How Maria Wendt Built a $22M Low-Ticket Course Business Working Two Days a Week
Marketing Minds host Aleric Heck interviews Maria Wendt on the content system, ad economics, and offer-naming rules behind an eight-figure $27 product business.
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yesterday
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Interview
educational
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
A low-ticket digital product business scales because the product and the sales page are both built once, which frees the entire company to focus only on generating traffic.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A course creator or coach with an existing audience who wants a lower-priced offer that sells on its own without sales calls.
A high-ticket business owner looking to add a self-serve front-end product that funds ad spend and feeds the higher-ticket program.
A content creator posting inconsistently who wants a concrete daily posting system and a repurposing framework that scales output without new ideas every day.
Someone running or planning to run paid ads to a low-ticket offer who wants real numbers on cost of acquisition, return on ad spend, and repeat purchase rate.
SKIP IF…
You're selling a service that requires live delivery or a sales call; this system is built around a product customers can buy without talking to anyone.
You want a quick AI-content shortcut; the host argues beginners should learn to judge good content manually before leaning on AI.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Maria Wendt built a $22 million business selling an average $27 digital product, reaching an $85 average order value across roughly 300 orders a day. The model works because delivery and the sales page are each built once, letting the whole company focus on traffic. Her content engine runs seven Instagram posts a day on a fixed schedule, with 80% of posts repurposed from past winners and 20% new experiments. Meta ads stay profitable from day one at a 2.5x return on ad spend, with a $39 blended customer acquisition cost against a $180 lifetime value. Her core offer rule: low-ticket products need hyper-specific names that solve one exact problem, unlike vague high-ticket branding.
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01 · Introduction: $22 Million Selling a $27 Product
Aleric opens by asking how $22M came from a $27 product. Maria frames her core achievement as proving low-ticket can build real wealth, not just pay the bills.
00:51 – 02:29
02 · Why Low-Ticket Offers Are So Scalable
Low ticket wins because delivery and conversion are both built once, a course and a landing page, unlike high ticket where every sale requires a new sales call, so the whole company can focus purely on generating traffic.
02:29 – 03:37
03 · Two Days a Week and $1 Million a Month
Confirms she works two days a week. The $22M was built at an $85 average order value and roughly 300 orders a day, and the business just started adding a high-ticket tier in the last 30 days.
03:37 – 08:40
04 · Why Starting Low Ticket Makes High Ticket Easier
Low ticket is a 'game of centimeters' requiring tight optimization at huge volume. Her first $50K-offer launch sold 15 units in a week and broke her fulfillment capacity, proving her low-ticket base of trusting customers converts easily to high ticket.
08:40 – 11:20
05 · Maria's Instagram Framework: Post More
Her entire framework reduces to posting volume: most accounts underperform because they're not posting enough, not because they're optimizing the wrong things. Each post now lives or dies on its own, regardless of follower count.
11:20 – 12:40
06 · The 80/20 Content Repurposing Rule
80% of posted content is repurposed from known winners, 20% is new experimentation, because most new content statistically flops and repurposing both saves time and guarantees a baseline of views, 35M monthly on Instagram.
12:40 – 15:50
07 · Turning One Carousel Into Reels, Emails, and Ads
One personal 'diary' carousel becomes a reel hook, an email, pre-launch content, and ad creative. Follower ads get run against any carousel that pops, so one written idea compounds into many assets.
15:50 – 21:47
08 · The Seven-Post Daily Instagram Schedule
Walks through fixed daily slots from a 7am pitch reel through a 9pm entertainment post, explaining the intent behind morning monetization, midday virality experiments, and afternoon education and storytelling. Scheduling in advance costs some reach but consistency wins over time.
21:47 – 29:53
09 · Why You Should Grow One Platform at a Time
She grows one platform to 100K followers before moving to the next, Facebook groups, email list, Instagram, YouTube, arguing mastery and credibility on one platform beats splitting effort, and that cross-posting content between platforms cheapens the growth you could have had.
29:53 – 34:27
10 · Instagram Trial Reels Strategy
Trial reels are shown only to non-followers with zero downside to the main feed. Her team publishes five a day, repurposing known winners, and roughly 1 in 10 pops off for a few thousand followers while most flop, so the strategy is pure, ongoing experimentation.
34:27 – 39:40
11 · Maria's Story: Homeschooling and Her Why
She credits being homeschooled for 12 years with an innocent, non-time-bound childhood that shaped her entrepreneurial mindset. She built her business through college and now runs it as a single mother working two days a week to be present for her daughter.
39:40 – 42:01
12 · Scaling Meta Ads at $10,000 a Day
Ads must be profitable from day one at a 2.5x return on ad spend, no delayed revenue. Current spend is about $300K/month with a $39 blended CAC against a $180 LTV, and the team has been stuck at the $10K/day plateau for about a year.
42:01 – 44:39
13 · Organic Content as an Ad Testing Ground
Organic posting now functions as free ad-creative testing. Since 2023 ad performance improved because an active Instagram presence builds credibility, and the organic and ad teams only recently started formally sharing which posts perform best.
44:39 – 46:31
14 · Selling High Ticket to Low-Ticket Customers
Aleric advises against cold-traffic ads for the new high-ticket offer and instead retargeting the hundreds of thousands of existing low-ticket customers, since that audience is already warm and gives much cheaper booked calls than cold traffic ever could.
46:31 – 50:58
15 · Growing to 100K YouTube Subscribers With No Edits
She grew her YouTube channel to 100K subscribers in a few months with an unedited webcam, using consistency, genuinely dense teaching, and a lightweight drawing-overlay app that made the video feel more produced without adding editing time.
50:58 – 56:00
16 · Maria's Take on AI for Content Creation
She's pro-AI for data dashboards and small fixes, like recoloring a shirt for text contrast, but warns beginners who jump to AI before learning what good content looks like can't tell their own voice from the AI's. Most of her actual content creation stays manual.
56:00 – 1:01:33
17 · How to Build a Great Low-Ticket Offer
Her core rule: low-ticket names must be hyper-specific, like 'How to Get More Sales With Your Instagram Stories', because a confused buyer doesn't buy, unlike vague high-ticket branding backed by a sales call. The best product ideas come from whatever detail gets a hesitant sales-call prospect to say yes.
1:01:33 – 1:02:56
18 · Final Golden Nugget: No $0 Days
Her closing lesson: a low-ticket business builds slowly but becomes extremely stable, 'brick by brick', eliminating single-customer risk and creating daily sales that stabilize the business emotionally and financially.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
A low-ticket business scales because the product and the sales page are each built once, so new customers add no extra delivery work.
$22 million came from an $85 average order value and roughly 300 orders a day, not from a handful of large sales.
80% of posted content is repurposed from past winners and only 20% is new, because most new content statistically flops.
One piece of pillar content, a personal carousel story, gets re-scripted into a reel hook, an email, ad creative, and a talking-head video.
A fixed seven-post daily Instagram schedule puts the highest-converting content, like the 7 a.m. pitch reel, in the morning when attention is highest.
Scheduling posts in advance measurably lowers views compared to posting live, but the consistency it enables outperforms the view spike over time.
Growing one platform at a time to 100,000 followers before starting the next builds more credibility than splitting effort across several platforms.
Trial reels get shown only to non-followers, so they function as a free audience-expansion test with no downside to the main account.
A 2.5x return on ad spend on day one, with a $39 blended customer acquisition cost against a $180 lifetime value, keeps ad spend profitable without betting on delayed revenue.
A 60% repeat order rate, roughly twice the 15-30% industry average, is what makes a low-ticket customer base valuable beyond the first sale.
Vague high-ticket program names like 'Wealth Academy' work because a sales call can explain them, but a low-ticket product needs a name that states the exact result, like 'How to Get More Sales With Your Instagram Stories.'
The best low-ticket product idea is often hiding in a high-ticket sales call, in whatever single detail gets a hesitant buyer to say yes.
Beginners who reach for AI before learning to judge good content from bad content end up unable to tell their own voice from the AI's.
Takeaway
The system behind $22M in $27 sales
WHAT TO LEARN
A low-ticket business compounds because the product and the sales page are each built once, which turns volume, consistency, and hyper-specific naming into the real growth levers, not luck or virality.
01Introduction: $22 Million Selling a $27 Product
A $22M business built on a $27 product proves low-ticket can create real wealth, not just cover a founder's bills.
Challenging the belief that low-ticket can't scale is itself a strategic choice, not a lucky accident.
02Why Low-Ticket Offers Are So Scalable
Delivery and conversion both get built once in a low-ticket model, so new customers add no extra work to fulfill or convert.
A business can scale fastest when the only unscaled activity left is traffic generation, since everything else runs on autopilot.
03Two Days a Week and $1 Million a Month
An $85 average order value across roughly 300 orders a day, not a handful of big sales, is what produced $22M in revenue.
A business can run on two working days a week once delivery and conversion no longer require the owner's time.
04Why Starting Low Ticket Makes High Ticket Easier
Low ticket forces optimization at the level of single phrases and micro-details, because volume means one small change moves hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A wide base of small-dollar customers who already trust you converts faster into high-ticket buyers than cold traffic ever will.
Selling out a new offer in days can reveal fulfillment problems before it reveals a demand problem, and that's the better order to learn them in.
05Maria's Instagram Framework: Post More
Inconsistent or infrequent posting is the actual reason most accounts underperform, not a lack of growth tactics or optimization.
Each piece of content now lives or dies on its own merit, so a small account has the same shot at reach as a huge one.
06The 80/20 Content Repurposing Rule
Most new content statistically flops, so building a system where 80% of output is proven winners protects total output and view counts.
Repurposing isn't just a time-saver; it also guarantees a baseline of reach because most followers never see any single post in the first place.
07Turning One Carousel Into Reels, Emails, and Ads
One well-written personal story can become a reel hook, an email, a launch asset, and ad creative without writing anything new.
Running follower ads specifically to proven organic winners turns an already-successful piece of content into a paid growth channel.
08The Seven-Post Daily Instagram Schedule
Placing the highest-intent, revenue-driving content first thing in the morning captures audience attention before it tapers off through the day.
Scheduling content in advance does cost some reach compared to posting live, but the consistency it enables outperforms that loss over time.
09Why You Should Grow One Platform at a Time
Mastering one platform to a real following, like 100,000, builds more credibility and compounding growth than spreading effort across several.
Cross-posting the same content across platforms can quietly cheapen the growth you'd get by building real traction on just one.
10Instagram Trial Reels Strategy
A content format shown only to non-followers removes all downside risk, making it a pure testing ground for new reach.
Expect roughly nine flops for every hit when running a volume-based experimentation strategy, and plan the content pipeline around that ratio.
11Maria's Story: Homeschooling and Her Why
A personal operating philosophy, like refusing to trade time for output, can become a durable business advantage once applied to delivery and scheduling.
Running a business to protect specific personal time, not just revenue, is a legitimate design constraint worth building the whole model around.
12Scaling Meta Ads at $10,000 a Day
Demanding profitability from day one, rather than betting on delayed revenue, keeps a paid acquisition channel sustainable at any scale.
Tracking blended CAC against lifetime value, not just return on ad spend, shows whether paid growth is actually healthy long-term.
13Organic Content as an Ad Testing Ground
Testing content organically before running ads turns the entire audience into a free research lab for which creative will perform.
An active organic presence can directly lift paid ad performance, because it makes the account look credible to someone who just saw the ad.
14Selling High Ticket to Low-Ticket Customers
A warm list of existing low-ticket buyers converts into high-ticket sales far more cheaply than any cold-traffic campaign could.
The right sequence for a high-ticket launch is retargeting existing customers first and only using cold traffic once that well is exhausted.
15Growing to 100K YouTube Subscribers With No Edits
Unedited, consistent uploads beat polished but inconsistent ones, because platforms reward accounts that reliably deliver on their stated schedule.
A small production touch, like live illustration while talking, can elevate a video's feel without adding any extra editing time.
16Maria's Take on AI for Content Creation
Learning to judge content quality manually first is what lets a creator later tell good AI output from bad AI output.
AI earns its place on narrow, well-defined fixes, not as a replacement for an undeveloped sense of what good content actually looks like.
17How to Build a Great Low-Ticket Offer
A low-ticket product name has to state the exact result in plain language, because a confused buyer doesn't buy.
The best low-ticket product idea is often already hiding in a high-ticket sales call, in whatever detail gets a hesitant buyer to say yes.
18Final Golden Nugget: No $0 Days
A low-ticket business is slow to build but extremely stable once it's running, because no single customer's decision can break it.
Daily sales, even small ones, create a stabilizing rhythm that a business built on occasional large sales never gets.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Blended CAC
The average cost to acquire one paying customer across all ad spend combined, used as the key profitability metric for a low-ticket funnel.
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
The ratio of revenue generated to money spent on ads; a 2.5x ROAS means every $1 spent returns $2.50 in revenue.
Repeat order rate
The percentage of customers who buy again after their first purchase, used to measure how much a customer base is worth beyond its initial sales.
Trial reel
An Instagram Reel published only to a separate, unconnected feed that is shown exclusively to non-followers, used purely to test content and grow new reach.
Low-ticket offer
A low-priced digital product, often under $100, designed to sell at high volume without a sales call or custom delivery per customer.
“I never thought I'm going to get to $22 million. What I thought was I'll be able to pay my bills with low ticket.”
humble origin story contrasted against the eventual scale→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
04:20
“You're not playing a game of inches, you're playing a game of centimeters. One microscopic change can be the difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
tight, quotable framework line with a built-in metaphor→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
09:25
“If you want more money and you want more followers, post more. That's it.”
blunt, mic-drop one-liner that cuts through tactics talk→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
15:00
“Your followers, like 2% of your followers are seeing your stuff. 4% of your followers are seeing your stuff.”
surprising stat that reframes the fear of repeating content→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
52:30
“We shouldn't be using AI if we don't know if it's good or not.”
contrarian AI take from a creator who posts seven times a day→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
“It's brick by brick, but do you know what's really freaking solid? A brick wall.”
vivid closing metaphor for low-ticket business stability→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
Topic Map
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 08:40denseLow-ticket business model and economics
08:40 – 29:53denseInstagram content system and repurposing
29:53 – 34:27Trial reels and platform growth strategy
34:27 – 39:40Personal story and background
39:40 – 46:31denseMeta ads and acquisition economics
46:31 – 56:00YouTube growth and AI philosophy
56:00 – 1:02:56denseOffer design and closing advice
The Script
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So Maria, you've done $22 million selling a $27 product. How is that possible? Yeah.
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me here. I'm so excited to be talking about marketing stuff with you. Well, I always tell people, I think first and foremost, the thing that I'm the most proud of is that I've really challenged the limiting beliefs that you can't make a lot of money with low ticket.
I think so many people want to have a more hands -off business where we just make the product once and we get to sell it over and over and over again. If we have more customers, that doesn't mean more delivery. And so when I first started wanting to make money with low ticket like that, I never thought I'm going to get to $22 million.
What I thought was I'll be able to pay my bills with low ticket with my little courses and be home with my baby. That was my whole reason why. That was everything that I wanted was just to not be working as much as I was and just be home with her.
And what I actually realized is that a low ticket business model is a very, very scalable model. It's very easy to make a lot of money with low ticket. And the reason for that is if you think about any other form of offering, right?
Let's just use high ticket as an example. You have to do all the marketing. work, all the work to generate that traffic, all the sales work, right?
To create that conversion, to get that customer, whether it's a sales call or a webinar or selling over DMs, you have to do that work to convert. And then you have to do the work to deliver, right? And so with a low ticket thing, if you do it the way I do it.
you don't have to do the delivery so there's nothing to do the client you've already made the course you get it once and then you also don't have to do the work to convert the customer over and over again because you made a landing page once versus with a high ticket you have to take a sales call over and over and over again so the delivery is scalable and the conversion mechanism is scalable and then that means that you as the business owner and as a company only have to work on the marketing.
You only have to work on generating traffic. Now, it is a lot of work to generate a lot of traffic, which you need for low ticket, but it's very doable because everything else is extremely scalable and extremely automated. And so the entire force of a company, the entire force of one person could all be going towards that one area of the business, which is just the traffic generation.
Now. When I started doing this four years ago, I had no idea that that's what I was unlocking. I just was like, let's make some money and not have to work so hard for it.
Like that was my thought process. And so it obviously blew up way bigger than I thought. But that is how you make such a scalable amount of money with low tickets because everything else is pretty automated.
Everything else is pretty hands off. It's just the traffic that you need a lot of elbow grease in, which you're a traffic guy. Not a surprise to you.
I'm happy to talk about that. But yeah, that's the bird's eye view of everything. Oh, we're going to be diving deep.
But do I have this correct? working two days a week and you're doing a million a month with no product over $300 right now. Is that correct?
That's about correct. So we just started, I'm happy to talk about this later. We just started like literally as of this month, within the last 30 days, we just started doing high ticket stuff.
And so I'm happy to talk more about that. So if you're watching this a month later, we are now offering high ticket products. But for the most part, that $22 million was built with an average.
order value of $85. That's our average order value across all of our customers is $85. And our lifetime value is like 170.
So this is a low ticket business is built brick by brick by brick. And it's just sheer volume of customers. I mean, we do something like 300 orders a day as an average.
And so it's sheer volume. So yeah, for the most part, yes, I always like to, I'm a transparency girl. I like to be very, very authentic and honest.
But for the most part, yes, we've built a huge business with hundreds of thousands of customers, average order value of $85. So yeah, it's a, it's a. It's a big it's a big machine in the back end, which is incredible.
And we're going to dive deeper into that because most people do it the opposite way, including myself. Right. You start like higher ticket and then, you know, you add in like these different products to bring people in and provide value to maybe people that aren't quite ready for that yet.
You've done it the exact opposite. Ended incredibly well. So I'm excited to dive into that.
I think it's I think it's it's the again, everyone's going to be like. we like to justify the decisions we've made, right? And so for me, I justified the decision of only doing low ticket.
But I think for me, it was a really great. thing to do, because when you're playing the game of low ticket, you're not playing a game of inches, you're playing a game of centimeters. One microscopic change can be the difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One little phrase, because you have such a sheer volume, you really are playing this game of optimization and tweaking at a micro level. It is actually tear -inducing, eye -watering amount of detail. But the thing is, if you can master that, if you can master that game of centimeters, what I'm finding...
30 days into doing high ticket is that it's very easy. Like we had a little offering, it was $50 ,000. We sold 15 of those $50 ,000 offers in a week.
And we actually had to stop the sales because we had no infrastructure to handle this. It was a disaster. That's what I'm like.
Great problem to have, but a real problem. I'm sorry, you paid $50 ,000. Now you're pissed at me because I had been thinking about onboarding.
Like I'm really, truly running into other issues. But what I'm learning from that is, oh, these are very fixable problems. And because I built out that really wide base of hundreds of thousands of customers who have really only ever bought little courses from me, they're very ready for more support from Maria, for more stuff from my team.
They're really excited to go deeper. And so I really like doing it that way. I think it's what I notice in people who are doing high ticket, trying to pivot into low ticket, is when you're used to making a sale and you have $10 ,000 from that sale or $5 ,000 from that sale, there's so much more margin.
There's more room for error. And so it's really a different game when you go from high ticket to low ticket because there's no room for mistakes. You've got to get your numbers dialed in and you've got to know your numbers because the profit margins on each individual unit are very...
They're like this. Multiply that out. It's the Walmart model, right?
That's how I think of myself as Walmart. And so multiply that and it's good. So I'm personally very grateful I started with low ticket and then added the high ticket because I think it's easier.
But I help students all the time either add on a low ticket area of their business or just fully pivot from high ticket to low ticket. And it's totally possible. It happens every day.
So it's totally fine if you're going to do it that way. Yeah. Yeah.
Which I think is great to really look at because you have this experience on that side of really building out the low ticket. You've built out a massive raving fans. I've seen, you know, on your on your Instagram, which almost at a million right now.
Maybe by the time, you know, people are watching this. Please go find me and follow me with your account, your dog's account, your husband's account. Follow me with all your accounts.
Yeah, I love people have accounts for their dogs. It's so fun. I remember when I found that out years ago or whatever.
account. I need all the followers. Which is incredible.
And we're going to dive in because I know you talked about these little small changes that make huge impacts with a low ticket offer. And I remember right before we started recording, the back area over there, and it was like, all right, we can just nerd out on this. And I'm excited for that because you've tested a lot, you've seen a lot, and we're going to dive into that.
But I want to give you a proper introduction. So I'm so excited to have... Maria went here on the Marketing Minds podcast.
Of course, we've known each other for a while, and seeing all your Instagram content, it's incredible. I think you're at seven posts a day right now? Yes, we're posting seven times a day now, which I'm happy to talk about.
We're going to talk about it in a second. But in terms of a formal introduction, you have an eight -figure business, predominantly low ticket. I know you're now expanding to high ticket.
You're also doing this while being a mother, and you're only working two days a week. And we were just talking about kind of the fast track that you have to ramp up, you know, as you're doing the high ticket offer, too, which is really exciting. I know you got some big goals.
I do think what I'm doing with the high ticket is going to get me to $10 million a month. That's exciting. So I'm at $10 million a year now.
We'll see $10 million a month. I really do think that. I'm so excited to be here with you, Alaric.
we've like you said we've known each other for a while and i don't think everyone knows this about me but i'm actually quite a nerd i was homeschooled all 12 years and so i really do identify like as a marketing scientist it's like a detective like let's what does the data tell us i don't care what the emotion sells what does the data tell us and not every person that i talk to as an entrepreneur is like that yeah so people are just into different things but i like minds recognize like minds and i know you're a marketing nerd too so i'm like i'm very very excited to just talk about marketing yeah um how beautiful it is to be a marketer, how lovely it is to have this as a career.
So I'm very excited for our conversation. Yeah. And that's what, that's what this is all about, right?
Diving in and really, you know, getting the marketing mind that you are out to, you know, to all the people like diving deeper into it. So I'm excited to hear, like, when it comes to how you think about your marketing strategy, let's start with Instagram because you're real like Instagram expert, but I also know you're a social media expert overall, but Instagram is what I know is like, that's like, when I think of Instagram, you know, I think of you, right?
And so, yeah, I mean it. And so what I'm curious about is like when you're diving into Instagram, like what is the framework that you're following? And then we're going to dive deeper into it because I want to get like the small nitty gritty details.
But let's start with kind of the broader framework. What do you see as your Instagram framework that you're using? And then how would that apply to people who might be watching this?
Super good question. Yeah, I love Instagram. I'll keep it really bird's eye view and then we can dive in.
If you want more money and you want more followers, post more. That's it. That's it.
And I'm happy to go into tactics. I'm happy to go into it. But whenever I see someone who doesn't have as many followers as I do or they're not making as much money from Instagram as I do, because I make a lot of money from Instagram, it ultimately comes down to you're hyper -optimizing things that don't matter because you're not even posting consistently and you're not even posting enough.
And then we can go into the next level, which is like, let's audit what you are posting and make it better. bare bones, like we are living in, it's a new way of doing social media, right? It's almost like it doesn't matter if you have followers or not, because each piece of content can live or die on its own.
And so we know how it used to be, right? If you had a bunch of followers, it was guaranteed views and bigger accounts did better than smaller accounts. And you had an edge if you had a big following.
But that is not true on Instagram. I have to work just as hard for views on every piece of content as someone that has. a much, much, much smaller account, 100 followers.
And so, I mean, we see new accounts going viral every day, new accounts getting millions of views, even though they don't have any followers at all. And so for me as a big creator, I'm very upset about that. And...
I'm very excited for all the people in my world, all the people in my space who are just getting started because they are in control of their Instagram output. You asked me about my framework. You want more money?
You want more followers? Post more. Anyone can decide to do that.
Anyone, the playing field is all, we're all starting here. Every day we wake up. I start here, you start here, all your students start here, my students start here, we're all starting at this line, and then it's three, two, one, go.
I'm just further than everyone else because I post seven times a day, every day, and I don't miss. I know what my content schedules are, my little slots. I don't care if it's Christmas Eve, I'm posting.
I make it happen. That's my only non -negotiable as a business owner is that the content goes up on schedule, and it's because that's how you make all the money, which I'm happy to get into as well. In my opinion.
as a business owner in this day and age, the most leveraged thing that you can do is create content, whether it's for ads, whether it's for organic. And so, yeah, you know, bottom line. More followers, more money.
You got to post more. Yeah, which is great. And now I know one of the things that you have is you also have a framework to repurpose some of your existing content.
So I think when some people hear seven posts a day, sometimes their brain shuts off. They're like, oh, I don't know how to do that. Right.
And so what I'm curious about is what's what is that repurposing framework? And then also, how often are you recording a video that day? Are you batch recording?
Like, what's your process? Yeah, that's a really good question. So most of our content is repurposed.
The number that we like to do is. 80 % of our content is repurposed, 20 % is new. And there's a very logical reason for that.
It's not just to save time, although obviously it saves so much time, it makes it so much more manageable, but it's also because... most people are trying to create new content every day. They wake up and create new content, but you don't know how that new content is going to do.
You have no idea. And statistically speaking, most new content is going to flop, right? You need a lot of experiments to find your winning angles.
Same thing with ads, same thing with YouTube. Like I'm preaching to the choir here. And so I want 80 % of my content that's going out to be content that I know is going to do well.
And I'm going to experiment with that other 20%. And so not only does my repurposing like principle of 80%, It always makes my job easier, but it also makes sure I'm going to have a lot of views.
We're reaching about 35 million views every single month on Instagram. And that is in part because I'm using angles that I know works. And so I'm happy to give examples of how I repurpose just so people can really see.
So I'll start with a carousel. People really like my vulnerable carousels that swipes. I tell stories about things I've gone through or things going on in my life.
Those are like what I call my Instagram is my diary content. Like what would I say to my diary? Except I'm going to say it to my million followers on Instagram, right?
Those always do well. No matter if it's new content or not new content. Anytime I personally share a carousel story, it will do well.
It will hit our benchmarks for success because it's me just sharing. It's very relatable. It's very vulnerable.
It always does well. So then we'll take that carousel and it'll become pretty immediately a bunch of different other pieces of content. For example.
the first hook of the carousel will become the hook of a reel. And then the entire rest of the carousel is going to be put into the caption. So you have a little bit of video footage with a short little hook and then a very long caption.
That's another piece of content. Then it's also going to be, well, there's a lot of different ways you can do this. What we'll do is we'll take the script, like the words of that carousel, re -script it, and it'll become a talking head studio reel.
I just filmed a bunch of those. And so let's say one of the popping off carousels is like, I became a millionaire because I was homeschooled, right?
And the whole carousel is me sharing how I was homeschooled. Then I will literally in front of the camera say, I became a millionaire because I was homeschooled. And I'm literally just reading off the carousel that I wrote.
That carousel will also become emails. It could also be used in like pre -launch content or pre -sell content for our launches. It will get turned into ad creatives.
We run Instagram and meta ads to very specific ads to get followers. So there's a type of follower ad you can run. So any top performing care cells will get.
follower ads run to them. And so that's just like off the top of my head. But it all starts with me, the founder, the person, the brand, writing that first piece of content.
And then it gets repurposed in a bunch of different ways. And so we know it all works. We know it started with a winning topic and a winning story.
And then it just gets spread and distributed in a bunch of different ways. And it only required one idea and one time being written. The repurposing is easy.
You're pasting a caption. You're reading off of a script. It's easy.
But that's how you get that much content out. And I've been doing that for like almost three years now, I think. Maybe two and a half years I've been posting on Instagram.
And so you just do that consistently enough. You stock up a lot of content that does well. Like today, literally on the plane right over here, I was republishing stuff that I made in January that did really well.
Now it's September as of the time of filming. Like that was nine months ago. Nobody's remembering what I put out.
The other thing that I will say about, and you got me on my soapbox, but the other thing I will say about repurposing is that, Your followers, like 2 % of your followers are seeing your stuff, okay? Like I wish it was more.
4 % of your followers are seeing your stuff. And so I wish more of our followers were seeing it, but the reality is they're not. And so that means even if you repurposed it a week later, it's still getting in front of an entirely new audience.
And so, yeah, that's another great reason to repurpose. You're not boring your audience. They haven't seen it.
They don't remember. You're not that important. Like you remember, they don't.
And so go ahead and repurpose. You're fine. Yeah.
Yeah. And I want to talk a little bit more about we're going to get into trial reels in a second. I'm very curious your strategy, different people, different strategies.
But before we move on from the seven different posts, what are what's kind of the breakdown for the styles of those seven posts? Do you have a formula? I do.
I do. So, yeah, seven posts. I'll go in the time of day because that's what helps me remember.
So in the morning, we start off 7 a .m. PST. All times are in PST.
That's just where I live. 7 a .m. PST, and we've experimented and done tests on all of the times.
Back when I was living on the East Coast in Delaware, I would always start with 10 a .m. because that time slot's a really good one. Okay, so 7 a .m.
PST, it's called a pitch reel. So it's a reel that has a call to action, and that will take the viewer directly to a checkout page. I like to do that one first because I like to make money first thing in the morning.
Like I wake up, make some sales, make some money. It's a good day. Right.
So that's 7 a .m. pitch. OK.
9 a .m. carousel where it's vulnerable. I want to hit them early with like my vulnerability content, my like, you know, sharing my good stories, my interesting, my best content.
Right. 12 p .m. This is a new thing that we've been doing for the last month and a half, two months.
It is popping off. I don't know why it's doing so well. It's getting us thousands of followers.
But it's literally just quote posts. Like basic 2016 style quote posts. Wow.
Like we did one maybe a week or two ago. It got four and a half million views. And I think it was like.
5 ,000 followers, 7 ,000 followers from a quote post. They're making a comeback. Dude, they're making a comeback.
So I'm riding that train until that's done. So that's noon. And then we have a 3 p .m.
slot. That's always, this is where we move into like education expertise part of the day, right? So like we try to be entertaining and get our money in the morning, basically.
And then we move into like education and just like, basically, these are the most three important slots. So we put our best stuff in the morning, right? And then intention tapers off.
People go about their days, their lives, their evenings, they go to bed, et cetera. So 3 p .m. PST is educational.
It's usually a studio reel or a clip of me speaking. So it's me just teaching something. And then 5 p .m.
is always storytelling, but it's literally my story and my timeline as an entrepreneur. So it'll look like in 2013, I made $63 my first year. It's just me telling the timeline of my business.
And people like... to know the timeline of a founder. They like to know what they did in what year and they like to see the journey.
And my journey I think is particularly inspiring because I was so bad at business at first. Like it took me a year to make $63 and then the next year took me another year and I only made $350. So it took me two years to make, I was super bad at it.
And so people feel encouraged by that. I'm like, dude, if you've made more than $400 in two years, you did better than I did, right? So 5 p .m.
is the storytelling. And then the last one, 7 p .m., that's set. No, I missed one in there.
I don't know what I missed. But there's one in there that I missed. Basically, probably, I'll just say off the top of my head, which they usually are like the entertaining slots.
And so the entertaining slots are like office trends, us being funny, behind the scenes, blooper reels. There's two entertaining slots. I'm blanking out.
So it's 7 a .m., 9 a .m., 12 p .m. I do post a lot. 3 p .m., 5 p .m., 7 p .m.
I guess it's 9 p .m. These two, the reason I'm fuzzy is because these two are the ones that I handle on my team now. Okay, I was about to ask that.
I don't have anything to do with these last two. And so that's why I'm personally blanking on it. The slots that I still own to this day and are in charge of is the 7 a .m.
pitch. and the 9 a .m. carousel, I do those all myself.
And then I like to help pick the quotes because I know it's going to pop off and do well. But then the team does the 3 p .m. clip cutting and stuff.
The storytelling ones, they've got that down. And then the two funny, entertaining ones, easy peasy. So that's why I'm fuzzy.
But these in the morning, I still own those slots every day because that means I still post as the owner of a company that only works two days a week. I'm still owning three posts a day. By myself personally.
So that's why people are like, I can't post once a day. Yes, the hell you can. Because I'm doing all, like you totally can.
It's very doable, especially if you're repurposing. It literally takes me like 30 minutes. It's not a lot of work at all.
Yeah. Actually, I was just about to ask that, right? So you doing your own post, because I know a lot of people look at that as, okay, do you do the post or somebody on the team or scheduling?
But also you see, like, I'm curious, you know, myth or fact about the schedulers reducing the... True. If you schedule, it does reduce your views.
However, we do schedule because it's impossible to put out content at that breakneck speed if you're not scheduling. So yes, it's true, in my opinion. You do take the hit.
If you just open, edit, publish, you will get a boost in your views. However, it's much less likely that we'll do that on a consistent basis. And over time, consistency beats that little spike in views.
So it's true. What I tell people is this. When I built, I did my Instagram all by myself for the first year and a half.
It's only in the last since April and now it's August. That's it since I've had a team. And so I built to 600 ,000 followers all by myself posting.
I think it was like three times a day. No team, nothing. And my friend Jen Gottlieb, who I'm really close to, she just hit a million herself and she still does all by herself.
It's literally still just her. And so it's totally possible. You just have to get yourself organized.
honestly think you need to get to a point where you're like, you know why you're doing it. You're locked into the why until the pain of not doing it is greater than the pain of doing it. You're not going to do it.
And I think you also need to see a clear path to making money from Instagram. I know how much I get paid on every single post. I have high -risk tracking.
And so I know how much every Instagram post makes me. And so when I know, okay, going to go get paid today, like it's motivating, you know. And that's why sometimes some of my posts have less views, but we still make them.
is because I'm optimizing for the posts that make the most amount of money. So I'm always going to like, I'm on Instagram to make money. Like that's the whole point of it.
I'm not doing this as a hobby. Lots of other hobbies. I paint, I read, I go to the beach.
Those are way better hobbies. Instagram is where I make my money. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Which is great.
And we're going to, I definitely also coming up shortly, I want to talk a little bit about the, you know, the deeper why that you have, because I know that's a huge part of your story and yourself. We're going to get into that in a second, but just to stay on like the Instagram side of things, I've got another myth or fact for you.
So myth or fact, if you're, let's say publishing a YouTube short, you're publishing it like a TikTok post and you cross post that and upload it to Instagram. Does that reduce the reach if it's basically. captioned on a different platform yeah i'm curious your perspective so my perspective is is this i think that we should grow on one platform at a time So my rule for my students is that you should go all in on a platform and not half -ass five.
So whole -ass one. And so I think that each platform has its own ecosystem, its own communities, own inner quirks. Like the inner quirks of TikTok are so different than the inner quirks of like YouTube shorts, right?
It's just, it's different and there's different features and there's just different, it's just different. And so what I teach my students to do and what I've personally done is I grow one platform at a time until I hit 100 ,000 on that platform and then I move on to the next one. And so that's why I have like literally no fault.
followers on TikTok right now. That's why I don't have anything going on on LinkedIn. That's why I don't have a podcast right now is because I'm very, very concentrating on the platform that I'm growing, which right now I just, you know, it's, I, it was, first it was, so it was Facebook groups, got that to a hundred thousand.
Then it was my email list. Then it was. Instagram, then it was YouTube.
And then I kind of circled back because I really wanted to get a million on Instagram. So I'm focused on that now. But then once we hit that million, I honestly think I'm going to go build up my Facebook.
Like I'm going to re -dig into Facebook. I've been really thinking about what my next platform should be. And I'd actually be curious to pick your brain about this because I'm trying to decide, do I get YouTube from like, I'm at like 130 ,000 subscribers now, so not a lot.
Do I go all in on YouTube and get that to a million or... Do I go all in on Facebook and get that? I'm a little biased here.
I'm talking to the YouTube guy. I understand, yeah. So let me tell you, and I'll come back to that question.
Well, I'll share one thing that I found too, though, because I found... especially for coaching, high ticket and service, like expert led offers. Right.
And low ticket for that matter, too. So you just used to say, you know, but like expert led like offers. I have seen YouTube and Instagram just be the primary like dominant channels.
And yes, they're definitely so Facebook as well. But Facebook's almost like a what I've seen that people have success like groups or like a quality over quantity approach. It's kind of very interesting.
Yeah. Obviously, there's an element of that with the different platforms. But I would say YouTube.
You would say YouTube. It's such an intent -based platform. People are searching.
They're looking for what it is that you do. And that's actually one thing I'll add. And maybe you have a comment on this.
So what I saw as an example is like, yeah, the content's different that does well on YouTube versus on Instagram. And obviously not doing anywhere near the number of Instagram kind of things that you're doing. Something that works well for me on Instagram is like a did you know hook versus on YouTube.
It's a here's exactly how you can. So it's like a how to versus a hey, did you know this thing? So it's different.
You know, it's so different. And I would rather that content creator go all in and, you know, really utilize every feature. Like if you're going to go on Instagram, like leverage lives, leverage the channels, leverage the reels, leverage the carousels, leverage the stories.
And you can't do that if you're posting also like copying and pasting. And so I think that like mastery comes from really diving deeply into a single platform. I think that you can kind of trick – like sure, you can get views from a same piece of content on YouTube.
But I think what you're really cheapening is the actual growth that you could have if you went all in on that platform. And life is long. Business is long.
Like there's so much time out there for me to go and get a million followers on TikTok if I want to. Or Facebook. I'll circle back.
or on Facebook if I decide to go all in on YouTube. And so I'm not impatient. I'd rather master a platform.
And it's so much more credible if you have 100 ,000... followers on one platform than it is to have like you know 10 000 on on several different platforms i'd rather you have that credibility on one platform um and then you just learn like how to grow in social media like a bigger audience and then you can apply that and there's some overlap right like some of the people who are following me on youtube came from my instagram and then vice versa like some of the people as i grow on my youtube they'll come from my instagram you know and so like it'll I think that floats it a little bit, but I think you should grow one platform at a time.
Yeah, that's my advice. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting. As you're saying that, I think I can definitely see, because I usually come in with a different perspective.
This is also why I love these podcasts, because we go back and forth. I can really see the perspective that you have, because if people have that limited amount of time, if they could dedicate that time to posting, maybe it's, you know, whether it's seven times or even three or four or five times. Or even once a day.
That's true. Once a day consistently. Yeah, once a day, like on.
on Instagram, then you're going to be able to see that growth or on YouTube or whatever it happens to be. You pay attention to your stats. You audit your content better.
You're more aware of what's working. Like you're just locked and dialed in. It feels like a waste to have content that could be published on different platforms not be there.
Like it feels like, oh, I could be so much more efficient. But I would argue you're actually way more efficient in the long run, one at a time. And that was my thought before.
And that's, you know, and I do think it might be. So I would still say I think it's a. case -by -case basis.
It depends on what the goal is, but I can really see your point of really focusing on that core one. And I think regardless, I completely agree, focus on one main platform for sure. And then whether you cross -post, I think it depends on the strategy.
Well, if you're running ads, for example, it helps to have... some form of life on that platform, right? Exactly.
That's what I would. Yeah, exactly. Like with YouTube.
The goal then isn't necessarily to grow on Instagram. It's just having content that was published recently helps the performance of. that ad if that makes sense like that could be a good reason which goes to your case by case but my students don't need case by case they need like yeah one plus one equals two black and white stay focused on your platform don't get distracted you're not the exception to the rule stick with the program like they do my students do really well because i work with beginners for the most part like in the low -ticker world and so they are hearing so much advice from so many and like when i come in and say nope don't do that that's wrong don't do this nope stay but like that's very helpful to them um which is why i tend to be more like do this this way and not that that way um for my people yeah you work with more advanced business owners so that makes sense that you can have that nuance yeah yeah exactly exactly there's nuance but i agree especially people who are starting out they need to pick a platform and run and and even myself too so i'm saying this now and also the advice i might give to business owners is different but when i started yeah similar to like you're describing it like i started on youtube i started when i was like 17 years ago i was like a kid i was building up the my youtube channel and everything and uh you know and that was the one platform
focused on and similarly right the first couple years what like you know i don't know i didn't add it up like a couple hundred bucks or something like who knows no but i saw this picture of you i don't know which platform it was on but i saw this picture of you you went to i think it was a vidcon like a hundred years ago yeah not quite a hundred but it's funny yeah it's just like like there's just people in this because you've been in the space for a long time as of like 10 years ago actually it was 10 years ago yeah that's i think that's what it was yeah um and so it's just like fun to see because i look back at those old photos and i'm like man like we were And we're still babies now, like we're still so young.
But it's fun to be in the same space for a really long time because you get to know the other like. OGs in the space. Yeah.
Exactly. Exactly. Which is really cool.
And so kind of looping it back, the last question I have kind of very focused on Instagram. I'm sure going to loop back to that, but I want to talk about your story. I want to talk about your thoughts on AI.
We got to talk about that. I also want to talk about ads. I understand you're spending $10 ,000 a day.
Trying to get up to $30 ,000 a day. So I'll take all the advice you can give me. We're going to talk about that for sure.
We've been hitting a plateau on meta at 10K a day for like a good year now. So I want to break that plateau. We'll talk about that.
And then also talk about... about your YouTube channel that you went from zero to 100 ,000 in six months. How many months?
I want to say it was either four months or seven months. I don't remember. But still, either way, very, very impressive.
And so we're going to get to all that in a second. I think now let's talk about the trial reel. Then I want to talk about your story.
And then we got a lot more value bombs. But I think the story is also really valuable to understand. So let's talk about trial rules quickly and then we'll dive in.
Yeah. So, I mean, trial rules are such an odd ball. They're so odd.
It's an incredible opportunity. So I don't think I don't want people to ever miss the fact that you can go and get in front of people who do not follow you. It's guaranteed to not show your content to followers, which is such an incredible opportunity.
I don't even know what that like. I can't even believe we get that opportunity, to be honest. And so trailers are amazing.
But but what I really find and I don't know if this has been your experience as well, is that it is so different from account to account on what works. That has been our experience, not just in our own students, but in my peers who run big Instagram accounts. And so I'll tell you what we do.
But what I really would tell people is like you have to experiment. Every good marketer experiments. You have to try it on your own.
We publish five trial rails a day. OK, so a lot. And I would love for us to be doing more.
Five is like our team's capacity. My team does it. And then what we do is pretty much identify.
Like if 80 % of our content is repurposed, 100 % of our trial content is repurposed from our winners. And so you change it up a little bit. It might be different video footage.
It might be like a slightly different clip. You might mirror the clip so it looks different, but we're basically just repurposing content that we know does well. And most, so like, let's say, let's get basic back and napkin stats.
Nine out of 10 trial reels will flop. One will get us 3 ,000, 5 ,000 followers, right? So it's nothing.
It's like 100 views, 80 views, a million views, and tons of followers. And we are yet to figure out what that rhyme or reason is. So what we're pretty much doing at this stage of trial rules is just collecting data.
We like to collect data for six months. We like to really just see what's going on. We just started publishing trial rules consistently about...
six months ago, it was January, so I guess a little longer. So we're still collecting data. We're still trying to figure out what works.
That's what's working the most for us right now is just quantity of stuff we know works, and then some of them will pop off, and that will get us a lot of followers. I think our average followers per each trial reel, if you average it out, I want to say is around 25 followers. So if you average it out, but it's really more like zero, one, two, three.
3 ,000. Like, so like, it's not a good, yeah. But that's what we're doing.
But your team does it five times a day. Five times a day. It doesn't affect your main profile.
It doesn't ever get published. There's no downside. No, exactly.
And you're getting an average of 25 followers. And obviously it's, you know, tilted towards the ones that do really well. Exactly.
And we don't know right now what's going to pop off. We still are trying to figure that out. And so we just keep.
doing all of our winners and changing them up. And then some of the winners will re -pop off. That's basically it.
I wish I could come to you and say, yes, first you're going to do this, and then you're going to do this. But honestly, there's a really good lesson in that, which is to experiment. So people think you're going to have to have the answer to something before you start doing it.
That's a great example of, no, I actually have no idea what the flip is going on, and I'm still out there in the trenches figuring it out. And that's what everyone should be doing. I think with every part of business, especially marketing, Question the requirements and go to your own experimentation because that's how I've gotten every big win in my business is because I just tried things.
I just experimented. It's classic marketing. And it's a license to experiment because it doesn't have any downside, any risk with the trial reels.
Do you publish the trial reels that do really well? I'm very curious about that. No, we do not.
We think of it as almost two separate feeds. So they just run very separately. The reason why is because you clog up the main feed.
And it's not like you publish to the main feed and it gets a huge boost. It does nothing. All it does is detract from the main feed when you clog up a repurposed thing.
And so we think of them as two totally separate feeds. I'll tell you something that I'm going to try. This is an untested experiment, but I thought it was brilliant.
It's to make almost like shooting ads for trial reels where you say, hey, you're seeing this because you're not following me yet. If you want more videos on growing on social media and making a bunch of money selling little products, be sure to go check out my videos and follow me. want to go to my studio and film a hundred of those i thought that was so smart such a good hack so i haven't tried it yet but one of my friends said that worked really well for him so i'm like oh i've got to try that and it's brilliant because you know that people who are seeing this haven't followed you super smart so i'm gonna try that that's a little hack i'm trying when i get back home that's a great right that's a really really good tip as well and it's free we're not paying for any of this yeah yeah yeah that's awesome yeah that's where i'm at with trial videos And so let's talk a little bit about your story, your background.
Like, tell me a little bit more about, you know, how you and I know some of this already for everybody who's listening or watching. Let's say they don't know, like, about your story. Like, how did you get into all of this?
What's your what's your why behind everything? Very good question. Well, I'll start off by saying that I was homeschooled all 12 years, so I never went to a real school.
And I really think that that was the most important gift my parents gave me for a couple of reasons. I think one being homeschooled really just. me a very innocent childhood i got to be myself like i really i never was bullied like i never had a billing experience all my entire childhood look how cool to be able to say that like i never experienced a bully and i never was like body conscious or image conscious i was never picked on for the way i looked or anything like i just had such a little innocent carefree childhood i got to read a lot i got to be outside a lot like it was just a really innocent childhood um which i think made me see the world in such a loving way.
People always say, you're so kind. I'm like, it's just because I have a nice little heart because I was just homeschooled. I don't know.
So I think that's one of the gifts my parents gave me in being homeschooled. But the other thing that's very important about my story and being homeschooled is that I was never taught to trade time for learning, right? We go to school.
We have a nine to five experience as children. We go and we sit there and eventually we learn something, but it's not optimized for time. Right.
So I learned as a kid, oh, my homework takes me two hours. Cool. I'm going to get it done and then I'm done.
So when the work is done, we're done, which really set me up for success as an entrepreneur, because now I don't trade time for money. I don't go into a nine to five and I don't I just I just make my money and it's not attached to time. And so, you know, for me, that was such a gift is that I was really able to think about the world differently.
My dad was an entrepreneur. And so when I was like 14 or 15, I got to work. at his company he was a website designer and so i learned a lot um and then i weirdly use my college degree.
I went to college. I know most people don't use their college degree. I use my college degree.
I went to school for communication arts. And so I learned how to communicate a message. I learned how to like, I practice like teleprompter reading.
I learned how to be presentable on camera. Um, I, that's our, those are skills that I use as a content creator every day. I thought I was going to go be a reporter.
Like that's what I thought at that point I was going to be like a weather girl or something. Um, but that I use my college degree every single day. Um, and so it really in college, I knew And fairly early on, oh, wait a minute.
No, I don't want a job. I want to own my own business. And so I always tell people like my college experience was very different than a lot of other people's because I was building my business.
Like 2013, I was a freshman in college. And then 2014, I was, you know, a sophomore or whatever. And so my goal going, you know, out of college is I don't want a real job.
I want to make this business work by the time I graduate so I never have to go get like a real job. And so I worked almost full time in college to pay for like at a job. to pay for everything.
And I did, took all my classes and I was trying to start this business. So I was really, really busy in college, but I, that four year grind where I was doing something different than my peers is what I think set me up to be several decades ahead of where, like in my head, I feel 45 now. Like I feel like I've achieved like the life stuff of a 45 year old person, just like I've got so much going on.
And so all of that to say that brought me to here and my why. is really my daughter I'm a single mama to a little four -year -old girl now um and I always like to joke that I'm a stay -at -home mama that happens to have an eight -figure business on the side um she's with her dad on Tuesday which is great which is amazing like that's the goal yeah I think that resonates with like the you know the fact that you are you know doing that I think a lot of people and maybe that's their situation or something different but I think it's really inspiring to a lot of people like seeing that and hearing that I I like to be a voice that isn't like all the other, you have to hustle and wake up at four in the morning and put all the hours in.
That is not my truth. My journey is that, no, I actually work two days a week. Tuesdays I go into the office.
Fridays I go into the office. And the rest of the time I'm bopping around Orange County with my daughter. We go to the beach.
We go to the library. We go on hikes. We paint.
We just get up to trouble together. And I want people to hear that because it's just cool to know, oh, hey, like. If she can do it, I can.
And I always say, not in this self -deprecating way, but I'm not that smart. I'm not that clever. I'm really not.
It took me a long time to make money. I would argue with that, though. But what I'm saying is, look how long it took me to figure this out.
It took me years. I clearly wasn't born with an X factor or any of these skills. Everything that I know about marketing, everything that I know about sales, everything that I know about business, I learned through blood, sweat, and tears.
I wish I was born with it, but you can look at my early years and see how little I knew. see how bad I was at business. And I think that's actually really encouraging because it means that I, a lot of people who start, you guys are so much better at business than me.
You're so much better at marketing. And so you have such an advantage. And so like if I genuinely believe that like if I can do it, anyone can.
And what a message of hope that is. That is a good message for a lot of people. But I would give yourself a little bit more credit than you're giving yourself right now.
I figured it out eventually. So diving into some of these other things, and I know we might have to rapid fire through a little bit of this, but just so I get the sense, when it comes to, let's talk about ads next, talk about the YouTube channel, and then we're going to close with some of your thoughts around AI. But when it comes to ads, you're doing $10 ,000 a day right now.
What is that currently looking like? Is that all the low ticket? the low ticket um so yeah i'll this is what we've been trying to break that like ten thousand dollars a day plateau for a while our ads are immediately profitable with an average of a 2 .5 return on ad spend that's kind of our metric and so we want to be profitable day one we want to turn one dollar into two and a half dollars right away tight metrics for success right because that means we're not doing any delayed revenue we're not going to scoop it back later 90 days or anything we want to be profitable at 2 .5 return on ad spend day one that's i think one of the bigger reasons why we haven't Scaled up as fast as we have pretty tight.
Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But right now we've gotten it up to spending about $300 ,000 per month on ads.
We sent all of our ads directly to like little, like I think like the most expensive thing that we will run an ad to. Might be $67 like it's ours a very low ticket With the way we think about it and what has worked for us is the job of the ads is to acquire customers So we try to keep our cost of acquisition very very low our blended CAC is $39 and our LTV is like 180 I think is what yeah, so it's like a nice It's a four to one ratio basically is what our LTV to CAC ratio is and so we run it all straight to a checkout page and then um or like to like a landing page exactly um and then we're like i said we're acquiring a couple hundred new customers every single day most of those are through the ads and then all the stuff that i'm in charge of is like the back end marketing so getting the customers to buy over and over and over again and so we might be immediately profitable at like a 2 .5 return that's been right there but then we have a 60 repeat order rate meaning our customers will buy from us again and again and again
industry average is 15 to 30 percent repeat order rate and we're at least twice as good if not like more than that um and so we really have a lot of great you know loyal customers who buy from us again we take good care of them we give them good products um and so yeah we don't do anything too complicated with our ads it's literally just basic creative to a landing page um which then goes to a checkout page yeah pretty simple yeah yeah and and that's that's the thing i think a lot of people don't realize is there is simplicity with scaling up you know some of these different ads when you have the right you know kind of strategy and pieces in place now i'm curious are you how much of your content are you testing as ads how do you see the ads content because that's obviously one thing you see more and more as people talk about the ability to use content as ads so it's very interesting when we ran ads for a few years before i started posting instagram and so when i started posting on so we were writing like decently profitable ads for a couple years and then in 2023 i started posting on instagram and we immediately saw a huge lift in our return on ad spend right when you're posting because it's not organic it just does better there's a symbiotic nature between those two they're related um and so that was like just the first thing is like oh this council go live it looks credible now it has a hundred thousand followers or you know subscribers or whatever now it's more credible uh but then
The way we think about it now is like organic is just a testing ground for ads. So we run ads to our best performers organically. And so we test everything organically first, which costs us nothing but like my labor and time.
And then so you're always going to have your flops, but let's just get the flops up for free and then run the ads to the best stuff. And we actually finally have now that we have a lot more people on my team, we literally like as of two weeks ago. got great communication out between the ads department and the organic we did not have that before and so now we have a nice little system that we bet out where the organic team communicates to the ad people here's what worked really well here's our top performance before it was like the ads people were going to find their creatives and like there was not a good relationship there um it just hadn't been built yet and so we got that going i think that's gonna help um we also got rose my sister out of it i think really what's kept us um plateaued is just lack of like like people and like a capacity issue like so we got someone else like duplicating and doubling the campaigns and scaling up the one like we got something else on like a couple other people on that that's the new thing we're trying we've been really cracking at this goal um i also wonder if just like the
um high ticket stuff that i'm launching is going to eventually get us like i don't know curious to get your thoughts on that yeah diagnose me you got a lot more expertise on this than i do so well there's so many opportunities there especially like you know as you're diving into the ads also different platforms i know you're starting to experiment with youtube ads and there's i want to show you my youtube stuff later and show you what we're doing that'll be great yeah there's there's so much opportunity there And and then also adding in high ticket.
It's just a whole nother, you know, back end area. And then you can retarget all the people that have bought your front end products, retarget them for high tickets. There's a lot of opportunity.
So would you run? That's a good question. And we don't have to make this whole thing like answer all Maria's business question session.
I would love to have a whole hour. Happy to. Well, we don't have the time today.
I'm happy to. Oh, yeah. So, like, my thought process was.
Don't run ads at all to the high ticket stuff. Just market the high ticket stuff to the hundreds of thousands of back end customers I already have. So that's a great idea.
And I would also recommend you might as well retarget. So yes, you don't need to do cold traffic to high ticket because you already have an amazing cold traffic funnel to low ticket. You've basically done the inverse of what people already do, which is they build up the high ticket and then they do low ticket to help fund increases in traffic.
But you're missing an opportunity if you don't retarget all the people that are at low ticket. for a call to high ticket because you can get such cost -effective book calls. Yes, I would start organically first, fill it up.
You know, you already hit capacity. But when you're like, hey, I've got more sales team members and there's time on their calendar and you need to fill them up, definitely do those. That's smart because retargeting, I know, is like, that's smart.
Because like with our low traffic, we've tapped into such a cold target now. It's freaking Siberia with the cold. Like that's how cold the traffic is with the low ticket.
Yeah, you don't need to do more of that on the high ticket side. You've already done all of that. So cold traffic.
Just keep it low ticket. But for retargeting, when you're looking for more calls. So you don't need to do it right away because you probably email your list or whatever.
We have setters who are calling our 300 people a day. Which is great. Our issue is actually closer capacity right now.
Getting the good closers and getting them trained. Typically, yeah, that's what we see. Yeah, so that's our next thing.
But, man, okay, that's good to hear. That's good to hear. I hear that, like, what I'm hearing is I'm at least heading in the right direction with that.
I'm going to follow up on that with you later. Exactly. Exactly.
Yeah. So we'll touch a little bit more on the high ticket side in just a second, because I think there's some other cool thoughts because I know you're really helping to bolt on the low ticket side. So kind of flipping it the other way around, but we'll come back to that.
But your YouTube channel, you grew that in whether it was four or seven months, right? From zero to a hundred thousand subscribers. And I remember you talking about, right, you did it with, like, a webcam.
Yes. It's not an over, like, big production. There was no edits.
How did that happen? No edits is crazy, too. No edits.
It literally was, like, at one point I went to answer the door and came back to the YouTube video. Like, I was filming, I answered the door, and I would sneeze and, like, keep it in. Like, it was so raw.
I actually think it was sheer beginner's luck. I think that's what made it do so well was it just was so raw. It was not fancy.
I just did two things that I think worked really well. I was very, well, actually I'll say three things. One, I was super consistent.
My upload schedule is my upload schedule. I learned that from Instagram. So I'm never going to miss.
Content platforms like consistent content creators. They trust your account. They're going to send people to it.
And so I took that really seriously. It was like, I'm going to publish my content when I say I'm going to. I did two videos a week.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, pretty easy to do. And I did two things with the actual content that I think really helped. One, I made sure it was really, really, really good information.
Like that was key. I was like, I am giving the best of the best information, truly teaching. Stuff not just like we hear give value like I really tried to leave it all out on the field and teach the stuff I wish I knew I thought that people need I try to think through anything that could possibly keep them stuck so they could watch that YouTube video and See results from whatever I was teaching like within an hour That was yeah like really I think good content was my first thing and then the second thing that I think helped the Production side of things is I use this app called notability and the software called Ecamm, which basically, if you ever see the drawings of iPads, I would draw whatever I was illustrating with an iPad.
And it was just that little bit of elevated production that didn't cost any more in editing time or anything. As I spoke, I drew. So when I clicked end, the video was fully done and ready to go.
I didn't have to do any extra editing. But I think that helped massage all the other lack of production. It gave something people to look at.
It felt like I knew at least a little bit about what I was doing. It wasn't just... just a talking head for 10 minutes because that's kind of boring it was a talking head that was also illustrating something that i can look at to the right um and so i think that helped like excuse the the lack of production um but i mean like we look at alex hermosi for example like so many of his best videos are just him yapping to the camera but it's really good content it's really good information and so from my perspective that's actually the most important thing and that's why it blew up i was super consistent with it um and i think that that's why it i really saw a huge spike in it and now You got me thinking maybe I need to triple down and get up to a million.
I wonder how long that would take me. Probably a couple of years. I think two years.
If I'm going to put a number on it, I think it would probably take me like two years of grinding it out. Yeah. Yeah.
And that's, I mean, for, yeah, the million, like, plaque, you know, there you go. Oh, I know. When I got my 100 ,000.
Do you know they made the 100 ,000 smaller? I'm so pissed about that. Yeah.
It's, like, this big now. I'm so upset about that. It used to be this ginormous thing.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, they went through multiple. And that's, I have the, you know, bigger one from the original, my original channel.
And it's funny. Yeah, it's, like, yeah, the newer ones are smaller. What are you things that you see in channels that go from, let's just say, a couple hundred thousand to a million?
What are the things that you see, like, really? So that's where, you know, looking at the strategy, but I also don't want to like defer you from where it is. I think providing a lot of value is going to be incredibly important.
The packaging will matter more to get it to a million because you want to package it. And that's what Alex Ramosi did a fantastic job at this. Super, super high value content packaged in a way.
that will get people to click it. It's like, you know, kind of sugar coating the vegetables, right? It's like, all right, like, you know, these are really amazing vegetables.
And those of us that like want to learn that, we'll seek that out. But a lot of people are like, ooh, I want candy, you know? And so if you package it that way, but then there's tons of value, you have the best of both worlds.
So that's actually where I would say to get from 100 ,000 to a million, that is what I would recommend on that side. Perfect. I don't know.
I think you're convincing me. I think I'm going to go home and tell the team guys you're locking in. Because I think we're going to need a new goal in about six seconds here because we're going to hit a million.
Exactly. We're going to have to come up with something. There we go.
You may have heard it here first. We'll see. I think you did.
So let's talk about AI because obviously that's like the elephant in the room, the thing that's changing. And it seems to be very controversial when it comes to the content, right? Because you have people being like, all right, let's use lots of AI.
And then you have no AI. And I probably fall somewhere in the middle using it for certain use cases. And so I'm curious, what is your perspective on AI?
And then how do you utilize it content -wise and within your business? We make a ton of money from AI. AI has helped us a lot.
many like i'll give you a very practical example we use ai to collect and display incredibly important data points in our business. So we have a massive screen in our office.
It's literally bigger than my arms. It's massive. It's a huge TV.
And it will display all the stats of our business, the revenue, the customers we got, all the important data points. That's all collected and reported on by AI. And it gives me an actual insight into what's happening in the company every second if I want.
I have a mobile version of it that I check on my phone a thousand times a day. I love to know my stats. But with AI and content, I think too many beginners rush to it.
They see it as the solution for the blank page, right? I don't know what to write. I don't know what to make content on.
So I'm going to use ChatGPT. I'm going to use Claude. And the problem is they haven't learned good content from bad content yet.
They haven't learned my unique voice from ChatGPT's unique voice. And so they're only cheating themselves. And so you can use AI, and I'm pro -AI.
I think it is the future. But let's know what the heck we're actually using AI for, and let's have expertise. And so I'm reading a book.
I highly recommend it to anyone watching. It's called The Algorithm. And you would think it's about the social media algorithm, but it's actually about the scaling.
the scaling algorithm like the algorithm of scaling and it's written by the president of tesla who helped scale up tesla he's also on the boards of like lululemon and spacex a bunch of different companies um and he breaks down like what is the science of scaling a business yeah and the last the last step is automating after you i you know question all requirements you actually understand what needs to be automated and then you automate at the very end and i think the problem is we're automating and using ai to a bunch of crap like it is slop it is slop and so i would never want to someone from the work we need to do, the elbow reach we need to do to become good content creators.
And then you will understand what are the stupid parts of content creation that can be automated and that can be outsourced and what are the parts you still need to do. And really, to be really honest, very little of our content itself and our content creation process is automated with AI. We're playing with it.
We're experimenting with it. It's not good. That's it.
Like it's not there yet. It's a little bits and pieces you can, but for the most part, it's not quite where we need it to be yet. And so.
And I think eventually it will get there. Eventually we can use it more for little things. Like I'll give you an example.
Sometimes when I go to make a carousel, the contrast on the text is really low. So I'll have like white text on a white shirt, right? I would upload that photo to ChatGPT and say change this shirt to a black shirt.
Now I have really nice contrast, okay? That would be an example, right? I know.
from a good content creator because i've made a bunch of content if on the first slide of a carousel it's bad contrast people won't read it and they'll scroll So I better make sure there's good contrast in the first place. But I only know that because I've published hundreds, if not thousands, of carousels, and I know what matters on that first slide of a carousel.
And so we use AI for stuff like that. There's other processes that we use it. But my philosophy is we shouldn't be using AI if we haven't quite, like, how do we know if it's good or not?
If you don't know it's good or not, I think you need to do it a little bit the old -fashioned way first just to know, just to recognize good AI. outputs versus bad AI outputs. That's my philosophy on that.
I'm very pro it if we know what we're doing with it. Yeah, exactly. And I have to ask too, because I know like you've grown the YouTube channel and I've got my software, thumbnailcreator .com.
Yes, and it's very good. So by the way, if you're watching this, highly recommend it. I used it.
And because I had made a bunch of YouTube thumbnails before, I knew what made good thumbnails on my channel. So I could use your tool and make thumbnails like this, right? It was super easy.
I love the variations. I love being able to, it's an amazing piece of software. It's a great use of AI.
And the thing about yours though, I will say is like, people can also borrow your expertise. So even if they don't know what good YouTube thumbnails are, you know what good YouTube thumbnails are.
And so you've made a software that can make good thumbnails. So I think that's another thing to think about too. But for me, I also had the experience of, yeah, these are good thumbnails.
These work really well. And that's how I was able to recognize what your AI tool was making was good. So yeah.
Yeah. Really, really, really great software. You built something amazing.
You should be very proud of that. Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
I appreciate that. We were talking about that beforehand. Very well approved, for sure.
Well, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.
And so, you know, when it comes to as we get towards the end, I feel like we could talk like all day. We're going to need to at some point do a part two and dive deeper into this. But, you know, when it comes to your expertise around not just Instagram, but also.
Low ticket products, right? That's what I'm curious is I would love to get your insights around low ticket products. And also from a perspective of, you know, and we were talking about this before.
I know a lot of your audience starts with low ticket and then now, you know, you're adding in high ticket and maybe some of them are doing the same thing. But a lot of the audience that I have maybe have started with high ticket, right? So what I'd love to hear is what are your best, you know, practices and recommendations for low ticket offers, especially with somebody who maybe already has a high ticket offer.
With that in mind, what do you recommend and what makes a great low ticket offer? Yeah, that's a good question. So I help a lot of people who have high ticket businesses add on the low ticket funnel of their business, the low ticket cog in their machine.
Whether it's... I want to liquidate my ad costs, acquire customers for free and get them to ascend. That's a huge one for high ticket owners.
Or I'm really burnt out with high ticket and I'd like to have a little bit more of a hands -free, hands -off model. And so what I see in high ticket business owners, the mistakes they make is that some of the skills that made them really successful in high ticket are an anchor in the low ticket thing. And I'll give you like a specific example.
Typically, our high ticket programs are called like... The Wealth Academy or Scaling Success or Grow and Scale. They sound sexy, but they're more vague.
And you can get away with that in a high ticket because you have a long enough conversion mechanism, whether it's a sales call or a webinar or a long nurtured email list, whatever, to really explain, okay, here's what you're going to learn in the Wealth Academy. Here's what you're going to learn in Scale and Grow or whatever, you know, the names of these programs.
So they understand the names themselves are brandable. But in a low ticket offer, you have no room. for vagueness.
It must be hyper specific. And so I'll tell you one of my product names, how to get more sales with your Instagram stories. That's it.
That's it. Right. Are we clear on what we're going to learn in this course or not?
We're going to learn how to get more sales from your Instagram stories. And so how to launch a viral digital product, right? Like this is the names of my products.
And that's a gap that people who are high ticket, they think what I'm going to name, but like actually so much of low ticket is understanding how to leverage impulse purchases, how to leverage impulse buyers. A confused buyer doesn't buy. We know this, right?
They don't buy. And so we need to remove the confusion and be solving hyper -specific things. And so the other thing that I tell high -ticket business owners, if you're like, I'm not sure what low -ticket product to create, how do I know if it's going to be good?
I'll give two specific little hints for you. One, when you're on a sales call, there's always something that you say, there's something that you do that gets someone off the fence.
Like some little trigger point. You say something like, oh, I didn't know what taught me that. I didn't know that was included.
I'm in now. There's always something that gets them off the fence. That's a good direction to look into for your low ticket, right?
That's a good like, huh, there's something there that gets people to move. That should be like my hyper -specific thing. Second thing, in high -ticket programs, typically they recommend, okay, right away in the beginning, give them some wins.
Help them. Give them a script that's going to get them some wins or a good little hack that's going to get them some wins. Then they're posting to your community being like, oh, my gosh, I implemented that script Tyler gave me, and I got a zillion views, whatever it might be, right?
That little hack that you give them, that little thing that gets a win, that could be a low -ticket product, right? So it's little specific things. You don't need to give them everything.
You literally only need to solve one very, very, very specific problem. But when you do that and your little low ticket product that they paid $27 for literally solve that problem the way they trust you and are that much faster to buy the higher ticket things. I see this all the time in my clients that we're adding in the low ticket things and their ascension rate is incredible because the trust factor is off the charts because of what they got from a little $27 thing.
They're like, man. If that was that good, I can't imagine what's going to happen in the bigger programs. And so that's my advice.
Keep it really specific and solve like one really specific problem that you already know does really well. That's my advice. That's great.
That's really good advice. And so what I'm curious about, especially as we get to the end of this episode here, though, we always have a final golden nugget at the end. But don't worry, that's just basically a fancy way of asking you, what have you not shared yet that's going to be really valuable?
We always end with a golden nugget. So make sure everybody sticks around. But how can people learn more about everything that you're doing?
How can they, you know, like work with you or, you know, I'm just curious. What would you like to share with everybody? Well, good question.
If I haven't hit a million yet. Go follow me on Instagram, please, with all your accounts. I'm begging you.
Please follow me. I'm really pushing every day for that goal. So go follow me on Instagram.
That would be my first thing. And you know what I tell people is, like, step into my web. Like, let my process bring you in.
Like, you follow me on Instagram, and then you just get to experience, like, stepping into the web and where you went. Because, like, trust me, like, I know how to turn a follower into a customer. And then I know how to turn a customer into a repeat customer.
And then somehow those repeat customers are finding their way into extra support and more ways I can help them. And so I tell people, you know, like, what you need from me finds you, it always does.
And so start by following me on Instagram. If I'm at a million, you can still follow me, it's fine. Or you can go subscribe to me on YouTube.
Either way, we're like, that's probably where the action is happening. But like, I never I want first people to experience what it's like to just consume my free content. Like I want I don't want them to shortcut the magic of just experiencing like the free stuff that i put out i don't want to like you can go to my website you can see everything that's like that i sell that's fine but you miss out on the magic like just come follow me step into my world um and then like we'll take it from there don't worry so that's what i tell people i love it that's great yeah that's awesome yeah definitely definitely encourage everybody to do that yeah and we'll put all the links you know down below too as well for all of that um and so all right a final golden nugget it's kind of a tradition that we do around here and really it's just a way of like what have you not shared yet that you think would be really valuable for the people who are watching.
And it could be anything related to low ticket, Instagram. I don't think people realize how easy their life and business gets when they add in low ticket. You know, there's a saying, slow to build, slow to break.
That's what a low ticket business is. It is slower. Like the elbow grease is at the front for sure.
It's brick by brick. But do you know what's really freaking solid? a brick wall and so you avoid you stabilize high tickets can be like this but a low ticket business is like this like it's just a freaking wall and it sits there and it's so stable and there's no stress about customers because each customer is like 27 so there's no stress about your customers and so i look at businesses that don't have a solid built -in low ticket funnel yet i'm like man a you're leaving a lot of money on the table because there's people who love you and adore you but can't afford your high ticket so there's a lot of low hanging fruit but b you're missing out on all the stabilization that comes from just Daily sales.
We have this saying in our business, no $0 days. There needs to be every single day in our business, we're making sales, we're making money. And the energetic relief and the way it feels to just have sales and orders coming in by the hundreds every day, it's delightful.
And so I think that if you don't have a low ticket element of your business, you really should. And that would be my golden nugget. That's great.
That's a great way to end it. Well, thank you so much again, Maria. This was fantastic.
I appreciate you having me. Thank you. Thanks.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Maria Wendt built an eight-figure business on an average $27 product, and the opening question is blunt: how does hundreds of thousands of tiny sales add up to $22 million? The answer she gives over the next hour is a full operating system for low-ticket, not a lucky break.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
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A single unbroken take in front of a glass office wall, where an agency founder maps out the three-times-a-week YouTube system, the two-account Instagram funnel, and the AI-run team behind a seven-figure-a-month content engine.
A fitness-marketing coach walks through the five-step AI system he uses to research competitors, write scripts, produce content, and build lead-generation software with ChatGPT's Astra model and Codex.
A student case-study interview: how a full-time stepmom with three chronic illnesses built a six-figure low-ticket business on 30 minutes of ads a day and a lot of repurposed content.
A solo creator opens her notebook, her ManyChat dashboard, and her email inbox to show exactly how $500K a month in digital-product sales gets split across Instagram, email, and $5-a-day ads.
How The Birdhouse extracts 20+ weekly high-signal X posts from client YouTube recordings to sell a $10,000/month mastermind without broad viral dilution.
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