338: How To Make Millions As An Artist With Arree Chung

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I have one of the most successful artists turned internet entrepreneurs that I know personally, Ari Chung. Ari is a student in my Create a Profitable Online Store course, and I asked him to come back to talk about how he’s killing it with his new business, which leverages his artistic background. So who says that artists can’t make money online? Find out how he did it.

00:27
But before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10X bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free.

00:55
over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. I also want to thank Klaviyo, who’s also a sponsor of the show. Businesses are always the most successful when they own their own data, customer relationships, and their growth. And that’s why more than 50,000 e-commerce brands like Living Proof, Solo Stove, and Nomad trust Klaviyo to deliver their ideal customer experience. Now having used Klaviyo for many years now,

01:20
I can wholeheartedly say that Klaviyo is the best email automation platform in the world for e-commerce, and you get everything you need to build strong relationships that keep your customers coming back. Now with advertising getting harder and more expensive, it’s time to take back control of the customer experience with email and SMS. So if you’re ready to drive future sales and hire customer lifetime value with a marketing platform built for your long-term growth, get a free trial at klaviyo.com slash mywife.

01:47
That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. Now onto the show. Welcome to the My Wife, Her Job podcast, where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Chu.

02:09
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Ari Chung back on the show. And if you don’t remember Ari, he is an award winning author, illustrator, and international speaker. And his books have been named the best books of the year by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and Amazon and are sold in over 11 countries. He’s also a student of my Creative Profitable Online Store course. And last time we spoke way back in episode 73, he had founded liveinastory.com, which used to sell wall decals with illustrated art.

02:38
And I specifically use the word used to because he decided to close down that shop. And in this episode, we will discuss why it didn’t work and then focus on how he pivoted to his new business ventures, which are now killing it. And yeah, they’re just killing it. And artists don’t have to starve. And Ari has been amazingly successful. And with that, welcome back to the show, Ari. How are you doing today, Thanks, Steve. It’s so good to be back. And it’s interesting to see all the changes from

03:06
then until now. Oh man, I love because so just a little bit of background story for the readers. Ari and my wife are actually friends. They went to college together. And so Jen’s been keeping me up to date on Ari’s progress. And I’m like, man, all this stuff has been amazing. I definitely need to have them on back. And let’s let’s start with this Ari for the listeners out there who may not remember you from last time, because that was what like three years ago, maybe maybe I think a little longer, maybe even four years ago.

03:32
Yeah, we’re just up first starting with live in a story, which is your decal store. Why didn’t work and then why you decided to close it down and how you pivoted. Right. So live in a story was something that was born out of your class while decals and I saw at the time the opportunity that I could bring bring higher quality wall decals to the market. Most of the wall decals then were very cheap and manufactured in Asia and they just look really cheap and

04:02
As an artist, I wanted to do something much better and I thought that I could find the market to, to sell and be very profitable in this venture. Why it failed and what I learned from it was, so first of all, that was my first business and I focused so much as an artist on the quality and the manufacturing. didn’t spend enough time on the marketing and sales part, which is really the biggest difference between what I’ve learned from then and now. I’d say the second thing is we just never,

04:32
got to a volume where we could produce these things at a very cost effective rate. I wanted to originally make them in the United States so that way I could control the quality and also we could make designs very quickly versus shipping in. But looking back on things, I wouldn’t have done that again, unless I had a lot of runway. I know that you’ve had several other students who did wall decal businesses that are actually crushing it and very successful now.

05:01
but it took them a while to find their, to build their catalog right into. Yeah, so I think we just didn’t last long enough. didn’t focus on marketing enough. We didn’t know how to acquire the customer. I just, as an artist, just was focused too much on the product part of it and not enough on the marketing and sales part of it. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I mean, there’s other artists in the class also that have gone the print on demand route. And I remember you actually got your own printer and your facilities and all that stuff. And there’s a large upfront cost, right? For all that stuff.

05:30
I saw the printer Steve, you do the market for a printer. Actually, know, surprisingly, we might be actually, if it’s on fabric, does it? It’s an awesome printer. Okay, talk to Jen actually, because we’ve been looking at fabric printers. Oh, so yeah. Yeah. It’s practically. Alright, so okay, so live in a story didn’t work out as your first venture, you you had a lot of upfront costs and that sort of thing.

05:59
How did that kind of pivot over to Storyteller Academy? And first of all, tell everyone what that is. Yeah, so Storyteller Academy is a online school for people who want to become children’s book authors and illustrators. I’m a traditionally published picture book author, illustrator for many years, probably almost 10 years. That was my biggest goal and biggest dream is to write and illustrate picture books. And so I came up with this idea.

06:29
when I was thinking about what kind of businesses I could make that would provide unique value. knew I learned a lot about writing stories that I didn’t know before that they don’t teach you in college. Such a niche thing. And so I just started with with a post on Facebook of, Hey, would anybody be interested in this? And actually, do you remember this, Steve? I actually emailed you later. I was like,

06:55
Hey Steve, there’s a lot of people interested in this. What should I do? Do you remember that? Yeah, I do. Didn’t we get coffee, I think? I think later, but you were like, that’s awesome. You got to them on a webinar. that was the first time I ever did a webinar and I sold my first course. And then we just scaled from there that now we have a whole program where you’re learning how to write, illustrate, and I’m even teaching business now in there in terms of building your own brand, running Facebook ads.

07:23
Because I realized that actually a lot of independent artists can self-publish their own books or grow their own audience and have more guaranteed launches when they launch their new book and actually build a business on top of their book career. Because you don’t want to just build your own author business off of one product that doesn’t have great margins. Well, so first of all, just for the people listening out there, Ari actually has two businesses talked about here.

07:53
This other one that we’re talking about right now, Storyteller Academy, isn’t actually the biggest one, but I wanna get an idea of just kind of Ari’s trajectory until what led him to his biggest win to this date. So for Storyteller Academy, you mentioned you did your first webinar. How did you get people to attend that webinar? How did you build your audience for that and that sort of thing? Yeah, so initially it was just posting on Facebook, asking people to share and then, and I started running Facebook ads, which…

08:21
weren’t that difficult to actually figure out in the very beginning. And I think that first webinar, wasn’t even that many people, was maybe like 400 people. But I just continued doing webinar launches over the next few years and learned how to run Facebook ads very effectively and just scaled our webinars to being tens of thousands of people. Can we talk about like the Facebook ads part of it? So when you first started out, how were you doing your targeting?

08:50
And what did your ads, if you remember what they look like, or maybe you can just talk about what they look like now, actually. Actually, you know, it’s funny is one of the first images I use, I still use that one, it still converts really great. So it’s, I use my artwork and it says how to become a picture book author illustrator. So I find with Facebook ads, since the ad has a catcher attention so quickly, it has to have an interesting image or something, you know, a pattern interrupt.

09:18
And the caption just has to be the thing they want. I think it’s best to be very straightforward. And yeah. And so we actually use that Ninja image that says how to become picture book author illustrator with Ari John. And this is click here below. It’s so simple. I’ve run a lot of other ads and that one still performs at the near the top, if not the top, um, after all these years. in terms of targeting, like, well, you, sounds very niche. Does that make it really easy to target?

09:48
It does actually. we target people who are interested in children’s books. We target people who like all the publisher pages. We target children’s literature. So you can find those interests keywords pretty easily. now I’m kind of expanding. I think I was so niche before I’ve kind of burned out those interest niches. Yeah. So, you know, from there I expanded to lookalikes and as we’ve been building our email list and our customer base that

10:18
that is gold. The lookalike audiences is a very easy way to scale. And then I think from there, it’s just trial and error. You can try lots of different niches and just see, you never know it’s gonna work until you try it. Can you talk about the economics a little bit? Like how much were you paying? Let’s talk about that first webinar, because you had nothing. And presumably a lot of people listening out there are starting with nothing. Yeah, how much were you charging for your product? How much was it per lead? Just some of the metrics. All right, so

10:46
product at the time I was selling and I and by the way I want to bring up this point because I think I under sold myself which I think a lot of people were starting out are a little afraid of going higher. So I sold a 12 week course for like a hundred twenty bucks something like that. Okay. But I did I did think this is because I was it was the first time I was doing it. I was afraid that I

11:16
that I wouldn’t deliver a great job. So I didn’t want to over promise. But I did say, which I would do again is this is the founding members price. This is the early bird price. And the next time we launched, the price will be double. And the price was double. So you have to go through with what you’re saying. So even the next time around, it was $200 and it was totally worth it. $240 and then we doubled again. And then we switched to a membership after that.

11:45
So our cost per lead though, you’re asked about that when we were advertising with Under a thousand people the cost per lead was something ridiculous like 40 cents 50 cents really. Okay. Wow, it was the same That’s where I was like, I’m hit the Old line, but as you know when you are scaling Facebook ads, it’s not as easy. Yeah At scale we’re able to get and I think this is still pretty good. You can tell me

12:14
We’re able to get leads for for under $2.50. I think it’s hard to tell because it really depends on who you’re targeting. Like in the make money space, that is really, that’s really good. I mean, that’d be amazing. Yeah, like people are paying upwards of, know, for a webinar, at least like six bucks per lead. Yeah, for your stuff. I think it’s a lot more niche, maybe not as many people are targeting that. So I actually have no idea how much it should be. But just to give you, I know we’re giving a preview of

12:44
creativity school, I’ve been able to get leads for 50 cents at scale. I believe that we’ll get into that business in just a sec. Let’s finish up with the story Academy first, but the story tell Academy leads anywhere between this in terms of terms of like cost per lead. Yeah. $2 and 50 cents. I’m happy. Sometimes we’ll even pay up to three, $54 and earnings per lead after your promotion is

13:11
about $5 a lead. I’d say two to one return. Yeah, any Yeah, and then it actually gets better now with time because we have a membership and 60 % of our members renew year after year. So their actual lifetime value increases year after year. So that’s slowly inches up every year. Can we talk about the membership aspect versus full pay? Yeah, go ahead. No, I was gonna say, do you know like how long the average person

13:37
sticks with your program. I think we had this discussion a while back because you had asked me why I do lump sum, right membership. I was just wondering how you came to your conclusions. Well, so the membership started from two areas is one is a people after people finish my class, it was just teaching them how to make a story and a dummy, they want to take another class. And that’s when I started hiring my friends to help build more classes, and I would pay them a royalty.

14:06
But what was challenging was that you were constantly having to sell another class, sell another class, and the classes are expensive. They’re like 300 or $400. And so the membership was really born out of, let’s see if we can build a continuity program and offer a cheaper price. And by then I had over a thousand people that had bought my classes and it was really easy to offer them this lower price membership for them to continue taking classes.

14:33
How much is the membership fee versus what you were charging for the full course? Yeah, so at the time the full course was $500 for 12 V class. We ended up breaking that to two classes for 250. So pricing has pretty much stayed the same. And then we then offer the membership for $60 a month or $600 for the whole year. And so in a year, you could take four classes.

15:02
And so that would have cost you $1,000 instead of 600. I see. And how many people actually prepay for the year versus month to month? I think it’s about 25 % that paid for the whole year. A lot of people pay month to month. And honestly, the reason why they pay month to month is because they can’t pay the whole thing at once. I see. Okay. And I think that’s, that’s probably the main reason why

15:31
when I think about why we continue to do it this way is it’s just making it affordable for my for my customers, my audience, a lot of them. Sixty dollars actually is a lot for them to invest in. Right. They’re writing. Yeah. How does that differ from a payment plan, though? It’s well, it’s I guess the difference in a payment plan is you would have a fixed number of payments and then you would own that course versus a membership is like Netflix. So

16:00
It’s ongoing. And then once you stop paying, then you lose your access and you don’t. Oh, I was saying like in terms of your decision payment plan versus membership, they’re very similar, right? Right. They could get access to everything and own it outright. Yeah. Well, I think the payment plan would be. So they would get access to everything after they’ve figured after they’ve purchased everything, right? So I think I didn’t do that because we’re still adding to the course curriculum. I see.

16:30
Okay, we’re aiming to build. So I feel like the opportunity now with online education and info space is in the niches and you can build the best library for that niche. So I want to be in the Netflix of children’s book education. And it’s really hard to compete with us because unless you have a lot of funding and a lot of specialty knowledge in that space, it’s going to take a lot of time to build courses. totally.

16:59
And so we want to go the membership model because we want to build years of classes that will help you grow through your career and offer an amazing value. We can even probably drop the price as we get bigger. We can make it even more accessible. And I think that’s a way that I’m aiming to scale with Storyteller Academy. Does that make sense? Yeah. So before we move on to…

17:24
your other business. First of all, how did you were doing pretty well with Storytel Academy, right? It was already a six figure business. How did that turn into your next venture? So I, so Storytel Academy has been overall successful. It’s been growing. It’s been hard though, because it is a very niche business and there’s some things that were working before were working that were working before stopped working. So webinars weren’t working as well last at the end of last year. For some reason there was like a turnaround.

17:53
And then, so I definitely was looking to diversify in terms of, of businesses and also looking at new kinds of way of marketing. So I started experimenting with live challenges or launches and they’re very similar to what I did before with a video series. It’s just live basically. And so what happened with Storytel Academy is I ran that series, live, a live series and it worked really well because engagement was so high.

18:23
And then at the time I was thinking about maybe doing something for kids online. And I had a company reach out to me about making a summer camp for kids that was in person. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to develop some content for that. And it would be fun to work with kids. I love working with kids. And then COVID hit and the summer camp got canceled. And so I decided to, why not?

18:50
try this online. So I offered a whole free week online. Did you have to refund all the money for the live summer camp? Oh, so for the live summer camp, I was not the operational person behind it. Oh, okay. Yeah, so I was just being hired as a contractor. I was just the instructor. So I didn’t have to do any of that. Thank God. Okay, they actually so they had a lot they have a customer list from previous years. And they had to just let those people know that there wasn’t going to be a summer camp.

19:19
Actually, I think she even tried to sell it still while COVID was starting because we didn’t know how serious it was going to be or how long it would last. And she had hard time selling it, of course. Yeah. Okay. So then you decided to do a free one, which I believe my kids took part in it. How did that work? Like, what was the setup? Were you just using? Yeah. So the it was very similar to storyteller cabbing where I said, Hey, I’m thinking about doing this free thing.

19:48
Let me know in the comments if you’re interested and there were lots of comments. And so then I put, quickly put together a landing page and the email opt-in and for that free camp, this is zero advertising. Uh, we had 3000 people sign up for it. How did you get those 3000 people? It’s just all organic shares. You mean you posted on your own personal page or? on my personal page and just asked people to tag and share. That was it. Okay.

20:16
And what was the offer specifically? Oh, so, well, it was just for a free week. I actually wasn’t, I did this as experiment. wasn’t actually planning on doing an offer quite yet. I was thinking I could grow my email list for my children’s books. And then at the end of the camp, there were so many parents that said how much they loved it and that they would be willing to pay for it. And they wanted, they were begging for me to make a product out of it. And I thought about it over the weekend and

20:46
I decided to go for it. actually emailed you. Oh, yeah, I said, Go, go, go. I you’re like, go for it. Let’s try. And then so I put that offer out and we had 180 people. Yeah, 180 people sign up for it. Let’s put some numbers. So that first free class you were teaching people is teaching kids how to illustrate essentially, right? Yeah, there was a different there was a different theme every day. So there was animation day and there was

21:14
drawing day, there was painting day. So there was a different theme every day. And then over the camp, what ended being is we then broke that up into a week of one topic. Okay. And then this was all conducted over zoom, right? All over zoom. Yeah, all over zoom. Okay. So when you put out that, that you were putting out a paid camp, and you said you got 180 people, how much did you decide to charge? How’d you come up with those prices and just all the logistics involved?

21:42
Yeah, so we charge super cheap. was $47 for three weeks. It’s one hour a day. And, and we, we came up with that price because I know from online marketing and selling courses, $47 is a pretty low ticket item. And I honestly cared about having everyone that was struggling be able to afford it. So I did that out of just making sure that

22:08
we gave a lot of value and then it was affordable to everyone. So that was the first offer. And in terms of coming up to the price, especially since it’s your first time, you kind of just got a pick. So I definitely was very conscious that I wanted to make this affordable and to go for volume. so that’s what we did. So our total revenue was about $8,500.

22:35
And then I took that $8,500, I spent $1,000 on Teachable, so that way can put the replays up there. And then I thought immediately, wow, this works. That was zero ad spin. Let’s put ads into this thing. So for the Teachable stuff, like were people paying to access those videos without the live instruction? No, we did not sell the replays at that point. Oh, okay. Yeah. It was just, so the promise was you would get live instruction for your kid.

23:04
And then if they miss class or if they want to go back and catch something they miss, they could watch the replay the next day. And we actually got it now to the same day, who get the replays up the same day. see. Just just for the people listening out there, if you guys don’t have kids, like during the summer when COVID hit, like, I was going nuts, because I wasn’t sure what my kids were gonna do all day. Yeah, because you know, it was really scary in the beginning, we actually kept them indoors, like

23:33
We didn’t even go out at all for a while. And I know your program was just like a godsend and it was dirt cheap. Like we would have paid a lot more than $47 to participate. that’s one of the, yeah, it was very smart. Yeah. Well, you know, we wanted to make it affordable for the person that was worried about losing their job and needed a respite from the kids, you know? Yeah. You’re stuck in one place. so I think the pricing was…

24:01
was good because it really did help a lot of people and it made it affordable for everyone. If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP.

24:29
So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself. Now, first and foremost, protecting your IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Counsel provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry,

24:59
you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult. And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show.

25:15
So then you notice that it worked and then it came time to scale. This is kind of like a different issue because everyone has kids. So I’m just kind of curious. Did you run Facebook ads like wide open? You know, it’s interesting because I, when you say wide open, do you mean? mean like very minimal, like targeting, like people, parents essentially, and just let it go. Yes. So I put all the interests that I thought would hit and then

25:44
When you spend more money with Facebook, Facebook notices that and then they give you a call and say, Hey, would you like an expert to help you spend more money? And so I said, yes. And then they signed me this guy named Ray who’s awesome guy. Hey Ray, if you’re out there listening, hello. But he, he pretty much said the same thing you just said. It’s like, said, wow, you’re doing such a good job right now with targeting. think you’re, I think you can just expand this thing. And so he helped me scale some

26:15
custom audiences. And then we even did no targeting. Basically, you just say everyone on Facebook, algorithm, go figure it out. And that’s doing okay, too. So by okay, so you read you you mentioned some numbers earlier, you said like, was it 50 cents a lead? Yeah, so this is the fun part. For all the digital markers out there, I was getting Facebook ads for about anywhere between 50 to $1 20 a lead and

26:44
I was able to get it down to about 80 cents a lead, but then I ran this up viral contest. So once you opted in to the free week, you could share and you could win prizes and you can win an iPad. And that was going like gangbusters over the summer. Pretty much for every single lead I bought, I got a free one through the contest. Nice. What was the quality of those leads like? Good.

27:13
People were sharing in all their mommy groups and their parent groups. Ah, that’s brilliant. It was insane. I have not been able to get up viral to replicate that. Actually, I replicated that success twice, but recently up viral has changed their… they’re updating their software and they messed it up. It’s not working as well as it used to. Interesting. Because up viral just gives you additional entries if they share it, right? Right.

27:43
But there’s there’s all the you know with digital marketing there’s all devils in the details so the way that they I was able to embed before I was able to bed embed the Sign-up form on my own website and so I can control the design And then I could lead that to a landing page that was on their landing page that had all the features But now they changed it to where I have to use their landing page on the front end to be able to use their line back in I see

28:11
has been that one changes change everything. I actually use viral sweep. Oh, it’s very flexible. It’s there’s a whole bunch of companies that do the same thing. I just got her viral sweep. used to run that group giveaway company. I don’t know if you remember that. I remember. Yeah. And so we kind of toured all the different ones. And yeah, don’t know. Yeah, we like viral sweep. It’s they’re all the same to me. I actually never really used up viral actually, because it was one of the newer entrants, I think at the time. I’ll send you some screenshots you will and

28:40
Google Sheet that I track all my leads in. Because just the numbers are insane. can we talk about that? So what was the ad that worked? mean, I would imagine it’s very similar to your Storyteller Academy, right? Just straight to the point. Yep. Yep. It’s so the form that I generally use is, hey, if you know, hey, your target customer, are you interested? Or do you have this problem? If so, then sign up here. So for this case, it was, hey, parents, do have kids that are stuck at home?

29:10
they need something to do? Do they love drawing and painting? Well, sign up for this free week. Sign up here. So you were still doing the free week as a lead gen or Yeah, so we would run the paid camp for three weeks. And then we would do a free week promotion. And then we would do another paid camp for three weeks. And then we did another paid from then we did another free camp and then we did another it’s like a no brainer then man. So we just continued that so

29:38
I every single time just took the profits and reinvested that all in Facebook ads. And I was just like, let’s just see how far this could go. And so the second, so the second camp, I invested $7,000 into it. And I think we bought 18,000 leads or so. And then we got 800 customers.

30:03
Oh my goodness. Okay. And then we did the same thing. then on camp number three, I got even smarter. I had a customer base now and so I pre-sold to my customer base. If you want to join the next paid camp, you can save 20 bucks. And then I took the, I think we had something like $25,000 budget. And so I took that and I put that to Facebook ads.

30:31
And then we got 1800 customers. when you’re running your Facebook ads, are you just literally doing it for a week? Yes. At a time? Okay. Just for a week. And then just for the just for the week to get people into the free week. And the free week is free classes. It’s a really great week. And our conversion rate was 4.5 to 5%. Crazy. Yeah. So it’s, it’s, it was doing really well. And so the third camp we had, had

31:00
1800 customers like 70, $70,000 of revenue for three weeks. It’s not bad. Oh, no, that’s fantastic. So we’re talking about lots of money per day on your Facebook ads for that focused week, right? Right. Yeah, we were spending four to $5,000 a day. Right. And then for those of you guys listening that that sounds like a lot, right? Did it faze you or did you work yourself up to that point? Or just based on Storyteller Academy, you already used for these used to these amounts?

31:28
Oh, I was getting leads at 50 cents. I knew that the more I could buy leads at 50 cents, there’s no, there’s just the chances of you losing money is so small. It’s probably less than a percent. Right. This is like every single dollar I have, I’m going to put into Facebook ads because the work that you do to deliver the course and experience is the same. You know, if I teach a hundred kids versus I teach 10,000 kids, it’s not that different.

31:54
Yeah, can we talk about your setup then? you’ve we talked before this and you said you had like, what was it like 12,000 people on it once or something crazy like that? So this is probably a good segue to the summer camp. So I ran three regular camps. And then I had customers already asking me, what are you doing for summer? Like we’ve been with you from the first camp three months ago. And I’m trying to plan my my kids summer schedule. What are you doing the summer?

32:22
And so I knew there was a lot of demand for the summer and I had my customers telling me you need to put together a summer camp now. And so I ran the numbers and I was like, wow, I think we can make a lot of money this summer, which would be great. Cause then I could, I can take that money and fund an afterschool program. And so what I did was I took, I budgeted $50,000 in, in ad spend.

32:48
And I ran the contest. We were able to still get leads at 50 cents a lead on average at $50,000. I wasn’t sure I going be to do that. Okay. I’ll do that. Yeah. It was a lot of lookalike audiences worked really well for that. And we enrolled 4,700 students over the summer. Is this at $47? No, we upped it. We upped it. So I knew that this was going to be a, want to group the summer into a longer program and charge more.

33:17
Because you just wanted them to buy once. And so we charge $127 for the five-week camp, which is still… Still a no-brainer, actually. Yeah, it’s completely… It’s in my heart to make sure this is affordable to everybody because a lot of times, these after-school programs are for people who only afford them and they do make a difference in a kid’s life. It’s the difference of finding a new hobby or skill that you love and doing later.

33:47
Is this 50 cents per lead including the up viral promotion? Yes. Okay. Yeah, so probably pre up viral is probably about 90 cents 95 still dirt cheap. Good Lord. Okay. Yeah. What about running a wide open or what we talked about earlier is was that more expensive than your lookalikes? Slightly maybe like 20 or 30 % more. Okay. Yeah, so I think it sounds obvious now but when when you think about it is pretty much anybody who has a kid is

34:17
a potential. Oh yeah, exactly. Targeting doesn’t matter as much. Targeting still does actually matter because you can like I’m running ads now and I can still get some interest under a dollar lead. Facebook ads, think also we had the perfect storm for being able to launch an online program because Facebook ads also did decrease in cost. They’re back to normal now I feel. Yeah, they’re they’re they’re 30 % higher.

34:46
dropped down for 30%. So they were on sale and now they’re back to normal. So can we talk about some of the metrics? So you got 100,000 people. How 110. So based on that, like, how did you know approximately how many you could convert? Let’s say your Facebook ads were more expensive. How did you figure out your break even point? Well, I just knew from our last three camps that our conversion rate was north of 4 % for four to 4.5%. And so

35:16
I was planning on spending $50,000 and trying to build my email list to over 100,000. And so I just took simple math, 100,000 times it by 4%, that’s 4,000. I actually assumed my conversion rate was gonna be lower because that’s much higher scale. And if you go up higher in scale, you think your conversion rate would probably dip, right? Right, but they didn’t, obviously. It didn’t. It was basically 4.7%.

35:46
Yeah. Yeah. And, and so we just made way more money than I thought we were going to make because we had more customers. And actually we wouldn’t even made more, but we had to close enrollment because we actually do have a fixed number of seats in our summer camp since it’s over zoom. The zoom meetings can only hold a thousand people.

36:12
I’m sure most people in this world never hit that limit. Yeah, we hit that limit. Actually, we had some other problems. People, the camp was so popular that people were sharing the link, the paid link. And then we had a little, we had, you know, we had some early issues. It was not all easy. Sure. Yeah, actually, I want to get into those details a little bit. Like, what are your expenses and all this outside of the ad costs? Yeah, so outside the ad costs,

36:40
These are the biggest expenses. I pay all my instructors really well. In fact, for the summer camp, I paid each instructor just teach one week. Initially it was going to be $5,000. And since we did so well, I doubled their rates. And then we had to expand. Like there was so much demand. I actually asked them to teach one more time slot. So some teachers were teaching four times a day. And then I

37:08
I paid them another $2,000 to do that. that’s four hours a day of instruction, essentially. it’s four hours a day, but it’s pretty exhausting because it’s like performing. It is Yeah, no, totally. Yeah. Yeah. So they had an hour break in between, but they made really good money. I think $12,000 for one week of work is it is that’s excellent. How did the logistics work on the zoom call? So you have 1000 people on let’s say, yeah. Is there how do they

37:36
Is it just one-sided communication or can they ask questions? they can’t. we have a moderator. There’s actually a lot of people behind the scenes. So I’d say the biggest expense is actually just people to run it and to plan everything. There’s actually a lot that goes into that. then servicing 4,700 customers. Like if anything goes wrong, everyone sends you an email and you literally have 3,000, 4,000 emails in inbox all at once.

38:04
We hired at the peak, think 12 folks in the Philippines to help us process emails. And even that was enough. Like if I could have done over, I would have hired 20. So how does that work? Were you guys using a help desk and how did you divvy up the work? Yeah. So we, we actually found, um, this new company is called help wise H L P W I S C. And I got on a amazing lifetime deal. I think it’d be like,

38:32
60 bucks for it, best 60 bucks I ever spent. Oh my goodness, okay. Yeah. And it’s great. Basically it works just like Zendesk or these other programs, but actually I think it works better. It’s cleaner and simpler. you have agents on there and you basically have, people can, they have a shared inbox and people can just assign themselves an email or you can have a manager that

39:02
basically reads the emails and signs them to certain people. And then you have canned responses that you personalize. So you don’t want to send out just a canned response. You want to make sure that you’re answering all of that. of course. Yeah, yeah, that’s how we did it. And that’s probably was the hardest part is actually in terms of logistics, there were a lot of errors and mistakes with like links. Sometimes there’s a link sharing problem. And so

39:31
when people get their link, they get really upset. Of course. Of course. Yeah. And then, or a lot of people also just don’t read so they don’t know where to go. So half the emails were, where do I go? Where’s this link? And email delivery is also another nightmare because not everyone gets the email. So we’ve been working on a fix for that, but the link sharing was a really big issue. How do you solve the link sharing issue? We’re still solving it now. Okay.

39:58
How we solved it was we had to painstakingly download who came to the webinar or to the free class, I mean to the paid class, and we cross-referenced it and we emailed people and just said, you pay for this link. Or if we didn’t do it an accusatory way because people have different emails, we just verified and said, we noticed that this email isn’t registered with us.

40:25
do use it for email? Otherwise, here’s the link to the cart. So we did that and then we actually had to, we had to change links and we had to pre-register everyone. So then everyone got through Zoom, a pre-registered link. So it’s their link with the token of their email in it. But that was a huge tech pain because then we had to, we had to through webhooks and API,

40:54
link them in. someone like you is probably like, that’s probably really easy for you, but someone like Well, no, no, no. It’s an interesting problem. That’s kind of why I asked if you had solved it. But we- So that’s how we solved it then, but we’re still working on solving that now. Okay. Trying to have the web- So that part solved it for us in sense that we can send you a unique link that no one else could use. You could not forward that link to someone else. Right. But it doesn’t solve the problem of

41:24
People still, even if you send them their link in email, don’t get it. They just don’t get the link because it’s in their junk box or for what I guess you could use SMS or Messenger for that. Yes, that’s a good idea. But with Messenger, not everyone has Facebook. Oh, that’s true. That’s true. So SMS, it also gets complicated. SMS is we have different people in different countries. So what we’re trying to do, I mean, that’s a smaller use case, but.

41:53
What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to have the Zoom webinar launched inside of a class, inside of a paid membership. And so they just log in and it’s the same place. So they know where to go. And then if it’s inside a paywall, then they can’t. Yeah, that’s how I do my course. Right. But the problem is we’re actually, shouldn’t say we a podcast, but like inside the paid course, they’re launching the Zoom app where they can still share the link.

42:23
So people were savvy with Zoom. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so it’s still a problem. So Ari, let’s talk about the different businesses that you started in your journey. So we didn’t actually go into depth on the e-commerce one as much, but given that this was your first business, like if you were to start all over again, and you decide to continue on with it, what changes would you have made? Number one, would not have manufactured in the US. That was

42:53
too ambitious. The only way would manufacture in the US is if you have enough capital. And I’m saying to me, I wouldn’t start a manufacturing in the US without hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital. I just feel like it’s just so labor intensive equipment. all the- You could lease your machine too, right? You chose to buy it outright, I remember. Yes. Well, I bought a lease to own. Okay. Yeah. And you know, the picture was still, it’s like 20 grand. was,

43:23
It wasn’t super expensive, but the hard part is the manufacturing, packaging, all these, you just can’t do that at scale unless you have a bigger operation with volume and you spend all your time figuring out those logistics when all that time you need to be figuring out how to get the core customer and what the price point is and having a product market fit. Right. So that was what I learned. I would, I, if I had to do that business again,

43:51
I would say I’m going to lose money in the beginning just to find my product market fit in my marketing. I would probably just pay printers here in the U S and sell and sell my product at a loss knowing that I just need to get product market fit and know my margins. And at the same time contact all the manufacturers in Asia and get, and be able to produce this thing at volume. And then building your customer list too, because I’m sure if someone bought one decal, they’re going to buy you from you.

44:21
more often. Exactly. So I would have planned if I would do that business again, I would plan, you know, four or five months of testing and getting your manufacturer set up in Asia, getting your first order as soon as possible. And meanwhile, just fulfilling your current orders and learning at a loss, because you’re setting up the pipeline for for the whole business. That’s what I would do differently. And in terms of the pros and cons,

44:48
of running like Storytel Academy and then now your new business. Can you just kind of comment on that? What you see? Yeah. So I’ve learned how hard it to run a physical prodding business because you are shipping good, you are selling good that probably is even at a lower price point. The margins are smaller and you have to fund the next

45:18
the next order, right? So you know, because you run it. And I feel like it’s, I just feel like it’s a lot more work. It’s a lot harder. I feel like, so from my perspective, I feel like when you’re doing e-commerce, you have to deal with less people. For us, like, I don’t like dealing with people and workers. And so you kind of scale with products as opposed to human labor, which is what you have to do more when it’s like a course or a more hands-on type of thing. That is true. Yeah, that is true. There’s positive and negatives. So

45:49
I think the positive to online courses is it’s easier to scale in numbers and, and, know, your delivery is so easy. It’s basically an automated email, right? Yeah. But you have to have more people to answer customer service. It’s a relationship. It’s built. It’s when you scale, you do actually scale with customer service and instructors and your program becomes much more complicated. So I think it’s a lot more work in that sense.

46:16
And then I’ve thought about this a lot too, and this is probably different than the way you’re running things. But for me, like the e-commerce store is a much more sellable asset than the other stuff that I have. For me, I do this for fun. So it’s probably not as much of a factor, but maybe for people listening who are just doing this from a sellability perspective, I feel like e-commerce and maybe SaaS carry higher multiples and are more sellable in general. Yeah. You know, what’s interesting is I’ve learned a lot from digital marketer with how they

46:46
basically change their business model from being courses to more of a SaaS they’re trying to replicate. And this is actually why a membership is so much more valuable is that you can actually, especially the way I’m building creativity school, this can be a very sellable asset later because it actually same with Storytel Academy. I’m actually working on getting my face off the brand and not being the main person because you basically have an online education program.

47:15
And if you can prove that you have these marketing funnels to acquire customers and they stay for two years, that is cashflow. And I think you can easily sell it, sell that. Yeah. It turns into kind of like a Udemy. so exactly. Right. It’s a very niche Udemy and actually probably the better example would be Linda.com Linda.com sold to LinkedIn for a lot of money and they were around for a long time, but yeah.

47:46
I think you can do that in a very niche way, which is what we’re trying to do with Creativity School. Yeah. And the beauty of all this is, I guess with the digital end is there’s no cost of goods and that sort of thing. It’s just human capital. And then for physical products, once you have like a steady thing going and a customer list, it’s just a matter of contacting the factory and ordering more. Right. So I guess there’s just different pros and cons.

48:12
Yeah, a lot more upfront money, I think required for physical products. Yes. Digital products. Yes. You started with nothing right for your digital stuff, right? Yeah. What I started with is just a small budget for ads and just, I mean, if you’re out there and you’re thinking about starting it, it’s just getting experiences, doing it, putting yourself out there and start, start getting an audience, whether it’s through Facebook ads or social media.

48:39
So let’s talk about some of the other cool things that are going on in your life. You want to talk about, are you allowed to talk about the other stuff or? Yeah, I can talk about it, but I probably can’t say any names. Oh yeah. Don’t say any names, but it’s just, it’s just a lot of exciting stuff going on. Do you want to talk, talk about the movie or? Yeah. So the mix mix is my children’s book that uses color theory to talk about race and diversity. And you know, it’s been such a powerful book to talk about black lives matter. And, and so there’s been

49:08
Hollywood interests in it just recently. So we’re actually in negotiations right now to sell the option rights. But when you sell your property or even the option, you’re selling all the merchandising, all the other, they want everything because they’re going to invest a lot of money into producing this thing. So it’s been a quite interesting journey of learning all the terms and what rights mean and all the accounting, the ways that studios account.

49:38
Yeah, it’s fun, but also stressful because there’s lots of long meetings with accountants and lawyers on what things mean. And then it’s full steam ahead with creativity school, right? Yeah, so we’re starting a whole new school. And actually, enrollment ends in mid-September. I think it’s the 13th. But we’re launching an after-school program. And people can…

50:07
have a whole year of our education for their kids for $175. Which is ridiculously cheap. So yeah, there’s a lot. Yeah. Awesome. Hey, where can people find you if they want to sign up for these? know, I bet a lot of listeners have kids. Yeah, www.re.com arre.com. That’s where you’ll be able to find creativity school in the future. We will have creativity school.com up but we don’t have that website built yet since Oh, amazing. You got that domain.

50:36
I bought it. Wow, that’s a really good domain. Yeah, it costs $4,000, but it’s totally worth it. Oh, yeah, totally. That’s not that expensive at all. No, not at all. Well, I guess we’ll have to have you back on after you get your Hollywood deal. You know, what’s actually interesting is, so I’m holding the publishing rights. So I have I’ll have the publishing rights so I can still make my own sequels and series of books. And I think that that is actually going to be

51:06
the next business is really growing mixed as a brand. So I still hold those rights. You can withhold some rights. I mean, in a way, like a lot of the stuff was like the perfect storm, right? Black Lives Matter with mixed. Mix was an awesome book. And then I don’t want to frame these things as positives, really, but like the COVID basically caused parents to have their kids at home, which really has, you know,

51:31
really boosted e-commerce as well as all the in your programs as well. So I’m just really happy that it’s that you capitalize on all these things. Thanks. And you know, I think Steve, the takeaway that I have is, and this, was a moment when COVID hit a lot of things I had that plan had planned. I was going to freelance for this app company that was building this reading app that disappeared, that job disappeared. I have the summer camp.

51:58
that was going to pay $10,000 was the job that disappeared. And I actually had a moment of fear where I was thinking, oh my gosh, these things I was counting on was going to disappear. How am I going to respond to this? And I thought to myself, how can I help? I think like all these terrible things have happened. You can look at silver lining and see how you can add value and give to people and truly give. And then that actually turns into the best top of funnel.

52:28
because people feel that sincerity and your offer just has to help them with their problem. And then it becomes a very straightforward transition of like, you want help with this and this is how can help you. That’s a great way to think about it. hopefully all you guys listening out there, you can follow Ari’s model. Ari’s a hard worker and he’s a go-getter and he’s always learning new things. Thanks, Steve. The next thing for me to learn is actually…

52:57
Blogging with you and Tony so buggy about that a little bit later. Sounds good. Are you any time man? All right. Take care

53:09
Hope you enjoyed that episode. It always makes me super happy to see students in my course doing great. And I love how Ari quickly pivoted during COVID-19 to create an incredible new business. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 338. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

53:36
So head on over to mywifecooderjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifecooderjob.com slash KLAVIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog,

54:06
If you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.