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#281 · why i chose low ticket over high ticket

youtube ↗Pricing

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.

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Related answers

youtube ↗Client Acquisition

Nick, I'm looking for the main constraint to landing my first paid client. I'm an appointment setter for a high ticket online coach and I built him a free chatbot for DMs and SMS. It books appointments but still makes some basic errors and I'm building it in exchange for a testimonial. The owner is open to commission-only ideas but doesn't have anything in mind himself. He's happy for me to work with other businesses and already employs an agency to run his ads. What should I prioritize? Should I perfect the chatbot to earn the testimonial, start outreach to other high ticket coaches, and propose a commission-based marketing service to an owner or something else?

A common issue I always see is people tend to think it's X or Y. They have to do option one or they have to do option two. That there's a fork in the road where every downstream option is mutually exclusive. All options are not mutually exclusive. You can do all of the things that you want to do simultaneously. The main core bottleneck is actually just the amount of effective focused time you are spending working. And so it is almost not always like sacrificing X in order to do Y thing. It's not like doing outreach or working on your current clientele. It is doing both simultaneously. And the benefit to that as well is when you do more and you're constantly pushing your zone of competence and what you are comfortable with, you will usually find better and more effective ways of working as well. So in the case of you know a hypothetical fella that was asking me what should I prioritize? Should I, you know, try and fulfill this current client? Should I start outreach to other prospective clients? Should I like try upselling the client on some sort of, you know, thing that I have going on? You should actually and legitimately just do all three simultaneously. You know, we come from a line of people that had to hunt, they had to cook, they had to secure water, they had to tend to their families, they had to, you know, constantly defend themselves night after night. You can't you don't just do one thing. We're obviously highly specialized today, but there's 16 hours available in the day. Everything there would might only take you an hour or so. You still have a lot of time available, right? To go hunting your saber-tooth tiger or to go get some water. So hopefully that makes sense.

prioritizationtime managementclient acquisition
youtube ↗Lead Generation

How do I get in contact with people who make big‑ticket decisions?

It's fairly straightforward: you contact big‑ticket decision‑makers the same way you contact anyone else. These people have less time, so their threshold for what deserves their attention is higher—think of turning up the difficulty in a game from medium to hard or extreme. It's still possible; many people succeed at extreme difficulty, though it's a bit harder overall. Their main concern is the extra marginal time they'd have to spend managing you to get a project from start to finish. New business owners often think the amount of money is what matters, but it's really the value you provide and the time that value frees them up. Beginners might say they'll work for free or do anything, but high‑level executives don't care about that; offering marginal value would actually cost them more time than it's worth. The way to pitch them is to make them certain that working with you won't consume any more of their time—that you're 100% self‑managed and will immediately solve a direct need that's currently costing them money, on which you can deliver multiples. It's not about offering to work for free or cheap; instead, you say, 'Hey Pete, I know you're suffering from XYZ problem because I've worked with a big name trying to solve it before—it cost them $48 million a year (or $400 k a year). We've solved it and made them $1.5 million. I've already started working on this for you. I know your time is valuable, so this requires no supervision. I've already eliminated XYZ % of this leak, and I want to continue doing this for you. If I do, you're likely to make this much or that much money. All I'm asking for is a simple okay from you, maybe a 10‑minute call to shake hands and orient you. I'll have no ongoing management costs and am entirely self‑directed. You can think of it as you spending just 5 or 10 minutes of your time and receiving a fix for a $40‑$50 k/month problem. People love this approach because it shows you understand how many directions their time is pulled into. My recommendation: pitch anyone whose problem is worth over half a million dollars a year—which really isn't that much when you think about it.

lead-generationhigh-ticketoutreachdecision-makers
youtube ↗Client Acquisition

I've been building AI customer service systems, and most clients came from Upwork and referrals — I've got a case study for a big property management company where a system led to big savings, and I built others for medical practices too. My issue is generating demand myself outside of referrals: is this sellable via cold outreach, and can it be turned into a front-end offer? I've sent thousands of cold emails with only one booked meeting, plus LinkedIn DMs and content, and I don't know if that's the right play or if I should pivot.

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.

cold emailai customer serviceopportunity costreply rate
youtube ↗Offers

You've said a teacher must practice what they teach; have you considered a high‑ticket offer for Make School members, or are you sticking with the low‑ticket model because your agency work consumes most of your time?

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.

high ticketmake schoolcoachingagency