15:55James Smith · Talking Head
How I Make $282,455 A Month (Without Sales Calls)
A 16-minute whiteboard walk-through of the content-to-email-to-event funnel behind a $5.1M mentorship business that has never run a sales call.
May 26thThe argument in one line.
Closing your offer more often than you open it can more than double revenue, because genuine scarcity compresses urgency, lifts call conversion rates from 25% to 60%, and creates a waitlist flywheel that reloads itself after every sellout.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You have an existing high-ticket coaching or course offer generating sales from YouTube and want to scale revenue without adding more selling time.
- You have real capacity constraints and want to turn that monthly cap into a demand-creation mechanism.
- You are running evergreen sales calls at 25-35% conversion and want to understand what urgency and scarcity do to those numbers in practice.
- You want one intense week of sales per month and the rest of your time on content and fulfillment.
SKIP IF…
- You do not have a proven offer yet. This system amplifies existing demand, it does not create it.
- Your offer has unlimited capacity. The mechanism is load-bearing on genuine scarcity; fabricated scarcity works for 3-4 months then collapses.
- You are a solo operator with no sales infrastructure. The model assumes dedicated callers to handle 100-150 booked calls in a 7-day window.
The full version, fast.
Keep the sales page live year-round but make the apply button a waitlist signup. Build to 500 waitlist signups per month (10% convert = 50 clients). One week before opening: 24-hr heads-up email, then the 4-line open email, then a 24-hr warning before the main list gets the announcement. After selling out in ~7 days, email everyone a sold-out announcement and link the next waitlist. The sold-out post reseeds the next cycle automatically. Result: call conversion rates jumped from 25-35% to 55-60%, monthly revenue climbed from ~$300K to over $500K. The system loses power after 4-5 months as audience fatigue sets in, and it only works if you can actually sell out every cycle.
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00:00 – 00:23
01 · Is Selling Too Much Costing You?
Pattern interrupt hook: $2M in 2024, nearly $5M in 2025, by selling 75% less. Sets up the counterintuitive premise.
00:23 – 03:19
02 · The Basic System Overview
Live Stripe graph walkthrough showing the launch-rebuild-relaunch pattern. The accidental discovery: closing sales outperformed keeping them open. Monthly progression: Jan 2025 $356K, Feb $443K, Mar $474K, then $500K+ months.
03:19 – 07:30
03 · How to Build Your Own System
Step-by-step mechanics: sales page with sold-out CTA, CRM waitlist tracking (target 500/month), 24-hr heads-up email, 4-line open email, 24-hr warning, main list proof email, 7-day sprint, sold-out email plus community post. Real email copy and hand-drawn flowchart shown.
07:30 – 09:20
04 · Unexpected Benefits
Three surprises: one week of sales stress per month; call conversion from 25-35% to 55-60%; content improved from freed mental bandwidth. Plus the accidental proof that each month's waitlist burns out completely after being emailed.
09:20 – 10:25
05 · Is This Ethical?
Addresses fake scarcity objection. The 50-person cap was real: Discord, onboarding, and support would break otherwise. Ethical when genuine capacity constraints exist.
10:25 – 12:23
06 · The Downsides
Three honest problems: (1) sales team working intense hours in a one-week sprint, (2) audience fatigue after 4-5 months making sellout progressively harder, (3) the entire system depends on actually selling out. Closes with Revtrack analytics pitch.
Urgency and scarcity are mechanics, not mindset.
WHAT TO LEARN
Selling less frequently does not require discipline alone -- it requires building a structural constraint that makes waiting feel like the smart move.
- A waitlist converts better than an open cart because it shifts the buyer's psychology from passive browsing to competitive urgency: 50 spots, 500 people, apply now.
- Tracking a single proxy metric -- waitlist size -- eliminates decision fatigue. If the number is low, make more content. Everything else is downstream of that one input.
- Sales call conversion rates are not fixed. The same offer with the same callers went from 25-35% to 55-60% simply by concentrating demand into a 7-day sprint instead of spreading it across a month.
- A waitlist is single-use. Once you email a cohort and the sprint ends, that group is spent. Treat each month's list as a fresh asset that must be rebuilt from zero.
- The sold-out announcement is not just a closing signal -- it is the top of the next funnel. Emailing a sold-out message with a new waitlist link generated 70-100 fresh signups within 24 hours every month.
- Scarcity fatigue is real and has a timeline. The system produced peak results in months one through three, then became progressively harder to execute as the same audience encountered the same sold-out message repeatedly.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
03:03
“I'm making more money closing my sales than I am opening it.”
05:11
“Within four lines, we would generate hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
04:27
“My whole entire life was basically just dictated by this one number, how big is the waitlist.”
11:45
“When you bring urgency and scarcity into an offer, you just make more money.”
09:23
“Once you've promoted to your wait list for that month, it's completely burnt out.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogystory
00:00Is selling too much earning you less money? Well, I actually think it might be because in 2024, I made $2,000,000, and then in 2025, just under $5,000,000 because I sold my offer 75% less.
00:13So in this video, I'm gonna show you behind the scenes of a sales system I used last year that doubled my business, and I think it could do the same for you too, and it's potentially less work as well. Alright. So let's start with the simplified idea behind this strategy and how it came about.
00:27If you don't know me, I used to have a high ticket program. Basically, I would sell something that cost about $10,000 that help people grow YouTube channels and online businesses.
00:36But it had a big problem. In the I was doing the content for the YouTube channel, making all the content for the program. I was running the program with my team, and then I had the sales team on top of that as well to kind of manage.
00:48Now that was absolutely fine. The issue was because I was pretty hands on my clients, I kept seeing things that I could change and upgrade and improve, which meant I continually wanted to rebuild my course to make it better, to give a better service.
01:01So if I just share my Stripe earnings with you, what you can see here is I would launch, make a load of money, and then suddenly make nothing because I would just shut down sales so that I could focus 100% on rebuilding my offer.
01:15But this is actually the thing that enabled me to then double my business, but not in the way that you would expect. Because what happened was, if we go back to, uh, here, March 2024, I have a system where sales are always open.
01:29That means people can pay and join and start whenever they want. I launched this system with no sales calls, and it made a couple $100,000. Like I said, not all payments come through here, so the numbers are gonna look slightly less.
01:40Then I shut it the next month because I was a bit concerned as to would it be any good or not. Once I got great feedback, I opened sales again, and we had a sales team come in. You can see here they were selling every month, and things were going good.
01:53Income was going up and up and up until I got here and went, ah, I need to shut the thing down. I don't have a time I need to rebuild it. So I did.
02:01At the end of August, I shut down sales for the rest of the year, and you can see the income just dropping down and down. In that time, I kept my sales page live, and when people clicked apply, it took them to a wait list.
02:11So I continued to make videos. I continued to put emails out, and all I did was drive people to this wait list. Then what happened was my product was rebuilt.
02:19It was ready to go, Joe. So I launched it January 2025, and we had our best ever month.
02:26I think it was just under 400,000 in total. Now because I'd made all of these changes to my product, I started to panic. What if it's not as good?
02:33What if I made it worse? So I shut down sales and said, look. We're only gonna let in 50 people max, and then I'll reopen sales again next month, which I did.
02:42There was no problems with the product. It had improved. But the interesting thing was next month when I reopened sales, having built a wait list for just a month, the sales shot up.
02:52Now we started to push. It was just under 500 k in total that month. So I thought, hang on a sec.
02:58I'm making more money closing my sales than I am opening it and capping the amount of people I can let in. So I thought, don't I just keep doing this?
03:06So I did it again the next month, and then I started to have over $500,000 months. But I basically just did this throughout the course of the year.
03:16So that's the sales system I used last year. Now I'm gonna go a little bit deeper and show you the exact system to use this yourself, um, and it's actually pretty simple.
03:24The cool thing about this is I some of my clients tried it too, and some of them went from struggling to make like 9 k a month to 35 k a month. So the system works like this. You make YouTube videos, and you drive people to a sales page.
03:37That's the first step. A sales page just looks like what you can see on screen right now. We've got a video, we've got a headline, we've got testimonials, blah blah blah.
03:45Right? But what made this different was when they clicked apply, it didn't actually allow them to apply.
03:53It said sold out, and it said something like, last month we sold out in seven days. Join the wait list to be the first to hear about when space is open.
04:03So then with this, all I would do once a week is come into my CRM and I would look or how many people entered the waitlist this week.
04:13So you can see here in February, I actually ended up with 1,500 people on it. But usually, what I was aiming for was about 500 people on the waitlist per month because I basically worked out over time about 10% of them become clients and I only had 50 spaces so that was my goal.
04:29So what that meant was if halfway through the month I looked and went, do you know what? We've only got 200 on the waitlist. We're bit behind.
04:35I would post more videos or send more emails or do livestreams to top it up. So , how big is the waitlist, which I really, really liked. It made life so easy.
04:46Anyway, what would then happen is we'd get to the date where we would be opening sales, and all I would do is twenty four hours before we opened, I would email the wait list, and I would say we're gonna open very soon.
05:00That's it. Then the next day, I simply sent them a four line email that said something like you can see on the screen right now. That was it.
05:08It just the the thing I liked about these emails were within four lines, we would generate hundreds of thousands of dollars. You really didn't need to send anything much more. The next day, I would then send that same wait list a warning, very short and simple.
05:21And it said, look. In twenty four hours time, I am going to email 25,000 people on my main list.
05:28We only have 50 spaces. If you want to get in on this, you need to apply now. So over the course of these two days, we would usually book around a 100 to a 150 calls.
05:40Then what I would do is the next day, my main email got one email, and it was usually a kind of case that that is that just showed off proof. It's a little bit longer, little bit more detailed, and that would usually drive, you know, 40 to 50 calls, sometimes a bit more depending.
05:54Rough kind of numbers, but it's always similar ish. And the the awesome thing about this waitlist model was because we now had urgency baked in and limited spaces and time urgency too, our conversion rates went up.
06:06We ended up doing about 55 to 60% conversion of the calls every month, means the sales guys had way less wasted time. Then what would happen is it would take a while to go through all of these calls, but at the end of the six or seven days, which pretty much took seven days almost every time we did this, as soon as we sold out, I turned off sales.
06:26I removed the option to be able to buy and put the wait list back on the sales page. Then I emailed my entire list, a very short email that looked like this, simply saying, we sold out in a few days again. If you want to get on next month and don't wanna miss out, jump on the new wait list here.
06:42And I would also post the same thing to my community wall. It looks something like this. And the hilarious thing about this was almost every single month I did this, 70 to a 100 people got on the wait list in the first twenty four hours, which was a huge weight off my mind because I only needed 400 more.
06:58I mean, it's 100 a week to continue to maintain, you know, $3.04, $500,000 months, and that is actually it.
07:06The people on the wait list, they were sent no other communication as a result of being on the wait list. I simply just kept posting YouTube videos and sent weekly emails to my main list. And I believe that this kept people warm and interested enough so that they were excited about the product.
07:20They kept me front of mind. Now I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing that. I have a very hot audience.
07:23I've been doing this for years. If you're new to this, I would probably be sending more hype to the wait list. So that's the basics.
07:30It's probably worth talking about unexpected things that happen now, as well as the problem that we came across.
07:37So some unexpected benefits. This was amazing. I had one week of sales every month.
07:44Three weeks of not thinking about how much money we're making, not talking to any of sales guys, just focusing on content creation and looking after my clients. It's the biggest weight off your shoulders.
07:57And then what you do is you have a week of stress, which is a lot better than a month of stress for me. So that was the first unexpected benefit.
08:04Second unexpected benefit was sales calls conversions went from like 25 to 35% to 50 to 60%, which is easier to convert. The other unexpected benefit of this was because I didn't have to think about selling, I actually found making YouTube videos easier.
08:19I was making them faster and actually they were better, and what I noticed is I would get more views simply because I had more headspace. The next unexpected thing was this. So one month after my biggest month ever, I sent the wait list email, and I used to sit there and watch like calls just get booked.
08:36It was crazy. You know, maybe like 80 in an hour sometimes. And I hit send the email, and I sat there waiting and nothing got booked in.
08:47And I thought, oh, maybe the apps just slow. I came back a few hours later, made four calls. And I thought, oh my gosh, no one cares about me anymore.
08:53What the heck? Like, what is going wrong? And about four hours later, thought, hang on a sec.
08:58Let's just check something. I went back to my email and what I'd done is I'd sent the email to the previous month's wait list, not the new one. And I'm kinda glad I did because what it showed me was once you've promoted to your wait list for that month, it's completely burnt out.
09:13It just shows you that once they're on that wait list, they either buy or they don't really come back. So now let's look at the the downsides. First, we just start off with is this ethical?
09:22So a a lot of people used to email me like, Ed, this is fake scarcity. It's fake urgency. You're just doing it to make money.
09:27And that's not true. This is very ethical. In fact, this is more ethical than what I was doing before.
09:32Because what I realized was, I can't take on more than 50 people a month. I don't have enough support. Uh, the calls would get overloaded.
09:40The Discord would get overloaded. Onboarding would get overloaded. I didn't have the systems to do any more than that.
09:47So I just set it at every month is 50 max. Some months I turned around and I was like, I'm gonna do 40 because the people who had come in the month before were taking up more of our time than usual, which is fine. So in terms of ethical, I believe this works if you have capacity issues.
10:02If you don't and you're just saying we're open and closed, it doesn't really make that much sense to me, and I don't think it makes much sense to a buyer either. So I'm not sure I'd do that.
10:11I currently have another offer which is open and closed for the same reason. It's a software I built. It will break if I let in too many people at once.
10:18So if you're worried about that, don't worry. The other down sell it was this. So firstly, I had to have three sales guys working very hard, doing kinda crazy hours, I guess, to manage that week of sales.
10:29Some of them didn't like it. They wanted it to be evergreen. They felt that actually evergreen would give them more of a chance to sell.
10:35Although, did switch it off one month, and I noticed about half the sales come in. So I don't know if I agree with that fully. Maybe over time, that would have chased.
10:42We also had a setter. So, basically, what would happen is someone would book in a call. We would have a very limited form.
10:48I didn't I didn't like putting too much friction in a form. The setter would then try and qualify them a bit more to see if they were the right fit for the call. If they weren't, we would cancel them.
10:55The other thing that I have to mention here is it peaked and then tailed off. So what I noticed, after about four or five months of doing the waitlist, it suddenly got harder to sell it out, and it felt like we had to do more. So in some months, I was like, are we actually gonna sell it out this month?
11:09Whereas the first three months I ran it, it was so flipping easy. And I think that makes sense. I think there's just an element of fatigue people get with hearing this whole we'd sold out thing.
11:17Eventually, they stopped caring as much. And then the final thing that I think is really important to mention is, I don't think this would have worked very well if I hadn't sold out. And I think it's actually why for some people, it's it's probably not the best option because that sellout email and seeing so many people jump on created the whole magic to the sales.
11:36So if I hadn't been able to do that every month ethically, I don't think I would have got the same result. But that is it.
11:41And I think the main lesson for everyone here is when you bring urgency and scarcity into an offer, you just make more money.
11:50If yours is lacking that, you need to ask why and fix it. Do you already have an offer that's generating sales from YouTube and you wanna sell more?
11:57Well, this will enable you to see which of your videos is generating the most views, sales, leads, calls, and it really was transformational for my own business. Now I know, of course, I'm gonna say that to you because I'm selling the thing.
12:09But really in 2025, I doubled my business, and without the data that this thing gave me, it just wouldn't have been possible because it showed me a whole new way to do YouTube. And for the cost that it is per month, you have almost nothing to lose trying it.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Selling less to make more sounds like a punchline until you see the Stripe graph. By closing his offer for three weeks every month and running a single waitlist sprint instead, a YouTube educator went from $2M to nearly $5M in one year -- and the mechanism is simpler than anything a sales consultant would charge you to learn.
Named ideas worth stealing.
03:19model
The Monthly Waitlist Cycle
- Sales page with Sold Out CTA pointing to waitlist signup
- Target 500 waitlist signups per month (10% convert = 50 clients)
- 24-hr heads-up email to waitlist
- 4-line open email to waitlist
- 24-hr warning: main list opens tomorrow
- Proof-heavy email to full main list
- 7-day sales sprint
- Sold-out announcement email plus community post
- New waitlist link immediately reseeds next cycle
A monthly open/close rhythm that compresses all selling into one week and uses the sold-out announcement to automatically rebuild demand for the following month.
Steal forany high-ticket offer with real capacity constraints
04:27concept
The One Number System
Track only one metric: waitlist size. Target 500 signups per month at a 10% buy rate equals 50 clients. If behind mid-month, create more content. All selling decisions flow from this single number.
Steal forsimplifying a content calendar around a measurable demand proxy
09:23concept
Waitlist Burn Rate Reality
Each month's waitlist is single-use. Once promoted to, people either buy or they do not come back. Cross-contamination (accidentally emailing last month's list) yielded near-zero bookings, proving it empirically.
Steal forunderstanding why waitlist hygiene matters and why fresh cohorts must be built each cycle
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
12:02product
“Do you already have an offer that's generating sales from YouTube and you wanna sell more? Well, this will enable you to see which of your videos is generating the most views, sales, leads, calls.”
Soft pivot: positions analytics tool (Revtrack/StoryOS) as the thing that made the waitlist system possible by showing which videos drove the most conversions. Transparent and brief.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
