How Ryan Clogg Scaled His Business Past $100 Million
Two direct-response operators trade notes on the offer changes that took a low-ticket start to nine figures, and why most health offers stall at the same monthly number while a handful pull in millions more.
Posted
6 months ago
Duration
Format
Interview
educational
Views
4.3K
133 likes
57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Businesses that break past a low-eight-figure ceiling in direct response usually get there by layering a low-ticket acquisition engine underneath a high-ticket backend, not by finding one offer that scales on its own.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You run a health, wellness, or supplement offer stuck around the same monthly revenue and want to know what separates you from businesses doing seven or eight figures a month.
You're weighing whether to add a high-ticket coaching or service tier on top of an existing low-ticket or direct-response product.
You manage paid media and a sales team together and want language for why performance swings so hard month to month.
You're scaling a call-booking or setter-to-closer process and want to see the volume math behind it.
SKIP IF…
You're pre-revenue or haven't run paid acquisition yet — this is two operators already running eight-figure ad budgets comparing notes, not a beginner's guide.
You want step-by-step funnel build instructions — this is a strategy conversation, not a tutorial.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Two direct-response operators compare notes on how one of them grew from an unstructured low-ticket start to over 100 million dollars in sales, and why most health offers stall at the same monthly ceiling while a few pull in millions more. Revenue ceilings turn out to be a volume and acquisition-mix problem, not a pricing problem: the biggest health businesses run direct-to-cart ascension models, add high-ticket coaching backends to fix weak lifetime value, and sometimes lean on brand trust or affiliate partnerships instead of cold ads. The back half compares a real low-ticket test's raw versus net cost per customer, and names the two real bottlenecks on scaling it: creative supply and setter capacity.
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The guest walks through the offer changes that took his business from an unplanned low-ticket start to roughly $1M, then a call-funnel info product with lifetime access pricing from $500-$1,500 got him to $10M, and switching from info to one-to-one coaching took him to $30M and now roughly $34M a year.
01:39 – 03:35
02 · Why most health offers stall around the same ceiling
The host raises the common belief that health offers cap around $600K-$3M a month. The guest argues the ceiling isn't about dollar value, it's about volume and offer size, and names V Shred as one of a handful of health companies doing $10M+ a month.
03:35 – 04:44
03 · The direct-to-cart ascension model
At scale, relying on one lead funnel stops making sense. The guest describes layering a direct-to-cart product, subscription, and multiple acquisition types to offset the volatility of pure lead generation, and contrasts a liquidated buyer against an unconverted lead using a $100 CPA / $90 AOV example.
04:44 – 05:46
04 · Brand trust and affiliate partnerships as alternate paths
The host floats a hypothetical: a high-trust figure like Andrew Huberman launching a health offer could plausibly do $5M a month with minimal effort. The guest adds that at least one major health company scales through an affiliate and partnership model instead of paid acquisition.
05:46 – 07:32
05 · The 2020 mastermind: getting off the offer crazy train
The guest tells a story from a mastermind just before COVID, when he was solo and doing $150K a month. Nine-figure companies including V Shred revealed their real breakthrough was realizing low lifetime value forced them to keep rotating offers, so they started adding high-ticket backends instead. Natural Health Sherpa's version: a $3K coaching backend roughly tripled LTV and stretched an offer's life from six months to two years.
07:32 – 08:51
06 · The merge between direct response, media, and high ticket
The conversation widens to an industry-level trend: DR and health companies merging with high ticket, and famous or high-reach media people monetizing through high ticket rather than becoming the public-facing guru themselves. The guest ranks affiliate/lead-gen operators as the strongest media buyers, and high-ticket coaching operators as weaker media buyers but the best monetizers, because of how much room for error the price point creates.
08:51 – 10:57
07 · A failed low-ticket test, and a second attempt that's working
The guest describes a rushed, low-buy-in low-ticket test from a couple of years ago that got shut down after looking unprofitable. He contrasts it with the ongoing volatility of running media buying and a sales team together, then shares recent numbers from a new low-ticket test: roughly $30K spent in a day at a raw CPA near $3,000, netting down to about $1,400 per customer after liquidation.
10:57 – 12:57
08 · The two real constraints on scaling low ticket
The guest lays out the two bottlenecks on scaling a low-ticket-to-high-ticket funnel: a creative production engine that can supply hundreds of new ad variants a week, and a large enough setter team to handle inbound call volume, walking through the booking-to-close math and the training-arc risk of ramping setters too fast.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
A health or fitness offer's monthly revenue ceiling has more to do with acquisition volume than with the offer's price point.
Companies doing $10 million or more a month in health typically run a direct-to-cart ascension model, layering products and acquisition types instead of relying on one lead funnel.
A $100 cost per acquisition against a $90 sale can still net a $10 cost per paying customer, which is a different asset than a $10 lead who hasn't bought anything.
A sufficiently trusted personal brand in a niche could plausibly generate millions a month with minimal paid acquisition, because the demand already exists.
Nine-figure direct-response companies have historically had to keep launching new offers because low lifetime value forced constant offer rotation to keep the numbers working.
Adding a single higher-priced coaching backend can roughly triple an offer's lifetime value and stretch its usable life from months to years.
Direct-response and high-ticket coaching are converging because high ticket is one of the more reliable ways to monetize an existing audience or lead list.
Some of the people best at monetizing an audience deliberately avoid becoming its public face, running the business from behind the scenes instead.
Operators with an affiliate or lead-gen background tend to be the strongest media buyers and copywriters in direct response.
High-ticket coaching operators tend to be comparatively weak at media buying but strong at overall monetization, because a higher price point tolerates more acquisition inefficiency.
A new acquisition channel tested with low internal buy-in and minimal tracking will often look like a failure even when the underlying economics could work.
Running paid media and a sales team together creates two compounding sources of volatility, so a month where both perform well should be treated as the exception, not the baseline.
The gap between raw, top-of-funnel cost per acquisition and true net cost per customer can be enormous once downstream liquidation is counted.
Scaling a low-ticket-to-high-ticket funnel is usually bottlenecked by creative supply and sales staffing, not by how much can be spent on ads.
Routing buyers from a low-ticket funnel directly into a booked call can make close economics roughly ten times better than a cold lead funnel.
Takeaway
Why some health offers scale to $100M and most don't
SCALING ECONOMICS
The jump from a six-figure offer to a nine-figure business comes from layering acquisition types and offer tiers, not from finding one funnel that scales on its own.
01The offer stair-step to $100M
A business can move through distinct offer stages: low ticket with no real strategy, an info product sold on a payment-plan-style lifetime access, then a one-to-one coaching offer, each stage roughly ten times the revenue of the one before it.
The biggest jumps in scale came from changing the offer itself, not from optimizing the same offer harder.
02Why most health offers stall around the same ceiling
A common revenue ceiling in a niche isn't proof of a hard cap. It can just mean most operators in that niche are running a similar offer size and acquisition volume.
Comparing businesses by monthly revenue alone is misleading when their offer prices differ by 5x or more. Comparing transaction volume is more useful.
03The direct-to-cart ascension model
At a large enough scale, relying on a single lead-generation funnel becomes a liability. Spreading acquisition across a direct-to-cart product plus other entry points reduces how much one channel's volatility can hurt the business.
A $100 cost per acquisition against a $90 sale can still be a good deal if it nets a $10 cost per paying customer, a materially different asset than a $10 lead who hasn't bought anything yet.
04Brand trust and affiliate partnerships as alternate paths
A high-trust personal brand can generate revenue with a fraction of the paid acquisition a typical direct-response funnel needs, because the demand is already there rather than being manufactured by ads.
An affiliate or partnership acquisition model is a legitimate alternative to running paid ads directly, and some of the largest players in a market use it instead of building a media-buying team.
05The 2020 mastermind: getting off the offer crazy train
When lifetime value from one offer is too low, a business ends up locked into constantly launching new offers just to keep acquisition economics working. Treat frequent offer rotation as a symptom of a monetization problem, not a marketing problem.
Adding a single higher-priced backend offer can roughly triple lifetime value and multiply how long an existing front-end offer stays profitable to run.
06The merge between direct response, media, and high ticket
Direct-response and high-ticket coaching businesses are converging because high ticket is one of the more reliable ways to monetize an audience, a lead list, or a media presence.
Some of the people best at monetizing an audience deliberately avoid becoming the public face of the business. The economics can work without a personal brand attached.
Operators with an affiliate or lead-gen background tend to be strong at media buying and copywriting. High-ticket coaching operators tend to be weaker at media buying but stronger at overall monetization because a higher price point tolerates more acquisition inefficiency.
07A failed low-ticket test, and a second attempt that's working
A new acquisition channel tested with low internal buy-in, minimal tracking, and a rushed setup will often look like a failure even when the channel itself might have worked with a real test.
Running paid media and a sales team together creates two compounding sources of volatility. Treat a month where both are strong as the exception, not the baseline, when planning cash flow.
The gap between raw, top-of-funnel cost per acquisition and true net cost per customer can be enormous once downstream liquidation is counted. Judge a channel by the net number, not the number that shows up first in the ad platform.
08The two real constraints on scaling low ticket
Scaling a funnel that converts low-ticket buyers into high-ticket calls is usually bottlenecked by creative supply and sales staffing, not by how much can be spent on ads. Plan for both before pushing spend higher.
A dedicated owner for creative production, with a defined recipe of what's working, is what allows hundreds of new ad variants to ship in a week instead of a handful.
Moving buyers from a low-ticket funnel into a booked call can make close economics roughly ten times better than a cold lead funnel, but ramping the setter team too fast to handle that volume creates a training gap that can undercut the gain.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Lead funnel
An acquisition funnel, such as an opt-in page or VSL, where the prospect becomes a lead but not a paying customer.
Liquidation
Recovering ad spend by converting cold traffic into a paying customer, even at a low price, instead of only generating a lead.
Ascension model
A funnel structure where a low-priced entry product is followed by additional products or tiers that raise customer value over time.
Direct-to-cart
An acquisition funnel where the customer buys immediately from an ad or landing page, skipping an opt-in or phone-call step.
AOV
Average order value: the average amount a customer spends per purchase.
CPA
Cost per acquisition: the average ad spend required to generate one lead or sale, depending on how it's defined for a given funnel.
Setter
A sales team member who books and qualifies inbound calls before handing the prospect to a closer.
Closer
A salesperson responsible for converting a booked, qualified call into a paying high-ticket customer.
00:00 – 01:39denseOffer stages that led to $100M+ in total sales
01:39 – 03:35denseWhy most health offers plateau around the same monthly number
03:35 – 04:44denseDirect-to-cart ascension model and liquidation economics
04:44 – 05:46Brand trust and affiliate partnerships as alternate acquisition paths
05:46 – 07:32dense2020 mastermind story: fixing low LTV with a high-ticket backend
07:32 – 08:51Industry-wide merge of direct response, media, and high ticket
08:51 – 10:57denseA failed low-ticket test versus a working one, raw vs. net CPA
10:57 – 12:57denseCreative supply and setter capacity as the real scaling constraints
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So you recently crossed over 100 million total sales. You said 103. Yeah, probably.
So what do you think is the biggest breakthroughs along the way that you feel like kind of helped elevate you guys through the different stages and eventually over there? We were low ticket to start. No idea what we're doing.
That's how we got into it. And it was like 100 -ish. That's how we got to a million.
The jump from one to 10 was doing call funnel, but we were selling info. So it was a lifetime access. It started at 500 bucks, went to a thousand, went to 1500.
And then from 10 to 30 was changing it from info to coaching. So it was one -to -one instead. Like those were like the big, if you had to look at the charts, that's what the change was.
That's 30 per year. Yeah. Right.
Okay, cool. Yeah. So it was literally, it was like one, nine, 10, 30.
0 .5 or whatever 34 this last year so like it's all it's gone up every time what do you but the stair steps was the offer what do you think is the biggest difference because like it's really interesting with health offers it's like a lot of people can't break let's say 600 a month and then there's a handful of people and there's like several who pretty much i mean look like there's differences in the offer but it's like pretty much the same offer but they're ripping like two a month three a month four a month five a month i mean i have a client doing i don't know the exact number but i know at one point it was eight to ten a month yeah right so like what do you think's the difference between those like the few people who are doing massive numbers and then like i would say most of like people in my mastermind who have offered like years are probably like four to six hundred three to six hundred yeah it's kind of like the i always hear people say like oh like
call funnels cap at like 3 million a month or this happens at like a million a month and or 600 in that example and i really don't think that it's that like i don't think that people should even look at it as it's at a dollar value because it's really volume So like if someone has a 30K thing or someone has a 5K thing or like we had a competition with these guys that have a 25K offer or a 7K offer, like it's different.
Yeah. So it's very different in terms of that. So that's first is like I don't think it's the dollars.
The difference in health market, I know three by name of like that's kind of in our world that's in health. And I'm sure there's a ton of ones that we don't know. Yeah.
But that are in our world that are doing over 10. right now right and um who are they can you say who they are probably not probably not so so i can i can break down their whole business models uh yeah well i know i know v shred obviously and then within health yeah yeah maybe i shouldn't say the next one and then i'm trying to think of somebody else but are you saying over 10 doing like more like high ticket stuff are you saying some of those people doing over 10 almost are kind of like an e -commerce high ticket blend yeah so And that's where I'm going with it.
And by the way, if you like this content and you want to come to our next event where I'm gathering all entrepreneurs, people like Ryan, and we're talking about what's working in the industry, what's not working in the industry and the lessons that we've learned scaling to over a hundred million in total revenue. We have an event coming up in our eight figure border mastermind.
If you want to know more information about that, you can click the link in the description and it'll tell you all about it. And essentially at like an acquisition source at a certain point of a certain volume, like it just doesn't make sense to not be sweeping up. or getting economy differences that you can get from something that's direct to cart or having direct to cart subscription on that like it just at that size starts to make sense to have either multiple products for ltv side or multiple acquisition types to like offset and like liquidate yeah so uh one two and three all use some version of a director cart right as like an ascension model yeah um and whether that's like a test kit thing whether that's an info product whether that's whatever and then they are massive direct response towards those things they get the liquidation they get the buyers instead of leads and then they go through that so it's like I would, I mean, that's, that's our direction completely.
Cause it's like, it's just so clear to us. It's very clear. It's volatility of just raw ramming lead funnels.
And when I say that, I always call them lead phones, but like opt -ins VSL, anything that's lead gen, anything that's lead gen where there's not direct liquidation and people don't become a customer is like a lead funnel in my mind. And like, they're needed and you need new lead flow to come in. It's sometimes cheaper, but sometimes not cheaper.
Even when you do liquidation, like we've had. or let's say we run a low ticket. You can have a $100 CPA with a $90 AOV, and it costs you $10 burned to get a customer, and you're getting $10 leads over here on a lead funnel, and those are not the same people.
No, not the same people. Those are not the same people. I would amend what you're saying to add something else, though.
I would say the only other over 100 million health type of thing you could do is brand. So I'll give you an example. He wouldn't do this, but if Andrew Huberman launched a health offer, he would probably be ripping, not even trying.
Five million a month. Yeah. And that's kind of what people in our world is.
Yeah. Because like, yeah, people who are not and people like there's a bunch of these companies that we were talking about the stuff a little bit, but like that it's found where I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Never heard of them.
It is info. It is in that world is direct response. And I've never heard of them.
They're not in our groups or things or anything. But the other one that's in that grouping of health has a different traffic source. which is very interesting so instead of having different acquisition and how they do their tiers or whatever They basically do an affiliate slash like partnership model.
So they partner. Yeah, I know who you're talking about. Yeah.
And they, and they crush, right? That's a very unique thing. But it can be used in a lot of, I mean, I believe that it could be used in a lot of ways.
And of course it's on the back of all these guys who do direct response. Right. And that's the one thing that's very, so I'll tell you a story is I went to this mastermind in 2020, literally the month before COVID, like they almost canceled it because of COVID, but COVID hadn't really, nobody really knew if it was going to like break.
massively in the US. And at the time, I was doing $150 ,000 a month with me and a part -time coach. So I'm just like solo guy trying to kind of figure out what...
At the time, I didn't really think the B2B would scale. I thought I was going to have to do RCA. Yeah.
And I was even thinking about doing like an RCA low ticket to start, which would have been stupid, but that's what I was thinking. And so I went to kind of like learn that, but I also went because my buddy invited me and I was like, it seems like a lot of high -level people there. VShred was there.
And dude, the whole... Like their main thing, which was crazy for me coming from like high ticket sales was they were like, yeah, our big, like I'm talking companies doing over a hundred million a year would get up and be like, yeah, our big breakthrough is we realized we had to keep rotating offers so many times because our LTV wasn't high enough.
So we've been adding like high ticket. And that was like the breakthrough. Yeah.
And I'm like. Yo, that's like common sense. Yeah, it's crazy.
But that's just there's so much more in the DR world. So much. And they were adding that for the first time.
So there's a huge trend of those companies who like there's this one. There was these guys from I think it's called Natural Health Sherpa. They gave this this talk about how to get off the offer crazy train because they had to keep recycling offers to get their DR numbers to work.
And they're like, yeah, we added coaching. We're selling 3K at the back end. Now our LTV is like 3X.
And now an offer rides for like two years opposed to six months. And I just thought that was really interesting. So there's a huge need of those companies to kind of merge with high ticket.
Yeah. There's a merge coming there. And they're doing it.
There's another merge between media and also high ticket because that's the best way to monetize media. Yeah. Right?
Like if you're like super famous on social media. Unless like you're to the Logan Paul's point where you're just going to do prime or something like that. Those guys are.
that as he's edged case but like even a lot of them is the servicing uh they don't want to be part of it they don't want to be the guru they don't want to exactly and like i yesterday we talked about this at dinner um there was two different guys who are like super they're running as growth partners growth op or whatever for very very well -known famous and they're like oh they refuse to do content like to to do um ads like straight facing i know whatever they do like they don't want to be on the back like it's just like not that interesting whether that's because the the dollars aren't that interesting or like the cloud and like and i get it i mean i don't i don't sell anything i don't like i don't know uh it's it but to go back the the health one is an example someone who's doing that with the partnership like affiliate model i when i started doing internet stuff was affiliate lead gen world all that and i have like a lot of friends yeah that's still their business model probably the best i would say those guys are probably the best media buyer copywriter marketer they literally are then there's ecom which most of them just graduate in the ecom yeah we're actually they want to we're actually like aren't industry whatever you want to call it people who do high ticket sale yeah coaching things we're like kind of the worst i would say yeah you know but we're the best monetization because we have the most room for error yeah do that yeah so
I don't know why it's taken me so long. Like we, we tried it a couple of years ago and did like a month long. I got up at like four in the morning.
I built an entire load ticket. And then in like a morning was like, just run it. And then it was on, uh, and on Sultanix AC framework at that time.
Cause this was like two, probably three years ago, two years ago. Um, we ran it and they were like, Oh, the economics of it suck. No one even looked at the ads.
Like it was just like a team dynamic, a buy -in, a whole thing where it was just like, Oh, we'll just run on this little side thing. Yeah. Barely any pixel stuff.
And then. We looked and it was getting like multiple hundred dollar purchases for like a $27 thing or whatever. We're just like, turn it off.
And we just went back and it was like lead funnels. And we've just been in this game of like, how do we, you know, spend 30 grand a day, 50 grand a day, 20 grand a day, like all over the board. And then, you know, manage these fluctuations and manage the huge fluctuation of the media buying.
paired with the huge fluctuation of a sales team and that's it and it's like when they're both good you're printing cash yeah and one is bad you're like breaking even only making money on the back yeah both are bad you're literally burning the back money it's like it has been our rampant and it's like it's terrible so like we're talking revenue maxing versus profit maxing we've had like we're good but like by no means are we like you good and now the economics of how we're starting to shift it it's like clear as day that it just needs a little bit more volume to get over like the the essentially like overhead burden and yeah Like in a cash flow sense, prior sales, all of that, like we just keep all that sitting there.
So on cash flow, you're like, oh, this isn't whatever. But when you look at like the unit economics now, Josh Gavin was just talking about low tickets at Nick Fisher's event. And I was like, I wish I would have shared the numbers.
But we had a day four or five days ago where we spent like 30 grand. Call it raw CPA on days like thirty two hundred bucks or three thousand something. Let's call it.
you go down we have all these columns and then you go to the net world and it's like 1400 bucks yeah because it liquidated so much from like we're starting to like teeter in that direction and i'm like how fast can we do this because i want to i want to just have leads going to the highest highest value highest ones like the the one to three percent that are ready to buy basically going through application getting our phone call ready and or organic there's so many how is is your low ticket when you say it's validated Right now or.
OK, so it is. Yes. So are you but you're not you're kind of.
So correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like because I talked to you a couple of months ago and it was not. And you're like, we're trying to figure out how to do it.
I think like we might have cracked it, but I don't know. We're like two days into this test. So now you feel like you've cracked it finally.
And it's a matter of you have a lot of spend. So it's just shifting the spend and shifting the spend, letting that eat the spend of the other thing. Yeah.
And the constraints of low ticket are. when you increase spend does cpa rise with it because that's bad and that's usually comes back to media buying offer and or right now what we're in a big belief of is our creative engine we don't we don't need way more creative low ticket so that's why like you see all my like my stuff right now is like i'm hiring a paid creative strategist hiring like we need a person that owns all the editors like and just has the here's what the recipe that's working right now i need 20 from this 20 from this and we have hundreds new a week is like that's the next yeah get for that um so that's like constraint one constraint two then is we go direct to call from that so then you need the mass essentially setter army right because if you're selling 300 a day and you're getting 60 percent call 50 for easy math you're getting 150 setter bookings are they fit and i message this i'm like are they 15 are they back -to -back 15 30 minutes and we're doing inbound book uh zooms
So they're booking in inbound Zoom calls. And, you know, what's the show rate on there? What are the levers you can pull?
What's the throughput of that to closers? Let's say blended numbers, 25%, right? Like that makes it to a closer call.
So you're getting like a healthy amount of closer bookings that then you no longer need to run. as anywhere near as much lead campaigns vsl opt -in stuff uh and economics are like 10 times better the closer environment's better or should be but then all of a sudden you have this training arc because then you ramped a bunch of people and they're just passing everyone through and etc or the closers get pissed like there's there's that whole world um so it's like constraint constraint constraint but you see the economics at it at like a small slash medium scale and you're like oh right oh this is why
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Two direct-response operators sit down after one of them crosses $100 million in total sales, and he walks back through exactly which offer changes moved the needle, then the conversation turns to why the health market's most common revenue ceiling isn't really about price at all.
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