How we used a $1 Guarantee to Break $75k MRR

please welcome Travis Chapel what's going on guys and gal how are you guys how's the conference been sweet sweet well uh as he mentioned we're going to talk about the one dollar guarantee to break 75 camera I'm gonna try to get through this as quickly as I can to see if we can get through to maybe some questions here at the end um but uh you have to forgive me if I'm a little bit slow I just got back from

Cancun on vacation just like for software Founders you guys know we don't really take vacations often so I'm feeling nice and relaxed how to get some coffee to wake me up a little bit but we're gonna we're gonna roll through this okay so the next 20 minutes dollar offer structure how to increase your average order value and then where to go find some traffic for the funnel okay so this is just all in a one funnel that we created uh with the with the startup that that I'm running called gestio where basically we connect podcast guests and podcast hosts more or less

and there's a lot more detail in that but we'll jump in here in a second so dollar trial funnel um how to structure your irresistible offer how to script your high converting vsl even if you're not copywriter and then we'll take a look at some of our numbers from when we're running traffic Direct directly into this offer okay how many of you have an actual like working funnel up and running currently okay how many of you do not know what I mean when I say funnel okay cool just want to make sure all right

so and it's important to note so 127 was all of 2021 we started development 2020 we did like soft launch 2021 just kind of brought on some users tested got some feedback a little a little bit of Revenue here or there and then and then January is really where we started to to kind of grow organically what we did is we launched a back end offer in January that allowed us to be able to get back some of our customer acquisition costs and then uh and then that's when we plowed it back into building out this

this dollar trial funnel okay and then that was in February and as you can see that kind of just kept growing up from there July we had a little bit of a Down month obviously I built these slides uh when we only had June July July we had a little bit of a Down month but then in August we closed at 2 20. um so it's still been kind of constantly growing throughout throughout the full year so first off is your irresistible offer now this is hands down the most important part of any funnel that you're going to put together any idea that you have it's

all about the offer the offer structure okay so I put this book up here because if you have not read it you're doing yourself and your company and your customers and your family a disservice um it is like a complete handbook on how to model or how to structure your offers and he goes way way way way more into detail than obviously I can with quick 20 minute presentation but I put up some of the like core things that I focus on when we're building out the offer number one is your Market if you don't have a clear understanding of your Market you cannot solve the

problems that they have and not just in terms of like the total addressable size of the market but also in terms of whether or not the product that you have is solving a pain whether it's a painkiller or whether whether it's a supplement is it a need to have or is it a nice to have um because especially as we move into more of like kind of an unsure economy Shaky Ground economy you know best case scenario right now people are going to start not buying the things that are not necessary for them to buy if that makes

sense they're going to stop with the supplements they're going to stop with the little add-ons and the little extras they are only going to spend money on the things that they absolutely need so your offer needs to speak to the need of that of that particular market and if you don't know the needs of that market because you haven't done the work on figuring out what the market is everything else is going to be way different way more difficult from there so start with the market and and by the way the Market's most important part of the offer because if you have a starving Market it doesn't matter what the offer is like if you sell crappy tacos but you're selling on him at 3am outside of

the bar did a bunch of drunk then you're probably gonna sell out of tacos every night right they don't have to be good you have a starving Market a literal starving Market they're going to buy them regardless now obviously you don't want to have crappy tacos you want to have a good product as well but it speaks to the power of first finding a market that really needs the thing that you have to offer to them so start with the market keep your offer low ticket but free because this is talking about a specific like offer on the front end of a funnel that you're selling to cold traffic or at least semi-called traffic even if

you're doing you know JV launches uh what was your name again Rob well it's what Rob was talking about with the JV launches and and joint webinars and things like that um keep keep the front the front end really low ticket but don't do it for free because you still want to get the credit card information so that you can you know put them on a rebuild because everybody here is doing mrr ARR everybody's focused on let's get recurring billing we want people who like who who not only like us enough to give us money once but love us enough to continue to give us give us money because our products so valuable right

so keep it low ticket but don't make it free when I say low ticket 99 bucks and less especially if you're selling to cold traffic anything higher than 99 direct to like a vsl or landing page or something like that you're gonna have difficult time converting to cold traffic um make it so good that they can't say no this is the I immediately put the next thing down as soon as I put the so good they can't say nothing because immediately when I say that people's mind instantly goes to price and it's not about price it's about value so whether you're selling it for 99 bucks

or for a dollar the idea is you have to overwhelm them with value and make it to where when they're looking at their offer they're reading through the bullet points and they're trying to figure out the deliverables and figure out if it's something that's worth the risk of them pulling out their credit card while they're scrolling through Instagram or Facebook or whatever then it has to be something that's so good that they can't say no to it it means it has to be overly valuable for what you're asking in return and completely risk free there's there's no risk for them if they take it and so to give you an example this was the vsl outline the actual

script for our dollar trial offer that we put together okay um so start with the hook the promise guarantee social proof call to action and then you can add a couple things at the end of this at the end of the CTA there if you want to do a little bit longer one you could have that be like more like a soft CTA like hey if you you know heard everything that you need to hear then go ahead and sign up right now uh but if you want to you know stick around for you know 90 more seconds put another hook in there make sure that they stick around for a certain period of time um then I'm gonna you know show you three more things about blah blah blah

blah and then you go into a little bit more social proof a few more you know client testimonials case studies and then put that after the soft CTA do a hard CTA ride again at the end of that and then really try to close people into it um so this was our offer so like I was saying one of our core offers is we help get people booked on podcasts to promote their offers uh to uh uh you know that their SAS founder coach consultant whatever you get booked on podcasts it's really really high quality super warm

traffic uh that you can get just by being a guest on somebody else's podcast it brings you credibility Authority trust recognition a lot of different things like that so that's essentially what we do as a company we have an agency that does that and then the software does it as well so the to pay attention to is this part right here so here's how it works um so obviously at the at the top very direct this is called direct vsl it's not indirect we're not speaking to people who are just problem aware and trying to get them to become solution aware and then product aware we're speaking to people who are already aware that they have a problem they're already aware that we're

trying to solve that problem and then now we're just trying to convince them that we're the best solution to that problem does that make sense cool so start with the hook and then we come into the promise and then here's how it works part so sign up for a dollar trial of gestio pro by clicking the button below then once you set up your profile all you have to do is pitch 10 shows on booking you as a guest over the next 30 days if that doesn't get you at least one booking so if you use our software and it doesn't do what we say that it can do then my

concierge team will step in and find a booking for you guaranteed so regardless of whether or not it works with the software you will get your next podcast booking for one dollar now we go into uh let's see put that in perspective so now I want to like contextualize that a little bit I actually paid graduate level research to put together a comprehensive report on the top booking agencies out there but like podcasts booking agencies specifically I literally paid like 4 000 bucks just to get this report done so that I could put

it in the vsl so we had data to you know back up what we're talking what we were saying to people so on average it's four to five hundred bucks per appearance so again this is what I'm talking about with overwhelming with value it's not about the price point it's about the value so if I'm saying like I can get you a booking for a dollar and if you do that anywhere else unless you have a bunch of contacts with a bunch of podcasters which is not likely then you're going to pay an agency four to five hundred bucks every time you want one of those you pay me a dollar and I'll give you the same thing okay then you can keep using the software because most of the time when people actually get in and do the things that we're

telling them to do inside of the software they can get more than one booking per month for 97 bucks a month so we want them to get in and start using the software take the actions that we want them to take and if it does not do the thing that we promised that it would do we're gonna do it for you anyway guarantee no questions asked okay does that make sense does that sound like a pretty good offer that this is this is the key to getting people inside of the funnel before you can start then throwing in like here's something else that we could potentially do for you also we do this and maybe that might be

more interesting for you or whatever okay so hook promise guarantee social proof CTA any questions on this before I move on all right so this was the result for us while we were running this offer this is by like I said directly to cold traffic so we didn't do any affiliate stuff we didn't do any launches we didn't have much of a warm list to start out with when we started this it was just a few Facebook ads that we ran on Facebook and Instagram and we put

traffic directly into uh vsl that sold a one dollar trial and then this is what happened with that trial conversion rate was about 42 uh so the the people who took the dollar offer 42 of them stayed on for the first month and obviously we're still working on the numbers in terms of how long they typically stay on but it's looking to be a lot longer than that uh which is obviously good for LTV now this is the key to the funnel because we're all we're talking about how to get

your CAC how to get your CAC back as quickly as you can okay because this is in my opinion the key to scaling and I think everybody would agree with that the sooner you can get that back the sooner you can go spend more money to go acquire more customers okay uh so let's just go and jump into it this is a friend of mine kind of a mentor as well Joel Marion he sold his company BioTrust as a supplement company uh for multiple nine figures uh in December and when I interviewed him for my podcast because how I got into all

this I'm just a door-to-door sales guy turn podcaster attorney software founder weird kind of story but when I talked to people like this and interviewed a bunch of like really successful people from my show I started learning a bunch of things and this is one of the things that always stood out to me and Joel told me this and he said I effectively lose money better than anybody else I was like what do you mean by that because it doesn't sound good like I can lose money really quickly too you know but I don't get paid as much as you would seems so I'm doing something incorrectly all he meant was that to

your point as well Rob so Joel built his company mostly through affiliate um affiliate marketing and all he meant by that was that he knew his back end numbers so well he knew his LTV so well and what eventually those customers would end up buying from him that he was able to actually pay out more than 100 percent affiliate commissions on the front end offer that he put in front of people so if you're an affiliate you have you're selling a 50 product and you're getting paid a hundred dollar commission to sell a 50 product that's a

pretty good deal so he was able to attract the best Affiliates in the world and in his first 12 months in business with supplement company needed over 100 million dollars in Revenue in 12 months with a physical product over 100 million in Revenue all because he knew that with his email marketing skills that's essentially like his core skill set his email us over 20 million people uh he knew that if they came onto the list that he was good enough and knew the proper upsells and path and and and and understood the customer Journey so

well that they were eventually going to stick around for X number of months and would eventually become profitable for him to do that um okay so this is the overall numbers of uh like page views of the opt-ins that came through the people that came uh into the uh the first page which is 369 right there so that's the dollar trials now that first upsell this is where obviously we made back the majority of the money that we're spending in advertising okay so we spent

uh uh we spent right around that number on ads during this period of time and obviously this dollar trial if you do the math on this 369 times one dollar is a lot less than 3446 right so we immediately had an order bump on the first page which if you do not have an order bump you're you're losing you're losing money immediately okay it's it's free money put something there make it valuable make it something that again

make it something they can't say no to we had a dollar trial and we had a 27 order bump and the order bump take rate bumped us up to the point where we had thirty four hundred dollars just on the initial order form from a one dollar trial so like our average order value heading into the rest of the funnel was already a 15x of what the dollar originally was right so the upsell this was a crazy good offer once again we uh it's 97 bucks a

month to be to have gestio Pro what we did is if you bought on that page we gave you annual access to gustio Pro for 4.97. couldn't get anywhere else that's 60 off of wherever you're going to find it but what it allowed us to do is collect twenty five thousand dollars on a funnel took absolutely dead cold traffic that never heard about me or my platform in their life before that makes sense so we put another irresistible offer after an

irresistible offer but the Fulfillment on that is just the software right so we were making the annual enough you know 13 take rate on that to bump us up to where we were like okay now this is actually making serious money and actually bringing back some of the money that we're spending on acquiring these customers to begin with then as like a as a a Fail-Safe we plugged in a down sell after this upsell so we had annual upsell after the dollar trial and then we went

to a down sell on a quarterly so we sold quarterly at 297 a quarter after they said no to the 497 upsell as one more chance to be like all right look before you go here's one more opportunity to do this and we're going to throw in this bonus or this discount or whatever it is if you want to try us out quarterly instead of annually and then that brought in another three thousand dollars so every single piece of this why is so important is the average order value started bumping up and run and getting really close to what our CPA

actually was right so our our the closer you get your aov to your CPA that's how you start being able to particularly scale um so I'm I'm getting I'm getting notification I'm going too slow here so I'm gonna try to run through a couple of things and if you have questions stop me afterwards okay um so there's the order bump credibility code is just a training that I put together on how to effectively use this in your marketing and stuff like that um and then there was the uh one year this is what after we bumped it up it was actually 497 when it was really

converting the best it was at 497. um and then this is the this was like the really big thing so we have an agency we built an agency offering on the back end to say basically like look if you don't have time to use the software yourself you're having you have a massive business and you're and you're making good money and you don't have the time to use the software let us get you booked on podcasts for you we'll do it all completely done for you and so we put this on the thank you page it's not even like a part of the actual funnel it's on the thank you page so you click

play and it's like hey thanks for doing this you know it's regular thank you page here's how to get your stuff make sure you check your email you know check spam blah blah but then it was like a quick call to action to hey if you're doing seven figures eight figures plus there's an application right here to be a part of our agency and so this is really what ended up outperforming the entire funnel this one thank you page brought in over forty thousand dollars directly within 60 days of launching it and we the people that jump into our agency are 12 month contracts so our contract value is hundreds of thousands

of dollars all on a one dollar trial offer does that make sense all right cool we're gonna run through this real quick okay so lastly is traffic so here's a quick warm audience hand raiser email that we did uh that converted pretty well to the people that we had already existing on our list don't don't let the people that you're paying to acquire go dead okay I did I made a mistake in one of my businesses where we were paying a bunch of money we're doing a webinar bringing in traffic adding people to our list and

then I just did not engage them properly and the list went dead like eight months later and it was it was just a show excuse my French um so make sure that you're always staying in touch with the list because stuff like this can work extremely well it's just a quick one-liner to say hey in case anybody's interested here's something that we're doing okay leverage Opa this is what we do so I had to mention this one other people's audiences uh podcast stages blogs Publications do not underestimate these traffic sources especially because they're so much easier to go get than a

lot of the things that you would think would be more difficult than that like the the getting booked on podcasts getting on stages like this or or doing guest posts and blogs or being featured in Publications all these things are ways to get other people's audiences without having to pay a bunch for them okay so this is just an example of me being on Ryan pineda's Show recently he's a kind of real estate guy you can see the accounts reached the the likes the comments the shares and the saves that were all about uh the thing that I do we got three or four

applications in on this uh this was very recent like a week or two ago three or four applications in I have like three or four calls on my calendar schedule of people who all have seven or eight figure businesses will probably get at least one of those people maybe two of them and it was just from me going on somebody's podcast okay and then the big deal is the three three reasons cold traffic is important besides the actual direct results that it gives you now this guy right here is a pretty controversial dude I don't know if you guys all know Grant or have followed him

or whatever okay regardless if you like him you don't like him he's a very very good marketer and uh I did this Mastermind in Cabo with him and about 25 others a couple weeks ago and this was one thing that I was one of my biggest takeaways uh from from this weekend was when he said that he was talking about advertising and he was and he was like people get it wrong people only advertise to acquire new customers and he was like acquiring new customers is at the bottom of the list for me in terms of why it's important for me to be

advertising and and putting our brand out there um he said the number one thing is you it's your brand it's your company it's more awareness around the um uh the things that you're doing more it's just it's all about impressions the because better known beats the better one all the time right best known beats best you guys ever heard that before if you're if you're the best known solution you're going to get more business than the one who maybe is the best solution even if they're better than you are okay so your

brand number two is your competitors you want your competitors anybody that's thinking about anybody that's thinking about doing something similar to what you're doing or anybody that is already doing something that you're doing and they're like spying on you you want to give them as much evidence that you guys are crushing it as you possibly can okay because you want to discourage like if you're especially for the you know you have first mover Advantage you don't want a bunch of other people coming in your market and if they think that you're you know flailing and not solving the problem effectively that gives them

an opportunity to move in and take some of your Market the last thing is your business development and this has been one of the biggest things for me is like advertising on Facebook Instagram just for webinars or whatever has brought me uh has brought me I mean we raised over a million last year for like a pre-seed round uh to just get the first version of the software out and probably over a hundred thousand dollars of that came from investors that saw an ad that had nothing to do with advertising or or investing in my company it was just because they kept seeing ads over and

over and over again and so I just went to an industry conference for Me podcast movement's a massive podcasting conference like three or four thousand people and I don't know a dozen plus people while I was there I came up to me was like Travis I keep seeing your ads I keep seeing your ads I keep seeing your ads let's do business let's talk some time like even the people that aren't clicking on it and and filling out information and going through the funnel and getting emails and signing up and taking the annual and the dollar like any even the people that aren't doing that they're still seeing you on their feed and it's always going to be good

for your brand so it's why I say like you know build grow your brand and your business as much as you can and any other channel that you can and maybe start with warm traffic especially if you're bootstrap but cold traffic to me like is always the best for predictable scaling um because it brings you so much more than just customers it brings you everything else that customers buy themselves don't bring you okay so dollar trial increase your aov and then go and get traffic I know I went through

that really quickly so does anybody have any questions for me real quick um what's a good resource that you recommend on how to script ESL um there's a lot of them out there that one actually one of our clients is a good copywriter to follow Stefan Georgia writes a lot of uh uh direct response copy I would say I would say that would be a really good one at the end of the day at the end of the day if you follow that outline and then just watch good

converting vsls that was the best way that I did it was like a few friends that were really good at doing vsls and I just watched like six or seven of them wrote out a quick outline and then just recorded a couple different versions of it um and had a couple people look at it but yeah it's it's most important just like you don't have to be crazy good like you know crazy um unique with it or whatever it's just direct directly speak to the problem that you're solving and then give them an offer to solve that problem that they cannot say no to it's

the most important part of it doesn't have to be 35 minutes long just simple direct but make sure they know that when they leave you can solve their problem cool well I think I think that's my time so I apologize but I appreciate you guys for for coming out I appreciate it [Applause]