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#281 · why i chose low ticket over high ticket

youtube ↗Client Acquisition

How would you go about growing an audience starting from zero for a service business targeting home services, using Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube?

Fausto RDS says, 'Nick, how would you to about growing an audience starting from zero? I'm thinking Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. My ICP are service businesses, home services, and I sell custom software and automations. I got a lot of people asking questions like, how do I start my own brand and what's the best way to build an audience? Cuz they look at the way that I built my audience and they're like, well, Nick obviously puts a lot of time, effort, and care into it, so um you know, he'll he'll know. But I'll be honest, I just I just tried 10 different approaches and then I found one that happened to work. Um I did not come with like a highly strategic approach. What I did was I simply asked myself, what provides me the lowest CPMs, costs per meeting? >> [gasps] >> Which platform, if I test it for 30 to 60 to 90 days, will get me the lowest CPMs uh comparatively? And it turns out it was YouTube. So, rather than start at the end, which you're doing right now, which is growing an audience and starting from zero, start at the beginning, which is, hm, why do I want to grow an audience? Well, I work in the home service businesses uh niche. My current CPMs are $45. And that's not very scalable because our lifetime values are, you know, at some ratio where the cost of acquiring the customer to the lifetime value just doesn't make sense. So, how can I get lower CPMs? And then, rather than choosing Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, like you have here, uh just try a bunch and then determine which ones work after the fact. Pre-commit yourself to some sort of test. Cuz that's what I always do and uh that tends to work pretty well. But yeah, man, it's all 100% just about your cost per meeting, if I'm honest, or your cost per, you know, uh intent. In my case now with Maker School, driving a chunk of my revenue, it's it's cost per intent. It's cost per like, basically, each person visiting my landing page. >> [gasps] >> And that's way better than through cold email.'

audience growthcpmyoutubehome services

Related answers

youtube ↗Client Acquisition

Can you show your community-based outreach process in a Reddit or Facebook group in a 5-minute daily update video?

In terms of outreach, I'm currently creating videos about what I do with AI and online services, and I reach out to specific businesses via Instagram so they can check my profile. I have someone handling cold calls for me, and I'm about to set up a cold email campaign. I don't want to show an actual video because it would ruin my repurposing, but the process for community-based outreach looks like this: First, find communities that match your ideal customer persona. If you don't know your ICP, join a variety of communities. Communities are groups of people who share similar problems, so by scrolling through posts you can identify those suffering from issues they'd be willing to spend money, time, or energy to solve—questions like 'How are you managing XYZ?' or 'How are you dealing with the new Instagram update?' Compile a list of these questions and problems; this is a direct line to what you can build systems around to make people money. You can't just join a community, list problems, and start pitching a $4,500 solution; you need to show up consistently so people recognize your face. After building your list and developing solutions, start answering people's questions, offering value—for example, 'Hey Sally, I've thought about this a lot, and an approach I'd take is X, Y, Z.' This simple method works: spend 15 minutes each morning on a community like Platinum, answering questions and transcribing them. Doing this daily for a month makes you one of the top five most engaged members, landing you on the community's leaderboard, which drives profile clicks and interest. Once you've warmed up the community and they like your posts, you can monetize by sharing how you solved a problem they face, leading to DMs and calls. On those calls, qualify the leads—some will be unqualified, but a third to half may be genuine business owners who have tried paid solutions. Showing them your superior solution, derived from studying the group's problems, can lead to closed deals. You can do this for free, though paid communities offer a simpler path because free ones often act as sales funnels for their creators. From there you can build an effective funnel.

community outreachclient acquisitionfacebook groupsreddit
youtube ↗Agency Operations

How do you manage the balance between your personal brand and your agency, and does your content help get leads for your agency?

My personal brand now drives the vast majority of new conversations, opportunities, and clients for my agency; I couldn't run the agency at its current level without it. Initially, I did everything outbound—door-to-door—then moved to less intense but scalable outreach like cold calling, cold emailing, and cold DMs. Three to four months into my YouTube channel, I was making $40k–$50k a month from cold outbound with my agency. I started the YouTube channel to scale my agency, and shortly after, I landed a $20k deal without a single sales call, realizing I could use my subscriber base as a main lever for client acquisition. Many people try to skip the outreach step, thinking they can just start a YouTube channel and get clients from it. However, building a successful YouTube funnel is very difficult and risky; it often takes years of consistent content with no return. Moreover, if you lack outreach, sales, and marketing skills, you can't reliably turn strangers into paying customers. If your YouTube channel disappears or platform changes, you're left without a fallback. Therefore, I recommend not skipping the outreach step: first build a business using traditional outreach, marketing, and sales skills. Content is important, but the internet is full of people who only talk without doing. In my own agency, I no longer manage most projects myself; I have a consultant/account manager (Cody) and a backend/team manager (Geo) handling projects, while I act in an advisory capacity, especially for large enterprise deals like Mr. Beast that require many meetings. In short, you should spend your time and energy building skills that turn total strangers into paying customers. Once you've validated that ability—maybe earning $10k–$30k a month with your agency—you can then invest in more scalable outreach methods like your brand, Twitter, or YouTube channel.

personal brandagencyoutreachyoutube
youtube ↗Lead Generation

Your school data consulting model is solid, but the main lever is getting more eyes on your outreach. With cold DM, only about 20% of recipients actually see your message, and only a tiny fraction respond or convert. To dramatically improve results, you should multiply your touchpoints—send the same prospect a DM on LinkedIn, Instagram, X (Twitter), and email, for example. Because each platform gives roughly an independent 20% chance of being seen, using four channels raises the overall visibility to about 60%, effectively tripling your potential revenue without changing your offer. Beyond that, the real bottleneck is top‑of‑funnel visibility, so invest in content that attracts a broad audience (e.g., YouTube videos that aren’t just ‘how to be motivated’ but showcase specific processes like AI agent workflows or $20k/month side‑hustles). Continuously test different angles and formats to see what drives the most views, then double down on the winners. Remember, for most small‑to‑mid‑sized businesses, sales and marketing—the ability to get seen and start conversations—are the biggest constraints, so treat lead generation as your primary focus.

Your school data consulting model is solid, but the main lever is getting more eyes on your outreach. With cold DM, only about 20% of recipients actually see your message, and only a tiny fraction respond or convert. To dramatically improve results, you should multiply your touchpoints—send the same prospect a DM on LinkedIn, Instagram, X (Twitter), and email, for example. Because each platform gives roughly an independent 20% chance of being seen, using four channels raises the overall visibility to about 60%, effectively tripling your potential revenue without changing your offer. Beyond that, the real bottleneck is top‑of‑funnel visibility, so invest in content that attracts a broad audience (e.g., YouTube videos that aren’t just ‘how to be motivated’ but showcase specific processes like AI agent workflows or $20k/month side‑hustles). Continuously test different angles and formats to see what drives the most views, then double down on the winners. Remember, for most small‑to‑mid‑sized businesses, sales and marketing—the ability to get seen and start conversations—are the biggest constraints, so treat lead generation as your primary focus.

cold dmmulti platformtop of funnellead gen
youtube ↗Client Acquisition

I'm building a startup for my cleaning business with all the knowledge I've gained. How can I reach the right people? I don't have social reach, and I made a YouTube channel but feel camera shy. How did you get past that phase?

First things first, you can't be camera shy in a world where your success depends on you being confident enough to show you in conjunction with your brand. People won't see that as shyness — they'll see that as a lack of conviction or a lack of belief. If you really believe in your brand, you will stand behind it 100%, and that includes putting your face on it. So it's not really a question of being shy or comfortable or whatever; it's a question of 'do I really fucking believe in what it is that I'm doing?' And if so, of course I'm going to put my face behind it — that's how you show the rest of the world your belief. So reframe that. The second thing is reach. There are many different ways to do it, but you don't actually need social reach in order to build a startup for your cleaning business. It depends on what your startup is, obviously, and the ticket value, but you can actually just reach out to people one-on-one, like I usually talk about on my channel. A lot of big high-ticket SaaS companies do this sort of thing, and that's how they actually grow. So if your SaaS or startup or whatever it is makes somewhere more than, I don't know, like $3,000 lifetime value, it actually makes sense for you to do this sort of outreach. And then your apps on the App Store are going to be 50/50 — probably not going to be that high-ticket, but just worth considering. And then if you did want to build social reach, the best way to do so right now is just to pre-commit 90 days to a platform and a format. A platform might be YouTube, a format might be talking-head AI automation tutorials such as I do. And then just rip and do one video or one piece of content a day every day for 90 days. If you feel like you can do more than one — because maybe it's a text thing or some sort of audio thing — then do two a day for 90 days. Don't assess yourself before that period; only assess yourself after that period. If after the 90-day period you think you made a positive return on investment for all the time, energy, and money that you've spent, then ramp it up and go all in. Otherwise, just move to another approach, take what you learned from the previous one, and rinse and repeat.

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