One minute, Dan Suckling had a business bringing in around $260,000 a month. He had a team of 12, 136 clients, and an offer worth around $20,000 per client. From the outside, it looked like a huge success.

Then everything fell apart.

Dan had agreed to sell the company, but the buyer never paid him. The new owner shut off the ad campaign that generated around 95% of the revenue, the team stopped getting paid, and clients started asking where their coaches had gone. The business collapsed, leaving Dan with nothing to show for the sale.

But that failure forced him to rethink everything.

Instead of creating another high-ticket business, Dan went in the opposite direction. He built a subscription offer with a $7 trial, and within 18 months, the business was doing around $120,000 a month with profit margins of about 70%.

So how did he do it?

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Were you tempted at that point to start, rather than agency, to start like a high-ticket coaching offer? Or did you go straight into this sort of unusual subscription model that we're going to talk about? I really wanted to test a new model. I remember being so stressed out, and so I launched this thing, and to my surprise, it absolutely... I think it's really important for us to understand the reason you even did that in the first place. Then have your experience.

It's Kennedy. I'm really excited today because I'm chatting with Dan Suckling. If you don't know who Dan is, he's the guy behind those really funny, quirky ads which feature a duck.

You've probably seen them all over your newsfeed. I've seen them all the time all over my newsfeed. He's from Subscription Kings, and I actually enrolled in one of his programs, and I was like, we need to have this guy on the podcast.

So Dan, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Great to see you. I want to... Before we get into this really unusual subscription model that you've really become known for, and I want to get into the details about how that's really replacing, for a lot of people, high-ticket offers in this sort of saturated world. We're going to definitely get into that, but before we get into that, I think it's really important for us to understand the reason you even did that in the first place, because I think it sort of can act as a bit of a warning for some other people who might be thinking, oh, everything is going fine, and we'd rather them learn from your experience than have your experience.

We're charging like US$20,000 per client, and we had grown that to about 136 members, you know, $260,000 a month, and from the outside looking in, everyone thought I was crushing it, but on the inside, I was absolutely dying. I had a team of 12 staff, you know, clients coming at me 24-7. There were endless sales calls and a lot of complexity in the business.

One day, I got an offer on the business to sell it, and so I agreed because I kind of wanted to get out of that model in the end. So I took on the deal. It was a vendor financing deal where it was $0 down, and it was to be paid off monthly over a two-year period, and so what happened next completely destroyed me.

So the new owner jumped in. He switched off the ad campaign that was responsible for about 95% of the company's revenue, and he wanted to test some kind of like cold outreach strategy on LinkedIn to lift the profit margins and cut back on expenses. Well, that strategy ended up bombing, and so he had a meeting with the team and said, sorry guys, can't pay you for a few months until we get the revenue back up.

The team reluctantly agreed. A few months had gone by. Team still hadn't been paid.

They started to leave one by one. The clients logged into Slack one day and said, where the heck are the coaches? And because this guy, he never introduced himself to the clients. He was like a background investor.

Basically, the whole company collapsed, and so I reached out to my lawyer, and he said that the next step is litigation because the guy kept ignoring the demand letters, but litigation was going to cost about $200,000, and at the time, I said to the lawyer, I said, I can't afford that because I haven't even been paid for the sale of the business, and so I basically had to walk away from a business that was doing $260,000 a month with nothing. And you're almost like watching it burn in the distance, like you've walked away from something that was great, and you've walked away, and you're watching somebody else like match after match, and then throw away the water. That must have been painful.

That was very painful, and it wasn't just like losing the money for the acquisition of the company was one thing, but the biggest thing that I was more concerned about was my reputation. I didn't want to destroy the reputation, and so not being able to tell clients on the inside what was happening because I had to keep things confidential for the lawyer, that was a really tough position to be in. So yeah, that's what led me to starting a subscription because I stood there and I asked myself, I was like, do I want to build another business like this? It was chaos.

And so I was like, I want to test this subscription thing. So I kind of went down that rabbit hole, tested a few different mechanisms, and it's been incredible, and I haven't looked back ever since. I love it, I love it.

So basically, you've gone from this high-ticket, high-touch, done-for-you agency-style business, which a lot of people are having great success with now, and obviously they all come with their different peaks and troughs and fable fives out again. So we can now do things ourselves and we don't need agencies. Maybe it's going to be the big headline of the next ad you see.

Agencies are dead! Like email's been dead and WhatsApp's been dead. It's all been dead, it's all dead, it's all dead. It's a graveyard out there.

We've now got you in this position where you've walked away from this business reluctantly, thought you were doing a good thing, thought you were about to do this great exit, which is the big dream, support your family, I'm going to have all this cash in bank. The deal gets knocked into a seller buyout type situation where you're basically earning the buyout over two years, and you walk away with none of the money and watching your clients get f***ed over and watching your business that you grew with your heart and soul burning in the background. So that's a horrible situation that I think would make anybody reluctant to go, well, let's just build a new one.

Like, no, that sounds horrendous. It's crazy. It's like, you know, you lose a pet and you're like, let's not get a new one because you're heartbroken.

Yeah, get it. All right. Were you tempted at that point to start, rather than agency, to start like a high ticket coaching offer? Or did you go straight into this sort of unusual subscription model that we're going to talk about? I really wanted to test a new model.

And I actually spent the next two months just kind of figuring out what I wanted to do. And obviously like processing what had just happened. I remember being so stressed out that I used to take day naps because just being awake was painful for my brain, just kind of over-processing everything.

And so, yeah, when I pivoted to the subscription, I thought to myself at the time, I was like, what if I rolled out like a free seven-day trial that just automatically rolled into a weekly payment of $97 a week and allowed them to cancel at any time so that people were there because they chose to be there, not because they were forced into signing a client agreement for the next six months, which helped me sleep better at night. And so I launched this thing. And to my surprise, it absolutely blew up.

Some mornings I was waking up to, you know, four, five, six subscribers joining in a 24-hour period. And the compounding revenue just continued to stack over time. And this was a subscription business that I created.

It was called FitPro University. So same niche as the high ticket, but just with a lower price tag. I think that's a very important lesson, actually.

You didn't just go, right, I'm gonna go and do a low ticket business in gardening. You took, you know, you took one element, which was a certainty, which gives you some confidence. Because when we're in rebuild mode, we've all been through those rebuild modes.

You have to have one leg of your chair that you're sitting on has to be a sturdy one. And you can make the other legs of the chair wobbly by going, I'm gonna try a new model or a new pricing thing or a new thing. So I think that is an important lesson.

Like you didn't just throw it all away and start from ground zero. You said, well, I have confidence in one thing. In your case, it was the fitness industry.

And you stuck with that and applied a new model to it. I think that's a really important lesson for anybody who does go through that reinvention process. Yes, and I already had all of the resources created from the previous company that I still had access to as well.

So I didn't really necessarily have to rebuild anything from the ground up per se. In terms of like content and frameworks and stuff. Exactly.

It was just a different marketing process, a different offer on the front end. And, you know, people came through, which was great. And so over an 18 month period, we scaled that to about $120,000 a month.

But the profit margins on this business were 70%. On the old high-ticket consulting business that was doing $250,000 a month, the profit margins were 20%. You flipped it, you inverted it.

Yeah. So I was making more profit with one tenth of the stress and far less energy and effort to keep it in operation, which was insane. And that peace of mind as well.

And there is something beautiful I love about the subscription offers we have in the business. Again, there's no minimum terms. And it's the fact that, you know, people are paying because they want to be there.

OK, there's going to be a small percent of people who've forgotten to cancel this month. You know, that's a thing. And that's, you know, just realistic.

And I was like, let's try this out. And then when I saw you doing it and having incredible success, that was like, wow, that kind of validated the thing I've been bubbling with in the background. So this is really powerful.

So let's look at this model then. So the pricing model is to have a weekly price. Could you just share with us what it is about weekly rather than the traditional monthly membership subscription? Why weekly? There's something magical about weekly pricing as opposed to monthly pricing.

And the way I see it is that the quote unquote now price feels different. If I was to say, hey, it's $97 a week versus, hey, after this trial, it's $388 per month. It just feels different.

And it also allows people to get started with less money down. And you actually end up collecting more cash on a longer time horizon anyway. So I really do like weekly pricing.

Yeah, because if you had 97 a week, if you have a monthly fee, it would be like 388, exactly as you say. 388 times 12 months is 4,656 collected if someone stays for a year. But because, of course, there are slightly more than four weeks in a month, that's 52 in a year, you collect just over five grand.

So you make an extra 400 and something dollars for something that feels to people like the same price. But the key thing you just said, which I think so few people are talking about, is the right now price. And that is such an important trigger for people of what do you need me to, what's my commitment right now? Interesting with the psychology of people, people are happy to think of difficulties in the future because when people imagine challenges, whether they are an amount of money they've got to find or a health issue or whatever that issue is, when it's in the distance, it is small.

But the thing you've got to do right now is very large. It's right in front of you. So if the thing that's large that's in front of them is a small number, then you've made it small in a different way by making it an actual small number rather than using distance to create the scale, which is really, really interesting.

So, and you do this in two places, which I think is the really key double ninja punch on this, which is you make today's price a trial. So even though it's weekly, you go seven, is it a seven-day trial? Seven-day trial, seven dollars. And if they stay after the seven days, it automatically rolls into $97 a week and they can cancel any time, even during the trial period, outside of the trial period, it doesn't matter.

And the reason why we put a low cost trial on the front end is to reduce the risk and the friction around the buying process. And that's what allows us to get people through the door with zero sales calls and zero DM conversation either. They literally see the offer.

It's a no brainer. They jump in, they try it out. If they love it, which we hope they do, and we strive for, then they stay and it rolls into 97 a week.

And if at any point they feel like they're not getting value out of the program, they can cancel at any time without being locked into a client agreement, which is really awesome. Yeah, yeah, I love it, I love it. So, and what's really nice about this is like, I think some promotions that you can do and some offers you can sell only work internally.

They're like an internal sell this to your list offer, which is what my monthly mastermind, we do weekly billing on that. And that was only ever designed to be an internal offer. Because I was like, I'm asking people to pay a chunk each week, but because of strapping onto the beginning of it, this trial where they get to literally just come in and try it, that's how good it is.

And the great marketing angle is, look, my marketing for this is great, but the actual stuff inside is even better. The best way for me to show you how damn good it is is to let you just come in and have a walk around inside. So we strap on that $7 trial.

Now, I know you've tested the hell out of the pricing of this trial, because you're like a total numbers, like how's it all working kind of guy. You tried free trial to begin with, from what I remember. Tell us a bit about why people need to be aware of the difference between free trial, $7 trial, higher ticket trial, like how does that all fall out? Yeah, so we usually look at it like we can have free trial, paid trial, no trial.

Free trial, highest conversions, but also highest churn and lowest subscriber quality, because they're literally putting $0 down to get started. And more chargebacks on the first rebuild, more customer support problems. More problems, yes.

And the other issue that I was finding when we were running a free trial on the front end is people would say, if it's a free trial, why do I have to enter my card details on the checkout page to activate the free trial? So by- There's a budget gap there, isn't there? Exactly, so even just by charging $7 on the front end for the trial, it kind of validates and it creates a reason for them to actually enter their card details without this hesitancy that naturally creeps up. Paid trial is really good. I mean, we still get high conversions, but we get lower churn rates and better subscriber quality because they're actually putting something down.

And I truly believe that pricing is psychological and even a low price tag can create serious buy-in. Funny story, I actually tested having no trial with Subscription Kings and just going straight to $97 a week to cold traffic and it completely bombed. The moment I put a $7 seven-day trial on the front end, perfect.

Yeah, I think no trial is really good for a warm list and I would recommend a paid trial for a cold audience. Yeah, awesome. And in fact, what we would normally do is we will run people through the, on our internal list, we'll say, here's the upfront no trial version coming at 97 a week in your pricing model.

And then we sell that and then we close that offer down. And then the following period, we'll then show up and say, hey, do you want to come and try it out? And we get the trial people in for $7 for seven days in your model. Because that means we get sort of two bites at the cherry, really.

What's also nice when we do it that way around is we get to validate the actual price by charging the price first and then putting it on discount later. So you've actually validated the discount. Because I think a lot of people are getting so fed up of seeing discounts and going, hang on, is that really even a discount? Because wasn't it always that price? It's quite nice to pre-validate.

That's really interesting. I love it, man. I love it.

All right. So, and have you ever tested other price points other than $7 for seven days? Or has that just, that's the one you stuck with and it's worked? So you've stuck with it. This is the one that I've stuck with because it works.

But I've tried a $1 14 day trial. I've tried a free seven day trial, $7 seven day trial, no trial. And I've kind of landed on $7 for seven days.

I, with the previous subscription business, I started at 50 bucks a week. And I had to look at acquisition costs and conversion rates and retention rates. And everything was really good.

So I said to my team, I was like, let's try 97 a week. And then nothing changed with CPAs, with retention rates and conversion rates. And then I said, let's try 197 a week.

This is to cold traffic, mind you. And everything stayed the same. However, retention just went downhill.

And so we found 97 a week for us in that business to be the sweet spot. And so I'm a big fan of like rolling out pricing on the lower end of the pricing ladder first to validate it. And then we could make slight increases and see how that change influences acquisition costs and conversion rates, retention rates.

I love it. Now let's talk about, so we kind of got the pricing model. And there's actually one more important piece of the pricing model, which is when we're talking about cold ads, which you're fantastic at, is you have somebody come in, they see the ad, they come to the landing page, and it is a VSL, so a sales video, and it's some written copy on the page.

So you kind of like a nice combo landing page. They choose to take the, and the offer is $7 for seven days of membership to this really cool thing. You've got a very specific promise.

It's not like a learn digital marketing promise. It's a, we're gonna do this thing together. So for me, what struck you, and I remember I DM'd you about, I messaged you about this saying, your approach to it feels more like the messaging from a course or a program, more than like a membership, if that makes sense.

Like, am I making sense? Yes, absolutely. And I think that we provide the same level of support and value as a $10,000 mastermind. Yes.

The only difference is, is that I run all of the support myself within the group. And we only have one other coach, which is a tech coach that helps with any tech issues. And it's actually quite easy to deliver to 50 members.

In fact, I could probably deliver to 150 members by myself. And what I do is I basically block out some time in my calendar. I've got 40 minutes in the morning, 40 at lunch, 40 before bed.

And I just go through blast all the client questions. Because I don't have to focus on DMs or sales calls, it just allows me to double down on client delivery and fulfillment. And also double down on creating some really cool marketing content, like the ads with the duck and stuff like that.

Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I know you go into in your program and stuff, which is about why you do that and how to find your own version of the duck.

Because you don't want to have a lot of people, you know, wearing flowery shirts and walk around with ducks in their arms, right? So we don't want lots of clones. That's cool. So, and so the structure of the program, and have you seen this with, I mean, because you're working with hundreds of clients and you've done this a lot.

Do you find that making it, basically taking what would normally be a high ticket offer, where there is a specific outcome, it's basically a program of building blocks. Do this, then build this on top, then build this on top, and you'll end up with a system. Is that the best type of offer? Or have you seen it work for more like a coaching, Q&A, mastermind kind of offer? Like where have you seen it sort of be the most successful? I've seen it become really successful when you actually like gamify the client experience.

So with us, we have four courses and they're all built out in sequential order. So we have clarity, build, launch, and scale. And so each course has a micro outcome attached to it.

So for example, clarity is getting clear on how to navigate the group, how to get support, also getting clear on their subscription deliverables, the pricing, et cetera. Then course two is build. And the outcome for that is getting the machine built.

Then we have launch. The outcome with that is creating the ads, launching the ads, tracking the ads, optimizing the ads. And then course four is scale.

So the outcome is omnipresence, retargeting, increasing AOV, automated referral offers, ascension pathways, creating bolt-on offers within the ecosystem. So every course has a micro outcome and we actually lock future courses. And they have to complete an assessment form at the end of one course to progress to the next course.

And we don't do that to gatekeep. We just do that to A, make sure that they've completed everything properly. And two, just to make sure that we can look over their work because we don't want somebody to launch and then it to completely flop because they didn't build an automation properly or the text size on mobile version in their funnel was like 150 or something along those lines.

And we found that to be really, really good. I love it. I love it.

And I think there's another thing to be said here. I'd actually talked about this in my mastermind group that I run, which is a reason for dripping out things like that over a period. Well, another one is that they don't get overwhelmed.

People don't just like jump to part three because they wanna know how to launch before they've got all the foundations in place. But the other one is, there seems to have been like a real uplift in dodgy scammy bastards jumping into programs, downloading them all and selling them for $3 on these terrible piracy websites, right? So what we've done across all of our programs is we've actually drip fed these things out. So things either need to be done or time needs to have passed so that, and it takes longer than the 30-day period for the credit card company to realize it was a fraudulent transaction.

And so you're actually protecting the investment of your clients by actually doing that is kind of the roundabout way of saying that, which I think is a really big thing. Yes, absolutely. One quick thing that I forgot to mention about the subscription funnel is that some of the people that are listening or watching this right now might think to themselves were like, if I'm charging $7 on the front end for this trial for seven days, I have to wait seven days to collect that first $97 payment, which is true.

But what we do have in between the checkout page and the order confirmation page is we have upsells and downsells, which basically helps us liquidate our advertising costs and get subscribers for free or close to it, which is really, really good. And we're seeing about 25 to 30% of buyers on the front end grabbing an upsell, which is insane. That's great.

And one of my upsells that we're going to test, and I just want to know before I do it, actually, if you've tried this, which is we're thinking about doing something where one of the upsells is a free upsell, just again, to really rejank the person's brain. It's a free upsell if they forgo the trial. So, hey, on the next page, you go, bang, do you want this awesome thing? You're probably expecting an upsell here because I'm in a jaded niche of marketing.

You're expecting an upsell here. Let me tell you about how you're going to get this thing for free and sell them on the thing. And the way you do it is if you're a super action taker and you just want to forgo the trial and pay the 97 a day, reward the action taker.

Have you tried it? Or does it sound like a shit idea? What do you think? It sounds like an incredible idea. I love that. I think I might test it after this too.

I was thinking about this yesterday on my little morning walk. I was thinking, could we get them to like skip the trial? How could we do that? Oh, we'll do like a free upsell. That sounds really interesting.

Let's do a free upsell. That is amazing. I really love that.

Even as like my O2, because I don't have a second upsell. I just have the one, which is the launch plan call. So that could potentially be a second upsell before they hit the purchase confirmation page.

That's great. I like it. Yeah, let's test that out and we'll come back and circle back on that.

That'll be fun. Yeah. Yeah.

Love it. Love it, man. All right, cool.

So we've got an ad running or we've got the emails going out to do the internal launch. We're going to, hey, give us $7, come and try out this thing. And what I really like about it and that I want people to be very, very clear of, because there's always alarm bells around free trials and low ticket trials.

You are very, very clear that after seven days, you will automatically be charged 97. Because I take, I don't know about you, I think you do, but I take it very seriously that we suck money out of people's bank accounts. Like we have to remember, that's what we're doing in subscription.

Like let's take that responsibility very, very seriously. And so I want to be very clear about that. And you're very clear in all of your stuff, aren't you? Yes.

Yes, absolutely. And I think the thing as well is that we should always be providing 10 times the amount of value as to what we're charging as well. And I think the value that we provide with subscriptions for what we're charging, it is on par with some of these 10, 20K masterminds in some cases even better.

Like there's been so many 10K masterminds that I've joined where I've just been passed off to a client success manager or a VA. I never get to talk to the founder. So I mean, the clients that come on to work with us, they actually get like one-on-one DM support with me personally, which is something that I don't really want to waver on even in the future because with the old business that I grew, the 250K a month business, we grew so quickly that I was just hiring left, right and center.

And it got to the point where I was so far removed from client support that I no longer had my thumb on the pulse. And obviously client results just fall by the wayside. And I never wanted to be in that position again because obviously our reputation is everything.

And without our reputation, we're nothing. I had a similar situation. We had an email writing agency for a short time and I had somebody else running that part and I felt like I'd sort of abdicated responsibility.

Like, and I was just like going, great, how do we get, who's running the ads for it? Who's doing this? And like not going, oh, are the clients getting results from this? And when you step back after, I mean, it only took me a few months. I was like, whoa, hang on. We're doing all this wrong.

Like this is, it becomes a different game you're playing. Yeah, a hundred percent. Another thing I realized was that when you're running a high ticket offer, obviously a lot of people are just selling through sales calls.

And so you can only make an offer to somebody that you speak to. And if you've got 20 calls booked on the calendar, that means you're only able to make 20 offers per week, for example. But with a subscription, with the same ad spend and the same traffic, you can actually make 10, 20 times more offers because it doesn't require a sales call to present it in front of somebody.

And I really, really love that. And so you see that as well with like show up rates with high ticket, where it's like, somebody is compelled, they read an ad or they watch an ad, they feel something emotionally, they book a call, but the call is in three days time. In three days, the emotion starts to dissipate.

And that's why we see, you know, show up rates and sales conversions dropping. We need a strike while the iron's hot. I'm a very big believer in that.

A hundred percent. And what's interesting is like for a 5k offer, which is what this is, it's five grand over a year, you would normally need to do a sales call for that. Like in normal coaching circles, that is a sales call appropriate price point.

Whereas when it's 97 a week, that's an easy yes, you know, especially. And what, just to set people's expectations when setting these up, if they were to roll out at $97 a week and we're going to assume that their content is good and they're following a lot of your strategies from this and perhaps from your program, what is a reasonable retention rate for this? So a reasonable retention rate would be 50 to 60%. And when we say retention, I'm referring to like being retained for like at least a month.

Our trial to paying subscriber conversion percentage is sitting roughly around 65 to 70%. And how long does somebody on average stay or what is the average member value? Our average member value is about 2,600. So it's about 26 weeks as an average.

And again, though, like if you look at that, if on average a person's worth 2,600, 2,600 is the no man's land price point of on a webinar, you can't, it's very difficult. You have to have an absolute banger webinar to go, hey, and at the end of the webinar, click this button, pay me 2,600. And it's also too low a price to really warrant getting on a sales call.

It's the no man's land price point. Whereas with no sales call, running ads that run 24 seven all day long with some email followup and all this sort of good stuff, amplifying it all, you're able to bring in $2,600 clients very profitably, pretty hands off. And then of course do the delivery.

Yes. And some of your viewers might also be thinking more like it's going to take me a long time to scale to 50,000 or $100,000 a month with these $97 a week payments. But what we also have on the inside in the subscription is something called the ecosystem.

And so what the ecosystem is, it is a series of other bolt-on offers that we can provide to our subscribers to buy from that helps to increase the average order value per subscriber. So for us, once they're on the inside, if anyone wants us to just build the whole thing for them, we have a done for you offer for 12K. We have done for you funnel design.

We offer like a 30 minute consulting session that people can buy for 197. We have all these other bolt-on offers that people can buy from. And that makes a huge difference to the overall revenue in the business.

So yeah, it's not just like the subscription and that's kind of, that's it. Some people have a high ticket backend. Some people offer done for you services and those things really, really help.

I think that's a really important point that this does not have to be the backend of this. I think you've talked about a lot is this could be the front end to a high ticket very, very easily. Cause these people are already willing to make that level of commitment.

The thing I think there's an opportunity for here is having a platinum level of membership. So they get this great level of support within this level at $97 a week. Is there a platinum level which is significantly higher, maybe double or triple, quadruple the price, where there is another level of service? Is that something you've ever seen anyone do or play with, where there's that ascension path?

Yes. So there's a couple of clients that we have that run group coaching with their subscription. They don't provide one-on-one support like I do. So it's group calls, group support. There's no one-on-one DM access. If somebody has a question, they post it in the group.

But for an extra $200, $300 a week, they can upgrade to one-on-one, which includes private one-on-one WhatsApp DM access. And then they've also included a private one-on-one Zoom call with the subscriber, whether it's like weekly or bi-weekly.

And just having that extra touch point of accountability and support, people are willing to pay that. And as the subscriber base grows, naturally, there's people that want closer proximity with the founder. They want more support. They want the nuance. They want their expertise.

And so people naturally upgrade. And the cool thing about the subscription is that you can bring people into your world for a low price point. You can build more trust with them once they're on the inside. You can further sell them on your methodology. You can help them get some wins on the board and get some results.

And you can actually create the perfect high-ticket client.

Whereas a lot of these high-ticket coaches, they're fighting in the marketplace for the 5% of people that are in a position financially to invest into high-ticket. But they're completely ignoring the other 95% because they don't have a second door for these people to walk through.

Right? So we can have two doors where most people just have one and the door costs $10,000 to walk through.

Yeah. And what's really nice is if you're in the niche where you help people have success financially, if they join this and let's say they join Subscription Kings and they start making now an extra 10 or 20 grand a month, suddenly that opens the door up for you as the business owner for them to walk through the 10K offer because you've actually helped them get to that point.

And not only can they afford to, but because they've had great success, they want to.

So both of those situations are fixed, which is just fantastic.

Yes. It's amazing.

And because you're the one that's got them to that outcome initially, the trust is already established. There's no objections. There's no verbal jujitsu to try to get somebody over the line.

It's like if the offer's there, if they want it, they'll take it.

Are there any other things that you think we need to talk about in terms of because the dream that people, other people, you don't sell this, but other people who sell membership as the golden goose egg of everything, of all of our dreams and wishes and desires in life, is like people pay you every single month.

And of course they do as long as they don't cancel.

So there's two parts. There's the acquisition of brand new members, which is one thing we have to constantly be topping that up and using all those strategies. But then there's the retention bit, which is really where the money is sort of made, I would say.

Anything else retention-wise? You've got the gamification stuff you talked about, which is very powerful.

Yep. I've seen some coaches, because the acquisition is automated, it requires zero sales calls, zero DMs.

I've seen some people treating the subscription itself and how they deliver in the same fashion, where a subscriber will join, they will tag them under the welcome post and then just expect or hope that they're going to engage, hope that they're going to go through the course content.

So one very simple thing that we've done that's massively improved our retention rates is when a new subscriber joins, I just reach out to them personally with a voice note. I mention their name so they know it's not AI or it's not sort of copied and pasted.

And then I just set a note in my calendar for seven days time. I reach out to them, check in, see if there's anything I can do to help keep them in momentum.

And then I set one more reminder after 30 days.

After that point, I don't physically reach out to these subscribers, but those three touch points, it kind of opens the door and invites them to start engaging with me. And it shows them that they're not just another number and I actually have their back throughout the process.

So that's been massive.

Outside of that, it's just the obvious things like we need a community, we need to run one group call a week. Obviously, we've got the course content, which is gamified. And then we have support, doesn't have to be one-to-one, could be in a group.

And then finally having some kind of weekly content cadence and a rhythm where we might have funnel feedback Fridays or what were your wins on Fridays? Or what are you focused on for the week ahead on Mondays?

And just trying to create a rhythm to encourage our subscribers to engage and create a really cool culture within the community as well.

Because I think it's community and culture that really drives retention.

I love it. I love it.

Awesome. Is there anything else that we haven't covered that we should have done?

I think that's pretty much it.

I've been asked a couple of times, I've seen a lot of people, Dan, they drive ads to a school community and you just get the $97 a month from the school community with the trial. Why don't you do that?

And the simple answer is, is that if you do that inside of school, you can take the payment, they get access to school, that's fine. But you can't redirect them to an upsell and a downsell and another upsell.

So we can't run this kind of ad liquidation process by having upsells on the back end. And that's exactly why we run it to a funnel.

Yeah.

Amazing. I love it. I love it. I love it.

I'm sure lots of people want to know more about what you're doing, get the details of every single piece of this. And of course, see videos of you and your duck.

So where can people find out more?

Yeah. So you can just jump over to subscription.kings on Instagram. I show up there, post content just about every single day.

And yeah, shoot me a message. I don't have a VA in my inbox. You can just message me.

It's always going to be me. It's never going to be AI or a Filipino VA.

Love it.

Awesome. Thank you so much, man. This has been awesome fun.

Dude, thank you for having me. It's been great.