The Startup Ideas Podcast - How to make internet money

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

Join me as I chat with Jonathan Courtney to discuss the mechanics of a successful sales funnel. He explains how funnels work to transform cold prospects into customers by warming them up through a strategic sequence of offers. The conversation covers both self-liquidating funnels (where initial purchases cover ad costs) and webinar funnels, with practical advice on implementation for different business models. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:01 - Why Funnels matter 02:26 - Demo of Facebook Ad Library to find competitors' funnels 04:00 - Walkthrough of the actual funnel pages and sales process 20:35 - Discussion of webinar funnels for software products Key Points: • Jonathan shares details of a self-liquidating funnel that generated $180,000 upfront and approximately $300,000 on the backend in just two weeks • The funnel structure includes a low-cost entry product ($6.99 book) with strategic upsells that qualify potential customers for sales calls • Jonathan explains how to reverse-engineer funnels by identifying customer transformation goals and creating irresistible offers • Live webinar funnels are presented as an effective strategy for selling software products without requiring heavy discounting The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ BoringMarketing — Vibe Marketing for Sale: http://boringmarketing.com/ Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.skool.com/startupempire/about FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND JONATHAN ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jicecream LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-courtney-4510644b/ AJ&Smart: https://ajsmart.com

In this episode, we exposed Jonathan Courtney's $500,000 a month funnel, and he breaks down exactly step by step how you can copy his funnel strategy for a SaaS business, for an agency business, for a marketplace business, for an AI agent business. I think it's really interesting what we can learn from funnels. It's kind of like a boring topic, but if you stick through this episode, you're going to come out of the other side, just being. a lot more successful at whatever it is your building. I ignored funnels for the longest time

when I lived in Silicon Valley, but ever since meeting Jonathan Courtney, Jay Ice Cream, he's shown me the light and he will show you the light too. All right, we got Mr. Ice Cream himself, Jay to the Ice Cream, Jay Ice Cream. By the end of this episode, what are people going to take away?

I'm going to show people one of the exact or behind the scenes of a funnel I launched two weeks ago, which has so far made, I think, $280,000 just up front in the funnel. And probably by the time this episode is out, another $300,000 on the back end of the funnel. And this is the type of funnel that we use for, you know, selling. It could be courses. It can be licenses for software, can be coaching. We're doing it for tons and tons of different businesses.

But usually I can't really show this stuff because we're doing it for other businesses. But this was for one of my businesses. So I can literally open up the software and just show you all the actual numbers. So a couple of things. One, do you think that this funnel is going to make you $200,000 to $500,000 a month? Or is this, is it dead? Like, is it dead after a month? Oh, no.

So the previous version of this funnel ran for five years and it made 450K per month until about December that just passed. And then it started to die a little bit. So usually I hope to get around four to five years out of a funnel, meaning that it's profitable enough for it to run and for it to make sense. Cool. All right. Let's get into it. Okay. So we just launched, I'll show you the first funnel. So this is the self-flict. liquidating funnelist, the one we just launched. What you can see here is one of my company's ad libraries, which is public. Now, I think it doesn't show every single ad that's running, unfortunately, but it'll give you a general feel for it. And so you can see here that there are ads running. Why does it say inactive? We're literally running these ads right now and we're paying for it. So yeah, there's some like, sometimes it's a bit buggy. You can see all the different ads we're running here. And these are the ads we're currently running for this book.

And let me show you, maybe I'll show like what one of the ads look like just to get a feeling for it, just to get a feeling for the vibe of what these ads can be like. So here we go. I'll just click here. Yeah. All right. So this is an ad. And by the way, I just record these on my phone.

Like they're not super crazy high tech ads. And this is strategy signal. It's my new book. And it teaches you how to run. amazing strategy workshops. That's exactly what it does. It's a step-by-step guide. We'll teach you how to run strategy workshops, kick-off workshops, leadership retreats,

anything that involves a bunch of people coming together having to make big strategic decisions. This book teaches it, and it's a simple step-by-step guide with no fluff. Get it now. Wow, that's dope, though. I know you did it on your iPhone and everything, but like the sounds and the story. here's what here's the here's the thing if you're looking at these ads and you're on Facebook you're on TikTok we've got the ads running there as well and you're like oh my god there's this book okay it's only 699 you click on it and you end up here so this is the landing page

it says you know run amazing strategy workshops you see the book here as well unlock your copy for 699 this page by the way my team and I just built it in a really simple software called click funnels you can do it in anything sometimes we use framer but when I want to get a funnel out super quick. I use click funnels. I have no affiliation. I do not get any. I mean, how would I even get an affiliate money for it because I don't even have a code or whatever? So yeah, I just like using the software. Most people come to the website on mobile. So it's like mobile optimized and all that stuff. So you're looking at this and you're probably, and if you're a customer, you don't yet, you don't know what this funnel is leading to. What I can tell. you as the person who's built it is I have built this funnel to generate call bookings for my sales team to sell some of our very high ticket stuff. So let me show you, you're looking at this book, right? And you're like, I'm buying this book for $6.99. But actually what you're buying or actually what I'm trying to bring you to is, for example, this in-person training that we do, which costs $14,300.

Okay? So the Facebook ad has brought you from, you've never heard of AJ and Smart before, you do not know who we are. You've now seen this book ad and you're buying the book and we're bringing you on a journey to having a phone call with one of my team members who will, if you're the right fit, tell you about something like our in-person training. Okay, so normally what companies would do if they were trying to sell something for 14K, and we can extrapolate this to any sort of thing. Like it could be agency work, like, you know, designing a website for someone, whatever. Normally what someone does is, okay, we have this service that we're going to do for our clients. We run design stuff. I don't know, we can design a website or we can make an e-commerce site for you.

So what we're going to do is we're going to make a website which talks about all the stuff we do and then we're going to like put Google ads on and maybe we're going to make content about it and then maybe we'll also do Facebook ads but they'll go to the actual website and then people will get to the website and they're like oh there's all this cool stuff and I don't know what to do.

What we do is we reverse engineer it. We think, okay, we want to sell facilitation in-person training. We have facilitation online courses and we also allow companies to hire facilitators from us and we can make money with that. So let's work our way backwards and figure out what is a first

point of contact that we think a customer could have with us, a pre-customer could have with us, that would get them excited about facilitation? Well, in our current experiment, we're thinking strategy workshops are a thing that people can understand and generally are an easy thing to talk about. And so strategy signal, the book we created because we needed that front end. Now, the book itself is not a super important element here. It's a, you know, it's essentially, it's a pamphlet, it's a PDF, it's a lead magnet. That's what people generally understand. But we're charging for it. So you pay for the book and in the process, and I can show you, I'm going to go into my ClickFunnels account so you can actually see all of the upsells that are happening here.

Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire. So Startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who will, want to build out their startup ideas. Now, they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what startup empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup, but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So you can check out the link to startup empire.com in the

description. So you can see so far the upfront sales are $235,483. You can see, by the way, unfortunately, I have to say the analytics here is not ideal because it doesn't track any back end sales and anyone who needs to buy something slight, like for example, Sometimes someone is like, oh, the payment isn't working. Can we use Stripe, whatever? It doesn't count it here. So you can see exactly what's happening. And so, but what you can see is that someone is going through,

how is it that our $699 book has an average cart value of $68.85? Well, it's because there's upsells in the process of going to buy the book. So I'll give you a quick example. And by the way, I'm looking at these. metrics every day and tweaking the prices of things and tweaking like the amount of stuff that has been tweaked to get to this point has been crazy. But still, it's not, it's, it's not like that we still use the template we're using over and over again, which is that we have an opt-in page, we have something called checkout bumps, and then we have these one-time offers that we experiment

with. And all of those lead to you being able to unlock a phone call with us. So I'll go through the pages and just show you how, how like, that works and just stop me, if anything, is confusing or weird. So you might have to blur some stuff out because my email address is going to be here. Oh, no, it's not. It's all good. So, okay, my first name, Jonathan, second name, Courtney, and then we'll leave the email address at that. And I'm going to go, I'm going to hit next.

Why do we split the thing into two? like why do we split the checkout into two? Well, because we want to have the email address so we can do abandoned cart emails. That's a whole thing. Like, if you're not collecting emails in the first step of somebody signing up for your product,

then you're not able to send abandoned cart emails which can dramatically increase the conversion rate. Quick clarifying question here. So just because I'm doing another funnel and I'm curious, what is your conversion rate from, cold ice cream traffic to an email

I show you here 58% wow that's crazy but I am tweaking it every day no no but that's crazy that's crazy right like you know from what I understand

a landing page on average convert 7 to 10% I think it's going to go down so I think now the ads have well I don't know. Like, I do think it's going to go down, but I don't think it's going to go down much lower than 30 for this particular page. And by the way, we have pages that convert way less. The reason

this is converting well is because the ad is clarifying that you have to pay $6.99 for it. You have a very clear visual of the thing you're going to get. And there's essentially no dissonance between the ad and the thing you're getting. So often your conversion rate will be lower. So for example, if we were like get the book, but we didn't mention that you have to pay for it, or if we didn't mention the specific number, then the conversion rate would be a lot lower. So, but by the way, then the numbers drop significantly if you look here from like the amount of people who then actually get the book is 18.49%. And you can also see these numbers are slightly incorrect as well. Like you can see that these conversion rate numbers, if you actually

do the math are not accurate. So, you know, 85 into 3,364, I don't think is 0.47%. So there's some, if anyone has eagle eyes here, you're going to see that click funnels is sometimes measuring things very strangely, which is, we've created our own dashboard because of that. But this is just, this just gives me a first pass. Everything like on the left here is accurate. Everything, everything from here on seems to be not super accurate. Okay. So by the way, also this page, you see this thank you bold text page and book your roadmap call page. The reason the book your roadmap call page only has 13 views is because we only added that page yesterday as a conversion optimization thing. So I'll show you what I mean in a second. Okay. So you land on this second part and you see

your first upsells. And these are the ability to upgrade your order. And what we're trying to do here is we're trying to say, okay, there are people who buy this book who are the type of people who want to have just quicker access to everything and want to use the stuff straight away. So for example, if you were the type of person who just doesn't really want it, you know you're not really going to read it, there's a video course and an audiobook for $29. You can add that on. Or if you're the type of person who's a consultant and you want to use the tools straight away that are in this thing. You can get our Miroboard, our slide deck and our assets. By the way, these are things we have already. We're just repackaging them and repurposing them into this project. And so you can spend

and you can see a percentage of people who do spend up to $80 right there before you even buy the book. This is now just showing today. I'll just do like this. 30. Okay. It's kind of the today view is tricky because the day just started. So it's going to give you like either way too good results or way too bad results. Okay. So you can see that's the home pay. Oh.

Oh. Whoa. You can see that's the opt-in page, the page I just showed you guys. Now you can see something else. There's something called OTO1 and something called OTO2. And then you see that there's a split where depending on what, the users do, they either end up on this thank you page or this thank you page. So the split is conditional based on we're trying to figure out the type of person we think who would buy

our more expensive products by not asking them questions, by just seeing which things they'll buy. And so what we've determined, and this is again just through some testing, we've determined that if someone buys this thing, which I'm just about to open and go straight into. So this is an upgrade. By the way, I look totally different in the video because it's a product, right? It's an older product that we're bundling into this that fits with this product. So if they buy this thing, then they essentially unlock, I'll show you. They unlock this page. And by the way, if you're running an agency, this is like, if you're not, not doing this and you're running an agency.

This is the best thing ever. So they purchase the book. They purchase some upgrades with it. They essentially self-qualify. And then we unlock a roadmap call for them with my team, which I explain in this video. Do you want to watch the video?

Or I don't know if it makes sense. How long is it? Yeah, we can like watch a little bit of it then. Yeah, I'll explain. I'm right here. I'll explain anyway. So I just explained that they've unlocked this call and it's essentially a career coaching call with my team where a member of my team will do

like a career roadmap with you. The roadmap is they'll help you figure out if you can add this workshop and facilitation thing to your career and how that would look over the next months and years. And if we have something to sell you, if we have something that we have to offer, we'll also offer it. And I also say that in the video. I say, this is a no obligation call. You don't need to buy anything. However, if we think you're the right fit for something, we will tell you and you can think about it. So I say that so no one's like, oh, but I didn't know you're going to mention it. It's also cool that people actually really like these calls. So what we've done here is we've run a Facebook ad. If you zoom out, we've run a Facebook ad and we've had somebody book a call with us.

And by the way, this usually happens in one go. So like the call bookings are coming in from the ads that people see today, the call bookings are coming in today. And then there's obviously other emails and stuff and there's some people who take a while to make the decision. But many people are just making these call bookings and booking these calls today. So they click here and then they end up on our calendar and you can schedule a call. By the way, I would really appreciate if you're, if you guys watching this, don't book this call because there is a real, you know, expensive sales team on the other side of this and they will like just don't book the call please. That's not like a reverse psychology.

No, it will mess with our metrics unless you're actually, unless you actually want to do facilitation stuff. I will really mess with my metrics if you do this. But anyway, you'd have to buy the other expensive stuff to qualify yourself anyway. So this is, this has been a system we've been using for like seven years when we want to get a call booking or when we want to generate call bookings for our agency work, for in-person training, for courses, for anything like that, we'll start with something that is like the reverse engineered starting, like logical starting point for someone discovering what they would

want to discover before they find us, like this book, for example. And then we bring them step by step through a journey until they book a call with us. By the way, if they don't book a call with us, if they're unqualified, or like low qualified, we send them to a one and a half hour video. So if they didn't buy anything, we unlock a one and a half hour training video for them, which essentially is a webinar, a pre-recorded webinar. And at the end of that webinar, they have the opportunity to book a call with us. So it's like if you're warm and kind of the right person, we want to have a call with you today.

If you're still kind of not sure, then we want to show you what we do. and then if you still want to have a call with us, then the option is there. And so that's the book funnel. It generated something like, I think, so it launched on the 26th of May, and it's generated probably 280 calls, which is amazing.

And obviously only a certain percentage of those turn into deals, but just, you know, it's relatively unheard of for an agency or company like us, to have 280 call bookings at all for anything ever. But we've had, we have a three-person sales team having their calls booked out all the time since like 2018 or something because of doing running funnels like this. So that's the funnel we just launched. And that's an example of using like an kind of non-obvious path to bringing people

to your product. And so maybe one question for your audience could be like, well, how would you do that for software as a service or something? I guess that's a common thing that your audience would want to know. Or like maybe you could ask me what type of funnel I would use for and you just pick some random stuff and I can tell you or show you? I mean, I think a lot of people listening to this are interested in building software. They're interested in building agencies and they're interested in building like AI agents.

Selfishly, I'd love you to just review ideabrowser.com. The reason why is I'd love to get your perspective on it, but also I think a lot of people listening this are building, they're building less like workshop stuff and they're building more like software like that. Yes. Yeah. Yes. So I, if you go to idea browser and, dot com and you can hit share your screen if you know how to share a screen.

What is a screen? Who is screen? I'll share my screen here. I mean, you probably know the first thing I'm going to say, which is that this is the website and not the funnel. Okay, so first of all, we were like high-fiving the other day because we're like, this converts at 30% of people who come to this sign up. But then once I saw sign up, meaning they put their email to get in a free start. Got it. Yes. Yeah. So basically idea browser.com is like the main mechanic is every single day you get a free startup idea.

They're mostly like AI ideas, but there's some agency, some SaaS stuff. And there's two paid products. One is where you get access to the whole database of ideas. Yeah, exactly. And you also get to see, like, if you, you know, using AI, is this idea a good founder fit? And then the $1,000 a year one is just, you know, AI chat strategist. We have, like, an AI research agent. So a lot of people don't need startup ideas, but they're, like, working on something.

And they just want an AI to basically, basically, it's like a, it's literally like me, like, critiquing your idea. So anyways, I want you to go through this. If Jay Ice Cream was running this funnel, what should I do to scale it? So with the goal of just making as much revenue as possible, I guess, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So the first thing I would do is, so the website itself is already, I just wouldn't touch it. Like I would, the first thing I do whenever we're working, with someone and helping them with the funnel thing or helping them with increasing their revenue is they're showing me the website and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine. Let's move on. So I think the website is fine and I wouldn't touch it. I wouldn't even, I wouldn't even, it wouldn't even be a conversation that we would have. The first thing I would do is,

I would decide like, okay, which, you know, which one of these things do we want to sell the most of? Do we want to sell the starter or do we want to sell the pro? Like for you, do you have a preference? Yeah, I mean the pro and not just because of the price, just because I think having like the AI strategy and is going to really, really, like a lot of people, it's fun to look at startup ideas and people are in that mindset a few times a year. But I think that having the pro as like your AI co-franchised,

is critical. Okay. So the first thing I would be asking is, okay, like, what is the, once I understand why this thing is valuable, what I would be trying to do is reverse engineer. The type of funnel I think that we would use for something like this would probably be a live webinar funnel, a live webinar training where you would invite your audience to a training. And the training itself, the hook has to be insanely strong.

so that everyone in your audience is just like, holy crap, I have to go to this thing. And it's going to be free or very low priced. And so if I'm thinking about this product, it's about finding your next big idea. It's get your ideas analyzed by an agent, an idea agent. Okay, so it's, what's the big difference between, like, what's the big benefit between this one and this one? Like between the pro and opportunity hunter? Is it the fact that it can tell you whether your ideas are good or not?

Yeah, your ideas are good or not. Also, it gives you, like, the top 5% of ideas. We have, like, pro ideas, which, like, I'm actually going and putting in the ideas. So you get access to, like, the creme de la creme, plus you get access to all the agents to help you build out your idea. Okay. So what result do you think your ideal customer is looking for? And just for framing the result that might be.

ideal customer at facilitator.com is looking for is to have a higher day rate, do less execution work, and more strategy work? I think that, so I built this for myself because I have a holding company and I'm always looking for ideas to build and I'm trying to build like a diversified holding company, a bunch of portfolio, a bunch of different revenue streams. And I think that the outcome that people want is they kind of want to have a similar holding company to me. So they want to have multiple products generating revenue.

And they don't want to raise millions of dollars for it. They don't want to spend millions of dollars building it. They want small, quote unquote, niche ideas that generate revenue. Okay. So you're looking for, this is basically, I'm just like speeding up what one of these conversations would look like. So it's someone who wants to have a hold co, hold co with multiple, products what sort of

why do they want that what's the what's the desire there so either they're at a nine to five that they don't love so the desire is

escape nine to five ultimately like build enough income so that you know you quit your job or or you're just, you know, you're a startup builder and you're just looking for a validated startup idea.

You're not looking to do ayahuasca in the forest and come up with a startup idea. You want the highest chance of success when you put something out there. Would you say like the character or the type of character that you want to target is someone who's almost like, I don't know, like, you know, Peter levels, but like five years before.

Yeah, exactly. They want to, they essentially, the transformation they're looking for is to go from where they're at, which we're not 100% sure yet, but they have entrepreneurial energy. So that's got to be a fact, right? They have some entrepreneurial energy

because they're following you as well. Like that's like the, you know, the people who are already following you are going to be the easiest to test this on. Then it's the, their aspiration is that they can have something similar to what you have. which is multiple different companies, multiple different diversified streams of revenue

and being able to find inspiration for what those streams of revenue are and from a validated pool of ideas, not just random internet, like Twitter stuff, or X stuff, whatever. Okay, so what I would be trying to do here with you is figure out if you had three hours to go up on stage and really inspire the shit out of this type of person.

What is the, all we're looking for usually is, what's the hook, what's the name of this talk that gets everyone to want to come to it? Like, we're not, we're, we know that eventually we want to talk about idea browser and, and give them an offer. But the first step, what we're trying to do is create a, essentially an event or, because book funnels are kind of tricky and not worth doing as the first step.

What we're trying to do is like, what's an irresistible event that someone like you could run for someone like them? I can give some examples. So let's say we're, okay, let's just brainstorm it. One thing could be behind the scenes of my blah, blah, blah, dollar business or a holding company. And then the subheadline is every single thing I've never shared about how my business is run

so that I can generate this amount of money, blah, blah, blah. How I go from idea to million dollar business. Like something like this, I think could work quite well with your business. And again, then you have to like think about your brand and maybe you don't want to talk about money and et cetera, et cetera. But you're looking for. what's something irresistible, that the type of person who you want to help transform

would want to hear from you that you haven't really talked about or you haven't had the opportunity to talk about on your YouTube channel. And so I think something around like the behind the scene or what works well for me usually is some sort of behind the scenes of how I went from one employee or just myself to the first million, which is the hardest to get through, or the first 10 people,

or the first four companies in my whole co. That is essentially a webinar. It's a Zoom webinar. You create a really simple landing page for it. I can show you like some of the ones we have done for ourselves. Let's go with, let's just say, just so people can take something away from this. Let's just say that we're going to go with the how I, you know, the behind the scenes of how I built a zero to one million MRI month diversified holding company.

Yes. With zero dollars raised. Exactly. So I'll show you the page in the minute because I'll lose my flow. I'll show you what these pages, but you can imagine a very simple landing page. A very simple landing page where it's like, you know, here's the name of the thing you're going to do. Here's what you're going to teach. and here's a picture of you on the left

and it's just a register button and a date for the thing that's happening. So the, instead of sharing idea browser, usually it happens within 10 days as well, by the way. Usually when you decide you're going to do this, it should happen within the next 10 days.

Now for the next 10 days, all you talk about in your content is this event that you're going to do, is this training that you're going to do, nothing else. You're always just pushing people towards that. Usually I buy a, what's called like a vanity

domain name for these events as well. So just like a fun, easy thing that you can verbally say, like, first million holdco.com. I buy one for every single one of these events that I do. You even turned up to one of the one I did for the book funnel. I don't even remember what domain name I bought for that, but that was like a two-hour live event.

So your event would basically be the number one and only thing you're talking to people about for the next few weeks. And people listening will be like, yeah, but Greg has such a big audience. It's so much easier for him. Yes. And you start with very few people turning up to these events. The first one I ever did, maybe 12 people turned up to. But by the way, if you're running an agency, 12 people, even if three jump on a call with you,

is an amazing first step and an amazing like, holy crap, this can work. and it actually gives you loads of motivation to go and actually start building your content machine and also testing out ads because you're like, oh, I know where to send them now. So a funnel, the cool thing about a funnel, and this is, by the way, the beginning of a funnel, you know where to send people

and you know when you send people there. They're not going to leak out somewhere. You're going to bring them on a really specific journey. So people are turning up to this landing page. It's about Greg teaching the thing you said. We'll bring it up on screen. the name of the thing. By the way, if you're in the comments and you want Greg to do that event, tell us, so everyone in the, everyone is going to sign up for that thing. They're going to get

many, many reminders all the way up until the day, especially one hour before and 10 minutes after it starts. This is a big deal for webinars. You're going to have around 50% of the people turn up to the webinar. So let's say, I think for you probably like three or four or five thousand people would turn up. We had like 2,000 turn up to our last one. And we, we, We don't have a very big, like, we don't have a lot of content stuff out there. So I think yours would be quite a bit bigger than ours. And you're going to tell a story about how you essentially went from zero to where you are now. And also at the very beginning, what I always say, and you heard me saying this in the last webinar,

this makes you not feel awkward. You're going to be like, everybody, welcome to this session. My name is Gregor-La, just to be 100% transatlant. transparent. I absolutely will try to sell you something at the end of this. I want to tell you about one of my businesses, that's part of this whole code that I think you should be part of. But if this is something that makes you feel uncomfortable, I'm giving you the heads up right now so you have the opportunity to leave because I do not want anyone to feel uncomfortable. That's like, I say this because I just don't want to be thinking the whole time. Oh, no, I have to transition to

selling now. So you're going to tell the story about building your whole co. You're obviously, what you're trying to do is you're trying to tell a story. You're then trying to talk about like the vehicle, the thing that gave you an aha moment. So usually on your journey, there's going to be this thing where you're like, oh my God, like I was struggling. And then something happened. And then it became easier. It felt easier after that point. Usually that somehow needs to relate to the product that you're going to talk about. So in your case, I mean, you're the... I already have the story because it's my life's, it's my life story. Exactly. You know, so it's so easy. I don't even need to prepare. You know, then the important part is you're going to say, and okay, guys, how can you

do this for yourselves? This is the transition into sales. You're going to say, guys, how can you do this for yourselves? Option A, you take the path I did. It was long. It was a lot, a lot of work, but it did get me to where I am today. And it's the, it's like the free, it's called the freeway, right? The freeway is do this. Or you can take the headache freeway, which is what I've created for my younger self, something that I actually would have wanted to get me here faster. And that is idea browser.

And blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's what it is. Here's a la la. And if you join before, you have to have some urgency. You have to. If you join before this date, you don't have to do a discount, but you say if you join before this date, you get this extra thing. So what usually I do is if you join before this date, you can join a one day boot camp with me where I'll show you exactly how to use the product, et cetera, et cetera. So that's like a, that's a standard webinar, live webinar funnel.

With your pricing, you don't need to do calls. So anything below $2,000, we don't do calls. Or we also tell our clients don't do calls. You can sell it right there at the end of the webinar. And often, especially if you're very clear at the very front, at the very start that there will be a pitch. Often it's actually an enjoyable and fun and silly experience. You saw our audience, which is a mixture of random people from Facebook

and all over the place. Generally, the sentiment is fun and positive. and like, holy shit, I can't believe I'm getting this advice. Then I will do a Q&A at the end. And the Q&A, my team is just telling me which questions the audiences asking that are the most relevant. And of course, I want my team to also select questions that are relevant to the product as well, right?

You know, anyone being like, oh, but can I do this with Idea Browser? Oh, can I do this with it? I want to answer those live. And the Q&A is also a value ad that they don't get in your YouTube videos. So for selling Idea Browser, if I were you, what I would be doing is I would basically just stop optimizing the website and trying to get people like I wouldn't even bother running Google ads. I wouldn't run any Facebook ads to the website. I would first do that webinar.

And if it's successful, then I would turn that. I would create a version of that webinar that's like looks very nice with a proper camera. and is just repeating. So that's then called a VSL. So it's a pre-recorded edition of that. And that pre-recording, you can either run Facebook ads to it all the time, or you can have it like every three months

it like comes back when you want to do a push. Or you can do it live every couple of months with a different hook each time. So like you could basically not do any regular sales for Idea Browser and just every, I mean, I did it every month personally, but every couple of weeks, whenever you feel like it, you do another one of those trainings. And people, especially if you're good at coming up with a new hook every time, even though it still has a similar like end point, you, and by the way, just to be clear, I did the same hook every time.

I was just this, I did the same one. It was called a 516 method every single month for like three years until we decided to make it into like a pre-recorded. One of the most fun things we did, one of the craziest things we did was we would do a new live every month, but I would only do the intro, then we would play the pre-recording, and then I would do a Q&A at the end so that we were able, so that I also didn't go insane doing that presentation every month. And so this approach, I think, would get you a crazy explosion of sales all in one go at the end of one of these webinars,

then it would ball off and trickle until you do it again. And that pattern, you can layer on top of the other pattern that you're doing, which would be the more slow burn. And this approach is really powerful. We use it for getting people to go from free to premium and apps all the time. Oh, and holy crap, the people who are free sign-ups for Idea Browser, they're also the perfect people to invite to something like this. They're the perfect people to invite.

So what you're always trying to do is have also a machine, again, which can be webinars, which moves people from free to premium within a product. Webinars work really well. What also works really well is, hey, if you join in the next 48 hours, you get this thing for free instead of having to do a discount. Things like this are really, really powerful. So I would recommend essentially a live webinar

This is Let's end the pod here You know I thought this is this is really cool I think like coming from You know I spent almost 10 years in Silicon Valley Raising Venture Capital Like we never talk about this stuff

Like in our Especially in like SF land It's all about you build a great product And then if the product is great, then people are going to talk about it. But I think that for the vast majority of people building products today, they need to understand this. And for the longest time, I've just, to be honest, avoided this because I always thought that this was like spammy and lame and cringe. So what I'm learning from you is that like it isn't. Like you're providing value to people at

at different steps and different levels of value. And you're kind of nurturing them. And I think the smartest part about what I really liked about the book funnel is, you know, the self-liquidating aspect of it. Like you're getting paid to bring them there. Like, are you kidding me? Yeah, I mean, you're a book funnel for you would be perfect because your book would be how to generate startup ideas.

You'd write it very quickly with your team within the space of two or three weeks. make the cover extremely beautiful and then the funnel itself self-liquidates with a couple of smaller products and the end thing actually your product is so cheap idea browser that that literally could be one of the one-time offers like if you built a book funnel

you wouldn't even need to end it on anything like a call booking you would just end it on hey I mean okay the 299 what is it 299 and 999? Yeah yeah So the $2.99 a year would be an OTO. So like in our, sorry, a one-time offer.

In our book funnel, the second one-time offer is $2.97 and people buy this, having never heard of us before. So a book funnel for you would be very powerful. What I would warn against with a book funnel is it is a complex thing to build and to track. like we have been building them for years and I we still struggle we still have like what's our actual at like return on ads spend today we still even though everything is you know we have our dashboard we have all of this other stuff it still breaks and it's still very requires a lot of tweaking whereas a webinar funnel is just the thing with the webinar funnel the trick that other people don't do that we do and this is why I think your audience also shouldn't

know this, normally what someone would do. Actually, having listened to what I said, what you might do now, you wouldn't because you're smart. But if you were just listening to this, you would be like, I'm going to do a tweet to my audience about this event. And then I'm going to do the event. And then we'll see what happens. That's absolutely the wrong way to do it. So what you're trying to do with this event is, first of all, you're announcing it everywhere you can at once. you're announcing it on all of your channels, X, LinkedIn, and you're emailing your list and also everybody who signed up for IdeaGia browser.com, but they're on the free thing.

So that's the first pass. You're considering that just the first pass. And you're going to look at your registrations and it's going to be whatever. You're going to be slightly disappointed. You're going to be like, oh, not that many people registered. Then for the next 10 days, every day, on your social media platforms, you're creating a new piece of valuable content

that ends with that as the hook, as the thing to send people to. Plus, everybody who's on your different lists is getting as many emails as you can stomach, basically, as you can handle sending to them without getting too many unsubscribes. So generally what we'll do is, if we have a webinar,

we're announcing it on a Wednesday, and it's happening on a Wednesday, we'll send like three emails, the first day. The first is just an announcement that's coming up. The second is sort of, here's some more detail on what's inside it. The third is a loom of me talking about what I'm going to talk about just to get people excited. And then the next days are like little different angles of it. Because you know that adoption curve where early adopters, then, you know, everybody else, or like, what is it called early adopters? The S curve? No, not the S curve. You know the adoption

curve thing. Yeah, like the. The laggards are up the end. The bleeding edge people. Yeah. And then there's everyone else. So in the very beginning, your first email is just going to get the early adopters. You have to apply a lot of different angles to really get everyone to come to it. And then when the event itself is like the day of the event, you're posting about it,

you're posting that it's today. And then the event happens. And then the follow-up emails are extremely important. So once people have actually turned up to the event, you'll know, who turned up and who didn't. For the people who didn't, you're sending them, sending them a loom of you doing a summary of everything. And for the people who did, you're sending them like, here's everything you learned, but broken down into lots of different emails with the calls to action and a reminder of the thing closing. So we have, like, for a normal webinar, live webinar, you know, we could have up to six to eight

emails before the webinar starts and six to eight emails after the webinar starts. And, if you're listening to this and you're like, that's really annoying, an annoying amount of emails. You're doing this based on what your audience can handle. And you're doing this based on the unsubscribe rate that you're comfortable with. So you're not just like blasting it out without any data. Like you'll know already after the first email. You get the feeling for what's too much for your audience. But most people, they're like, they do one thing, they do one announcement about the webinar.

not enough people turn up, then they don't send any follow-up emails. No one buys the thing, and then they're like webinars don't work. It's like the webinar is just the excuse to send the emails. Don't hate the player, hate the game. And by the way, webinars are a great excuse to do some marketing as well, right?

When you're like, what do I talk about to push people to Idea Browser this month? Well, you don't have to. You just think about what would be a valuable training for you to do. And then you push people to that. it also adds variety instead of constantly. Go to Idea Browser. Go to Idea Browser. You know what I mean?

I will say six to eight emails. Too many emails for me. Like it just sounds like, yeah, for me. You might be right, but you also might be on email lists where, like, if you look at companies like, you know, Magic Mind or Eight Sleep, they send, when they had their new Eighth Sleep pod Ultra, they were. doing an email or two per day or at least two weeks. And you're not just doing it willy-nilly. You're also putting in conditions like if someone doesn't open these emails or if someone has looked at this email or not looked at this email, then don't send them another one. So yeah, there's conditions you can build in. But I'm just trying to give a feeling for how many emails

you might have in total. For example, okay, if you try to, if you go and try to buy our book, but you don't buy it. You just put your email in. Most companies don't even do abandoned cart emails. So if somebody, and we have six, so we have six abandoned cart emails, and that's an email chain that happens over the space of two weeks. But of course, if someone buys or if someone opts out, we won't send them another one. So yeah, it's just like a complex interweaving of lots of email-y stuff happening there. This has been great. You're a sauce dispenser. I appreciate you sharing the numbers and and everything with us. I think this is, I think this is going to change a lot of people's trajectories and I can't wait to see what people do. I want to say one more

thing about a book funnel. You saw this because I think you saw the live webinar, but what we did for our warm audience, so the warm audience is not even very important for doing one of these funnels because we're trying to get new people into the funnel. But for the warm audience, because we were like, we'd like them to buy the book, we'd like to make some upfront revenue here. what we did is we offered a physical edition of the book for like 48 hours and that really created some explosive sales as well. But, you know, physical additions are really annoying to do, but that was a really good way. Like having these timed, you know, they're called like, sometimes they're called MIFKis, Most Incredible Free Gift Evers, but sometimes you actually

pay for them, PIFKis, I don't know, or MIPKis. And so yeah, having something where it's like, you can get this, but for this period of time, you can only get it, you get it with this and this. Because a lot of people are like, oh, honestly, this is an important point. Every person who has software is like, I can't add urgency because this is software and I can't say there's only 10 seats left, et cetera, et cetera. And you don't need to add urgent. And they're also like, I don't want to discount all the time. Like, you don't need to do any of those things.

Add something on for a period of time and that creates urgency. Like, Endel, the company that does this really nice audio app, do you know Endel? They're amazing at this. Two years ago for their Black Friday sale, or last year, I screenshot everyone's funnels, by the way, or everyone's sales. Two years ago, they were like, okay, if you renew for another year or if you join in the annual subscription, we'll give you a tote bag. And I'm like, yeah, I want to have the tote bag. By the way, it never turned up. But it's all good.

I still wanted it. it's just one of those things where it's like you can be creative and add little things in instead of discounting or creating fake urgency. I love it. I love it. All right, man, you got my creative juices flow and I appreciate you. Thanks for coming on. I'm juiced up.

See ya.