In this instructional video, the presenter explains how to grow a paid community (e.g., on Skool) using paid advertising, primarily Facebook/Meta. He starts by describing the common problem: sending cold traffic directly to a high‑ticket community subscription ($97‑$397/month) results in a high customer acquisition cost (CAC of $200‑$300) and a long payback period of 2‑3 months. To solve this, he proposes a funnel that begins with a low‑ticket "tripwire" product priced $7‑$47, tied to the community’s niche. The funnel includes an order bump ($27‑$37), a two‑step order form to capture leads, an upsell to the community membership ($97/month) and a downsell paid trial (often $1). By front‑loading revenue from the tripwire and bump, the advertiser can immediately offset ad spend, lower CAC to $60‑$70, and achieve faster profit. He also emphasizes building an email/SMS list from the two‑step form and using follow‑up sequences to sell the community to those who didn’t convert initially. The presenter shares a real‑world case study with Frank Kern’s Inner Circle ($397/month) to illustrate why the traditional approach fails and how the tripwire funnel makes the math work. Finally, he advises reinvesting the front‑end revenue into more ads to keep a growth flywheel, and encourages viewers to ask questions in the comments.
Chapters
How you can grow a paid community like school using paid advertising. This is super cool. This is something that I learned after working with people like Frank Kern and Patrick Bet-David and Grant Cardone and many of these folks that they do have communities. And I want to share with you kind of the tips and tricks that you want to use if you want to grow a community like school or any type of paid community using paid advertising, especially on Facebook and Meta. Okay, so that's exactly what I want to share with you right now. Now the The reason why I want to share this with you is because I know that once you've gone the organic route, once you tapped into your audience and whatnot, what's going to happen is that if your community is doing really well, then you want to reinvest some of that money that you're making from that community back into advertising so that you can keep the flywheel going. You can actually grow your community faster. Now, something, and this is a funny story, I remember that I was running ads for Frank Kern. This was like probably I don't know, 5, 6 years ago, and he had this product called the Frank Kern Inner Circle. So it was a community. It was $397 per month, and we were trying to figure it out how to sell it. We were trying to grow it as much as possible, but it definitely was on the higher end on the price point, right? $397 a month and whatnot. And I remember that at that time, I used to do a call every single week called Facebook Friday, and it was a lot of fun. I would coach everyone on Facebook ads, and then I will, you know, we will crack open their ad accounts and it was a lot of fun, but we had a lot of issues when it comes to just sending traffic to a sales page or directly to join the community because again, we couldn't get the math to work. So we had to devise this strategy that I'm going to share with you so that we could actually get people jumping in and make the math work when it comes to paid advertising because advertising, when it comes to advertising, it's all about the math. It's how you make the math work. So the main problem with communities is that a lot of people, they don't want to add another expense or a monthly expense to their business, okay, or to their life. It doesn't matter what you're selling. That's the reality. You know, that's why people, they simply don't like to join continuity programs, okay, unless they know, like, and trust you a lot. And that's why going and building an audience and then selling to them makes a lot of sense. So how do you go with this and how do you make the math work? So let me actually share my screen so that I can share with you what we did to kind of grow a community and what we're doing right now for our clients at scaledriven.com to grow, to help them grow their community as well. So here's my screen right now, and here's what most people are going to do when it comes to running ads, okay? They're gonna have ads running on Meta or Google. This, I'm gonna be focusing on Meta and Facebook, but this can apply to any type of advertising platform that you might think of. So what most people are going to do, they're just going to run ads to a sales page for the community, okay? And then this community, let's say that it's $97 a month, okay? Which I know that many people that are on Skool and some other platforms, they're selling their community for $97 a month. So this is what's going to happen, okay? They're just going to run ads to a sales page that sells the community for $97 a month. Now, there's nothing wrong with this, But here's the thing. The thing is that right now, at the time I'm recording this video, and we're running ads for many infopreneurs and experts and whatnot, you can expect to pay anywhere between $200 to $300 to get a new member into your community. Sometimes less, sometimes more. This is on the business space. Maybe if you sell a B2C offer like how to grow your hair, which we have a client that does that, how to get your spouse back, or whatever, then the costs might be lower. But still, you need to make the math work. It doesn't matter what you're selling at the end of the day. So what's going to happen is that let's say that you're getting a buyer right now for $200 to $300. The main problem with this math is that you need to wait. You need to wait 2 to 3 months to actually start breaking a profit. Okay? The first month, the first second month, you're gonna be the second month of the third month. What's going to happen is that you're going to be paying for that customer that you generated today. Now there's nothing wrong with that if people can, you know, if people stay in your community for let's say six months, but you're still having to float a lot of money up front before that money kicks back in. That's basically how most businesses make, you know, do business and how they acquire customers. They actually lose money on the front end and then they make it back. On the backend with additional offers and whatnot. Now, the reality is that you're going to be capped as to how much money you can pour into ads and how many new members are going to come back, and again, you need to wait. You will need to wait 2 to 3 months to actually start breaking a profit, so you're going to start making a profit from month 3, month 4, and so on. Now, here's a better way, and here's how we were able to fill that community that I was telling you about. Because every time that we would send traffic to a sales page for that community, that was $397 a month. So we would be paying $1,000 or maybe $800 to get a new buyer into that community, which again, we had to wait. So how do we bypass that, right? How do we bypass that and whatnot? And the reason why I'm throwing out those numbers is because again, most people, they are not going to buy, especially if you are sending cold traffic to your sales page, people that do not know who you are, they haven't heard about you and whatnot. So how do we bypass that? Bypass this? Well, it's really simple actually. Let me move this back because we're going to put it around here. What we're going to do is we're going to tweak these slightly. So instead of sending ads directly to the community, what we're going to do is the following. Okay, what I like to do is the following. We're going to create a, what we call a low-ticket offer, or this is also called a tripwire offer. The bottom line is that you want to create a little product That could be a training, could be a guide, could be, you know, could be a call. And I'm going to tell you some ideas to create this product. And here's what we're going to do. We're going to send people to the sales page for that specific product. Now the product needs to be tied to your community, right? So if you have a community on how to grow your hair, how to regrow your hair, then the main product needs to be tied to that community, right? Because the goal is going to be, okay, now that you have this product, now that you have this training, wouldn't you want to be held accountable? Wouldn't you want to share your wins with other people? So that's how you segue into the next offer, which is going to be the community. So you need to brainstorm a little bit, but the main point is that we're going to do a tripwire. This is called a tripwire or a low-ticket offer from anywhere between $7 all the way up to $47. Okay? Now, what's going to happen here is that people understand that this is a one-time payment. So it's going to be much easier for them to take action. This is going to be more like an impulse buy versus a $97 a month commitment, right? And again, they generally don't know who you are. They haven't heard about you, so they need to trust you a little bit before they dive into the ask, which is the $97 a month. So what we found is that having a low-ticket product on the front end, meaning sending traffic to that low-ticket product, actually kind of makes things a little bit easier and better for the business owner and for the buyer as well. So this sales page for the tripwire, again, this could be a mini course. And by the way, since you have a community, you have a lot of information in that community already, okay? You have, maybe you're doing a monthly call, maybe you're doing courses for that community, maybe you keep on feeding it good stuff. So you can actually splinter out something out of that community and package that as a product, right? And again, when you're thinking about this, think about how I can introduce my community in the product, in the product itself, and then sell it, you know, on that upsell, okay? The community needs to solve the problem of accountability, follow-up, and motivation and all of that. So here's the sales page for the tripwire. Now we're going to sell it for $7 to $47. Now here's some additional elements that I'd like to add to this page. I like to have an order bump, okay? An order bump for around the same price, okay? So $27 to $37, okay? Again, you might need to split test. You might need to test the pricing a little bit. The order bump It can be another thing. It could be a cheat sheet. It could be a set of spreadsheets. It could be your best supplement list to grow your hair. Whatever that is, that could be an order bump. Okay? It's a simple add-on to that main offer. And what's going to happen here also, and you can achieve this, by the way, with any type of landing page builder, you want to also collect leads. How do you do this? Okay? It's really simple. What you do is you do a 2-step, what's called a 2-step order form. On this page. And again, you can build this— pretty much any type of landing page builder allows you to have what's called a 2-step order form. Now maybe you've seen this, you visit a page and you have the sales page for that product, and then you put name, email, phone number first, and then you click a button and you go to the next page or the next step, right? And then on that step you input your credit card information or you go to PayPal, whatever. What happens there is that your actually capturing leads. So this strategy will also allow you to build your email list, which is super powerful. Okay, so you're gonna collect leads through a, through a 2-step order form, and then we're going to sell them to the sales page for the community. This, it's called a one-time offer. Okay, a one-time offer for $97, or an upsell. I'm gonna put it upsell, reflects a little bit better, for $97. What's going to happen here is that now that people said yes to this, it's much easier for them to say yes to this $97 a month. Okay. Now, another thing that I like to personally add to this funnel is a downsell for a trial. Okay. It can be a free trial or it can be a paid trial, which is my favorite. It could be, generally speaking, I do a $1 trial for this. Okay. So it's a $1 trial for this community because people tend to stick longer if you do a paid trial versus a free trial, okay? But what's going to happen is that your cost to acquire customers on ads on Facebook is going to go down because again, this is more like an impulse buy. So you might be paying again on the business world right now, we're paying anywhere between $60 to $70 to acquire a customer and whatnot. At the same time, we're collecting leads, but then what happens is that between these $47 and these $37, if they take the whole thing, now we are at $84 versus $70. So that means that you're breaking a profit here. But the main point is that if they join the community, which around 10% of people, 10% of buyers will join the community, then every time somebody renews, that's pure profit. That is pure 100% profit. Even if they don't take the order bump, if they take the community, that is pure profit for you. So it's much easier to grow because now you grab that money, you put it back on ads, and you keep this flywheel running. And then guess what? For everyone that didn't— now we're gonna have a thank you page here, okay? Now for everyone that didn't take this upsell, which is gonna be most people, or this downsell, what do we do? Now we follow up with them, okay? And this follow-up can be done through email, can be done through SMS, can be done through whatever. So that you can sell the community for $97 a month. So now we're building a list also. So we're gonna put this bad boy here. Okay, so we're building a list, we're collecting leads, we're also, uh, following up with everyone that didn't buy the community. And this follow-up sequence can be as much as you would want. Okay, now again, you don't need to build this all at once, but this is the strategy that I like to use to actually grow paid communities because You'll get buyers, you'll get money back a lot faster. It takes a little bit more setup than just sending traffic to your landing page, but it takes a little bit more setup, but it's so much worth it because this means that you will be collecting leads, you will be liquidating your ad costs right away, and then all of your community is pure profit. Okay? So I hope that this is helpful. Let me know if you have any questions, any comments, anything that comes up. I'm here for you. I'm here to answer them. I read all comments. So let me know somewhere around here, whatever you see in this video, so that I can help you with that. And I hope that you have tons of success growing your community on Skool or whatever it is that you're building. Thank you so much for watching. I'll talk to you soon.
