And so we're going to kind of document that whole journey. I'm excited to share. I mean, the end of year business review we do is going to be. I mean, this is kind of like the lightweight version, but in terms of the amount of things we've learned, it's absurd.

I think too. Just a little takeaway for anyone listening here. The whole secret to building education products that people want is they are buying your pain. So we will want, we, we will launch a product. I guarantee, I guarantee we will Launch a product that in some way communicates. We spent a million dollars on paid ads. Here's everything that we learned. So when someone buys that product, they are buying the pain that we had to endure spending a million dollars. So if you want a really easy way of thinking about building and launching education products, just ask yourself, what pain can you put yourself through? And this works at every level. Like, broke me 10 years ago would have bought a product called I spent ten grand on paid ads. Here's everything I learned. Right. So you just take that pain everywhere, from beginner all the way up to expert. You package it up, and then you give it to the version of yourself, you know, right before where you are right now.

It's so funny. The more time I immerse myself in paid ads, I'm already just. I couldn't stop thinking about the potential hook for that product. It's like we need to print out kind of like a cardboard thing that is just the amount of money that says paid to Facebook. And it's like, I paid Mark Zuckerberg. I paid Mark Zuckerberg this much money, and it says, like, a million dollars.

Yep.

Here's everything I learned on it. That'll be fun to do.

It'll be a great product. And if you notice a lot of our. If not all of our products in some way are we endured pain, we learned we are going to save you from that pain. And that's really the essence of every education product.

And so that's been the main focus of PGA in terms of getting that to work and all the different pieces that go into that. And just like PGA reaching a point of maturity around having a success team, what that looks like, having a backend.

What that looks like, it's a very cool business.

You know, having all these pieces in place that then once you, like we said, turn the marketing dials, it just becomes a. Like a calculator game, you know, where I can assess the business on a weekly level or a monthly level, rather than being so in the weeds, which is where we're both at right now.

Yep.

And sort of the. Just to crystallize the level, you know, PGA doing, we'll say ballpark somewhere between 60 and 100 enrollments per month, give or take. The Success team is 8 people. The closing team is 6, 7. The next hire will probably be a sales manager, which is what I'm playing right now.

Yeah.

And so it'll be interesting to see where we choose to take it from there. You know, depending on how you dial in cold Traffic. There's a world where maybe all of that doubles. There's another world where we just keep increasing the defensibility of the business. And we decide, let's just stay right here. We don't know yet, but we'll see. We will see.

And so over the next week and a half, our Black Friday product goes live, which we're extremely excited about. Of all the different business lessons we've learned, I think we have the most unique perspective to share on this one because we started a paid newsletter, we started a free email course newsletter, we started multiple different. You've started a paid newsletter that have basically been the engines of all four of our businesses. And now it's like what's everything we learned doing that over the last three years? Go take those lessons right away.

Yep.

And this is the most nitty gritty, in depth product I think we've ever created in terms of like click this button, do this thing, it will make you more money.

Automation.

Put this exact thing in whatever you have to sell like an abandoned cart sequence and you will verifiably make more money, maybe 50% more. Just by telling people who didn't buy, hey, did you mean to not buy? Yeah, like little things like that. That in terms of financial like upside from implementing these things I think is probably our fastest time to value of any product.

Yeah, I feel like we were talking about this before we started recording but a, this game of, of education how to sorts of content and products. It's a really interesting game in the sense that it gets exponentially easier the longer that you play because each thing you build and you build successfully becomes the credibility for the next thing that you build. And so B, the second thing is I feel like one of our most powerful long term advantages is going to be us being able to say we have monetized this in different verticals with different business models, which not very many people can say.

Different verticals, different business models with different acquisition systems. Like the second we have this one from paid ship, 30 from purely organic.

Yep.

And then who knows what we do on a potential like B2B marketing style offer of implementing all the things get like same thing right. If long term we wanted to create some kind of B2B. Hey, we help you implement our organic content vortex style thing. It's same thing buying paint. It's like we have spent the last two years trying to refine a marketing system that works for all five of these different types of businesses no matter which one you're in. Maybe we'd specialize in one. But like, this is what we would set up in yours. And then kind of like a done with you style thing. But each problem that you solve for yourself then becomes an opportunity to sell to someone else.

Yep.

And that's, that is why it gets exponentially easier. Because as your own business grows, you face more and more complicated problems. So as they, as you solve them for yourself, you just create more and more products. And actually that is what. It's such a great, like mental trick I noticed that we use all the time. Whenever we're faced with something hard, we just look at each other and go, we're building our next product.

So we're in R and D mode.

Yeah. So don't think about it like, oh, my business has this problem. Instead you're like, no, I am actively figuring out how to solve this. And at the same time, I'm literally documenting how I'm going to explain it to someone else.

And I feel that way as I put my ad manager hoodie on and lose money again. And lose money again and deal with all the different pro. I mean, every single time I feel like I've made progress on this, I just have found out 20 things that I didn't know. It's so painful every single time. I'm like, I keep kind of like a business journal of like, here's what I'm working on, here's what my last week's wins were or something like that. And back in like July, I was like, I got LinkedIn ads. I got them. And now we barely run LinkedIn ads because, like, we started to go to Facebook. We picked one platform. We're like, we're gonna learn this one ran that unprofitably for a while. Okay. What's like each time I'm slowly, slowly honing in on a hypothesis that this will end up working. And each time I do that, I can then in a future course module, say, here's what I tried to arrive at. This, do not do this, this, this, this, and this. Here's the amount I spent trying to do that. Failed. And then here's the one that actually worked. Let me just shortcut that entire thing for you.

You know, it was a really humbling but very cool experience was that PGA ad that we recently created that was an absolute banger. Like we, we finally created an ad where I watched the whole thing straight through and thought, that is actually a very good ad. And what was so humbling was realizing that that ad was the result of a hundred different repetitions before that where it was different scripts, different hooks, different takes, different recording sessions, different banners, different slicing using, you know, another hook, different CTAs. And that, that was one of those experiences where I just sat here and I had to just say to myself, like, of course, like, you were such an idiot to think that it wouldn't take that many reps to get to this end result. But so many people, ourselves included, you take something like paid, and you're like, oh, I'm going to learn paid. And then you record two ads and you don't magically make $100 million. And you're like, oh, I don't think paid ads works anymore. It's like, no, you just don't have the skill.

Someone was describing it to me. It's like, yeah, you thought creating your very own money printing machine would be easy. Yeah, like, that was what he said to me. I'm like, oh, yeah. He's like, you recognize that once this works, it is strictly a dollars in dollars how it came.

Yep.

Like, oh, okay. That's way different than anything else. So it's been fun to learn. And I think that you had to learn how to create that ad. And now the ad is going to a different page. That page is not quite. Like, I can do the bottleneck analysis down the entire thing. Now go. Okay, we're gonna do this for this one, this for this one, this for this one. My hypothesis is that all three of these combined will create this. If we do that, here's the theoretical max we could spend before that number, like, caps out on our business. It's all there. So it really becomes a far more like, math game, which I'm enjoying personally. And getting to that next level is going to require just. We're a few iterations away, but having a lot of fun with it.

Yeah.

And I think what's cool is we don't come from. We didn't come up in the paid ads world. We don't come from the E Comm world. We came up in the organic Twitter world. And so it's also really interesting to go through this process and look at all the other creators that we've come up with or have similar tangential products or programs. And you can see how all of them, just like we were, are very afraid to open the door to paid ads.

Right.

And yet, you know, the level that we've gotten to in the size of our business, doing more organic at this point, like, we can't.

You can't do anymore.

You can't do any more we're posting as many times as we can on each platform. We're doing it as best as we can based. I mean, we could always improve, but.

Like the marginal return there is not a step level improvement.

Right.

You have to go to a reliable, predictable thing that says when I do this, more people see it and therefore I can predict the throughput of the entire thing.

Exactly.

And ultimately we're choosing this pain. I reminded myself a lot of this of like on an organic business side, like you ha. We had as good as it could possibly get at a certain size, but it was. I personally would not feel that I was maximizing my personal entrepreneurial potential right now in terms of skill acquisition. Unless you said we were going to go learn paid. We were going to learn how to do a completely different thing that is ten times harder. Document the entire thing. And I know that just the pursuit of this type of thing is making me better at all other everything, all other areas.

Yeah.

But damn, it sucks sometimes.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's why when I look at other creators, especially ones that we, you know, we know or know of and we came up sort of around the same time and I see how they hit the same level and, and things were great and they had organic going and they were making good money and they, they were like, this is fine. I don't want to push from here. And in many ways I don't fault them for it because like, that was an amazing place to be. But I think our personalities, you just always want to grow and you're like, what's the next thing? What's the next thing?

Cause you can always go back there.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? But I feel like we're so close to having this work that then it would be laughable to think we wouldn't want to do this and then repeat it across a different vertical or something like that, you know, and either way, I mean we talk about this with all of our products is what you choose in the beginning doesn't matter. You can always reapply those skills elsewhere and it's who you become in pursuit of that, whatever goal it is that matters the most.

Yep.

So do we want to even bother setting 20, 25 goals?

No, we're not even close. I personally have like, long list as, as we go into the, like our end of year review of all the things I want to think about for next year, like my content, YouTube. We didn't even put in here that you started to post long form on YouTube in here because that only happened a Few months ago.

Yeah.

Nicole's been crushing it on YouTube. I'm getting to kind of watch. He's like eight months.

I'm building the playbook.

He's building the Playbook. So that I. I mean, you're doing it for Instagram too, which we just started posting on. I feel like the two hormones. You made that video that was like the two best acquisition systems for all of his businesses were Instagram and YouTube. And we looked at each other, we're like, oh, we're not on either.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like, okay, we should probably do something on those.

Yeah.

And starting to see some early success there. But yeah, I mentally have like the first, the middle two weeks of December because I think we have a couple things to do right after Thanksgiving, where we got like a one week window. We'll do another little session like we just did. Put that into practice.

Yep.

And then say, all right, two weeks of December. Let's. Let's reflect on the fact that you moved, you got married.

This has been a crazy year.

We did all that. You moved, you got married, you built a team from 14 to 30. Just a couple bullets.

Just a couple bullets. Just a couple bullets.

But we've enjoyed every second of this. And I think the thing I'm repeating to myself is I look back on all the quote unquote, painful moments from each stage of the journey. And at this point I look back on them very fondly of like, those were the glory days. Those were. I remember when we were in Miami together for the first two weeks in person at. We were like rewriting the ship, 30 modules. And I was like, two and a little over two years ago.

Yeah.

And so I know that future me is looking back. I'm like, oh, remember when we filmed our first set of ads? You know? And so each of these is. Brings a little smile to my face knowing that future me is looking back on them. Like, damn, that was awesome.

I've. I've been thinking about that a lot actually, and I feel like the chapters with the most pain are always the ones that have the most nostalgia later. And so you just gotta embrace. Embrace the process. I mean, yeah, that was an extremely chaotic espresso hour. But I mean, there's no other way to come back.

We're back in it. And yeah, we wanted to just do something. So we mentally go, okay, we should be creating these again every week, especially as we go into the new year. I think it will inform a lot of the stuff I create content about too. It's like, okay, go make a long form on that one.

Yeah.

And when we do it, it makes me realize how much we've done.

Right?

Because otherwise, if you don't, all of this just blurs together. Like, this whole year feels like a blur.

All right, that wraps up this episode of the Espresso Hour. The secret word for today to let us know who's excited about us actually recording these. If you've listened all the way to the end, you're part of the exclusive club. Leave a comment with the word Black Friday in it anywhere.

And use it in a sentence.

Use it in a sentence so people don't know the. The secret word. And we're gonna have a little special bonus for one lucky winner who leaves a comment. There we go. Will determine what that special bonus is in the next episode. So for now, that's all we got. Leave a comment With Black Friday, Cole and I are going to go get back into the lab, finish our Black Friday product that goes live on Monday, November 25, one week from today. So if you're watching, this is probably live in a day or two. Go check that out if you want to build a category newsletter for yourself just like we've done. But we'll probably be back in meantime.

All right, back at it. Thanks for listening, everyone.