I'm Going to Scale to $100k/mo in 90 days

[todonelist]

Catch up on my story by reading my first GOLD post here: GOLD! - HOT! - EXECUTION - From a broke Uber Driver $9k behind on rent to $30k Per Month...QUESTIONS?

And my second GOLD post here: GOLD! - SCALING - From $9k behind on rent to a 7 figure business! Here's how.

I run an herbal tea company that I started from ZERO while doing Uber. We focus our marketing on Anxiety Disorder because that's our main selling blend and the one that started the company. If you notice in my first post, I had a goal to hit $100k/mo within a couple months after that post.

It never happened. Our highest month in the past 3 years has been $78k. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my herbal tea business - but growth has been difficult and because we sell low ticket physical items, it has been a pretty tough few years. Shipping sucks and buying all the herbs and supplies is a lot.

The Goal
I want to make $100k/mo. It's been a goal of mine for years and I know I haven't been truly putting my best foot forward. Over the next 90 days, I'm going to attempt to figure this thing out and scale up. When I run FB ads, I make between $30k - $50k a month depending on how aggressive I am. When I'm not running any ads and only sending emails to my list, I make $10k - $15k. The reason I know this is because I took like 6 months off from running FB ads to focus on organic.

I just started back running ads in the past week after investing into coaching so I can improve my FB numbers because that was the main reason I stopped - Facebook just started getting difficult. In hindsight, it was all MY fault for not constantly keeping up with updates and strategies to work around the total annihilation of the old Facebook interests I use to rely on for targeting. Overnight, FB became more about going broad and focusing all your attention on the creative and copy. I was slow to adapt so we went from consistent $50k - $60k months back down to around $25k/mo and my profits were dropping significantly. Eventually I turned off ads and have been milking my list for the past 6 months and only making $10k/mo which has kinda sucked.

I'm ready for bigger and better things in my life. I was 32 in my first thread and now I'm 35. My oldest daughter is 13 so I want to REALLY bring some wealth into our lives. We've had an amazing 3 years, we were blessed to hit 7 figures but it took too long. We only took home around $300k of that so that's not a lot of money in 3 years. I want to get rich. $100k/mo is my goal.

The Plan
My average order value is $35. First of all, I plan on increasing that to around $50. I'm getting ads back running and I know for sure my biggest mistake the past 3 years was not testing enough. I'm going to be testing 1 new creative every day or at least 5 per week. Before, I probably tested a total of 10 creatives over the span of 3 years. For one whole year I had a creative working well all by itself and I never tested anything until it started dying and I was left scrambling. I won't make this mistake again.

My focus is going to be on creating GREAT content for ads, youtube content, IG reels and Tik Tok. Before, I didn't put enough focus on creating a lot of content that I could test in ads and/or just use for social media content. We've gone viral many times with IG reels and have grown our following to 47k followers. Over the next 90 days, I plan on being extremely consistent by posting on IG, Youtube and TikTok consistently, while testing the 5 new ad creatives each week. I want to be figure out how to consistently spend $1k a day on ads and make $3k back.

That's my plan for the herbal tea side of things, but I also plan on focusing most of my attention on promoting my new coaching program for people who need more serious help with Anxiety. I have a Skool community where I am hosting the course and everything.

My only dilemma is I'm not sure if I should focus on building MRR or High Ticket. I've sold a couple early copies of the course to people on my herbal tea list for $1,497 but I plan on selling it for at least $3k if I run ads to it. But I also have some members signed up for $97/mo so I haven't decided which offer I should focus my marketing on. All I know is, adding in a digital product/service in the backend is a MUST for me to be able to hit that $100k/mo goal.

Whichever one I choose, I'm going to create a VSL and run ads to it to either book a call if I choose high ticket or I'll just attempt to sell the $97/mo membership to cold traffic after bringing them in the funnel with some kind of free training.

I'm not gonna lie, I'm kinda scared to post this and end up failing but hey I need some damn accountability if I really wanna get rich. Tired of living this middle class a$$ life haha.

I'll update this thread at least once a week with everything I've done. (Hopefully I chose the right category for this)

OPEN TO ANY QUESTIONS OR SUGGESTIONS

 

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[FreakyThomas]

Hello,
Thank you for posting your precedent progress and challenges, it's inspiring.

I'm way behind you so I'm not sure my advice is really valuable but I still would like to give it to you.

I don't think setting numerical/results oriented goals is a good idea. While giving you a direction, it's totally outside your control and if you don't manage to reach them, it can be a bit depressing.
I think you should instead focus on non numerical goals, such as : augment revenue, or augment profit.
Then, you should also fix and focus on action-oriented goals, that are within your control. That's exactly what you did when saying:
"I'm going to be testing 1 new creative every day or at least 5 per week."
Or
"My focus is going to be on creating GREAT content for ads, youtube content, IG reels and Tik Tok"

The more specific the better. How do you plan to actually create this great content?

Because in the end, what matters is not what you want but what you're actually doing.

I hope you'll find this advice valuable.

Good luck and please keep us posted! You've already done much more than most people on this forum, including me, and we'll all learn from your experience.

Thomas

 

[WillHurtDontCare]

My only dilemma is I'm not sure if I should focus on building MRR or High Ticket. I've sold a couple early copies of the course to people on my herbal tea list for $1,497 but I plan on selling it for at least $3k if I run ads to it. But I also have some members signed up for $97/mo so I haven't decided which offer I should focus my marketing on. All I know is, adding in a digital product/service in the backend is a MUST for me to be able to hit that $100k/mo goal.

Do you need to pick? You could probably do both - have the $X per month or $Y lifetime access offer.

Really this boils down to a math formula - [number of expected customers] x [expected profit per sale]

So if you want to compare which is better, you'd just compare:

• [# of lifetime package signups] x [average lifetime user profit]
• vs
• [# of monthly package signups] x [average monthly user profit] x [average duration of monthly customers]

The other part that will be key here is how often you update your content. If you don't update your content, or you only post rarely, then you customers will just sign up for monthly, save the content, and leave.

So just plug in the numbers to what I described and see what makes more sense to you.

Congrats on the $80K sales months BTW!

 

[todonelist]

Hello,
Thank you for posting your precedent progress and challenges, it's inspiring.

I'm way behind you so I'm not sure my advice is really valuable but I still would like to give it to you.

I don't think setting numerical/results oriented goals is a good idea. While giving you a direction, it's totally outside your control and if you don't manage to reach them, it can be a bit depressing.
I think you should instead focus on non numerical goals, such as : augment revenue, or augment profit.
Then, you should also fix and focus on action-oriented goals, that are within your control. That's exactly what you did when saying:
"I'm going to be testing 1 new creative every day or at least 5 per week."
Or
"My focus is going to be on creating GREAT content for ads, youtube content, IG reels and Tik Tok"

The more specific the better. How do you plan to actually create this great content?

Because in the end, what matters is not what you want but what you're actually doing.

I hope you'll find this advice valuable.

Good luck and please keep us posted! You've already done much more than most people on this forum, including me, and we'll all learn from your experience.

Thomas

For sure I'm definitely more focused on smashing my goals as far as output way more than actual numbers. I just love to aim for numbers goal as well and thankfully I do an insane amount of mindset work thanks to the business I'm in so I don't really get depressed when I don't hit the numbers like most would.

I plan on creating GREAT content by being super vulnerable, relatable and funny. We've grown on IG by being funny while teaching health stuff so now I want to add more vulnerable content in the mix and talk about my childhood more which is quite traumatic so it should tie into our mental health content very well. As far as Facebook ads go, I'm working way more strategically on the HOOK of my ads, following a framework of HOOK > STORY > OFFER. I'm also utilizing the many interesting testimonials we have to create content around - like a cop who cussed me out the first time he saw our ad but went on to buy the tea and feel great results. We help therapists w/ anxiety so those are great reviews to build content around.

Thanks for the feedback I appreciate it!

Do you need to pick? You could probably do both - have the $X per month or $Y lifetime access offer.

Really this boils down to a math formula - [number of expected customers] x [expected profit per sale]

So if you want to compare which is better, you'd just compare:

• [# of lifetime package signups] x [average lifetime user profit]
• vs
• [# of monthly package signups] x [average monthly user profit] x [average duration of monthly customers]

The other part that will be key here is how often you update your content. If you don't update your content, or you only post rarely, then you customers will just sign up for monthly, save the content, and leave.

So just plug in the numbers to what I described and see what makes more sense to you.

Congrats on the $80K sales months BTW!

Makes sense! I do plan on testing both and comparing the numbers so that helps thanks! I offer weekly group coaching calls that should make people want to stay. I also update the course with new content once a month and that should make them want to stay. I'll def update the thread with the test results!!

And thanks, that was last year Black Friday!

 

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[GoldFibre]

Idea: Pay a Facebook ads expert $200 to do a one hour account review with you and potentially multiply your efficacy at minimal cost.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Am I reading this right?

So your strategy to $100K/mo is not to scale your herbal tea company (which looks to be a solid venture) but to go the guru route and sell high priced coaching courses?

 

[todonelist]

Idea: Pay a Facebook ads expert $200 to do a one hour account review with you and potentially multiply your efficacy at minimal cost.

Thanks! I did just get a mentor in this area that's helping me!

 

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[todonelist]

Am I reading this right?

So your strategy to $100K/mo is not to scale your herbal tea company (which looks to be a solid venture) but to go the guru route and sell high priced coaching courses?

Hey MJ! Good to see you chiming in... well not exactly. Don't you think I've made a mistake by not having a backend in place? For the past 3 years, I've already offered a free video course to new customers.

That free video course gathered a lot of amazing testimonials, but it was basically 3 years of charity work.

Scaling the herbal teas alone have been hard which is why I've failed to hit $100k/mo in a month in 3 years and I feel like if I would have offered a coaching program on the backend since the beginning(instead of giving away a free course), I would be in a completely different place right now.

So now... I definitely have a good amount of focus aimed at scaling the herbal tea sales in general by getting better at ads, testing more hooks and angles, getting better at customer service, being more consistent etc because my goal is to spend $1k a day promoting the tea and make back $3k, which would put me at $60k profit but I believe having a $97/mo membership or a high end coaching offer would help me close that gap to $100k profit.

Plus scaling a low ticket herbal tea business w/ FB ads is hard bro lol at the point of hitting $70k+ months, we were so damn busy it didn't make sense. We were falling behind on orders a lot - we got up to 3 employees which was getting super expensive and hard to maintain.

Having a digital product on the backend should help me reach my goal without the huge stress revolving around maintaining a $100k/mo physical product business.

Plus it's nowhere near overpriced. We literally help people heal from severe Anxiety Disorder that cripples their whole life. Most can no longer drive, be alone, work, go outside, or do anything that normal ppl can do. While therapy can cost between $250- $500 a month on average and return little to no real results, we help people overcome Anxiety in just a month or two. We even have helped several mental health therapists who were on the verge of quitting.

This isn't like some overpriced eCom coaching, it's mental health coaching so the niche isn't nearly as bombarded by "courses" and "gurus"

 

[msufan]

While therapy can cost between $250- $500 a month on average and return little to no real results, we help people overcome Anxiety in just a month or two.

What do you offer that's better than the competition in this area? It feels like you are just a self-proclaimed expert, so until I see why you have a productocracy here, I have the same concerns as MJ.

Regarding pricing your tea higher, I think that is wise. Price it higher and some people who are insensitive to the price change will pay it. For others who are more price sensitive, offer specials and deals to your mailing list which could generate an even better return. Getting a "$50 item" for $35 feels better than getting a $35 item for $35, even if it's the same item.

 

[todonelist]

What do you offer that's better than the competition in this area? It feels like you are just a self-proclaimed expert, so until I see why you have a productocracy here, I have the same concerns as MJ.

Regarding pricing your tea higher, I think that is wise. Price it higher and some people who are insensitive to the price change will pay it. For others who are more price sensitive, offer specials and deals to your mailing list which could generate an even better return. Getting a "$50 item" for $35 feels better than getting a $35 item for $35, even if it's the same item.

We offer far more value than therapy services like BetterHelp, which I would consider a competitor for my program. Obviously, we teach about herbs in the program which you won’t find in therapy. Plus, our program offers an actual strategy to follow to reach the outcome they desire (being free from Anxiety).

80% of our customers have already tried therapy and had little to no results. Then they find us and we change their lives. So, “just a self-proclaimed expert”? Lol um no… as mentioned, we have therapists come to us. Police officers come to us. Vets w/ PTSD come to us. Teachers, ppl w/ anxiety due to the death of a loved one, etc And we help them when everything else failed them. I think our results speak for themselves with 3 years of service so it would be a disservice to humanity for us not to have an offer to help ppl closer who can’t reach their desired outcome with the tea alone.

As far as pricing the tea higher, that’s not the plan because it’s already considered high. We want to increase AOV not prices in general. We’ve gotten complaints for 3 years that $25 is too much for our tea. I’ve actually been testing lower prices which seems to be resulting in a way better ROAS, but these are early tests within the last week.

 

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[msufan]

As far as pricing the tea higher, that’s not the plan because it’s already considered high. We want to increase AOV not prices in general. We’ve gotten complaints for 3 years that $25 is too much for our tea. I’ve actually been testing lower prices which seems to be resulting in a way better ROAS, but these are early tests within the last week.

My bad -- I misinterpreted "My average order value is $35. First of all, I plan on increasing that to around $50" as you surmised.

 

[todonelist]

I meant to throw an update here earlier this week but we've been slammed with orders from Black Friday/Cyber Monday so I've been doing a lot of working in my business rather than working on the goals set in this thread. But I absolutely HAVE been working on the business as much as I could! What has that entailed? Well, a lot of looking within and becoming radically honest with myself.

First, I created a list of "things I've sucked at" over the past few years when it comes to this business.

1. Providing excellent customer service
2. Shipping out orders quickly
3. Analyzing FB ads data correctly
4. Testing my ads/funnel way more

Providing excellent customer service
Our customer service hasn't been bad but it hasn't been excellent. One thing that has pushed people away is our slow turnaround time when it comes to customer support emails. When we get busy, I might go all week without checking our inbox. I'm in the anxiety niche, so not being able to get in touch with us wasn't good - it made them have more anxiety and that would turn them off from ordering from us in the future.

We probably have the most difficult customers so it hasn't been easy. While most people would be anxious to receive an online order of a t-shirt or something, these people suffer with Anxiety Disorder so they are always 10X more desperate for us to respond to their emails FAST and ship their orders FAST. Trying to keep up with so many "where is my order" emails can get exhausting and that is why I have sucked at maintaining excellent customer support/service.

Previously, there were too many ways for customer to contact us. Email, Live Chat, Phone, Facebook messenger, Instagram DM's. This led to many people jumping from place to place reaching out and eventually leaving a comment on our public posts saying something like, "I've tried to reach you guys 5 different ways and no one is responding!". Now, again, these folks are suffering w/ anxiety disorder so many times they did all 5 reach outs within a 24 hour span but people leaving these comments are a bad thing because it doesn't take much for someone w/ Anxiety to get scared away from trying our tea. They could read 500 life-changing testimonials and see one "I ordered my package two weeks ago and it hasn't shipped yet" comment and we lose them.

How I'm Fixing It: At one point I had an employee that got our customer support TOP NOTCH. All she did was reply to emails and DM's and every day she had our inbox to zero. Now, I am focused on training Chat GPT to be my customer service email bot. I've done a great job at training it to speak in our style and tone so all I have to do is copy and paste our customers email and then add in a little bit of context on how I want to respond and ChatGPT crafts an awesome email that looks like we dedicated extra time to address their concerns. This is helping me speed up our turnaround time like CRAZY. I have also removed Live Chat and Phone support as they were just too much to handle.

Shipping out orders quickly
This is our biggest problem. Keeping up with the amount of orders we receive. Right now for example, our turnaround time for shipping orders is 10 - 12 business days and we might go a day or two over. So people are taking almost 3 weeks to get their order. Outside of sales seasons, we still take up to 5 business day to ship. Our audience simply can't wait this long and we struggle to ship as fast as they desire, and they want their stuff shipped out as soon as they press pay.

How I'm Fixing It: I'm thinking about moving to a fulfillment center like Dollar Fulfillment. I don't know much about this though so this is still a premature thought that I plan on taking action on in January. If I can solve this problem, it would free up so much time. I have no place sitting here packaging and shipping orders - that time should be spent elsewhere. Using a fulfillment center would free up tons of time to work more ON the business.

Analyzing FB ads data correctly
I learned recently that I've sucked at reading data. After going back and checking out all my old ad campaigns, I realized that I operated the past three years with basically a 1.0 ROAS on the front end. In other words, I broke even on cold traffic and all my profits have come in through repeat buyers. Thankfully I have this consumable product and after a couple weeks or a month, many customer come back and order more and more. My lifetime value for a satisfied customer is THROUGH THE ROOF. I have learned a lot about how to actually analyze the data we get from paying for ads and use that to make tweaks that can improve my ROI on the front end.

How I'm Fixing It: Continuing to learn. Diving deeper into the data instead of just playing a guessing game. I use to let ads run way too long because I didn't understand data correctly. Now, I cut losers quickly based on benchmarks and that is leading to far less wasted ad spend. JUST me shifting into cutting ads faster has already helped my increase my overall ROAS.

Testing my ads/funnel way more
The amount of testing I was doing is pathetic. I barely tested anything lol. I ran one creative for over a year before I started testing new creative due to being forced to because that ad wasn't working any more. Over the past couple years since that ad died, I've only produced and tested about 15 - 20 different ad creatives. That's pathetic. You know what I did wrong? I focused too much on trying to produce an "epic" video. That made me put a lot of hope into each video I created. I worked too hard on making these creatives and put too much emotional connection to it. This made me run creatives for way longer than they needed to run like I said in the last section. I thought the creative was great. I thought it should work. So I based my decision on emotion and not data.

How I'm Fixing It: I am still working on this but... now when I create a creative to test, I have no emotional attachment to it. I still love and have high hopes for certain ads that I think I crushed the hook and angle on, but if it doesn't work... I don't hold on to it any more. I just move on. One thing that helps me do this is I spend way less time and effort on trying to create an "epic" video and instead just doing ugly ads. Just pull out my phone and talk. Since I spend far less time on this, I have less of an emotional connection and if I see it isn't working, I cut it quickly whereas in the past I would spend thousands of dollars trying to make it work. I am recording and testing 5 - 10 new video ads per week now so I don't ever have to put so much stock into one creative and it ends up flopping, leaving me at square one. That cycle use to stress me out so much. When an ad I loved wasn't working, I became a little baby instead of listening to the data and moving on. No more. I'm also doing way more testing on other stuff too. The biggest thing is pricing. I have found that testing lower prices has actually helped my increase my ROAS significantly! More on this in a future update as I'm still testing stuff out, but I have been seeing ROAS as high as 6.0 on some ads because it seems they order more tea when the prices are lower so my AOV actually increases.

There were a couple more things on my Things I Sucked At list but this post has become too long so maybe I'll touch on those last two things in a future post as I work on improving!

 

[theazizmoh_]

Catch up on my story by reading my first GOLD post here: GOLD! - HOT! - EXECUTION - From a broke Uber Driver $9k behind on rent to $30k Per Month...QUESTIONS?

And my second GOLD post here: GOLD! - SCALING - From $9k behind on rent to a 7 figure business! Here's how.

I run an herbal tea company that I started from ZERO while doing Uber. We focus our marketing on Anxiety Disorder because that's our main selling blend and the one that started the company. If you notice in my first post, I had a goal to hit $100k/mo within a couple months after that post.

It never happened. Our highest month in the past 3 years has been $78k. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my herbal tea business - but growth has been difficult and because we sell low ticket physical items, it has been a pretty tough few years. Shipping sucks and buying all the herbs and supplies is a lot.

The Goal
I want to make $100k/mo. It's been a goal of mine for years and I know I haven't been truly putting my best foot forward. Over the next 90 days, I'm going to attempt to figure this thing out and scale up. When I run FB ads, I make between $30k - $50k a month depending on how aggressive I am. When I'm not running any ads and only sending emails to my list, I make $10k - $15k. The reason I know this is because I took like 6 months off from running FB ads to focus on organic.

I just started back running ads in the past week after investing into coaching so I can improve my FB numbers because that was the main reason I stopped - Facebook just started getting difficult. In hindsight, it was all MY fault for not constantly keeping up with updates and strategies to work around the total annihilation of the old Facebook interests I use to rely on for targeting. Overnight, FB became more about going broad and focusing all your attention on the creative and copy. I was slow to adapt so we went from consistent $50k - $60k months back down to around $25k/mo and my profits were dropping significantly. Eventually I turned off ads and have been milking my list for the past 6 months and only making $10k/mo which has kinda sucked.

I'm ready for bigger and better things in my life. I was 32 in my first thread and now I'm 35. My oldest daughter is 13 so I want to REALLY bring some wealth into our lives. We've had an amazing 3 years, we were blessed to hit 7 figures but it took too long. We only took home around $300k of that so that's not a lot of money in 3 years. I want to get rich. $100k/mo is my goal.

The Plan
My average order value is $35. First of all, I plan on increasing that to around $50. I'm getting ads back running and I know for sure my biggest mistake the past 3 years was not testing enough. I'm going to be testing 1 new creative every day or at least 5 per week. Before, I probably tested a total of 10 creatives over the span of 3 years. For one whole year I had a creative working well all by itself and I never tested anything until it started dying and I was left scrambling. I won't make this mistake again.

My focus is going to be on creating GREAT content for ads, youtube content, IG reels and Tik Tok. Before, I didn't put enough focus on creating a lot of content that I could test in ads and/or just use for social media content. We've gone viral many times with IG reels and have grown our following to 47k followers. Over the next 90 days, I plan on being extremely consistent by posting on IG, Youtube and TikTok consistently, while testing the 5 new ad creatives each week. I want to be figure out how to consistently spend $1k a day on ads and make $3k back.

That's my plan for the herbal tea side of things, but I also plan on focusing most of my attention on promoting my new coaching program for people who need more serious help with Anxiety. I have a Skool community where I am hosting the course and everything.

My only dilemma is I'm not sure if I should focus on building MRR or High Ticket. I've sold a couple early copies of the course to people on my herbal tea list for $1,497 but I plan on selling it for at least $3k if I run ads to it. But I also have some members signed up for $97/mo so I haven't decided which offer I should focus my marketing on. All I know is, adding in a digital product/service in the backend is a MUST for me to be able to hit that $100k/mo goal.

Whichever one I choose, I'm going to create a VSL and run ads to it to either book a call if I choose high ticket or I'll just attempt to sell the $97/mo membership to cold traffic after bringing them in the funnel with some kind of free training.

I'm not gonna lie, I'm kinda scared to post this and end up failing but hey I need some damn accountability if I really wanna get rich. Tired of living this middle class a$$ life haha.

I'll update this thread at least once a week with everything I've done. (Hopefully I chose the right category for this)

OPEN TO ANY QUESTIONS OR SUGGESTIONS

Why not improving the product page conversion rates? Instead of scaling you fb ads

Have you tracked user behaviour on product pages?

 

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[GoldFibre]

Idea: Sell pre-paid subscriptions for tea, like 3 months, 6 months and 12 months and send them the tea each month, along with your upsell inserts.

 

[Choate]

I think your customers are normal people who are just wondering where their order is. They might be ordering it for a parent, or want to get it in time for a special occasion, or just love the taste of your tea. You may be doing yourself a disservice by attributing their neediness to them having anxiety. It's attributing the issue to an external factor when in reality you've neglected the customer care and service part of your business.

Besides that, I think some of your problems are mitigated by setting better expectations.:

Having a single contact form for order inquiries, let them know your average response time (48 hours but may take longer). Direct everyone here from all platforms. Not sure if ChatGPT is necessarily the answer, it might feel good to you but it could potentially be worse than a simple automated response letting them know you've received their inquiry and are working to get back to them.

What are your customers' expectations for shipping? Can you let them know that it's 3 weeks or would that impact sales significantly? Do you provide tracking?

 

[mkmiller]

I am new here, but I noticed you said you were going to try a new creative every day? That is not a statistically significant amount of time to determine whether something works or not.

As others have said, you have a 'solid' business already, why pivot? It reads like you want the result right 'now', without really digging into the 'why's' and 'how's'

For example:
1: Why do you get better results from paid ads, than organic? Can you make fine tune adjustments to change that? Blog Posts, Guest Posts, Social Media presence, etc...?
2: With the paid ads, what is your final monthly profit? Because 100k a month that costs you 70k a month in ads, is only 30k a month to you. Why not aim for 100k a month, that costs you 5k a month in content writer for organic?
3: Are there changes, you can make to increase your conversion rates both for product sales, and increase your newsletter and social media subscribers at the same time?

Just a thought...

 

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[Nikolaj_]

I meant to throw an update here earlier this week but we've been slammed with orders from Black Friday/Cyber Monday so I've been doing a lot of working in my business rather than working on the goals set in this thread. But I absolutely HAVE been working on the business as much as I could! What has that entailed? Well, a lot of looking within and becoming radically honest with myself.

First, I created a list of "things I've sucked at" over the past few years when it comes to this business.

1. Providing excellent customer service
2. Shipping out orders quickly
3. Analyzing FB ads data correctly
4. Testing my ads/funnel way more

Providing excellent customer service
Our customer service hasn't been bad but it hasn't been excellent. One thing that has pushed people away is our slow turnaround time when it comes to customer support emails. When we get busy, I might go all week without checking our inbox. I'm in the anxiety niche, so not being able to get in touch with us wasn't good - it made them have more anxiety and that would turn them off from ordering from us in the future.

We probably have the most difficult customers so it hasn't been easy. While most people would be anxious to receive an online order of a t-shirt or something, these people suffer with Anxiety Disorder so they are always 10X more desperate for us to respond to their emails FAST and ship their orders FAST. Trying to keep up with so many "where is my order" emails can get exhausting and that is why I have sucked at maintaining excellent customer support/service.

Previously, there were too many ways for customer to contact us. Email, Live Chat, Phone, Facebook messenger, Instagram DM's. This led to many people jumping from place to place reaching out and eventually leaving a comment on our public posts saying something like, "I've tried to reach you guys 5 different ways and no one is responding!". Now, again, these folks are suffering w/ anxiety disorder so many times they did all 5 reach outs within a 24 hour span but people leaving these comments are a bad thing because it doesn't take much for someone w/ Anxiety to get scared away from trying our tea. They could read 500 life-changing testimonials and see one "I ordered my package two weeks ago and it hasn't shipped yet" comment and we lose them.

How I'm Fixing It: At one point I had an employee that got our customer support TOP NOTCH. All she did was reply to emails and DM's and every day she had our inbox to zero. Now, I am focused on training Chat GPT to be my customer service email bot. I've done a great job at training it to speak in our style and tone so all I have to do is copy and paste our customers email and then add in a little bit of context on how I want to respond and ChatGPT crafts an awesome email that looks like we dedicated extra time to address their concerns. This is helping me speed up our turnaround time like CRAZY. I have also removed Live Chat and Phone support as they were just too much to handle.

Shipping out orders quickly
This is our biggest problem. Keeping up with the amount of orders we receive. Right now for example, our turnaround time for shipping orders is 10 - 12 business days and we might go a day or two over. So people are taking almost 3 weeks to get their order. Outside of sales seasons, we still take up to 5 business day to ship. Our audience simply can't wait this long and we struggle to ship as fast as they desire, and they want their stuff shipped out as soon as they press pay.

How I'm Fixing It: I'm thinking about moving to a fulfillment center like Dollar Fulfillment. I don't know much about this though so this is still a premature thought that I plan on taking action on in January. If I can solve this problem, it would free up so much time. I have no place sitting here packaging and shipping orders - that time should be spent elsewhere. Using a fulfillment center would free up tons of time to work more ON the business.

Analyzing FB ads data correctly
I learned recently that I've sucked at reading data. After going back and checking out all my old ad campaigns, I realized that I operated the past three years with basically a 1.0 ROAS on the front end. In other words, I broke even on cold traffic and all my profits have come in through repeat buyers. Thankfully I have this consumable product and after a couple weeks or a month, many customer come back and order more and more. My lifetime value for a satisfied customer is THROUGH THE ROOF. I have learned a lot about how to actually analyze the data we get from paying for ads and use that to make tweaks that can improve my ROI on the front end.

How I'm Fixing It: Continuing to learn. Diving deeper into the data instead of just playing a guessing game. I use to let ads run way too long because I didn't understand data correctly. Now, I cut losers quickly based on benchmarks and that is leading to far less wasted ad spend. JUST me shifting into cutting ads faster has already helped my increase my overall ROAS.

Testing my ads/funnel way more
The amount of testing I was doing is pathetic. I barely tested anything lol. I ran one creative for over a year before I started testing new creative due to being forced to because that ad wasn't working any more. Over the past couple years since that ad died, I've only produced and tested about 15 - 20 different ad creatives. That's pathetic. You know what I did wrong? I focused too much on trying to produce an "epic" video. That made me put a lot of hope into each video I created. I worked too hard on making these creatives and put too much emotional connection to it. This made me run creatives for way longer than they needed to run like I said in the last section. I thought the creative was great. I thought it should work. So I based my decision on emotion and not data.

How I'm Fixing It: I am still working on this but... now when I create a creative to test, I have no emotional attachment to it. I still love and have high hopes for certain ads that I think I crushed the hook and angle on, but if it doesn't work... I don't hold on to it any more. I just move on. One thing that helps me do this is I spend way less time and effort on trying to create an "epic" video and instead just doing ugly ads. Just pull out my phone and talk. Since I spend far less time on this, I have less of an emotional connection and if I see it isn't working, I cut it quickly whereas in the past I would spend thousands of dollars trying to make it work. I am recording and testing 5 - 10 new video ads per week now so I don't ever have to put so much stock into one creative and it ends up flopping, leaving me at square one. That cycle use to stress me out so much. When an ad I loved wasn't working, I became a little baby instead of listening to the data and moving on. No more. I'm also doing way more testing on other stuff too. The biggest thing is pricing. I have found that testing lower prices has actually helped my increase my ROAS significantly! More on this in a future update as I'm still testing stuff out, but I have been seeing ROAS as high as 6.0 on some ads because it seems they order more tea when the prices are lower so my AOV actually increases.

There were a couple more things on my Things I Sucked At list but this post has become too long so maybe I'll touch on those last two things in a future post as I work on improving!

Hi there,

I haven't got any experience yet in entrepreneurship. I've only finished reading TMF and just now reading Unscripted .
But some questions come to mind when reading your story.

You've had months of 50k+, which already sounds amazing to me. But only with enough advertizing.

Now unless you've sold all of those customers a life long supply of tea for $35 dollars, why are those customers not reordering and giving you a steady 50k each month? Did it not solve their problem (was there one to begin with?). Did they find a better/cheaper alternative?

I would suggest to send out a survey to just simply -ask-. 50k for $35 on average adds up to 1400 customers that can tell you what's wrong, instead of doing some heavy ad analyses and guessing.

Just my 2 cents. Hope it makes sense.

Cheers,
Nikolaj