Why did you choose a low-ticket MMR model over a high-ticket one-off fee, especially for beginners getting their first client?
Yeah, so he's referring to my low-ticket product called Maker School. Now, I don't know if you guys know, but there's a difference between a low-ticket or a pretty affordable product, and then a high-ticket or a I don't know, maybe 5 to $10,000 per month product. Um mine is low-ticket. It costs a very little money in the grand scheme of things, specifically relative to the the amount of value that I provide. Um so, basically the way that, you know, my positioning and and mental model works is my audience was beginners. They're people that want to get their very first customer for a paying service. And so, odds are they're not going to have a lot of money. Uh they're not going to be able to afford a high-ticket product. Yet, at the same time, I also don't want a tremendous amount of responsibility. What I find typically occurs with a high-ticket product is you end up being responsible not for just creating the product and then marketing it. You also are responsible for selling it, actively selling it through like a high-ticket call funnel, a sales funnel, uh some sort of flow like that. And then finally, um I personally have worked with a lot of high-ticket products. Sorry, my alarm's going off. And I find that typically because they have to make crazy promises in order to justify the return on investment, uh a lot of them end up kind of falling prey to bad business practices and uh that sort of stuff. So, this is where people will get you on some coaching call that's $10,000 a month or whatever and then do whatever the hell they can to sell you. Typically, you know, you have people making poor financial decisions cuz they're all incentivized to push really hard and it just ends up I think souring the whole business model. So, I I wanted none of that. I wanted no calls. I wanted uh something very scalable. I wanted something super lean that I could manage entirely on my own without a sales system or sales team rather. And then I wanted to just be able to, you know, wake up, do my marketing, um um crush with the business model and then do the same thing the next day. And uh that's ultimately what, you know, I did with low-ticket MRR. Now, that's not to say I couldn't start some high-ticket coaching program, but I don't really want to make my money primarily through like a high-ticket program or anything like that. Uh I don't really want to make my money through any sort of programs. I'd much rather make my money through providing real tangible value to the world. Education is just one part of that. So, yeah, that's why I'm not doing that.
Right now you're focused on the savings, and I think that's the main thing you've understood automations to provide, but savings is a small fraction of the total value of an automation. Say you build a system that saves 10 salespeople 1 hour a week each — that's 40 hours a month, and if they're paid $50/hour that looks like a $2,000/month automation. That looks sizable, but it's only a small part of the value you're capable of providing. The big thing isn't the savings, it's the revenue: if you free up an hour of a salesperson's time and they can use it to close deals worth, say, $500 in that hour (amortized across their whole workload), you're not just saving $2,000, you're making them an extra $20,000. That's the difference between a savings mindset and a revenue mindset — it's opportunity cost. When I sell a cold email system, I don't say 'this saves you $50/month on cheaper leads,' I say 'this frees up 10 hours a month of your salespeople's time, worth $500/hour, meaning it makes you $5,000.' Reorient your pitch around revenue, not savings — savings only matters if you're working with a multi-billion dollar enterprise. On your second issue: 3,000 emails to one booked meeting is a 0.03% booked-meeting rate. Two meetings would be 0.06%, three would be 0.1% — that's totally fine, not the best ever (ideally 0.5-1%, a meeting every ~200 emails), but it proves it's possible. You've run the equivalent of a 10-minute mile; now make your copy better and run a 9-minute mile.
I think many agency owners become really good at what they do, then decide to teach it to make money. They start teaching, but soon they make so much money from teaching that they stop doing the agency work that gave them their skills. As a result, they lose touch with the specific tactics that helped them grow their agency, and end up teaching an outdated business model. If you’re not constantly practicing what you preach, you’ll get worse at it, and people can sense that. I have considered a high‑ticket offer, but it’s not as time‑leveraged as my Maker School community. I only spend a little time on Maker School each day—about an hour to an hour and a half—generating roughly $120k MRR, which works out to an effective hourly rate of nearly $3,000. A high‑ticket coaching offer would require far more personalized work: maybe one‑on‑one sessions every couple of weeks plus a few group calls each month, which drops the leverage and hourly return. I’m leaving money on the table by not moving clients up to a higher ticket, but the current model is far more leveraged and lets me run a successful business while working only a short time each day. Most people tell me I should chase high‑ticket offers and build a sales team, but I prefer to keep full ownership and work just an hour and a half a day. I’m still in the agency field because I believe it’s important to stay grounded in the work I teach.
The limiting belief section in my career plan addresses whether I have any beliefs holding me back. I’ve had two such sections; the most recent one was written when I was earning $100,000 a month, where I mapped out how to reach $167,000 a month, then surpassed it to hit $400,000 a month. I concluded I don’t have any limiting beliefs for my current goals, though if my goal were a billion‑dollar business I’d likely have many. If I did have limiting beliefs, the most effective way to eliminate them is to repeatedly do the thing you’reafraid of—acting contrary to the belief changes your habits, which reshapes your beliefs and identity. It’s almost like reverse‑engineering the belief: instead of deep meditation or soul‑surgery, simply muster the courage to do the feared action once; doing it once makes repetition far more likely, and then you keep doing it. Action over knowledge, action over thinking—this is the straight‑line path to dissolving limiting beliefs. I personally had a big limiting belief about hitting $167,000 a month; I doubted I could reach that figure. My yearly goal was $2 million, which averages to $167,000 monthly—a target that felt realistic yet challenging within the realm of possibility, making it effective for growth. I then examined bottlenecks and beliefs, realized I could achieve the figure if I set my mind to it, and saw no fundamental reason why not. Later I recognized I’d already solved those earlier limiting beliefs, perhaps in an earlier blog post. Beyond mindset, I’ve been thinking about increasing the value of my videos—not just production value, but the actual business value they deliver. I’m considering lowering production effort a bit while raising the substantive value, inspired by an accountability partner who spends 20 hours per video and publishes once a week. I’m experimenting with higher‑value, intensive content on the main channel while keeping the daily updates as a lower‑effort, value‑rich format. I’m also planning to redesign the website to better showcase the team, edify collaborators like Noah, and highlight agency work. Future ideas include hosting live dinners in Calgary to build local community, and continuing to share stats and growth updates.
limiting beliefsaction over knowledgevideo valueagency
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.'