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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 ↗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 ↗Mindset

Why do you consider YouTube subscribers the most important KPI instead of metrics like paid members churn rate or MR?

The most important metric for me is not the amount of money I'm making (MR). It's not the number of people in my community. It's none of that. The most important metric for me is YouTube subscribers. Why? Because I believe strongly that in an age of intelligent machines, in the AI era we are heading toward at breakneck speed, the only thing that will matter and distinguish me from other entrepreneurs or business people is my distribution. I believe strongly that the ability to build and have a distribution in the AI era is the only fundamental thing that will set you apart. Let me give you an example: If I were Netflix and existed in an era where any website or company could clone my entire tech stack by typing 'make me a Netflix dupe' into chat GPT, what value would my company have? The only value my company has is in my customer base. Everything is essentially commoditized. Therefore, the only value I will have in this market is how many customers I currently have. You can call this wealth divide, follower divide, audience divide. But I believe strongly the only real thing that matters and will matter to me is the number of subscribers, the number of followers, and the strength with which those people follow me—like authenticity. I don't just want to be one of a million YouTube channels; I want to be the best YouTube channel talking about the topic I discuss. I want an unbroken chain of me showing up every day and delivering on my promises, because the probability that others will do that is extraordinarily low. That's what I'm optimizing for. Sure, the money I'm making now with school and all that is nice, but what will I do with that money? Let's be real: the difference isn't between people starting at zero dollars and those at $5 million net worth. The difference is between basically all of us and the select few at the top with net worths in the hundreds of millions or billions. So that is the only money-wise divide that actually matters. I won't get there in the next couple years realistically. When you view anything from a sufficiently high vantage point—say, on a skyscraper—nothing down at the bottom that we do really matters. From that height, people with hundreds of billions of dollars and me with a few million dollars look basically the same as everyone else with zero million dollars. Does that make sense? So, in terms of money, there's no point optimizing for money because I'll never reach that level in any reasonable time frame. But the one play I have is the subscriber base, and that's what I'm going for.

youtubesubscriberskpiai
youtube ↗Lead Generation

I want to start a service business for US mobile mechanics but have no capital—just a laptop and time. What direction should I take?

If you're using Facebook for this, it's essentially game over--Facebook DMs are extremely difficult, limited to about 10 messages per day per account, and you'll quickly end up in message requests. By contrast, a cold email account lets you send 25-30 emails daily and costs only $2-$4 per month, whereas a Facebook account runs around $50 per month due to verification overhead. Therefore, you need an intermediate step to obtain their email addresses, then conduct cold email outreach. Calling is also effective, especially for towing businesses that are often on the road; you can't reliably email auto shops, so walking in or calling works. This approach isn't perfect, but it's workable. Regarding my own situation: I've realized I need to set up ads. Yesterday I hung out with Jackie Chu in Vancouver, who's now ranking for businessman and is a brilliant guy--I plan to send him a message. I also met Tom Wang, who's really cool, and Tony, founder of Bessie. Their advice was to run retargeting ads from Maker School; they said not doing so would be idiotic. I agree and will implement that, with help from my team and the school. My strategy is to list the problems my community faces, pick five or ten, and record a video addressing each. The videos will reiterate that Maker School is 100% free if you don't land your first client within 90 days, with a full refund. We also have $20,000 in discounts; most people use about 10%, giving roughly $2,000 off, which means a new member gets an immediate 10x ROI in the first month before even getting a client--so there's no reason not to join. I'll track video completion percentages to gather more data. My offer is strong and the product quality is high, so I'll put it in front of as many people as possible. I'm also excited that a friend is onboarding people for Claro, and I'll meet school guys later today for a coffee-shop flyover activity and other fun. Overall, I'm amped up about everything happening, and I believe ads could unlock insane growth if executed well. As for my channel stats: my main YouTube channel currently shows 471,066 subscribers, which is abysmal growth; other metrics indicate decent growth elsewhere--my paid offer has 7,234 sales, my Maker School rank is still two, and we're making good money, though subscriber growth isn't what I expected because I'm not creating viral head-type videos. I'll keep growing at a steady clip and hope to reach 500k subscribers by year-end.

lead genoutreachservice business
youtube ↗Marketing

Alphabet says to So, to give you a little bit of context, I have grown a Tik Tok to 266K followers and 300 mil views in 2 years. But I did it faceless with AI voice. The videos I make are highly edited faceless videos, which take 6 to 8 hours to make. But posting almost every day. And in doing so, I've developed a test of how short form content works. thing is since I use AI voice and faces, my RPMs, revenue per mill, which is the amount of money that you make from let's say ad platforms by posting on social media are super super low. Like in the month of June, I got close to 10 mill views and got like a 1k payout. Wow, that blows. So my question is what to do next? I could charge and teach people how to make faceless content in the process of making my content better and break it down hundreds of short form videos and I have kind of a good grasp on many niches. So I also show people how to do and monetize that or I can start posting myself and within like 6 to 3 months believe I can grow at 100K with lifestyle content but with this I have no clue of monetization. Yeah, fitness opinions and philosophy. These are all pretty unmonetizable inherently. Um still could you apply it to anything that's more of like a monetizable niche with higher RPMs? I don't know.

You clearly have an extremely valuable set of skills; your question is how to take this valuable set of skills to market. Very few people can get 300 million views in two years—you could genuinely change the course of the global economy with this skill, and millions of politicians would be interested in achieving 300 million views in two years organically on a super broke budget. So this sounds pretty good. The thing is you need distribution to begin with; you could show your current audience how to do that. That’s reasonable. But you should also leverage the systems you already have that enable you to do it—this is just your bottleneck. Six to eight hours to make a video is tough; you could bring that down to three or four hours, allowing you to make two videos for two approaches. In six months you’d have a solid base to sell—maybe a fitness channel program or something similar. That’s probably what I’d do.

tiktokfaceless contentmonetizationdistribution