We spend so much time competing in online markets where everyone is running increasingly sophisticated distribution systems that we forget how primitive customer acquisition still is across entire industries It’s standard practice for anyone operating online to build and enrich lists, segment markets, identify decision makers, run cold email and cold DMs, build paid acquisition funnels, test offers and creatives, retarget and deploy all of it at scale One of our consulting clients runs an influencer agency in the European market, where nobody in the industry has a proper distribution system Deals are still generated through existing relationships, inbound opportunities, introductions, agencies circulating briefs within their existing networks, or managers manually pitching brands one by one Agencies representing large rosters of creators don’t have shit in terms of infrastructure for mapping the full universe of potential buyers, identifying the relevant decision makers inside those companies, segmenting them properly, reaching them across multiple channels and doing it at enough volume to generate a consistent flow of opportunities So we had our client run two test campaigns simultaneously for one of the influencers his agency represents She operates around motherhood, family and lifestyle, and the first step was figuring out how many different pools of buyers we could realistically sell her audience and content to We looked at the categories where she had already landed partnerships, the ones she wanted to enter and adjacent categories where her audience made commercial sense From there, we ranked each segment based on the depth of the brand pool and whether those companies had enough budget to make it worth attacking That gave us multiple segments across baby and kids products, skincare and clean beauty, home cleaning, home services, appliances, food, furniture, supplements and other consumer categories The segmentation matters because “brands that work with mum influencers” is useless as an outbound strategy A baby food company, a robot vacuum brand, a skincare company and a home services platform might all want access to the same audience, but the reason they would work with the creator, the person responsible for the budget and the angle you use to approach them can be completely different Once those segments were mapped, we built the first campaign around direct access to the buyers For each segment, we built the company lists, identified the people responsible for influencer marketing, partnerships and relevant marketing budgets, and reached them through cold email and cold DMs At the same time, we built a second campaign around access to the buyers We targeted media agencies, PR agencies, social agencies, influencer marketing teams operating on behalf of brands and other intermediaries already sitting on relationships with multiple companies in those segments The economics of that relationship are completely different Going directly to a brand gives you a shot at that brand’s budget Building a relationship with someone managing campaigns and creator spend across a portfolio of brands can give you access to multiple budgets and a recurring stream of briefs We ran both campaigns simultaneously because they compound each other The direct campaign created conversations with the companies holding the budgets, while the partnership campaign built relationships with people already managing those budgets across multiple brands Within a few weeks, the combination secured six figures in annual deals from a test campaign for a single influencer There are thousands of businesses with great products, real demand and shit distribution Meanwhile, online mfs are fighting over the same audiences with the same acquisition channels, bloated tech stacks and more expensive infrastructure A lot of the skills you had to learn just to survive online are still barely being used in other industries Take them somewhere distribution is shit and put them behind a banger product or service

You might be sitting on a $30K+ offer that you're currently selling for a fraction of that Without changing much about what you actually do We had a client who was already building media engines for info guys, building the content infrastructure, personal brands and distribution behind them Then he took the exact same expertise into politics and started closing politicians on $25K-$45K+ deals In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans That's pretty much what you're doing when you take a capability that's already everywhere in your industry and bring it into a market where almost nobody has it Info guys have spent years obsessing over how to capture and monetize attention They've had to figure out how to turn one person into a media property, produce enough content to stay everywhere, build distribution around it, understand what gets watched and systematically turn that attention into money Politics has PR people, communications teams, campaign strategists, press relationships and all the traditional machinery you'd expect around a politician But attention is worth a fucking lot to a politician So the same media expertise our client had been selling to info guys could suddenly command $25K-$45K+ per deal And you can find this kind of pricing disconnect all over B2B Something everyone around you already knows how to do can be worth $30K+ to people in a completely different industry People spend their careers moving between the same companies, hiring from the same talent pools, going to the same conferences and learning from the same people So entire bodies of knowledge can get developed inside one industry without traveling very far outside of it And instead of trying to invent another offer from scratch, you can steal from all of that accumulated R&D Years of testing, millions spent figuring out what works, and thousands of operators iterating on the same problems Then you figure out who else should have it Obviously you can't just copy and paste the exact implementation A media engine built around some 22 yo ecom course seller in Miami can't be dropped unchanged onto a politician You're now dealing with a completely different audience, layers of approval, reputational risk and consequences for getting shit wrong The mechanics that made the original model work are what you steal Everything around it has to be rebuilt for the market you're bringing it into Now think about how many industries you've never even looked at Find the fire Then find the humans who still don't have it

If you're an online marketer and almost everything you consume was made by other online marketers, you're studying people who studied people who studied the same fucking people you did Which is how you end up with thousands of monkeys selling slightly different versions of the same shit At some point you have to stop jerking off the same five guys everyone else follows and go study completely different industries Look at how racehorses are marketed The racing itself can be a tiny part of the money made around a horse Once a stallion has won enough, people can pay six figures just to breed a mare with him, and the best ones can do that more than 100 times a year His offspring can then sell at a premium before they've ever raced because buyers are buying the bloodline If they start winning too, the father's breeding price goes up again There are breeding rights, syndicates, auctions and entire businesses built around this shit Then you have boring industrial businesses selling the most basic products imaginable that have controlled their markets for decades through a handful of key relationships and distribution deals The same goes for casinos, funeral businesses, private islands, sperm banks, fertility clinics, citizenship by investment programs and engagement rings, all running on completely different models of acquisition, distribution, trust, status and retention Cults are probably top 3 for me Ignore the morality of it for the purpose of the analysis They're obviously fucked, but very few organizations have ever figured out how to package this many human needs into the same system, with some basically covering every level of Maslow's pyramid At the physiological level, even sex gets covered because cults tend to facilitate relationships between members, giving you a dating pool where everyone already shares the same beliefs, community and social circle Then comes safety, which can mean housing, money when you're struggling, people around you when shit goes wrong, and a set of rules that removes a huge amount of uncertainty from your life Belonging is pretty obvious when your friends, family, social life, weekly activities and entire community can all end up concentrated in the same place Esteem gets built through internal hierarchy, recognition, responsibility, proximity to leadership and whatever signals that particular group uses to define a "good" member Then self actualization gets absorbed into the ideology itself The organization gives you the mission, tells you what your life is for, gives you a path to progress along and defines what reaching the highest version of yourself is supposed to mean So you end up with something that can touch all five layers of the pyramid at once, while also controlling a meaningful percentage of the person's social environment Leaving can mean losing your partner, friends, community, routines, status and the entire belief system you've spent years building your life around Some of these organizations are absolute cash machines Jehovah's Witnesses spent more than a century accumulating real estate in Brooklyn alone, then sold 37 properties between 2004 and 2018, with estimates putting the combined sales at around $2B You have millions of people spreading the message for free, recruiting new members, repeating the same rituals and using the same language, with internal status systems that reward certain behaviors, physical infrastructure everywhere, and relationships that make the network harder to leave as it grows These organizations have managed to make themselves part of where people live, who they marry, who their friends are, what they do every week, what they believe and what they spend their money on There is more marketing to learn from figuring out how a bunch of door to door preachers ended up owning billions of dollars worth of Brooklyn real estate than from watching another monkey explain how he structures his VSL

Nah bro, this is absolutely not true There is no inherently superior way to monetize a personal brand You're treating the price of the first transaction as the value of the customer, which only makes sense if the entire business begins and ends with whatever you sold them on day one A few years ago we worked with a client where we deliberately did almost the exact opposite of what you recommend We used low ticket as the entry point into the ecosystem and did $30K+ days for roughly two weeks straight entirely from organic traffic with less than 10K followers on X The low-ticket sales were already making a fuck ton of money, but the real value was what having that many customers allowed the client to do afterwards Without getting into the specifics of the offer because the client would be identifiable, the front end was effectively creating a continuous pool of people from which much larger opportunities could emerge The client partnered directly with some of them on a rev-share basis and participated in the businesses and opportunities they went on to build So the economics weren't simply “customer pays X for product” The product generated revenue while simultaneously functioning as a discovery and selection mechanism for people the client could make significantly more money with on the backend The important thing is that someone paying you $100 isn't necessarily worth $100 The transaction has also identified a person with a specific problem, demonstrated that they're willing to spend money to solve it, given you permission to continue communicating with them and moved them from anonymous audience into your customer base Your marginal cost of reaching that person again is now basically zero, and you know exponentially more about them than you did when they were one of 100,000 people watching your content The client ultimately made enough money from the ecosystem that he's basically retired now and barely works anymore But even that understates the actual economic value that came out of the business, because what you build around a business can create second and third-order effects worth significantly more than the original revenue At the time we were processing a lot of money for this client across several Stripe accounts and I wasn't comfortable relying entirely on Stripe, so I started looking for other ways to process payments That's how I met a guy who had some of the solutions we needed and also happened to have built multiple 8 figures himself We eventually became partners and have since run multiple offers and businesses together, including very high-ticket ones, but also several low-ticket products that we built intentionally The logic behind those products has nothing to do with being afraid to sell expensive shit We wanted multiple entry points into the same ecosystem across adjacent areas of expertise, where every additional product deepened the relationship and expanded the number of problems people trusted us to solve That gave us a much larger surface area for acquisition while progressively increasing LTV as the right customers moved into $30k-$60k+ offers One guy eventually deployed more than $1M into a deal with my partner So was he a low-ticket customer or a million-dollar customer? That's the fundamental problem with your analysis It assumes the product is the economic unit when, in a well-designed ecosystem, the customer is the economic unit You can't compare 2,100 $47 customers with 20 $5K customers without knowing what happens to those customers after they buy You need to know what percentage of those 2,100 people buy something else, what they buy, how frequently they buy, what the gross margin is across the product stack, how many become qualified for higher-value transactions, what percentage ascend, what those backend transactions are worth and what other economic opportunities are created by having thousands of buyers moving through the ecosystem Then you can actually compare the models In my case, the partner I met while looking for payment processing solutions introduced me to an entire network of world-class operators and partners I now regularly route traffic and opportunities to people in that network and take a cut without doing any of the fulfillment myself There are revenue streams and relationships in my life today that can indirectly be traced back to us selling a low-ticket product years ago Obviously you can't build a financial model assuming every $100 customer is eventually going to introduce you to a multi-8-figure entrepreneur The point is that distribution creates optionality, and a large base of transacting customers creates far more optionality than the revenue visible on the initial checkout page None of this means low ticket is better than high ticket either We sell a fuck ton of high ticket and for many businesses I'd recommend moving upmarket immediately because the economics are dramatically better But ticket size is a variable you choose based on the architecture of the business you're trying to build If you have no backend, no ascension, no cross-sells, no differentiated IP and you're trying to maintain a giant $47 community purely through recurring subscriptions, then yes, the churn math can be fucking horrible Now, if you've got an audience, offer or expertise worth selling and you're currently monetizing with no backend or ascension path, send me a DM and I'll show you how to craft an ecosystem around your current offer that monetizes, segments and feeds your backend with 30-100K+ buyers

I understand people are always going to preach whatever content model is currently working for them, but saying the talking-head educational video is dead is just completely retarded You're confusing the economics of attention with the economics of persuasion Entertainment is obviously a very effective way to capture attention, but that doesn’t mean attention itself is what creates commercial value The only attention that matters commercially is attention that changes the perception of someone capable of buying from you A boring video that fundamentally changes how 50 qualified buyers perceive your expertise can be worth infinitely more than an entertaining video consumed by 5 million monkeys We just built $2.3M in originated pipeline for Kadenwood Group in 30 days, with mandates in the $30K-$75K range coming directly from Instagram, using almost entirely raw educational content with basically zero entertainment built into it The account was fresh, it generated 800K+ views, and 48 qualified consulting calls were booked in the first month Every piece of content was engineered around a specific belief we wanted to install in the buyer’s head Exit multiples spoke to one type of operator, distribution spoke to another, case studies were placed according to where the buyer sat in the sales cycle, and the content was sequenced so that each piece moved him further into the ecosystem Prospects were literally referencing specific pieces of content on sales calls Some of the reels that looked like they “underperformed” from a content perspective were actually the ones pulling the money Low views, weak algorithmic performance, and $30K-$75K mandates sitting in the DMs That’s because a view from someone who controls a serious budget isn’t economically equivalent to a view from some monkey scrolling Instagram for his next dopamine hit Entertainment works insanely well when you want to sell to monkeys, because monkeys are the overwhelming majority of the internet They give you the likes, comments, shares and watch time that push your shit into more feeds We actually used that dynamic ourselves at the top of the funnel: you can package certain ideas broadly enough for the masses to carry the distribution while the people you actually want to sell to watch from the sidelines But confusing the mechanism that gets you distribution with the mechanism that gets you paid is retarded The guy who can actually buy your $50K engagement will happily listen to you talk into a camera for five minutes if what you’re saying maps directly onto a problem he cares about All he needs is to see enough evidence that you understand a problem worth millions of dollars to him, understand it at a level his current advisors don’t, and have a credible mechanism for solving it If you accomplish that with a guy sitting in a chair talking into an iPhone for 90 seconds, the format has done its job Entertainment is a distribution mechanism It’s not a prerequisite for persuasion, and it definitely isn’t a prerequisite for making money You can make content for monkeys and optimize for how many of them watch Or you can engineer content around the handful of people whose attention can turn into a $50K wire We’ve done this repeatedly across completely different industries and I can confidently say almost nobody thinks about content and distribution the way we do So if you run a consulting firm, agency, capital advisory firm, or have a strong offer, skillset or expertise worth selling, send me a DM and I’ll show you how we’d reposition it, package it and build the distribution around it to attract buyers capable of paying $30K-$100K+

How to secure $30K-$60K+ deals by strategically manipulating the buyers thinking patterns after sales calls: (our exact internal process)

We're running a very similar email right now but with the intention of booking in-person meetings Targeting family offices, private banks and wealth managers with this specific consulting offer Recently had partner at a multi family office managing clients at CHF 50M minimum inviting us for coffee off the back of a cold email we sent Historically, deal flow prior to us implementing this strategy came from 3 places: - Word of mouth inside closed finance circles - Trusted referrals between operators - Private dinners, in person meetings and invitation only conversations The model produces high quality conversations, compresses trust fast and generates interest from serious counterparties But it also scales linearly with time, presence and social bandwidth, and concentrates risk in a handful of relationship nodes If one node goes quiet, an entire stream of mandates goes quiet with it But being able to combine a well crafted outbound method solves the throughput problem entirely So we structured the outbound as our way to generate and qualify demand, and then use private dinners and in-person meetings to secure the deal Sitting down face to face amplifies trust in a way no other channel can touch and it matches the internal dynamics of how this market has always moved These circles built their entire commercial logic around physical presence decades before digital infrastructure existed Capital moves between people who've shared a table Reputations get transferred over lunch Mandates get agreed on walks between office buildings When you show up through the same rituals the market already uses you become perceived as one of their own This is how you become a chameleon inside any market You study how it operates on a daily basis including its rituals, trust mechanics and unwritten rules Then you camouflage your way in and infiltrate circles that stay permanently closed to outsiders The private wealth world will ignore a vendor for a decade but will open completely to a mf who moves like the market moves So what we needed to implement for ourselves was simple We needed to structure an entry point into a high skepticism, over contacted, reputation sensitive market without diluting the trust signal that referrals and private dinners naturally provide That constraint dictated everything about the outbound strategy It had to behave like a referral, carry reputation without an introduction and signal relevance instantly It had to avoid the appearance of BS at all costs too Anything else would damage positioning in the market Which is exactly why most operators going upmarket can never get their offer to land They treat outbound as a volume game The moment the message resembles marketing you’re immediately categorized into a specific category and it’s difficult to revert back So the messaging was built on a different principle Buyers in finance do NOT respond hype, novelty or promises They respond to messaging that understands their position, constraints and timing without needing any of it explained When a partner at a family office reads a message that demonstrates fluency in his world, the message comes off like a peer surfacing something relevant The reply happens because the offer required no explanation That's the point where outbound starts functioning like a warm introduction Then when you book the in person meetings, they have the cleanest way to evaluate whether you’re worth working with or not This market runs its due diligence face to face So the relationship itself is becomes the infrastructure behind a deal Then that relationship node produces mentions to the lawyer who feeds him clients, who mentions it to the banker he knows Introductions are the only acquisition channel this market actually trusts, and they typically flow exclusively between people who've physically met One good meeting can quietly work its way through an entire backend over the following years