A (1:49)

So now tell me about how you get customers.

B (1:50)

Basically, like I said, it's a book funnel. And 85% of our customers come from buying the book.

A (1:55)

I'm familiar with book funnels.

B (1:58)

Another 10% comes from conferences, meetups, guest podcasting. We're beefing that up. We're trying to diversify our channels. And then right now, affiliates and charity partnerships are kind of in their infancy, but we do get about 5% of customers there.

A (2:12)

So what are the problems, Roda?

B (2:13)

So our biggest problem right now, single channel advertising. We're heavily dependent. Like I said about 85% on Meta. We're kind of hitting a ceiling at 100 grand a month. I spent 150 grand last month and it got 10% extra book sales. It is a loss leader. It's currently taking us about six months to break even. Even with the back end.

A (2:33)

Yeah.

B (2:34)

Second problem, a lot of skepticism in this industry largely because we are associated with travel hacking. A lot of people assume this is a lot of trouble to save 10 or 20%. The actual savings when you travel the jegut way is more like 70 to 90%. When people plan a trip, the odds of them getting a great deal on that trip and they've already painted themselves into a corner, say they want to go to Italy in June. The odds of that being a good deal is kind of like placing a chip on roulette.

A (3:00)

Yeah.

B (3:01)

Most times it's going to be very expensive. Every once in a while, like one in 20 times they get lucky. The Jegu way of travel is you find the good deals, there are thousands of them out there. You plan your vacation around them and. And it's like placing a chip on the roulette table after the marble drops.

A (3:15)

Anything else that you have.

B (3:17)

So knowing that you probably have more points than you know what to do with, but not enough time to figure out what to do with them, we put a little itinerary together that includes a Singapore suite that typically goes for five to ten grand apartment. That's another five to ten thousand dollars flight one way. And we basically put an itinerary around the world that would normally cost about $70,000 for the five countries that we found. And, and we showed you how to do it on points for 1800 bucks out of pocket.

A (3:44)

Love this for us.

B (3:45)

So basically we're going to send you from Vegas to San Francisco to Singapore to Abu Dhabi, then to London and back home through Mexico City.

A (3:56)

Great images.

B (3:57)

And all of these are first class flights that would have normally costed either $70,000 or 7 million points. And we put them together for about a million points.

A (4:08)

It's a clear savings prop. You have to spend money in order to spend money to save money type thing. What percentage of your sales right now

B (4:15)

are outbound versus inbound right now? So we just implemented some aggressive outbound. Like within the past month it's been probably 60, 40, 60% inbound, 40% outbound. We'd like to really ramp that up.

A (4:29)

That'll probably be a central feature of what we're talking about. What do you want to have happen with the business? You want to double it. Do you want to sell the business or you just want to make money with it?

B (4:36)

And zero interest in selling this business?

A (4:37)

Right. Well then this makes it way easier.

B (4:39)

I just like to impact twice as many people's lives.

A (4:41)

So now that we've gone through Joel's business, I'm going to work through core areas where he's stuck and what we can do to fix them. And for each area, I'll break down the exact principles and tactics Joel can use to scale, which are likely going to apply to your business as well. So let's get started with number one, which is being clear whether Joel has a supply constrained business or demand constrained business. I have a bunch of ideas. You want to come on this side and we'll utilize this brand new beautiful paper desk that my team made for me. Very excited.

B (5:05)

Let's do it.

A (5:06)

My first triage question that I'm always thinking through is this is supplier demand constraint business. And so this is demand constrained business. Like you can handle more customers. So there's two ways we can think about this. So if we have this from a decision tree perspective, right. It's like, okay, so this is a demand constrained business. Got it. So in order to fix demand we can go new channel. I know that you're considering doing like the second channels. I feel like there's a lot more that you can milk on the existing one. Okay. By like a lot. Just because the nature of this offer is so broad. This is the type of offer that can probably scale to like a hundred thousand plus a day and spend. It's like, okay, so we have new channel. We have lower cac which underneath of this we can do through CRO. So conversion optimization. Or we can do this for better creative or offer. So this is, this is me just kind of sharing how I'm thinking through this. So we can get that or we can just spend more. Right. Is always a fun one. But given the fact that you said you've had these constraints on whenever you do spend more, you like quickly hit a wall, which is fairly common, then it's going to probably be a combination of one of these three things. I'm basically going to focus on those pieces because these are basically the three things that are going to unlock that. So right off the bat with better. Where are you getting your ugc? So user generated content because you have the most visual type of product. The image that I saw was just like you and the team, my God, people take pictures on their vacations and I feel like your groups probably have Crazy. You know, them in front of the, the Taj Mahal and you know, whatever else. I feel like if you have that kind of like a TikTok style, like check out this trip that I just booked for under X. I think that would destroy.

B (6:41)

So like video generated content.

A (6:44)

Yeah. Like selfie style. Like you. I mean I'm sure you probably get all these like, think about these Instagram pages that just show like trips and like all these kind of like hacks and stuff. And a lot of them have like 1 million, 2 million plus and like they're very active, like super engaged. I would model those style videos. Michael, can you just try and pull up a good travel page on Instagram? So this style just like this. Okay. With your real like. And that's a real person. You can tell she's not some model. It's like a real person. And if just had a pin thing on the top that was like, I did all this for under $1800. I think it will work really well

B (7:20)

and just run all of it, test it all. And I mean again, we can run it organically like this.

A (7:25)

It's so visual. This is so visual. And people watch these so they can just vicariously live through it. And it's like, you don't have to live through this. You can do this. Okay. That's compelling. The highest point of leverage, I think in this business. I'm going to change some backend stuff too. But like if you unlock the UGC loop, this thing will crash. And so I think. Are you on TikTok?

B (7:45)

Ah, embarrassingly low following.

A (7:48)

Okay. There's some businesses that it's tougher. If I have a tax savings business, it's like maybe I have a business owner talking about his tax saving. It's not very visual. Right. Maybe get some emotional about the story and things like that. And that's the angle we'd have to take there. This is so visual. What we need to do is, number one, we need to incentivize people to post the reels inside of the story. And when they do that, they get to unlock some sort of checklist that you hold back. And people like, how do we get access to that? It's like, oh, post a montage of your trip that you're able to do in under 60 seconds and here's how you do it and you can show them how to put it together. And I think a lot of people would want to do that. And you already probably have a ton of them anyways, but just ask for permission to use them. And then you can get the basically in exchange for permission, they get this extra training or they get this extra thing. I think that what we'll unlock this is a decentralized content machine. So instead of you trying to be like, okay, we have to go make more ads, it's like every week we have 20, 30 videos that are coming from our community of the trips that they were able to take. And every week we blast all 30 videos up there and we see where the winners are. And then boom, once we have the winners, then we just juice them and then we try and cut them a bunch of different ways. Okay, so the second thing. So the UGC loop, right? I'll go into more detail in a second, but that's kind of like the big thing. Number one second one is something I call Kaleidoscope. But basically I know you have one piece of creative. Do you want to pull it up, Michael? The highest converting one of all time. So one of the interesting things we can do here is like, so this image, it's like there's 20 ways to Sunday we can do this. So like you had the AI versions of me that you did in all those. I want you to take this image and then aify a bunch of different versions of this. It's like, okay, how do I make this black and white? How do I do. With a sepia filter, take this and put it into AI and say, make a three second video of this image. Which it would then just make a 3 second video of it even though it's just an image. Let's do a cartoonized version and let's do cartoon in this version and Ghibli and let's do like, because right now that's trending. And so that will give you 20, 30 variations of. Whenever you do have your winner, blast the hell out of how many more slices and angles that you can take on it. In terms of the copy, what I found in scaling campaigns is that when you do have copy that wins, you don't need to change it nearly as often as you think. So like when we ran the school games all last year and pushed it really, really hard, we had one version of the copy that we ran for six months and then a second version of the copy that we ran for three in a different company that we own, we spend, gosh, couple hundred thousand a day. And after five years, there's three hooks, there's three. Like when you find the winners, you just run them. And so I think so part of it is just like putting your Mind at risk of like, what do we need to do this difference? Like, no, you found your winner. So now we just need to like create different versions of the creative on the other hand, versus that changes all the time. But with the copy and the messaging it's like we just leave that if it's, if it's working, it's like you can just keep using that over and over and again. But I do think this UGC loop will be really big. And then once we have the winners, we kaleidoscope the hell out of them. Which is like how. Which is like AI. We have filters that we can do, we have, you know, remakes, which is, can we take this video and then just refilm it? Because these are, a lot of these are gonna be video based. And so what's interesting about video versus static is that statics work better for a lot of businesses because they suck at video. Not because video doesn't work, but good video beats images. Yeah, good video beats images, but images be bad videos. And so most people are like, oh, statics work. Like we can't get videos to work. Only statics work. It's just because the videos weren't good. And it's the same thing as people who make content. And like, oh, content doesn't work. It's like, no, good content works but bad doesn't. Do you make shorts or anything like that?

B (11:20)

Very painful and slow growth.

A (11:21)

But yeah, you need to just get one hyper caffeinated 20 year old who lives and is brain rotted. Gen Z. See, see I'm using, I'm using this, I'm using the slang, right? Who just really is native. They're plugged in to the platforms because they'll be able to look immediately at your stuff and be like, oh, this is why it's not working. It's like, okay, the hook's off. Like you're not using trending audio. You're trying to make these look professional, but they just need to be like iPhone selfie style. And we can use like a pinned comment on the top of the video. There's so many like meme versions of this. It's like you can travel around the world for less than $1,000. Prove me wrong. And then it's like, and then you'd have troll city right underneath of it. Like there's so many different contextual like trending things that are happening right now. I would say that the number one biggest thing that's limiting the business is better creative. So typically when there's a cap Sometimes it's a money cap which is like we just can't afford to spend more and I'll cover that in a second. But like the creative unlock is usually why someone gets limited. We've scaled to $10,000 there, whatever it is, and it's like, okay, $10,000 a day is all we can spend based on how good this creative is, right? And so the easiest, because I know you come from an ad background. So if you're familiar with the Old Spice commercial, the guy on the horse, my theoretical view of the world is that if you have a product that everyone could buy, then there is one ad that is good enough that could convert everyone. So that ad took Old Spice from a small player in the men's body wash into the majority of the market with one campaign. That campaign literally took the entire market for them. And it was because it was so good that it could convert everyone. Typically the limits are just that. As if you think about how Facebook or Meta spends, it's like they're going to go to the most interested people first because you're optimizing for conversions and they'll be like, okay, these are probably a little bit less interested but still kind of adjacent. And then this is like your CPA starts going up. Okay, now there's this way bigger market over here and then as soon as you hit break through this wall, your CPA goes up because the creative's not good enough. This UGC loop plus 20 year old crack addict who lives on his phone or her phone is probably the unlock here because the best way to test this out is start getting more aggressive with your short form content. They can make these as obviously like organic posts. And then when you find your winners, just take that same Post, add a 5 second CTA at the end and then run that as an ad. It crushes. It's a double dip because you're posting content and then you don't have to waste any money. And then when one crushes you take that boom, post it and then run it. So that is the content winners. Also, I'm going to bet something interesting here. This is Alex just making a bet with no informed data. Part of the reason that you have avatars that are retirees and business owners is that you are a retiree business owner and they see your ads. And also Facebook's AI reads who's in the ad and then displays the ads whether or not you choose to target them based on who is most likely to convert. And likeness is one of the strongest predictors of Conversion. It doesn't take an AI genius to be like, oh, we've got an Asian lady. Let's show this to Asian ladies. Because Asian ladies are more likely to convert, but they do it through the algorithm. So it's not racial profiling, but if you want to have more diversity in terms of the types of customers. And this is also, like, you think about this little loop here. Well, there's another one of these that's for Asian ladies, and another one of these that's for each of those. And so, like, you could probably get to kind of saturation on each of the circles, even with your existing quality of creative, by just having a diversity of avatars in the ads themselves.

B (14:43)

And so even though we could still target the exact same audience, but the algorithm will go target the subject of the images.

A (14:50)

Yes. Because they're the most likely to convert, and they're the most likely that you'll keep spending because it's converting. So I'm going to write a bunch of these down, and then we're going to just prioritize which one is the most likely. But AI avatars right now are just about good enough to be used. And so you can have these kind of like, TikTok ified AI videos that are 15, 30 seconds of, like, guys, you won't believe it. I just went around the world for under $1200. And the craziest thing is it did an objection number one. Objection number two. Objection number three. And the best part is I got it with this book, and I found it on a random ad. Totally changed my life. That's it. And then it goes straight to the book funnel.

B (15:27)

I think that'll crush all of this. Means we don't have to do all

A (15:30)

of that other stuff. More. Yeah, more and better first if we can. It's just the nature of what you sell is so visual. And people naturally take lots of pictures. They want to share food and travel. This is super visual. Tons of people post about this stuff. Travel. Tons of people post about this stuff. And I would look at the top travel pages, look at the most viral content they have, and model that for my ad. 7 hidden gems that you've never heard of before. And it shows these, like, crazy montages, and those things get, like, gazillions of views. All we have to do is just weave the fact that we have a pinned. How do you see the seven gems for under $1,000?

B (16:00)

Okay.

A (16:01)

Right. Just. We just have to just layer a filter of, like, our offer in front of it. And I Think it'll I, I think you have so much creative. Like if this is the creative that's been running the business, there's so much room, I think it looks authentic. But again, this is where I think the UGC loop will be big. So one is you can use it with AI avatars, you don't even have to ask for them. But I think the UGC loop is like probably the faster, easier, immediate thing that you can do without having to learn, you know, new stuff. I think that this is really the front end stuff. Like this is how do we lower CAC with just better creative. So this gives us more from the customers, this expands and multiplies that even more. This gives us a content loop that the 20 year old crack addict is going to be able to make by modeling travel pages. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10 stage roadmap from 0 to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business. What the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this. And it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description but you just go acquisition.com roadmap just enter info and it'll spit it right back to you. All free. The meat of this is still going to be the sales team. So the fact that you started last month I think is encouraging. I do think that we can improve dialer pickup rates. What's the benefit of being on the call?

B (17:28)

We want to make them, help them get as much out of the book for the people who don't qualify. Like if they spend less than 5,000 a year, they just aren't going to have the muscle memory to learn these strategies.

A (17:38)

And so when you're saying, when you said the $5,000 thing, you're saying if they spend 5,000 a year on their vacations. That's correct.

B (17:44)

On. Yeah. On travel in general. Yeah.

A (17:46)

Okay. Per year. Interesting. Okay. Does it have anything to do with their credit card spend?

B (17:51)

Yes, Those are the two most important factors. Okay, so also 5,000amonth.

A (17:57)

So when I was asked at the very beginning, like Are there, are there specific factors that qualify the avatar? So those are the two factors that are most important for the sale. Then those are the two things that I would want to weave into the funnel that we could get that way. It's like if your team's going to make the outbound dials and your dialer probably can score leads or should be, you know, prioritizing the leads, then it's like, well, then we're going to start with all the people who are spending over 5,000 on their credit card and then 5,000 year on their vacations. Then it's like they're two for two. Call those first and if it's a one out of two, call them second and zeros. It's like maybe we'll get to them for. So I think lead score, which is then add credit card spend and what was the other one? Oh, and then vacation spend to opt in. All right. One of the things that you brought up was that big list of excuses that come up when you do the pitches. So one of the things that I want to do is we need to call it out before they do. So on the sales call, I want to basically front load all of our damaging admissions because you said it's too good to be true. And when you even offer this too good to be true, you need to make it less good so that it's more believable. That sounds counterintuitive.

B (19:03)

No, basically we have to do this. But it's like our testimonials are often accused of being fake generated AI.

A (19:10)

Sure.

B (19:11)

To the truth.

A (19:12)

How old are you?

B (19:13)

53.

A (19:14)

Yeah, you could be like, listen, I'm 53, I don't even know how to work AI. So these are real? No, but what I would do with the damaging emissions piece is say, listen, before I tell you about the good, let me tell you about the bad. And then I would just start listing off all the things that suck about this. It's like, listen, if you want to only go on a specific day per year, it's not going to work for you. If that's a problem, then like I want to tell you that these are some of the issues. If you want to go to top shelf places that we're good so you can have what you want, just not when you want. And so that's the trade. Now if you're at a different point in your life where you're like, you know, I can take off whenever I want. They don't mind if I take two weeks in the middle of September Versus the middle of October or June. To your point, with Italy you can backpedal. It's almost like selling off the back of like, hey, if that's a problem for you, then this isn't going to work. So it's like telling them all the reasons it's not going to work up front so that they're like okay, so

B (19:58)

then they can self qualify. Okay, I could do that.

A (20:00)

Yeah.

B (20:00)

Versus I refuse to do that.

A (20:02)

There's no way. It's too good to believe there's tons of other things that suck about this. So let me tell you about the things that suck. No, but the thing is that after you put all that damaging mission so now when I tell you what's good about it, you're going to believe me. But we have to, I think you front load, you want to take all the wind out of their sails and give them all of the reasons that. And then you can weave in overcomes obviously, but you can do it from the position of like here's all the reasons it won't work. But a lot of people are like, oh, I don't mind that they're self qualifying because everybody still wants the benefit. They just don't believe it. They want it, they just don't believe it. So damaging emissions, front loaded. We went through all of this but I'm going to simplify this into really just two steps.

B (20:38)

If that works for you, that sounds great. I'm a master of over complicating things.

A (20:43)

All right, I think big picture this right here is thing number one. And I'm actually just going to go this way. Dialer lead scoring. And I think you need to increase your number of salespeople. If we added this all up, we've got call it 250 book sales a day. And then you said you have 40amonth. Who joined the $99 thing or 40 a week?

B (21:05)

Well, we're averaging about 6, 700amonth.

A (21:09)

Okay, 700amonth. So divided by 30, so 20ish per day. And then book, which is free shipping grant, something like that, I'm guessing. And then Facebook group you said was 1500 per month?

B (21:21)

Yeah, 1000 to 1500. Okay, so we got 30 here, 30 new Facebook members. We probably get 10% of them who give a phone number.

A (21:27)

Okay. We could just make it required if we wanted to. And I think the reason they would do it is because you say we include a free travel assessment. So I think that's the nugget that we give and I think you do that for both of these. But here I'm just going to just use rough math here. Obviously you put a little bit of. But we have about 300 prospects per day that are coming in the funnel. If you have 300, I would probably be thinking like, gosh, you're gonna need a bigger team. Like if you really want to work the leads, you'll probably need six guys with a power dialer. Their KPI should be like 300 a day each. And you can use something called a parallel dialer. What it does is it calls 10 numbers at once. For each of them you have 5% pickup rates. So you definitely need something like this. But let's just say two people pick up here. It'll automatically connect this one of them, that person and one person to this person. So basically the bigger the team, the better it works.

B (22:16)

Better the answer rate because it'll just

A (22:18)

roll to exactly whoever's. And so now you just have massive amounts of dials that are happening. And what you do is you're maximizing talk time. Instead of them just spending a lot of time just waiting for a connection, they're going to be like connected. And so the efficiency team is also going to go up by a lot. And I think you can actually work these leads because I think that the two doubles, probably more than one double in the business. This is a multi X unlock and this is a multi X unlock. And I don't think there's anything else you have to do. And I think these two things, the nice thing is that like they all will work off what your existing spend is. But this will drive down cac. All this, this will also drive down cac. So your LTV CAC ratio will improve. So profitability. But then what it'll do in the main long term benefit is that it'll break you through this barrier into this much bigger pool and then you'll be able to continue to spend and scale.

B (23:10)

Yeah. And that's something that I've written off. I started the company for this bigger pool.

A (23:14)

Yeah.

B (23:14)

Started the company because I was broke. I had no business traveling. But I discovered it and it was only by getting past assumptions.

A (23:22)

Yeah.

B (23:23)

And I can't advertise to them. I'm advertising to these people.

A (23:25)

Yeah.

B (23:26)

Because they pay the bills. But I'd love to impact them.

A (23:29)

Yeah.

B (23:30)

And I think this solves that problem.

A (23:32)

Yes. You have a demand constrained business. So these are the paths. You know, we can spend more, which we tried new channel a little too hard for right now in my opinion. Can we lower cost to acquire yes. We're going to do that through better Creative Conversion Optimization. We could have tweaked the offer, but the offer is already converting, so I don't really want to mess with it. These are the two angles that we attacked it from. This is the outside. This is the conversion side. Love it. Rock and roll. Easy. Pleasure. Thanks, Alex. Yeah, Sam.