9 Week Guide to Launch a Startup to $1MM ARR with Trevor Longino

Hey everybody, welcome to this Founder Institute webinar. My name is Jonathan Gruetchen, co-founder and CEO at the Founder Institute. Thank you all for joining us today. I know that we had, and I see people are, are starting to pipe in right now. We had almost 1,000 people registered to this event from all over the world. And just to reiterate it, if you have not been on a Founder Institute webinar before, just know that this event's 100% live. Okay? This is not prerecorded. And really the whole goal of these events is to have as much interaction and to answer as many of your questions as possible. So please don't be shy. If you are there in the chat, why don't you let us know where you're joining in from right now? I'll even, I'll kick things off. Hi everyone in the chat here. This is a 100% live event, and I see here Ozan from Germany and Martine from Miami, Arish from Iraq. I see Brazil, Dallas-Fort Worth, Portland, Lisbon, Wisconsin, Nigeria, Cape Town, Calgary, UK, Jamaica, San Diego. Awesome. Very, very cool. And I think it probably shouldn't be too surprising that we have such an international audience today given the topic that we have. So one of the biggest challenges that we see entrepreneurs have in the Founder Institute and otherwise is getting that initial growth for their business. This is something that, you know, and I know that a lot of people talk about growth hacking and things like this, but at the end of the day, it really is just about finding the right value proposition, the right marketing channels, and the right audience. And we have a great speaker here today to talk through some of this stuff. And let me just, before I bring him online here, I just wanna say that Trevor is, I believe Trevor came into our orbit, so to speak, through being the CMO of one of our portfolio companies, Unito, based out of Montreal, unito.io. If anybody wants to look that up, it's one of the more successful Founder Institute companies. They've raised a bunch of funding and they're doing really well and growing very quickly. And then since then, Trevor has been mentoring Founder Institute chapters all around the world. And we did just release over the summer our Global Startup Leadership or Global Startup Mentor Awards. And Trevor was the only person to be nominated for multiple awards. So thank you very much, Trevor. And let me, let me take the pin off my, my screen here. And not only is he the only person to have to be nominated for two of the awards. He also definitely, without a doubt, wins the award for the best mustache for any mentor in the Global Founder Institute network. And that's over 25,000 mentors, by the way. So that is not just any mustache. It is a special mustache. So welcome, welcome, Trevor. So yeah, tell us a little bit about yourself, Trevor.

Sure thing. I'm Trevor. I, as Jonathan mentioned, I've been mentoring in FI for, I think this is my 5th year. I'm now in North America and a couple chapters in the Middle East and a few chapters as well. And what I do is I launch startups to market. I guess I'll bring up my slide deck and talk a little more here.

Yeah, let's do that. Okay. And then I will, so here's how this is going to work, everybody. I am going to hide myself. At any time, please throw any questions that you have into the chat. Okay, Trevor's going to go through a workshop here on how to launch a startup to $1 million ARR, or that's annual recurring revenue if anybody doesn't know that acronym. And then throw any of your questions into the chat at any time. We're going to collect them, and then after Trevor's done with the presentation, we're just going to do some Q&A. All right, so I'm going to hide my screen and mute myself and Trevor, the floor is yours.

Awesome. Thanks so much. So the reason I called this up is because I had a handy slide talking a bit of who I am. I thought that might be worth reviewing. I've been doing startup marketing since '05. I've been doing marketing since the year 2000. That's 22 years ago. I've launched a bunch of startups and 14 of them, including some of them on that list I have here, grew to more than $2 million ARR, some of them up to $10-15 million. Uh, right now I run an agency that launches startups. So I launched 30 startups as CMO. I probably launched 25 startups in the last 18 months as an agency. And my expertise is in figuring out what it is you do to make your startup different. So why believe me? I've done this a bunch. And by doing this a bunch, I have built up a very systematic way to say, how do I ask the right questions? To identify my audience, figure out what they need, and figure out how I can tell them I provide it. And there really are just 3 pieces. That's it. Your audience, the problem they have, and the offer you make to fix their problem is all you need to know. That's it. We can close the window. No, not really. It's a bit more involved than that to discover it. But what you wanna think about here is when I say audience, a lot of startups, I see this all the time as I mentor at FI, right? My total addressable market is $23 billion a year. Hmm, no. Like, if you capture a 10th of 1% of that market, you're an unfindable speck of a fly, right? Something can crush you. You want to find not the TAM, not the total addressable market. They talk about the SOM, the strategic achievable market, right? What you can actually objectively find. And that is a much, much smaller audience. And it's important to note, as you're building that, you cannot have too small a niche. I say that, I sound like an idiot. You can't have too small a niche. You legit cannot have too small a niche. One of my favorite stories about this. This is North America. It's about 21% of the, of the world's landmass, right? If you look really carefully at this map, you can see a tiny red dot. Right where New York is. I'm gonna zoom in somewhere. We're gonna do the CSI enhance. We're looking here in New York at this part of New York. Actually, we're looking at Manhattan right now. Okay. I talked to a woman who has a business that is geographically bounded. It only serves people, not even in the entirety of Manhattan, just the parts that are south of that big green rectangle, downtown Manhattan. All of her clients are right there. And what she does is she takes apartments and refits the apartments into many small 200-ish square foot studios. And each of these studios has tons of electric, high-speed internet, and soundproof walls, and that's it. And she's renting each of these studios for thousands of dollars a month. Because what she's done is in this narrow geographical area, she found a tiny niche of people who need access to secure, safe places where they can do video camera work because she sells, she rents her services to OnlyFans content creators. Now OnlyFans makes usually pretty explicit content for people who subscribe to an individual artist. And many OnlyFans creators haven't got a space in their own house. If they rent from somewhere and the landlord finds out, they'll kick them out. She said, no, this is, I'm building this space for you. She's doing more than $120,000 a month. On, once again, let's point out you can't even see her physically addressable market. And then she's tackling a tiny sliver of a tiny sliver of content creators in that tiny space. And she's earning more money than 90% of startups ever will. You cannot have too small a niche when you start. So how do you tackle finding this tiny niche? Well, there's a systematic way I like to go through audience and problem and offer. And if you go to business school, they will teach you a bunch of systematic ways to do this, right? This is the classic one. I think I got this off of Y Combinator and you'll find it at Greylock Partners and all of these things. There's 9 different vectors here and there's 10 or 15 bullet points in each. And I will be honest, I am not smart enough to make use of this. They teach classes that are a semester long just on this. I don't have time for that. Most of my clients haven't got time for that. Most startups aren't moving slowly enough that they have time for that. I don't like it. So then a more common framework that's easy to grasp in just a couple seconds: top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, tofu, mofu, and bofu. And you talk about building awareness, teaching people why a solution is right, and then explaining why your product is the best one. And even that's a bit too complex for me. That's still very generic, right? I want to be very tactical here. You came here to learn how to launch your startup. Let me not discuss theory. We're going to discuss digital marketing. Obviously, we're here on a Zoom webinar. We all have access to the internet. That means you're ready to do digital marketing, even if that's not your core competency, what you love most. Top of funnel, for my purposes, is going to be we got somebody to see what we wanted them to see and they clicked the link. Middle of funnel is they came someplace we chose and they chose to take a conversion action, right? Book a demo, try a free trial, whatever it is. And then finally, the bottom of the funnel is they actually tried the product out and made up their mind whether or not it's the right product for them. Top, middle, bottom. Now I mentioned there's 9 weeks to get you to $1 million ARR, or at least to build the machine that will get you there. That divides up nicely. 3 weeks in the top, 3 in the middle, 3 in the bottom. We're looking at interest in the beginning, 3 weeks of studying what gets people's interest. We're looking at 3 weeks of going from interest to consideration, right? Not just what, but to go, oh yeah, maybe that'll do it for me. And then 3 weeks of how do we really best optimize for the action which of course is buy, right? Come do something for me. Give me your money. Take an action. Try my product out and then buy. So that's what we're looking to optimize for 3 weeks, 3 weeks, 3 weeks. So in the interest area, I can actually subdivide this further into attract, which is just what, what is this? Engage. It makes the brain think a little bit. And then click is, okay, I want to find out more. There's a week for each of these. So our first week's worth of experimentation is we're going to see how do we attract someone. Now there's a couple of different ways you can talk about this. We're going to look to find an audience. We're going to look to engage an audience, and then we're going to look to get that audience to make the click. So first up, finding an audience, right? What I'm going to talk about here is a series of using mostly performance marketing and digital ads as a giant survey where we're going to isolate variables, try and run experiments, and really understand what it is that's going to make someone want to take action. So our very first week here, we're looking to find an audience. How do we find that audience? We're going to make a set of creative. I tend to use Facebook ads because they've got incredible market penetration in virtually every audience you might want to speak to. Some companies would rather go on a larger business scale. Maybe you hit up LinkedIn first. If you're skewing to a younger crowd, maybe you go to TikTok. The platform you use isn't so important as the fact that the audience you wish to communicate with is there. You're going to try several different audiences, right? We have a bunch of different made-up people, I guess, Jonathan, at the bottom here. Who might be an audience to buy a product. This is a set of ads that right now I'm running for a client. So because they're on their Facebook ad library, I'm not violating any, anyone's confidentiality. This is live right now, right? And these are very similar looking ads mostly, but there are 3 different ways to talk about an idea. And then you take those 3 different ways to talk about your core value proposition and you try different audiences who might be interested. And when you do this, you're very quickly going to form a fairly robust grid of information. I'll show you some results from a different client that's anonymized on what you might expect to see. So let's imagine for a client, they've got 3 different audiences that they want to know who wants to buy my product. I'm talking about a client for almost all of you would be you. You're running for you. You're the business. You're the client. Yes, you're doing it for yourself. And so you can say for whatever they're testing, right? People who moved, young families, and students. Okay. If we're running very identical creative with several different ways to talk about it to these audiences, who cares? Who clicks? We're measuring at the very beginning here, what's our click-through rate, which you see at this column here. And we also want to see over here the frequency. This tells us two things. One is that click-through rate. This is our first time we're exploring. We don't know what we're doing right now. We run these ads, we look and see what engagement we see, and we're looking at the frequency here. We need to see a frequency of less than 2. If the frequency is more than 2 on these relatively, like, only 30,000 different humans were reached across this whole ad, which ran for maybe 5 days, right? If we had a frequency of 2 or 3 or 4, That would mean this audience is very small. We cannot actually make a lot of money off of them. With a frequency of under 2, there's room to expand. We now know there's some opportunity here. We have found the beginnings of an audience. Now, once we found that audience, we're also going to look and see in, this was, I think, in the third option and the people who moved option, right? I can dive in deeper into those numbers and see how each individual variant did. Now, if we go look back at what I had to talk about here, we have different ways to talk about our product in each of these kind of vertical rows. So I'm able to say for this people who moved audience, this ad number 3 didn't do very well, but number 2 actually did way better. And there's enough data here that it's statistically significant. You want to have at least a 90% confidence interval. SurveyMonkey has a great tool where you punch in some numbers. I think it's the confidence interval evaluator. You go punch in the numbers for what your experiment results are. It'll tell you how likely that is to be a significant result. If it is significant, awesome. Now you've learned something. So now we know for this product, people who moved really liked that second message. We have found an audience. There's plenty of room in the audience to grow. It's a 1.2% frequency and up to 2%, actually, for this audience. They're a little tighter. But the benefit to people who move here is unlike young families where that, that change happens infrequently, people who move happens all the time. So even though normally I would say this is too small an audience because folks move every week, we can actually not worry about the churn rate through of this audience. So we've got this audience, we think there's some opportunity here. What do we do next? One thing worth noting is as you get more mature in your funnel, you'll start to see click-through rates of more like 6%, 3%, whatever. Click-through rate is not the be-all end-all. Most advanced marketers tell you click-through rate's immaterial because you can manipulate it, and you can. But if what we're testing is really simple ads with really simple messaging and not click here for a free Ferrari, your click-through rates are not going to go bananas because you manipulated them. You're instead testing engagement of an audience, and the more aware you are of your audience and their problems, the higher those click-through rates will end up becoming. So now we're trying to engage them. We found an audience that looks like it's big enough. We found an audience that's starting to show some levels of interest. We have to develop them further to really say this is an audience who's going to end up working with us. So week 1 was fine. Week 2 here is engage. And on engage here, we're looking to say for that audience we found, let's try a bunch of different ways to present them with information about our offer. And see which of these works. Now, in this case, all this creative looks a lot alike. This is ads for my book, so I can show you the information how these ads did. And we didn't do a great job of differentiating all the visuals because Crowdtamer's website looks like this, and we just went, let's make it look like this. And the result here was nothing performed super well. Well, how do I know what number you want to see? There's a success metrics you want to hit here. If we're seeing at least 1.5% on that unique click-through rate on Facebook, it goes up or down a bit on LinkedIn and TikTok and other channels. But fundamentally, I'm looking for Facebook's average click-through rate on an ad is 0.5%, half of 1%. Triple that indicates you are now rising above the noise. You are interesting. So you want to be up in those levels. I've made these ads, I've served them to my key persona of people named Jonathan who are CEOs at Founders Institute, and I found which one really works for him. And now I've either got success here or I've got failure. This is failure. That means you haven't progressed past week 2. When I say this is a 9-week guide, these weeks are bounded experiments, but you have to get past the success metric before you go on to the next one. So it might be you run this week in a week. It might be you takes you 3 or 4, and maybe you're not running an experiment every week. That's fine too. You're going through this sequence of answering the questions to discover what's going to make a difference for your business. So we're looking to define this audience. We've kind of found them now, right? We found an audience. We're presenting them with different ways to talk about the problem we're solving. So we've answered the audience issue to some extent. Now we're driving into finding a problem statement that gets them engaged enough. You've got 7 words on a display ad and an extra maybe 60 or 70 on the text around the display ad to get someone's interest. And you have to tell them, I understand your problem and I'm going to make it better. So with that in mind, right now we're testing on this engagement. What's the engaging problem? The offer part we don't worry about right now. So we're modeling out this top of funnel. Finally, what we'll see is we're optimizing to getting people to not just look at the ad, but to click on what we have to say about their problem. And so at the engagement level, you want to see at least 1.5% click-through rate. But once you've built that, you need to iterate some more. How do I make better copy? How can I make a more persuasive statement? You really want to get about 2% as the third week of experiment. How can I optimize up into this click? If I'm getting that kind of engagement on an ad, I'll be spending a relatively small amount per click, which means I know even before I model out the whole rest of my funnel, odds are pretty good that I won't be spending too much to make my business function. So success metrics here, the first week we don't have any, We don't know what we're doing. Second week, you wanna hit a 1.5% engagement rate. You wanna iterate on your creative, try again, and to get past that third week of more creative, more experimentation, 2%. Once you've got that click, now you're in the consideration phase. There are 3 weeks here and 3 things to try and get. First is make that not just a click, but a visit, because bounce rates are going to be really high, particularly initially. I've discussed all of this top of funnel. I'm not really saying about where you send it to. For the whole first 3 weeks of experiments, I'm going to tell you to do something that every marketer will tell you never do, which is just send the ad to your homepage. Because it's not that you don't care about these clicks, but you don't really care about these clicks because you're testing way different audiences, way different problem statements, super different ways to talk about your product. And if you're trying to keep landing pages up to date with all this different testing you're doing at the top of the funnel, you'll go insane. It'll take you a month to launch every experiment. You'll be broke long before you learn what you need to learn. So you're tossing them towards your homepage and your bounce rate— bounce rate here means somebody hits your website, looks at it for 3 seconds and goes, nah, and closes the tab. It'll be really high initially, 70, 80, 90%. Because the difference between the ads and the landing page will be tremendous. But once we really have a message that's driving those clicks that we know is engaging people's interest at the end of this third week, now we have to start sending this traffic somewhere where the bounce rates aren't 90%. Bounce rate should be down under 60%. Once we've got that bounce rate down under 60%, we do this by aligning what the landing page says with the ad that brought them there. So if the ad says, you know, solve all of your problems with productivity by using our really cool project, then the landing page better say solve all of your problems with productivity so that I have my expectation from the ad is met on the landing page. If the messaging is different, bounce rates go way up, you lose all your traffic. So the first part of this visit interaction here is whatever ads did well, make a landing page that just furthers the message of those ads. The next step after you've done this, so, all right, now we need to have them understand what we're actually trying to tell them, understand why this product is interesting, understand what they get out of it. And it's important there, understand what they get out of it, not what you do. No one cares what you do. I mean, you care what you do, but nobody else does. When you, when you buy a drill, you don't really want a half-inch drill bit. That's not what you bought really. What you bought was a half-inch hole, and the drill was the way to make half-inch holes. So many founders, they make a page. This is a client of mine called Pluck and They install a wood box in your front yard and then they tend it to you so that you can have organically grown food in your front yard. Cool. We make growing your own food easy. That's what they do. That's not what you want. If you're buying from them, you didn't really buy a garden box, but they talk about here, we're making garden boxes easy. Here, look, here's your garden box. Here's some vegetables. Here's, a garden you can rely on. They're talking about all of the work they do. So when we came over to say, how can we help your messaging? We said, look, you grew a garden because you wanted food. You wanted to have local, organic, cool things to eat. So let me start with the picture of the result of gardening. Then let me have a human here show you, this is what I achieved. I got this crazy list of things out of using Pluck. That's how you need to talk about what you do, and they have to understand, if I use Pluck, I get food. If I use Trello, I get productivity. If I use, uh, I don't know, any product, any software, I get the end result. If I buy Nike shoes, I get to be athletic and fit and cool and purposeful. That's what you're selling. Stewart Butterfield talks about, we don't sell saddles here. He's the founder of Slack. If you go look up the article, he talks exactly about this. Slack doesn't sell instant messaging back and forth. Slack sells freedom, communication, camaraderie, productivity. And the way you do it is through instant messages. You need to have that version of your landing page where you don't talk about the thing you built, which of course you are proud of, and of course it's tremendous work on your part. You talk about the half-inch hole. And when you've got that working, you're going to see bounce rates drop down, drop down. You're going to want to see engagement of some kind on this site. A scroll, a click on a button, some interaction with your site to indicate people aren't just looking at it and going, I wonder what that is. People are looking at it and going, ooh, I want to know more. And you want to see that upwards of 40%, upwards of 50%. Ideally, once you're hitting that number, your landing page is beginning to tell a story to your buyer that gets their interest and they go, oh, scroll down more. Oh, learn more. And then you have to go from understanding into converting. Now, when you make a conversion offer to somebody, it can be get a free trial, book a demo, take a sales call, whatever it needs to be. In your very beginning. Of either a new business or just a new offer for an existing business. You have tremendous friction over trying a new thing because nobody ever got fired for buying from IBM, the saying goes. You have a, a need to convince them to try you out anyway. And the best way I know of to do this is to make an offer so good you're an idiot to say no. So the existing offer from Pluck here. Schedule a quick chat to get growing. Why? Maybe you like our box. That's fine, but it's not very compelling. Am I an idiot to turn this offer down? No, I'm busy. I tried gardening. It wasn't for me. Whatever. Get a free plant when you talk to us. What do you want when you grow a garden? You want food. What are we giving you? Food. That's pretty easy. Another one I've had great results with. I was mentoring an agency. In a very crowded space. And I said, look, tell them we'll give you 110% of your money back if you're not happy with our services for any reason. Agency helps you make money. It's a performance marketing agency. Either we run your ads, we make you money, and you're happy, or we don't run your ads, we give you back more money than you gave us, and you are still happy. You make money or you make money. What idiot says no to that? Make an offer that strong and you'll see signup rates go up and up and up. I see a lot of websites, particularly new ones, 1% signup rate, half a percent signup rate. Terrible. You want to make an offer that's so good you're seeing at least 3, maybe up to 10% signup rate on this page. That's how you know your offer is now speaking to this audience. And remember, we handpicked our audience way back at the top of this funnel. That's important. Your handpicked audience needs to be performing this well. Random organic people who hit your website, if they don't convert right now, you don't care. I'm going to assume you haven't optimized all your SEO yet, which means people who just stumbled across your site are very possibly not your tribe. They're not your audience. We're building a funnel that makes a tiny niche of people super happy. A lot of people who come to your website won't be in that niche, and that's fine, and they go away, and that's even better. Because if you can make 100 people incredibly happy or 1,000 people, eh, I know which one is better for the early stage of a business. Now, in the action stage, this is tricky. In the action stage, you figure I'm driving everything I've done up to the point where there's do the conversion action on the website. Book a sales call, try a free trial, get a demo, whatever it is. My job is done on the go-to-market side. I'm finished. You're not, you're really not. You're way less so than you might think because on this first step of I've said yes, I'm converting. A buddy of mine, Azhar Shad, you can find him on Twitter. He's a super brilliant growth marketer. Ran a survey, and the sample size here is a bit small, right? 22 people. But of them, look at the numbers here of number of people who signed up to your product's conversion action who successfully activated, who completed it. So if you signed up for a free trial, did you actually do anything with your free trial? And here, 20% of people are in the 15 to 20% range. That means at least 80% of their users never even activated. And then 10% here are in the 11 to 14% range. And then another 10% are in the 4 to 6 range and 5% are in the 0 to 3% range. 45% of these surveyed companies had less than 20% of the users who signed up actually activated. So you go, oh, you've signed up my, my lead form. Oh, thank goodness. I put all this work in and now I'm going to be able to show you my product. No. Overwhelmingly, 4 out of 5, they don't even go any further. So your number one thing to do here is to measure this, right? As we look at connect, we're connecting your data pieces together. So many businesses, every startup I work with, I think at the, at the beginning, they may have Google Analytics, they may have HubSpot, they may have all these pieces put together to see what their traffic does up till the moment they convert. And that's just a black hole. And so you're losing so much money and so much business because you think the job's done and really you're only a fifth of the way there. The other four fifths are still out there trying to be activated. So get everything connected. That's the first part. The next part is you want to try, you want to get people to actually try your product. So success here is you've got things connected. Ideally, you're doing better than 20%, but honestly, odds are that you won't be just based off of this relatively small dataset. So how do you get them to actually engage? Now, this is a bit of a question of scale. At certain scales, different things are available to you. But I'll give you an example of what you can do at any scale to start making this better. I was, as Jonathan mentioned, CMO at Unito. And the headline here, you can argue, is not the best headline. When I was CMO there, we kept dithering on the right headline here. But social proof here is incredible, right? Look, bringing 4.5+ stars on all 3 major validation platforms. Try it free. The instant you click that button, you get taken here. You don't go into the product. Not yet. You get taken here and I get to see there's 5 steps. It's about 11 minutes. You've just told me what's going to happen. And furthermore, the first step is about 2 minutes. And in Unito's particular case, in order for it to be worth anything to you, you have to connect it to a tool like Trello or Asana or Wrike or Jira in order to make it work. So you start with that action and then you move your way through all of the steps required to actually conduct a trial. Now, one of the brilliant things about this is this is a 5-step process. And they know because you're being hand-led through this where your trial fails. When I first joined the company, people would sign up and they'd be dumped right into the app. And the activation rate was like not even 10%. It was like 8.25% because people just went, oh, I got no idea what to do or how to do any of this. It's way better now. I have no idea what the numbers are nowadays, but it's way better now. Because in the app it doesn't start by saying, good luck, have fun. It starts by saying, we know what you want to accomplish, let's take you there. You can do that in your app. There's a number of ways you can do it. Even you think about an e-commerce storefront. I've got these sneakers. What's the step before buy a sneaker? Can I do a virtual changing room? Can I get a conducted conversational sale tool to ask what my style preferences are and if this really gels with my wardrobe. There's a lot of ways I can take little itty-bitty steps before the big one of give me your money, where I'll be able to optimize that performance. So here you want to see at the end of the try phase, 20 to 30% minimum are activating. If they're not, you need to go back in your tool and figure out a way to handhold people in. And once you've got even 30% activation rate of your, whatever your key action is, right? 30% of people who book a demo call show up. Awesome. There you go. If it's 10%, you're in trouble. If it's 70%, cool. These people really care. Then you need to get them to actually use your product, take the action that is the one right before they buy. This can be a number of very complex things. The simplest one I know of is to say, let's send automated in a tool like Intercom or any of its many, many competitors, an automated sequence to look at the people who started a trial process and then didn't finish it and say to them, I want to bring you back. If you have enough volume of people trying your product out, you can do cool stuff like say, hey, I know that you got stuck on step 3 of the onboarding process. Let me offer you, let me chase you down on Facebook and on LinkedIn with a display ad that just says, hey, I see you weren't able to complete your onboarding. Let our CEO conduct you through it. That's a pretty good offer. Not for you, but for a different company. We did that and had like a, on those people who saw the ad and clicked on it, every single one who booked showed up and the activation rate lifted substantially. What you want to do here in this final step on this 9th experiment is you want to try and lift of the people who aren't signing up 10% to come back in and actually try. So if we expect the usual here, right, 30% are activating, 70% are not. If you capture 10% of those and feed them back in, that's a— now it went from 30% to almost 40%. Of your users are activating. That puts you in the top 5% of startups right there. And you can say, why work so hard here at this point to get 7% of my signups back? But if you get that 7% back during the trial phase, it adds 200 or 300% to your ARR at the end of 12 months. Because all of these virtual cycles improving makes a tremendous increase in how well your company can perform. So you get all the way up to this end here. You've measured, you know, you're at least hitting an acceptable conversion rate by in the app, getting people on board, and then by using off-app nurturing tools and maybe even off-app retargeting to bring people back in. Then you finally got all of the pieces to understand that everything is broken. Ah, crap. What? That's right. Because what you've built right now isn't going to be perfect. Even when you put all the pieces I've just mentioned together, you've worked like hell for 9 weeks, you've reached the destination here at the end. You're going to look back on this and like Coolio, see that everything is just a barren plain. Walk through the shadow of the valley of GTM. I take a look at my life and see there's not much left. Well, that's good because now you can see what is broken. You've learned all of the touchpoints you must control, and you've learned what you need to do to make them better. There's two ways you can tackle fixing your broken funnel, and you're like, why you have a picture of a circle for a funnel? Well, really, the bottom of the funnel, people buy, people love your product, they should recommend your product to new people and make you a new top of the funnel. It's really a full circle. But for the purposes of trying to understand the 9 weeks and all the problems you want to tackle, let's think of it as a funnel for now. We're building this loop, this virtuous cycle, and we can understand every place it's breaking. You can either say, I'm gonna tackle it. I built everything, it's all done, everything's awful. I'm going to go back to the start and build again. Or you can say, let me see which numbers are the farthest off from goal. And tackle those first. That tends to be my preference, to say what's worst. If I know I'm supposed to have a 20% activation rate and I have a 1% activation rate, nothing else I do in my funnel matters because that is the sticking point. So start looking at building and optimizing. For a, a client of mine early this year, we brought their cost per lead from $150 down to $8. Extraordinary. They had a really good top of funnel and their activation rate from demo to actually trying the product was 0.3%, a third of 1%. Didn't matter how good a job we did top of funnel, no one was willing to try their product out until they fixed it. Addressing that next was their number one concern, obviously. So there are 3 key numbers you need to know, and that's really it. If you have very strong command of these 3 numbers every week, you will be more in tune with what your startup is doing than at least 80% of the founders I teach and mentor and work with. Impressions to visits. I know this is a bad metric. Every marketer says so. If you build a comp plan where impressions to visits matters, where that click-through rate matters, of course people will game it. But if what you're trying is my gen, my actual genuine offer, not click here for free Ferrari, my actual genuine offer to an audience, does it engage? And understanding audience engagement will change over time. I can refine my pitch over time. I can find new audiences over time. All of these 3 different ways this can move will just give you a pulse for At the very top of my funnel, how good a job am I doing of telling the people I should care about I can help? CAC to ARPU. This is cost to acquire customer, CAC, over average revenue per user, ARPU. This is a little more controversial metric than it used to be. I've seen people saying, no, this is a terrible idea. The basic idea here is I look at all of the costs it took me to get You know, the multiple of what did I pay per click and then the multiple all the way through to of those 100 clicks I bought, this many actually came to buy my product. That number is the cost to acquire the customer. That needs to be a 1 to 3 ratio, maybe 1 to 2 if you're super well-funded hyperscale. You want to know that you're getting more money from the user than it costs to acquire them. If not, you're in real trouble. And knowing that number every week is super handy. And finally, weekly cohort conversion. Now this requires some advanced tooling that most new startups don't have, but I think it is important enough to invest in early. The idea here is if we're running experiments all the time, different audience, different message, different landing page, different channels, all these things. If you're just looking at how many users converted this week, You're looking at over the last 5 to maybe 30 days, what I did then affects my conversion rate now. And it's really hard to steer. But if I can say every user who signed up on the week of October 3rd, how many of them engaged and activated a trial? Like, how many converted? How many activated a trial? How many bought? How many churned for this week? Then a year from now, the numbers for this week are still true. That knowledge tells you the changes I made, what effect did they have on my business? You need those and you need tools for those. And broadly speaking, everybody has analytics, right? Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Matomo, whatever it is you want to use to give you someone came to my site from somewhere and what did they do? Cool. You're going to want to get a lead enrichment service, Apollo, ZoomInfo, something, whatever, unless you're just extremely, extremely B2C. You're going to want to actually be understanding who everybody who's in your funnel is. Lead enrichment does usually require a CRM, which is kind of a bottom of the funnel tool, but they do have to come together. You can, you can get a CRM without lead enrichment, but you really can't do lead enrichment with no CRM. And you have to have data connectors. Some are just top of funnel connectors like Google Tag Manager. You might want Zapier or there's millions of other ways to move data around. Segment, but you're trying to build a link where that knowledge from guy came to my website or gal came to my website, did something, went away, came back a week later, signed up, deal starts. You want to have all that information flowing. That's in your CRM. And then you need a tool like ProfitWell or one of their competitors to do revenue cohort analysis. All these pieces together instrument you to understand the results of these 9 weeks of experiments that we're running. A few things to keep in mind for your growth mindset. This is hard. This is hard, and somebody has to own the problem. If you're the solo founder or if you're the CEO, it's probably you. Even if you don't want to be the one to own it because you're busy, you've got a million things to do, you didn't need more. A whole lot of this you can do with a bad product and still find enough information on your market to go raise money. If you build a perfect product and you don't have any of this work done, you can't raise money. Almost all of my clients come to me because they built something cool and they have no idea how to make money with it. You don't go to a go-to-market expert when things are going well. The earlier you address go-to-market, the more tailored your product is to your market, the easier it is for you to raise money. This is hard. You've gotta stick with it and you'll fail a lot. Once you finish that first funnel, it's no good. You have to try again. That's expected. But the important thing here is you fail a whole lot, but you can't start lying to yourself, to other team members. After 6 consecutive weeks of failing to cross a quality goal for a top of funnel or middle funnel experiments, it can be very disheartening. You can be like, what if I just If I change my sample size a bit, the data looks good enough that we can move on to the next one. No, because what you did right then was you told a lie with data, and every conclusion you make from there on will be wrong. Honesty is crucial to making this work. In my team, mistakes are fine. In my team, screw-ups are fine. If you ever lie about data, you're fired, right? I cannot work with you because I can never trust you again. That's crucial. So this is the idea, right? Audience and problem and offer. Go through these 9 experiments. Figure out how to take your startup to $1 million a year in revenue. I know this works. I've done this 14 times for other people. I am building this for my own agency as well. This systematizes the problem solving around what do I do next when you're not comfortable with marketing. And I hope you found this helpful. Happy to take any questions you'd like to ask. And of course, if you wanna follow up with me outside of this webinar, my website is crowdtamers.com. You can book a call there. You can go straight to SavvyCal, book a call there. Whatever it is, I'm on a mission to help 1,000 startups make $1 million a year in revenue by the end of 2028. Every conversation I can have is valuable. Thanks so much.

That was amazing, Trevor. Thank you. Can you guys all— can you guys see my screen right now? Okay, there I am.

There you are.

Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much. And just— we have a lot of questions to get through here. So before I do, I just want to make it clear to everybody. Yes, we will be sending a video of this presentation to you in the coming days. Trevor, I believe that there were some other in-depth links, right, that we can probably send?

Yes.

As part of the follow-up email as well. Yeah. After, after this webinar, why don't you just email those to me and I'll make sure that they get in there. And are you okay with sharing this presentation with everybody?

Please do. As broadly as you can. Like I mentioned, my mission is to help.

Awesome. Yeah, it is. Because there was some in-depth stuff in there. So, I mean, we could literally spend days going through even just one of those of the 9 steps. Right. But I won't subject you to that. Okay. So I just, I wanted to point out just two things that I found like super insightful there and that really just kind of, you know, kind of struck a chord with me. Number one is you can never have too small of a niche when you start, right? This is probably one of the most common mistakes that I see entrepreneurs make is just not being focused enough and just trying to boil the ocean like one fell swoop kind of thing. Right. And I love that, honestly, using actually Facebook or any other digital ad service to really find that small audience as a means of just validating the right message for the right audience to the right channel and then growing it from there is a great mindset for entrepreneurs to have, especially for beginning. And then the second thing I just want to point out is on the messaging front is don't talk about your features, talk about your benefits, right? Yes. I love, I love the example of, oh, we have this great garden box, it's an amazing garden box, it does this, does that. At the end of the day, it's, it's just a means to an end, right? Is there, is there any like piece of advice there that you will typically give a client as to how they can kind of break out of that insular sort of thinking where, you know, they're almost like talking to their employees about how they're, you know, the features of the product rather than trying to step into the eyes of their consumer?

I do. I'm putting together a little Twitter course exactly on this. You can follow me on Twitter, twitter.com/TrevorLongino. It's with a new startup where they actually, the course happens on Twitter. I have no idea how it works yet. I'm finding it all out. But I also have a blog post explicitly about this. And the idea is if you go back 2,500 years, they solved this. Aristotle teaches the three rhetorical appeals, emotion, logic, and authority. When we don't care about authority now, we care about social proof. And if you were to just say, How would I tell somebody what you get out of my product using an emotion, right? Something like Trello is a great example, right? Trello would be quit being overwhelmed with lost work. There's an emotional tie to it. A logical appeal is spend 3 hours less chasing down tasks every week. There's a number. Social proof would be, I don't know, Barack Obama says Trello helped the White House make a lot more bills pass or whatever, right?

Cool.

Social proof is somebody said something. Those 3 different ways to talk about it are all a result, right? Social proof is never gonna be somebody saying, oh, I love the blue buttons on Trello. That's a feature. They cared what did I get out of it? And likewise, the other ways you talk about it are by forcing yourself into this little narrow box. I have always found that constraints around creativity but you systematize it and increase the overall creativity of your output. Yep.

Yeah, it makes sense. It's just, it's hard as a founder, right? Where you're just dealing with features and stuff all day to not talk about that stuff. It's like you kind of have to shut yourself up and, right. Just try to separate yourself from the product a little bit. Okay. So I had a couple of questions here just on kind of the ads. So I guess we're going to the top of the funnel here, right, where we're actually testing the messages and the audience on the ads. And then that really everything kind of flows from there. A couple of questions here. I mean, like, what do you think would be kind of the total or the minimum amount of money that you might— and a couple of people had questions along this realm, of course, the minimum amount that you would recommend somebody use you know, for one of these tests to kind of get a statistically relevant dataset.

So the bare minimum is about 1,000 impressions per every single variant. So the example I showed you with 3 different variants to 4 different audiences, that's 12, right? So I need at least 12,000 impressions on Facebook. That'll run you like at a minimum, like $300 and maybe up to $500, $700. Okay. When I'm working with clients, I always say $1,000 because that way I know I'm gonna hit that number. If you're bootstrapped and really tight on money, $500 or even maybe $300 and then look and see if it was enough data. If it was, you can probably go. If not, then add a little more money and run the ads a little longer. You're trading time and money there, right? If you don't have much money, then you gotta spend more time.

Right. Yeah, that makes sense. And how long would you, let's see here. Yeah. I mean, okay. So Manny is like, how long do you think the specific assets can last? Well, you know, for kind of the optimal efficacy, right?

Like, so how long? It does depend on the frequency, right? If these ads have been shown a whole lot, they will lose some efficiency, but good ad creative can last for years if your audience is being Okay.

Andre actually, or Yuri actually had a question specifically about frequency, right? And I saw a couple things there. Can you just kind of give the 101 on the frequency and then also just kind of connect as to why you, the optimal would be somewhere, you know, under 2, I believe is what you said. Sure.

So frequency, and you'll find it in TikTok and LinkedIn and Google search and Facebook, all of them have this metric. It is an individual, a user, how many times have they seen your ads? Now, on a, like a retargeting campaign or a lookalike audience campaign, that's a conversion optimized event. This is like way later in your performance marketing lifecycle, seeing 5 or 8 or 15 frequency. As long as you're making money, you don't care. Right?

Right.

But here at the beginning, we're basically saying, are enough of you out there? And if on a 1-week experiment with 3,000 impressions, I've already hit my audience 2, 2.5, 3 times, my audience is pretty small. And unless my value is really high, I can't build a business off of just 2,000 people. 10,000, 50,000, there's a really good niche, generally speaking. In the, like, in the small business side. When you're working in big enterprise businesses, you, if you run a bunch of tests to them and every week they see something different about you, they're gonna be like, who are these jokers? And you have to find different ways to iterate there. And I could talk about that a lot, but this is broadly like most everybody is trying to get their audience from 5 million people down to a smaller niche than that, right? Look for 10 to 50,000 and you're probably in a good spot.

That's a good way to put it. It's like, yeah, it's almost, it's, you're essentially looking at these services almost like they're like scouts, like, go find my audience. Right. And then you have to sort of piece together. Okay. It doesn't really seem like there's enough of these people out there for the time being. All right. That's super helpful. Are there others? So, you know, I know you used mostly there, we were showing Facebook, right? Is that still the, your preferred platform of choice to do these tests? Are there others that you would recommend? And I guess a couple people also had questions regarding like, you know, does any of these strategies, would they change if it's a B2B or a B2C product?

Sure. So 85% of my clients are B2B. I know Pluck wasn't, but all the other examples I showed today were B2B. The challenge you have with B2B on Facebook is targeting is a little wonky. On LinkedIn, it's really easy, right? I come up with a list of domains and I just target those domains. Job's done.

It's more expensive though, right?

It's more expensive. And this is why I don't start with Google search. Google search is extremely good, but this cost per click and the cost per visit is way higher. And so once you've answered who's my audience, what's their problem, what's my offer, then you do Google search because now it's worth the cost to get the higher intent. Usually speaking, right? Just the static display ads on any platform are very cheap to make. I, I have an in-house designer, but before I had an in-house designer, I would go to Fiverr and pay, I don't know, $30 to get a suite of ads made. So even if you're a terrible designer, you pay $30, you've got the ads, and then you can run them. Job's done. Or even just video ads.

You can go to Canva too, right? I mean, even they make it ridiculously easy for anybody to create a good-looking ad.

Canva has them. I actually have some free ones for download on my website. I should have plugged that. But the idea here is you can make a design really easily and test an idea, and you'll be done in a day, right? Or you'll be done with the creative part in a day. TikTok or YouTube or even LinkedIn video, they're all gonna be higher activation rates, but the expense of making the ads is 1,000x. So I don't start there. As you know more, you can go to other channels where you have to make different creative. Generally speaking, Facebook has everybody, so it's easy. Twitter has a pretty good reach too, but I find fraud traffic on clicks is real high. Facebook, as long as you don't use Facebook's display network, I tend to find the fraudulent clicks are substantially lower. LinkedIn is good B2B, but you pay 3 to 7x as much per click. Google search is good for later on in your journey when you really know what you want to say. And then TikTok and YouTube and all these other channels, they have niche applications that I wouldn't start with if you're not comfortable with performance marketing.

Okay, uh, and here Jason's asking, and this is kind of funny, uh, not a funny question, uh, for you, just I think it's funny just because of all the rebranding, but when you say Facebook, do you mean Meta to include Instagram, or do you literally just mean Facebook? So you said you're, you're opting out of the Facebook, um, display, I think is what you said, right?

Well, so they have also Facebook on Facebook, right? Like in Facebook app or on Facebook mobile. I'll run that. Instagram, I may or may not, depending on the audience. I found like random factoid, if you're running in the, what was it? They were in the physical fitness sector. If you're on Instagram, the click rates there are like 98% fraud, just abysmal. So I turned them off for them, right? But in the fintech space, if you're running on Instagram, like the click frauds are the same as Facebook itself, right? The 10 to 30% range, it's fine. If you see really bad results on any channel, just turn it off rather than going crazy trying to micromanage it.

Right. And these markets can change on an almost daily basis too, right? Like if somebody starts making a lot of money on the fintech ads on Instagram, then it's gonna be the same thing that's happening with the fitness. Exactly. So Oliver asked the question here, and I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this question, but but I'm gonna ask it regardless because I think it's an important point. He's asking, do you recommend testing and creating this funnel before developing your MVP?

Yes, yes, yes. I launched 4 products in the last 12 months. None of them had enough pickup where I thought it was worth taking focus, for me, I should say, right? 4 products for me where I went, maybe this is a cool startup idea. And none of them did so well that I went, let me lose focus off of my agency and build this thing too. Because of, I was able to make a landing page, throw a grand, 2 grand of ads to it and go, oh no, that quickly. I saved myself all the hassle of developing a bad product and then having to find a way to make my ROI on the development costs show up someday.

Exactly. And a lot of this, I mean, you can get away with just— anybody can start doing this tomorrow, right? Just get up a landing page and start getting all the copy together. I mean, you don't need a product. And someone here mentioned also, Jonas is mentioning, you know, the good old concierge MVP route, which essentially just means, you know, you're in the background like the hamster on the hamster wheel doing what it says your product does. You're just doing it manually. The user thinks it's some amazing algorithm, right? And again, these aren't, these aren't long-term strategies. It's just trying to figure out in the beginning before you spend a lot of time and money building something that you have the right value proposition, the right audience and the right channel.

And I am actually increasingly now, I partnered up with a couple product agencies where they get someone come in to have something built. And then they come to me and they say, should it be built? And I'll go run a few experiments, either go, hey, yeah, or, oh, maybe not. Let's think about what you really want to have happen here.

It's a fantastic question. And I love— that's an ethical product agency because a lot of product agencies may just say, hey, we're not here to question, we're just here to build and do what the customer tells us. And they'll gladly take that money, right? So that's a good product agency you found, an ethical one. So A couple questions about tools here. All right. So we talked about some of the platforms. Maria was asking any like quick landing page constructor that you would recommend. And I'll probably maybe just add the premise there too of like, you know, for beginners, for somebody who just is looking at the strategy that you've outlined here and wants to get started on it with this little cost or technical know-how as possible?

So there's two ways to go about it. Because I run an agency and I'm a little more advanced, like technologically, I tend to build everything in WordPress because WordPress will scale up. A lot of people will say build on Carrd. That's C-A-R-R-D dot, I think, C-O. Carrd is just brain-dead simple, almost entirely impossible to screw up. People will say Unbounce, people will say Webflow and like, because Webflow is easy and it's actually really hard, but whatever. But I tend to use WordPress because if it works, I don't wanna have to migrate to a new platform. And WordPress powers my website. It powers little dinky one-page client websites. It powers thewhitehouse.com, right? Like it'll scale anywhere. And so you start there. And if it works, you're good to go. I think a third of the internet is powered by WordPress. It's a pretty good platform.

Something like that. Yeah. Um, at least I know at F5 when we need to just get a page up quickly, it's, it's, it's not the cheapest option, but we use, uh, Squarespace. Um, and especially there it's like you get one page up and then you can just copy it. Um, and launch another page. I mean, we registered a domain name and launched a page yesterday. Right. Yeah. So it's, it's, that's super fast and easy. Are there, Radu's asking any tool recommendations to really track the leads and the customers? I mean, I think if you're, you had mentioned using Unito, right, to kind of connect the different tools together. Is there kind of a combination, a recipe, so to speak, of like tools that you commonly find yourself using for, to take care of all the different components there?

Well, Unito won't connect together your martech tools, right? Unito is literally only productivity apps. So they connect like Wrike and Jira and GitHub, all that. At Unito, our stack was Intercom connected— well, Google Analytics connected to Intercom through Intercom. Intercom connected to HubSpot through Zapier. Like, that was it. That was 5, 6 years ago. Nowadays, you want a tool like Segment which will suck up all the data from everywhere and put it in one place. You will want a tool like Zapier to automate moving things around. And then, I mean, you can— I see a lot of startups, like, the trade-off is you use HubSpot, it's really easy, everything works out of the box. And for one year, the price is real good. And then the next year, they have you by the nose and they're gonna charge you 8 grand. Yeah. And that 8 grand for a year is— that's a real kick in the, in the jimmies. Um, I tend to say find a CRM like Zoho CRM or whatever and put together the data movement you want from Intercom and ProfitWell and Zapier altogether. I'm technologically like, I'm a little more comfortable. Uh, if you just want something that works, you're gonna do it, you're part of an accelerator where you get access to the really cheap plan for, for startups, HubSpot for a year isn't bad. A year from now, you can worry about, can I afford it? Is my data worth $8,000 a year or more a year?

Right.

Borrow that trouble later. I've used HubSpot for a decade. I used to hold literally every certification they have. It's a good tool, but don't, under no circumstances, don't build your website on HubSpot. They'll tell you do it. Don't. They're lying to you. Their website tool is, uh, It's no good.

Yeah, and that's switching costs, not just the single out HubSpot, but a lot of these, there are a lot of these types of offers that, yeah, it's, yeah, it's great if you're successful, it's great. If you're kind of middling, it can cause some issues in the future.

Real headaches. Yeah.

So Yuri was asking, and these are two questions, okay? And it's, and then we'll take a couple more questions, but we do want to wrap things up here shortly. Thank you so much, Trevor, for spending the time today. Yuri was asking, do you think, is a week really realistic for each of these steps? And then kind of on a related note, somebody, I'm sorry, I'm trying to find it here. Oh yeah, Nathan was asking, you know, is this something that you truly believe a real non-tech savvy audience can execute?

So the technology here, the only really tricky part is in the bottom of the funnel. Everything before there on bringing a lead in, checking my site traffic, my optimization rates, that's literally you install Google Analytics and you'll have the information you need. Even if all you did was build the top and middle of your funnel, if the bottom's not great, I mean, I had a startup raise $2 million. The ones who I mentioned had a 0.3% activation rate. They raised $2 million because they proved there was need. With the $2 million, they've now gone in the last 3 months and built a whole new product, right? It was enough to say, I solved the go-to-market issue. Now I gotta make user activation happen. The technological side of this, if all you have is Google Analytics and a Squarespace website, you can solve that part. So the next thing to do then is to say, can I do it as a founder? Now, my agency, we run, we sell top of funnel, middle of funnel, or bottom of funnel packs for people, right? And we run start to finish in a month. So that's 4 weeks. That gives me a little extra time for client approval back and forth. If you don't have a client to approve because it's you, you gain that time back. But on the downside, you're not experts in this subject matter. So it'll take you a while. The first few experiments, those first few weeks, maybe they're 2 weeks. But as you build up more confidence in the tools and more competence in the tools, you'll find that time compresses. It really is writing copy for ads or for a landing page is a day. Designing an ad or a landing page. I think my most recent blog post is I do a live video of me building a landing page from start to finish in half an hour. Yeah. And I am not a great designer. I used to do design years and years ago. Nowadays it's just, let me take a template. Slop the pieces together and then I'm done. And I built the landing page in Figma and then I went and paid somebody, I think $45 to go build a WordPress page out of it. Right? I'm done. There we go. Or you can build it in Canva and push one button and it exports the HTML, like whatever. Okay. The technology part of this isn't the hard part. The discipline part is the hard part.

I agree. And it's a lot, especially when you're getting started too. A lot of it's just getting organized, right? Because you're looking at these different cohorts and different ad sets and different messaging, right? So just kind of getting all that stuff organized. I think there is a little bit of a learning curve in the beginning, but once you get that stuff going, then it's just something you can just continue to repeat. And I think the returns will just get more and more over time. Are there any— Tanya was asking, like, are there any home run examples of kind of like let's call it a lead magnet, or just, you know, maybe it's the one, the biggest piece of advice that you'll give to somebody on that landing page. I know that you mentioned before that, you know, a landing page is only as good sort of as the ads that are pointing to it, right? And if they are not in conjunction with each other, if someone clicked on an ad because to solve this problem, they land on something that's talking about something else, they're gone. You just wasted, you know, 30 cents or whatever. So yeah, are there any other pieces of advice you can give for that landing page to really, you know, not only just make it compelling, but to make sure that it's getting you statistically accurate results and you're not trying to give away a Lamborghini, as you mentioned? Right.

So the idea here is you want to talk about lead magnets are very middle of the funnel late stage business sort of tool, right? Starting with the lead magnet, like I'll see people advertise top of funnel, like, hey, attend our webinar, right? No, I'm not gonna. Sorry. I need to know you first. I need to know, oh, you're smart. Now I'll come to your webinar. That's middle of funnel. Likewise, download my white paper. No, thank you. This is dumb. Oh, I know you. This is interesting. Let me learn more. So at the beginning of the top of funnel, you wanna speak to the pain, right? One of my clients years ago was a really big security technology company. And they, one of the big problems that big companies have with security is everybody's got their own device, right? I've come into the workforce, I've got my mobile phone and I'm connecting it to the Wi-Fi. I'm logging into work apps here on my phone. I'm doing all kinds of stuff, right? The security here when you're, I don't know, Truist Bank is you'll go nuts. And so to be able to say, the emotional appeal was sleep well at night because the edge of your network is secure. Now, if you're not a security expert, the edge of your network, what? Don't worry. To them, That was their pain. They knew this was a problem. And then they came to a landing page that basically showed, you know, I think 5 little steps, right? Here's how it's all secured for you. So the interest was, I would, I would like to not worry about this. Oh, you actually deliver on your promises. Let's take a demo, right? That's what you want to do. You don't want to say, if you get hacked, we'll give you a million bucks. One, at that size business, they don't care about a million bucks. But two, that's falsely inflating your, your click-through rates. What you wanna do is make the actual appeal of your business, sell that actual half-inch hole, and then you find who's actually saying, I need that. That's the numbers you wanna find.

Speak to the pain. We all have pain points. Yes. All right. This has been awesome, Trevor. Thank you so much. Everybody give a, a virtual Round of applause or a thumbs up or whatever you want to do here for Trevor. So you can learn more about Trevor at crowdtamers.com and we will be following up in the next day or two. We just got to get the video together. Trevor, yeah, email me any of the other links that you think you might've mentioned today or other ways that people can kind of dive a little bit more into this method. We will include the deck, we will include the video. And yeah, thank you so much for your time. Today, Trevor. Uh, super appreciate it. And I— hopefully we put a dent into that mission, uh, that you have today.

Uh, what was it?

A million startups to a million revenue by 2028. Okay, well, hopefully we did a little bit to put a dent into that today. All right, thank you everybody so much for joining.

Thanks so much.

Thank you, Trevor. Everybody have a good morning, evening, or afternoon wherever you are.

All righty, take care.