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- [00:00]
Nick Lopa
We just got back from this family trip and it's always great to unplug and spark some creativity by getting outside of your normal routines. But there's a part of me that doesn't love the house just sitting empty while we're gone. Like, here's an asset that could be making us money, maybe even offsetting the cost to the trip. This is where Airbnb's co host network comes in. Whether you're working remotely or you're constantly on the road for your 9 to 5, or you're splitting time between homes, your house doesn't have to sit empty. Instead of letting it drain your wallet, you're still paying for it. Let it fill your wallet with a little help from a professional local co host. Extra income without the extra stress. That's the Side Hustle dream, right? The key is finding the right support to help make it happen. Airbnb co hosts handle everything from creating a standout listing to managing reservations to communicating with guests, even helping you style the space. They take care of the details so you don't have to be on call all the time. If you're ready to make your space work for you, take the next step and find a great co host for your property. Just head over to Airbnb.com host and now onto the show, the $1 product challenge. How my guest earn $4,000 in just 10 days without paid ads what's up? What's up? Nick Lopa here. Welcome to the side Hustle Show. Light on the theory, heavy on the tactics. It's the entrepreneurship podcast you can actually apply and you've been around online business for any length of time. I can almost guarantee you've heard the phrase the money is in the list. And all the experts, myself included, extol the virtues of building your email list right. It's the platform that you own and control. You're not at the whim of algorithm updates, social media changes, but the question is, are you building an email list of buyers? Subscribers are great, but you're not buying groceries on subscribers alone. My guest today has a unique list building and business building strategy that throws free lead magnets out the window in favor of low priced products starting at just a doll and has seen some exciting results, including that $4,000 in just 10 days from growthmodels co Pete Boyle. Welcome to the side Hustle Show.
- [02:07]
Pete Boyle
Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.
- [02:08]
Nick Lopa
You bet. I'm excited for this one. I got to know what's the $1 product that you Came up with, how did this work?
- [02:14]
Pete Boyle
Basically, I found myself in a position where I tried a bunch of things in business that didn't quite work out. As is always the case, you know, you try some new things, it doesn't always work. And I was like, right, I need to get some good, positive cash flow coming back in. Went back, tried the usual lead magnet, get people in, try to nurture them towards buying from me somewhere down the line, a day or week, a month, whatever, it didn't work. And so I was like, right, I need to actually get some customers coming in. And so at that time, you know, ChatGPT was doing huge numbers in terms of the actual, you know, daily usage and custom GPTs had just come out. But most people weren't really using custom GPTs, they didn't know how to do them. So I sat down over a weekend and I thought, I'm going to figure out how I can create some custom GPTs. And much like the philosophy that's now in the $1 product challenge, one of the things that I wanted to do was create something that was easy for the end user to use. Not like a big load of information, but a quick and easy solution. And I created some custom GPTs that were around content marketing because I spent a lot of my career doing content marketing for different brands. And I said, look, these are four custom GPTs that will help you identify a great topic, create great headline, do the brief that you need to send to a writer, and even help you with the first draft. Four of them, you can get all four for a dollar.
- [03:30]
Nick Lopa
Oh, okay.
- [03:31]
Pete Boyle
And then, yeah, it kind of spiraled from there because they were so easy to use and people could basically go in, answer a few questions and get the results that they needed. And I kind of daisy chained them along so you could take the output from one into the next to get the next stage, and so on and so on.
- [03:46]
Nick Lopa
Okay, so this is rather than starting from like coming up with your own series of prompts to get the outcome that you want, it's kind of like a done for you type of set up thing.
- [03:57]
Pete Boyle
Yep, exactly. So one of the issues that I see now with a lot of the AI influencers, for lack of a better term, the lead magnets they're using is like, here's a thousand AI prompts that you can use. And I look at it and I think, well, that's great, but I only need five.
- [04:13]
Nick Lopa
Sure.
- [04:13]
Pete Boyle
That are really going to be useful for me. So you've given me more work that I'm Going to have to go through all 1000 to find the five that are useful for me.
- [04:20]
Nick Lopa
Yeah, I'm sure these are all great. Right, but what's most relevant?
- [04:23]
Pete Boyle
Exactly. And so I was just like, what if I do that work for you and I say, right, answer these five questions about your audience, what you want to create content about, a couple of other sort of clarifying questions and this will just create the end thing, like answers that everybody would have and that they would have to do anyway with a prompt. But I'll take the prompting out of the equation and you can just take it from there. And this was right when custom GPTs first came in. So there was a lot of buzz around them. And yeah, sold all four of those for a dollar.
- [04:51]
Nick Lopa
Wow. Okay, so maybe some upfront work for a low ticket price, but then you don't have an email list. You have an audience to speak of at this point. How do you find buyers for this?
- [05:03]
Pete Boyle
So I did have an audience at that point and I had my email list and all of this, but I didn't use them to sell this to. I didn't sell this to them. They weren't really that interested in content marketing because I had an audience of freelancers who wanted to know how to attract clients. Okay, okay, so there's a bit of an overlap there, but they weren't the exact ideal market. What I wanted was I wanted people who were running content for larger brands. So I had to go out and try and find them to get him to buy it.
- [05:31]
Nick Lopa
How do you find them?
- [05:32]
Pete Boyle
So I did something that I'm now calling spear phishing was I found free communities of, you know, content marketers who, you know, they're all in there helping each other. You can't usually go into these places and promote because as soon as you go into a good free community, the moderators are going to be like, no promotion.
- [05:49]
Nick Lopa
Yeah, exactly.
- [05:49]
Pete Boyle
So I went in and I created just value based posts. Like I said, I've been doing this for quite a while, so creating these posts wasn't too hard. Eventually I created another custom GPT that helps me create the posts. So I had to take some of the work out of it. But essentially I go in and I'd say, look, these are the big problems that I see with content marketing. This is the solution. I've actually created some custom GPTs to help me do this. No promo. It was like a value based post. Here's the problem, here's the solution. I've been working on this thing. Just a little tease of what the offer is, then anybody who liked commented I'd follow up with in direct messages. So it wasn't a cold DM then. It wasn't like a complete stranger saying, hey, how's it going? I could go in and I could say you enjoyed the post. Thanks so much for engaging.
- [06:36]
Nick Lopa
Yeah, there was some level of interaction.
- [06:39]
Pete Boyle
Exactly, exactly. So not cold DMs, warm DMs, I guess. And it was. Thanks so much. Really enjoyed it. Any questions? And then if they were receptive, I would then segue that into a, you know, I put some of those custom DPTs together, I can give you access for a dollar. And that was how I started to get the initial sales coming through. It's not a very scalable system because it still requires you to go in and talk to, you know, in these groups, but it can still work quite well. And as long as you focus on value, the moderators so far have most of the time, like 80% of the time not had an issue with it.
- [07:14]
Nick Lopa
Yeah. And if you're listening in, you may already be a part of some of these communities where it's not you coming in completely, completely cold. You kind of know the, you know, the culture of these different forums and communities where, you know what kind of content is going to fly or what kind of posts are going to fly in there. And if you can lead with this value first, this spearfishing is kind of interesting. Like, I don't need everybody in here, but, you know, a handful of people who are interested and it's going to help me validate whether or not there is any legs to this idea.
- [07:43]
Pete Boyle
Yeah. And that was the whole thing is, you know, as you say, you're looking for those people who are basically giving you a digital hand raise of saying, that's cool, I like this. You know, comment or likes, and then you can follow up with those. And then, you know, that just made it so much easier when following up with those people and just getting some kind of a result.
- [07:59]
Nick Lopa
Okay, so now technically, are they sending you Venmo? Are they sending you PayPal? Is there like a stripe landing page? Or like, how are you figuring out, like, okay, I can give you access to these for a dollar. Okay, next step to collect and deliver.
- [08:15]
Pete Boyle
Yeah, so it's one of those things and I think a lot of people really overanalyze what they should be doing with this. And it's like, oh, how do I deliver this? So it feels like a premium package and all of this sort of stuff. For years now, I've had a ThriveCart subscription and I don't know if you're familiar with ThriveCart, but it's a checkout software and you pay once for lifetime and I think it's like $500. So no monthly fees, nothing like this. And then it integrates with Stripe or PayPal, but you can set up a nice looking cart checkout. Quite simple. And so I set it up there and basically then I said, anybody who buys this, send them to this thank you page which then has the links to the get them here. Very, very simple, very low tech. You could do the same with a Stripe checkout, I think, or even a PayPal page. Once you have payment, you just send them the links to the custom GPTs.
- [09:01]
Nick Lopa
Okay, got it. Thanks for sharing that. How many people bought the $1 thing?
- [09:05]
Pete Boyle
I think it was 26.
- [09:08]
Nick Lopa
Okay. And so the manual in these different communities groups.
- [09:11]
Pete Boyle
Right.
- [09:11]
Nick Lopa
So the people who might be interested in this thing leads to the direct message outreach to the digital hand raisers, the people who engaged with that content and then a percentage of those people click through to buy the thing. So now you got a grand total of $26 minus processing fees.
- [09:26]
Pete Boyle
Exactly it.
- [09:27]
Nick Lopa
So that's still not going to make much of a business out of this. You know what happens next? Kind of the how do you lead people up the value chain to buying more from you or doing more business with you?
- [09:37]
Pete Boyle
This is where ThriveCart kind of helped out. And there's plenty of other tools that you can do this with as well. A lot of them are termed as like funnel building tools. But also any of the good cart checkouts, if you look to see if they allow you to create a bump offer and upsell offers, one click upsells because that massively reduces the friction. And basically what this allows you to do is add other products onto the checkout.
- [09:58]
Nick Lopa
Yeah.
- [09:58]
Pete Boyle
So that somebody then has the option to go, oh, you know, I also want this and you know, yeah, I'll take that as well. And I basically built a couple of extra products that I added onto the $1 product on the front. The way that I would view this is the, the $1 product or the front end. The first thing that they buy is there to help them achieve a quick solution. Don't give them this massive big thing of information that they're going to have to sort through and figure out how to use. Give them something that they can take and just put into their business or take and use and get a very quick result. Because that's much Easier to sell. Okay, use this. It takes five minutes. You get this result very easy to sell compared to some of the other things out there. The bump offer, when they go to the checkout, there'll be a little checkbox that says, do you also want this? And that bump offer should be there to add extra value to the initial offer. And I like to think that it's going to help people achieve the result faster, easier, cheaper, or more profitably. So it's going to make getting the result from what you're just selling them for $1 faster, easier, cheaper, or it's going to help them get a bigger result.
- [11:00]
Nick Lopa
Okay, the extra value off the bump offer. So the, you know, would you like fries with that kind of thing?
- [11:06]
Pete Boyle
Except in a business similar to. Yeah, I like to think of it as like the catalyst to help them get better results. And so in that case, I then recorded a couple of videos of myself building custom GPTs. And I put a basic template of how I did the description into the custom GPT, because you give it a custom description that it follows that process. So I gave them that template and a couple of videos around it, and I said, you know, for an extra, I think $47 is what I usually go for for a bump. You can also get the whole system that I've built on how to do these so that you can create not just these for content marketing, but for any repetitive task in your business. You can teach an AI agent how to handle it for you, and you just follow this.
- [11:45]
Nick Lopa
Okay, so like the how to tutorials, the instruction manual. Plus, hey, if you ever want to do this on your own, here's how.
- [11:52]
Pete Boyle
I set this up exactly. Yeah. That is like the first page that they'll see when they go to buy. They'll, you know, be filling out their payment details for the $1 product. And then just before they can click go through, it'll be like, do you also want this? It'll teach you how to do this. It's like, oh, great. And then essentially, when you've sold them that initial product, you've solved a problem in their life and you've given them this solution, and you've moved them from where they are today to that transformation of where they want to be after that product, that new area, that new sort of reality that they have, they now have a new problem. And so I then offer them an upsell, which helps them solve the new problem. So it's a solution to that new problem that they experience. And so in this case, we're Talking that they have custom GPT that will help them create content. And then we got something that will help them create their own custom GPTs. But they have a new problem now that they're going to have this content. Is it optimized? How do they promote it? How do they actually get sales from that? So then the upsell was more information on how they can turn one piece of content into like a sales machine so that people who read that piece of content will actually buy rather than just producing content and seeing no tangible results from it.
- [13:03]
Nick Lopa
Okay, so that's the no shortage of content or digital clutter on the Internet. But how do you actually get results from that? So that's the upsell offer. Do you remember what that was priced at?
- [13:16]
Pete Boyle
I want to say it was 97-0197 and I only had maybe a handful of people take that. It wasn't like a huge number of people, but I was 97 or 197 because that's usually the numbers that I'll go for is the initial product will be anything from. I always start these at $1 because it's a very low barrier to entry. And just beginning thing on a transactional relationship with the person changes the rest of your relationship with them. It's buyers versus freebie seekers. But it's usually $1, then $47 for the bump, then 97 to 197 for the upsell is what I tend to go for. And that gives you potentially 250 in all digital.
- [13:56]
Nick Lopa
You know, no direct time required on your part to deliver this.
- [14:01]
Pete Boyle
Good.
- [14:02]
Nick Lopa
It's not like people are signing up for coaching or consulting yet.
- [14:05]
Pete Boyle
Not yet, no. So this was all just something that I've created and it was loom videos. So pretty low tech in terms of, you know, there was no lots of editing and like flashy things. It was me sat in this very chair doing a screen share. Like go here. This is how I do it. These are the templates. This is why it works. Very, very low tech sort of approach. It took me maybe an hour to create the bump and the upsell together. And then once I created them, I could sell them dozens and dozens of times.
- [14:32]
Nick Lopa
Okay, interesting. This is like I'm starting to piece together. You almost have to start with what you know. I don't know. Where would you recommend people start to like start peeling out different segments of their knowledge and expertise or like, you know, how to think about these different tiers, these different offers. Like it's really interesting.
- [14:49]
Pete Boyle
I would always start with the, the end customer, like who is it that you're trying to sell to figure out what are their problems that you can solve? So they have various. Everybody has problems in their life. What are the problem for your ideal customer that you can solve? That's where I'd start. And usually if we're talking about sort of business offers, whether it's services, coaching courses, there'll be one primary offer that will take somebody from where they are today to that end, transformation of where they want to be. And that might be earning a set amount of money, having x percent freedom or whatever it might be. The $1 product needs to eventually lead into that big thing. Because if there's no direct line between the first purchase and the big purchase. Yeah, you know, you're not going to. I see what a lot of people do with their, with their low ticket offers is they sell the equivalent of like, oh look, here's some stuff for blue shoes. And then their primary offer is yellow T shirts. And it's like the person who wants blue shoes doesn't care about yellow T shirts. So there has to be like a direct line.
- [15:50]
Nick Lopa
More with Pete in just a moment. Including the small percentage of customers that make up the majority of your income and why you want to validate your funnel sequence with free traffic before you try ads right after this.
- [16:02]
Pete Boyle
In my case, what I could help people with was content marketing. And I had a course at the time which was the content marketing model. And that's how I did like built whole content marketing systems. And so that was the going to be the end thing for this. And so I had to go back. What would be the very first thing that I could do that would be very small and help somebody solve the initial problem that's stopping them getting from where they are to that big transformation of where they want to be. I just want to help them take that first step.
- [16:27]
Nick Lopa
Got it.
- [16:28]
Pete Boyle
That's what the initial $1 product should be. Then the bump offer is the catalyst to help them achieve that faster, easier, cheaper. The upsell is the next problem that they have. And then that all qualifies them for whatever the bigger piece is that you're going to sell them down the line.
- [16:42]
Nick Lopa
What was that in your case? Because it didn't even stop with the upsell. It's like there's still more. And it harkens back to the 80, 20 sales and marketing where for everybody who buys this thing, a percentage would buy something 10 times more expensive and then a percentage of those people would buy something 10 times more expensive. So what was it in your case?
- [17:03]
Pete Boyle
Yeah, I email my email list every single day and I'm always like, you know, keeping in touch with them. And this was going to be. And the way that I build things now is there'd be an automated thing on the back end where it then drip feed some information for whatever the big offer was. And as I said I was going to push them towards it was a thousand dollars course which was the content marketing model. At the time I thought that things wouldn't take off so quickly. I didn't think that I'd see sales initially. I was just testing things. So I didn't have everything ready for that. And so I started emailing people and I was like, if you'd like some, let me know. And essentially somebody reached out and they were like, seems like you know what you're doing, can you help us? And closed. I think it was like a three grand short term consulting gig with this brand. They just reached out and said, when can you start? And I said yeah, I can come in. And it was very low effort for me because it was more like a coaching rather than me doing the work. So I would come in, help their team. But that was what it became in that short term. And that's why in those 10 days they went from buying a $1 product to hiring me for $3,000.
- [18:05]
Nick Lopa
Isn't that crazy? That's just like such an interesting sequence of events or a sales funnel, so to speak, from strangers to building up trust and authority and credibility to getting somebody to pay you three grand.
- [18:18]
Pete Boyle
Yeah, I think it's that difference between starting off on a transactional versus a non transactional relationship. The way I look at it is if somebody's willing to pay even a dollar, they have a pain that they're actively trying to solve. And I always term it as in it's the difference between people who think information and the solution is nice to have. And what they do is they collect it, they put it in like a Google Drive folder and they're like, I'll come back to that in a week. And people who think that the information and the solution that you have is something they need to have, if they're willing to pay even a dollar, they need the solution which means they're going to be more receptive to more help to help them get that solution and the transformation faster.
- [18:54]
Nick Lopa
Yeah, we've heard this phrase a few different ways. People who pay pay attention and in a lot of ways it's easier to take somebody. And this was the Example of Fiverr, you know, his, his line was it's easier to take somebody from $5 to $10,000 than it is to take somebody from zero to five. It's like that initial transaction hurdle, like ah, I gotta bring in my credit card, I gotta pay for something. Like it's, it's a much bigger burden of, of proof to get somebody to pay you even a dollar than it is to, you know, sell them more stuff. Once you have built that trust.
- [19:24]
Pete Boyle
Yeah, 100%. The way that I view it is the $1 product is, is little more than a filter for those who are serious because everybody's collecting these big email lists and I've worked with people who have got tens of thousands, hundreds of thousand people, but they're not making the revenue that they should from that audience because there are those people, like you said, who want to go from $5 to $10,000 and spend. But when you've got so many people who just want free stuff, it's very hard to identify who they are. And you know, that whole argument of signals versus noise, it's very difficult to find when you've just attracted the freebie. See. So I just view the $1 products as a filter for those who are serious and then I can continue to serve and help those people achieve their goals.
- [20:04]
Nick Lopa
Yeah. And in your mind the days of the ebook or the, you know, the five day email course or challenge, like that stuff is kind of, it's just like more information versus you know, if I'm charging for a thing, it's almost got to be like you said, this custom GPT like something that people can implement right away. I'm curious your, your structure or like what, what might make sense for that intro offer.
- [20:29]
Pete Boyle
I think any format can work and it's really depending on what, who it is that you're working or targeting to work with and how you're trying to bring them in. But I know guys who are using this with like ebooks and they're charging for the ebooks so not the free ebooks. It still works. I know people who are running little challenges. The difficulty that you have with both ebooks and challenges and courses is consumption because it's great having somebody pay a dollar, but you need them to actually go and consume it and use the thing.
- [20:57]
Nick Lopa
Right.
- [20:58]
Pete Boyle
To then make the high ticket stuff really viable when you're talking about nurturing them post purchase. But I don't think there's any one thing that is like, doesn't work. I think the difference is whether or not you're giving it away for free or charging for it, because that payment is what filters the serious people.
- [21:16]
Nick Lopa
Okay. Is there any thought to what competitors are doing? Or do you find that people are like shopping around, so to speak, for this, like a dollar thing where it's like, well, if other. Other people are offered this for free, so why should I pay you?
- [21:29]
Pete Boyle
So I've not had any sort of pushbacks with anything like this. And yeah, I've not seen it. I guess there is a thing where when you're trying to sell something, you do probably have to put a little bit more effort into the marketing to make it feel a bit more premium. One thing that I'm always very confident in is that anything that I sell, I know that the quality of the information and the solution inside is good. It works, it's always tested. So I'm not worried about somebody not getting that money back. What I always try and do is make sure that they get at least two times value of what they've paid. Because then nobody can ever come back and be like, oh, that wasn't worth the money. With a $1 product, you're looking more at like 100 times the value because nobody wants to pay you.
- [22:10]
Nick Lopa
Yeah, yeah. It's hard to imagine to be like, can I get a refund on this? This was not worth a dollar.
- [22:15]
Pete Boyle
Exactly. Yeah. One of the things that I realized when I did the custom GPTs is you needed a chatgpt Pro account to actually be able to use them. And I put that on the sales page. One person didn't notice it. They emailed me like, I can't use these. And I was like, I'm happy to give you a refund. They were like, that's fine. So, okay. But yeah, no one's going to ask for a refund for a dollar, even if it's terrible. But last week or the week before, I actually bought somebody who's doing a similar thing with $3 as a product. And the quality of the information inside was really quite lackluster. And as a result, when they then started to put me into their email sequences to pitch me the higher ticket things, I had no trust in them. So when I'm doing the $1 products, I like to offer at least like $100 worth of value for the $1, because this is the first touch point of this relationship. If I start off on a bad foot, if I charge them a dollar and it's terrible, I'm not going to be able to charge them $100. $1,000 down the line, it still has to be of a high quality.
- [23:17]
Nick Lopa
Yeah, I'm with you. It's like the first. It's like that free sample. It's gotta be good. Where $1 sample. It's gotta be enticing enough to build that trust and say, yeah, this guy is worth doing business with.
- [23:27]
Pete Boyle
Exactly. And my thought is, if you can give me a dollar and I give you $100 worth of value back, when I turn around and I say this thing's like $100, you're gonna say, how good is this thing gonna be? It's gonna be amazing.
- [23:39]
Nick Lopa
Right, Right. This is helpful. If I'm pausing, it's because I'm trying to map out like what, you know, what the sequence might look like. Are you still selling this sequence or still selling this product or you kind of migrated to something else? Are you still going active in these communities or is there at a certain point, We've heard of people doing a self liquidating offer like trying to drive advertising traffic through Facebook or Instagram or whatever to the $1 thing and then at least pay for the ad costs. You do anything like that?
- [24:08]
Pete Boyle
100%. Yeah. So the, the initial offer I'm not running anymore because it's, it's obsolete now. AI's got to a much better point than it was that you don't really need the custom GPTs for what I was doing it for. You know, it's gone through several iterations since I was selling this and really I don't think there's much value in the custom GPTs that I had built for those things. I still use a lot of custom GPTs in my community with people based around templates that we know that works. But yeah, not using that offer, still using very low ticket offers. And I still begin them all at $1 and I still go out and I start spear phishing in communities where there are people who are interested in this just to try and get feel. Because I think the problem that a lot of people have and the mistake that they make is they think ads are a cure all is like a silver bullet. If you just run ads, you'll make sales. Ads in my opinion and experience are a catalyst again, like they're fuel to the fire. You need to be able to sell one of something, then you should be able to sell 10 of it. If you can sell 10 to 100 of that thing, ad will then help you sell 100 to 1000.
- [25:14]
Nick Lopa
Okay.
- [25:15]
Pete Boyle
Most people don't have the money to throw at ads to Then find out if something works to lose thousands of dollars. So I want to go out and I want to see if this will sell without having to put money behind it and then I'll put money behind it. So yeah, still running $1 products. And then what happens is once you start running ads, you're going to have to play with the prices a bit to try and get sure to make sure that the average order value beats the cost per acquisition on ads. So I'm running my own ads now for the $1 product challenge.
- [25:42]
Nick Lopa
Oh, okay. It's very meta.
- [25:44]
Pete Boyle
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's all very dependent upon making sure that when they come through that initial funnel, they at least break even with the acquisition cost. So yeah, you do have to play around with it, but it's just the easiest way to scale because doing the spear phishing is great, but it's difficult to scale after a certain point.
- [26:03]
Nick Lopa
Yeah, it's manual outreach or it's time consuming versus something that could just have sales coming your way. And I like this idea of validate it first, make sure somebody is going to order it, get those first 10, 20 people to, to buy it from this manual effort before trying to automate the thing and then making sure those ad costs are in line. What do you see? I guess it varies, you know, the cart value. The cool thing is, you know, right away like because of the sequences, you know, it's like the order bump and the upsell, like you get a pretty good sense of, well, what's the conversion rate going to be like, what's the average cart value going to be? It's not like this three month, you know, lead time to make a sale.
- [26:44]
Pete Boyle
Yeah. So you can generally find out quite quickly as long as you can drive the traffic to it through spear phishing or ads or whatever, you can find out quite quickly whether or not things are working. And like I said, it's just playing around with whether the offers are right to get the right conversion rates on the bump offers and the upsells and also the front end products and then also playing around with the pricing to find this sweet spot.
- [27:05]
Nick Lopa
Do you have a rule of thumb on average order value that you shoot for or conversion rate or cost to acquire a customer? Any of those metrics that people should keep in mind.
- [27:16]
Pete Boyle
Very different depending on the industry. So obviously me selling this, I'm in one of the more competitive industries for, you know, biz op as it's, you know, often called. So like, you know, the sort of make money online type stuff, it's very competitive up there with finance, legal, all of these things. So currently for me, my average, or sorry, my cost per acquisition is around $35 to $40. It kind of fluctuates between those two. So if I'm paying for ads, I'm going to be paying 35 to 40 bucks just to get a customer. I worked with a guy who was a sports psych and we were getting customers for him at $5 like it was a much lesser fee because very, very specific to a specific industry of sports psychology. There's somebody in my community and they're running a pure $1 product funnel where it's just $1 products that they're selling on the front end, language learning and again, far cheaper. But they're also targeting markets where it is cheaper ad spend. I'm targeting the us, uk, Australia, Canada, New Zealand. They're teaching English and so they're targeting places that are cheaper for ad costs. So their costs are low. So it's really difficult to say this is what you should be aiming for. The golden rule is just that you try and have to make the average order value better than the cpa and that's going to fluctuate so much depending on the industry, the offer, the audience, all of these things.
- [28:38]
Nick Lopa
Okay, got it. So collect that data up front and through this manual method or through your own traffic channels before turning on the ads because it's a good way to go backwards in a hurry if you can't recoup those costs. Now, it is important to know this is kind of like upfront, like where I may need to break even or make a small profit on this initial ad spend. But then I've got this list of buyers that can hire me for consulting. They can buy my higher ticket stuff. Like it's an engaged group who hopefully has some trust in what you're doing and can continue to do business with you down the road.
- [29:12]
Pete Boyle
Exactly. And we've found people who will spend even a dollar are up to around 12 times more likely to buy other programs, offers, services from you again than if they came through from free leads. So you're going to get 12 times more sales by focusing on these people than you would on people who just want information because it's nice to have. And that's even if it's just a single dollar rather than like a 27 or $47 front end.
- [29:39]
Nick Lopa
Got it. Anything that we missed on the $1 product challenge? I like this stuff.
- [29:43]
Pete Boyle
Yeah, I don't. I don't think so. I think breakeven is good. If you can make even a small profit, it's better. And it is, you know, figuring out. It's a lot of testing between the offers to really get that right. But as you mentioned, running straight into do ads is fine if you have the capital to burn. Because I know guys who will just throw $10,000 at an ad campaign to see if they can make money back and they'll find the messaging because they'll test heavily. A lot of people don't have that money. So test manually first and then once it's working, use ads to kind of scale that reach.
- [30:16]
Nick Lopa
Right? No, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. So growth models co$, you can learn more about the $1 product challenge over there. We're going to be right back with Pete, including round two, donate a business idea right after this. All right, we're back with Pete Boyle from Growth models co. Round one was the $1 product challenge. Round two is donate a business idea. This is something that you might start yourself if you had more time. This is something that you think listeners could run with, something that ought to exist in the world. What have you got for us here?
- [30:50]
Pete Boyle
Going to go through something that's very self serving. One of the things that, you know, I'm really working on with my business is how to increase the reach and how to attract more buyers. Obviously ads are great for this, but I do a lot of email marketing and there are lots of tools out there that will allow you to do newsletter exchanges. And there's tools like, you know, I could name a couple of them where it's like, hey, you've got an email newsletter that's a similar size as I do. Let's exchange newsletters. Let's see, you know, if my subscribers want to become your subscribers, there's also ones out there that will allow you to find ones to sponsor. What I'm really looking for is ways that I can find affiliate marketers who have engaged email lists that could be validated in some way so that then I could approach those affiliate marketers and say, look, I have this offer. You know, affiliate marketing is a great way if you have the right overlap of audiences to reach a new audience. I'll give you 50% of all of the sales if you can promote this, your audience and all of this. Because when I'm working with affiliates in the past, you attract a lot of them. 5% of them will drive 95% of the sales. Some of them will come through and they'll turn out that they don't have a good list in terms of engagement or that it's just the wrong audience. So it'd be great if there was some kind of directory of good vetted affiliate marketers who are promoting people's offers and are willing to do co promotions and all of this sort of stuff and had a method that you could directly outreach to those people.
- [32:19]
Nick Lopa
Okay, so that's the business idea directory of essentially affiliate marketing email lists.
- [32:26]
Pete Boyle
Yeah. And like there's things where it's similar to this but not quite. There's you know, places where you can find newsletters for sponsorships. But of course a sponsorship is just usually one email, a static piece of text or a static image, which is fine.
- [32:40]
Nick Lopa
Yeah.
- [32:41]
Pete Boyle
When I've been an affiliate for people and when I've had affiliates who do the best for me, what we tend to do is we build a full sequence and we run it on the same kind of process where it's, you know, same concept of spearfishing. We do a digital hand raise. Who's interested in this? People who say that they're interested in this. They then get like a 5 or a 10 day promotion of the other our offer. That way you don't annoy your email list, but you tend to get much higher sales than just a sponsorship in somebody's newsletter.
- [33:07]
Nick Lopa
No, that makes sense. Do you know Matt McWilliams?
- [33:10]
Pete Boyle
I do not.
- [33:11]
Nick Lopa
Matt. I think it's the Affiliateguy.com or something. Anyways, Matt's been on the show before. He's been in the affiliate space for a decade plus and he kind of coordinates these types of launch, you know, geared toward product, you know, big online business, celebrity type of product launches. And you know, on the affiliate recruiting side is a specialty. So he may have something like this internal to his company, this, this kind of database where he could go work with. On the directory side. We did an episode late last year with John Rush, episode 647, I want to say in the podcast archives where he talks all about building these types of directory websites where you're pulling in the data and that's the value add is the data. And in this case it could be number of subscribers, you know, industry that they reach, you know, how long they've been in business, like different data points that you could have and I don't know, maybe there's some business where you take a percentage of a percentage of an affiliate. I don't know how you would necessarily monetize it or maybe you charge for access to it because it's like you know, there's obviously some money to be made on the other side, but this would be an interesting one to run with.
- [34:25]
Pete Boyle
There's things that are close to it and even like, you know, ConvertKit. Now I use ConvertKit from email service where they have a thing where it's like the creator network and you can go and find other creators, but it doesn't tell you the size of their list, how engaged their list are, how often they email. You kind of have to manually do all of that and then you have to manually go and find their email address to reach out to people. And it's like, oh, you know, it's a lot of extra manual work. And I'm like, there's a simpler solution somewhere.
- [34:49]
Nick Lopa
Yeah, but it's the manual work that leads to conversations like this because it was one of those. You sent me a cold email. It's like, hey, I've got this thing called the $1 product. You want to promote it? It's like, well, learn a little bit more about this. It's like, hey, this is kind of interesting. And now we got to do a whole episode about it. So there's pros and cons to it. Sounds like you need a virtual assistant to do some of this initial research and outreach for you.
- [35:13]
Pete Boyle
That's the thing. Yeah. And there's part of me which is thinking if I get somebody in to help, almost as an affiliate partner, if we can just chronicle people that we find who are up for it, get their approval, we could maybe create this. Because I know certain tools as well. They started off literally with this as similar thing, but for like newsletter promos. There's a guy that I know who did this, started it off as an airtable and eventually sold the business. And that was it. It was just finding newsletters, pulling all the stats for co promotions, doing intros between people, and then it became an acquisition for somebody else. Like somebody came along to acquire the business.
- [35:51]
Nick Lopa
Yeah, this would be. No, no, no. The more we talk about it, the more I think like, yeah, this is super valuable because there's going to be. There's always going to be people with offers, so there's always going to be people with email lists who need those offers to monetize their business and help their, and help their audience. So it makes sense.
- [36:07]
Pete Boyle
In fact, can we go back and come up with another idea? Can we, can we just do this one ourselves?
- [36:11]
Nick Lopa
Yeah, maybe. So you got anything else? You got another idea you want to toss out?
- [36:16]
Pete Boyle
I'm going to have to come up with one quickly. But I think personally I would find this as quite a valuable idea if somebody would create that. It's definitely something I would be interested in testing.
- [36:27]
Nick Lopa
Yeah, there's definitely something here because there is. Like you said, there's the matchmakers for the email newsletter sponsorships, the exchange, like do you have this newsletter exchange, like promo swap type of database. Do you have a resource that you like on that front? That's an interesting one.
- [36:42]
Pete Boyle
Letter growth is one. And I believe that I think Beehive has one that's kind of built in. I'm not sure. I don't use Beehive. And like I said, ConvertKit also has one where you can recommend one another and like, basically when somebody subscribes your email list, it throws up a pop up and it says, hey, these are my friends. You should also consider subscribing to these guys. And then there's a paid version where it's a Sparkloop which integrates with a lot of these tools. And you can use them to basically say, anybody who sends me a subscriber, I'll send them $1, $2, $5 per subscriber. If you're going to do that. It's very important to know your payback periods and the average customer lifetime value so that you know you're not going to get into trouble by spending $5 per subscriber and then actually they only pay you on average $3 back.
- [37:31]
Nick Lopa
Yeah, we would go backwards on that math, but there's something to this matchmaker model and we've seen it in sites like podcastguests.com, like how do we match people who have podcasts with people who need guests, with people who want to guest on podcasts and even help a reporter, journalists who need sources and sources who want to get some press. So there's definitely some precedence for it. So I like this one. We'll call this the affiliate marketing email database business idea.
- [38:02]
Pete Boyle
There we go.
- [38:02]
Nick Lopa
All right, that is round two. Round three is what we call the triple threat. And the first part of this is a marketing tactic that is working right now.
- [38:12]
Pete Boyle
$1 products. Yeah. One thing I mean that's working right now that I'm really trying to do more of is YouTube. I think YouTube is one of the better tools that people aren't using as much as they should. And the reason that I really like YouTube is there is a great balance between both paid and organic on the same platform. And so you could probably get compounding gains. And that's one thing that we're Trying to really look at is how you can use paid to accelerate the organic growth or vice versa with like retargeting audiences and all of this sort of thing. But I don't, I see a lot of people who are jumping into still things like Facebook ads and I'm running Facebook ads, But I think YouTube really is a better long term opportunity.
- [38:59]
Nick Lopa
Interesting. You see a lower cost of acquisition there.
- [39:01]
Pete Boyle
Not so much yet because I'm still really getting to grips with the advertising and I think that's probably my shortcoming that I'm not seeing as good as cpa. I'm seeing much cheaper click through rates and all of this sort of stuff. But I think as well as we move towards more AI content, having real people on camera is one of the things that is at the minute harder for AI to sort of recreate. And so as most selling is done based on trust and based, you know, people buy from people.
- [39:34]
Nick Lopa
Yeah.
- [39:34]
Pete Boyle
Having a face to the brand really seems to be working quite well even with smaller audiences. I know guys with like, you know, 2,000 subscribers who are pulling good money because they're not relying on YouTube's ad revenue, but they're using it as a way to bring them course customers, coaching clients, that kind of stuff.
- [39:52]
Nick Lopa
Yeah. What's a typical call to action for you on a YouTube video or an example of a video that's done well?
- [39:59]
Pete Boyle
Again, this is one thing that I am currently figuring out. I am about 17 days into a test that I'm doing. I run a lot of my little experiments where I'm trying to publish one long form YouTube video per day, about 10 minutes each. So I'm about 17 days maybe into doing one video per day. And so I'm happy to check back in and say what worked and what didn't. What I've tried as well is a method similar to the spear phishing approach where basically I pick some of my top performing videos, put money behind them to reach the audience and then retarget those people with a conversion focused ad because you can get reasonable reach for quite cheap on YouTube. And then basically if I know somebody watches the video, they engage with it, they click on the thumbnail. If I then hit them with a conversion focus, I'd like, hey, this system will help you attract buyers, not freebie seekers. Check it out over here. That's one thing that I'm sort of working on really just nailing down at the minute.
- [40:58]
Nick Lopa
No. Okay, this is, see this is the kind of nitty gritty stuff that I, that I totally love. Geeking out on so organic video, long form content, see, which is naturally going to rise to the top, put some money to boost that, you know, promote that video to, you know, a broader audience, send it out to the world and then retargeting those to be, hey, you watch this thing. And then if you're serious about this, this is the call to action related video where it's like, now go, go buy the $1 thing. And now you're into my, into my sequence.
- [41:26]
Pete Boyle
Exactly, yeah. And at the same time what I'm doing is people who buy the $1 product challenge, obviously I have other offers that are the primary profit drivers. Now I want to get people into them again. People buy from people. If I can get them to consume and get a result from the $1 product challenge, they're primed to buy the next stuff. But you know, people buy from people. So I've recorded YouTube videos that help coach people through those next stages as well. So that's why I think YouTube is way more sort of flexible than a lot of other channels. And at the same time I could keep going for hours on this. I'm sorry, this is going to be a long one. But one thing that I've been doing as well is trying to figure out how you can be, you know, there's the whole concept of omnipresent marketing. People log into Facebook, they see you, they're on LinkedIn, they see you. It's very difficult to do that because it's so much content to produce. If I can produce one 10 minute video.
- [42:16]
Nick Lopa
Yeah.
- [42:17]
Pete Boyle
I use a tool which then separates that into seven or eight different short videos for YouTube shorts, TikTok, LinkedIn. I can then have AI take the transcript and turn that into a couple of different social posts. And so that's another thing that I've been playing around with is as I'm recording one of these long form videos every day, one long form video is becoming five to ten shorts. It's becoming five social posts, text posts. Those shorts and text posts can be used across Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram.
- [42:50]
Nick Lopa
Is there a specific tool that you're using for that? Because that's the next question. A new or new to you tool that you're loving right now?
- [42:55]
Pete Boyle
Yeah. So the tool that I'm really like relying on at the minute is, I don't know whether it's descript or descript. I don't know how they want you to pronounce it, but descript D, E, S, C, R, ipt Yeah, and it's, you know, I picked it because I hate video editing. I'm no good at it. It takes up too much time. And this, it transcribes the video. If there's a piece of the video you don't like, you just cut that, the words from the transcription and it'll edit it out of the video for you. So much easier. They have an AI tool built in where it's like, hey, create some clips. You give it some prompts about what kind of clips you want. You go away for three minutes, you come back, your clips are ready.
- [43:31]
Nick Lopa
Oh, I didn't know they had that. Because we use, we use descript or my, my video editor uses descript for the video editing stuff too. And it's like the first time you use it, it's like just this amazing experience of like I could just edit the transcript versus like having to find that specific timestamp in the video and drag the thing over here. No, it's really, really cool.
- [43:48]
Pete Boyle
And then, yeah, it's underlord. You know, it's at the top, in the top right corner of the, of the sidebar on the right hand side. Underload and then scroll down about 2/3 of the way, there's a bit which says create clips. And it'll do all of that for you. You can pick a template so that it designs it well and then it would just export them all into that template. You have to double check them because sometimes the clips are no good. But you know, it's the fastest way that I found to do clips. And then I'm using socialbee.com I think basically what that allows me to do. So Yesterday I exported 15 shorts and I was like, this is going to take a long time for me to schedule this. Socialbee allows you to set up queues, so at 1pm every day, share a short to these platforms. And then I just upload 15 shorts, give them the title and it adds them to the queue and I don't actually have to manually schedule anything out.
- [44:42]
Nick Lopa
Okay, socialbee.com that's a new one. We'll link both of those up. Descript and Socialbee. Other tools that you mentioned in the call, ThriveCart, Loom, ConvertKit, Beehive. Lots of different tools at your disposal. So we'll link up all of those in the show notes for this episode. The last question of the Triple Threat is your favorite book from the last 12 months.
- [45:05]
Pete Boyle
So it's maybe not my favorite book from the last 12 months, but as I mentioned, I'm really trying to get better at YouTube. And what I found is headline thumbnail are really important for getting people to engage with the video. And the first 30 seconds are really important to get people invested. And so I've been rereading a book called Great Leads, which is a direct response marketing book about how to start sales messages. Like, and this is from guys who would write ten 20,000 word sales letters. And this book is all about how to open them up in the different ways that you can do it to hook engagement and hook like curiosity from people to get them to want to read the rest. So, you know, you grab that attention early. So that's one thing that I've been rereading in an attempt to see if I can port any of that information over to video.
- [45:51]
Nick Lopa
Okay, Great Leads, a direct response marketing book. We will link that one up as well. That's, that's new to me. Again, you can find Pete at growthmodels co. Growthmodels co$, is the place to start your $1 product challenge. Big thanks to Pete for sharing his insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. As always, you can hit up Sidehustlenation.com deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message. You might benefit from adding the $1 product challenge to their business. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle show. Hustle on.