22d • General discussion
This is why most info businesses fail
after working with 100s of info businesses in the last several years, here's what separates the ones who keep winning apart from the ones who fizzle out:
speed of iteration.
sounds simple, but let me break it down for you.
the average info guru finds a pocket with their offer that converts like crazy with one specific funnel type
example: high ticket health coaching
maybe they record a killer webinar, run it evergreen, and scale it slowly to ~300k spend a month
they think to grow the biz their main focus points need to be sales + fulfillment
so they put a year or two into growing a killer sales team and ensuring the product is good.
both great things to do
at 100k/mo, they see almost no attrition, so they spend 200k the next month
CAC goes up a bit, but hey, volume is good. "we can afford for costs to be a bit higher."
so they scale more, and eventually they get to 300k/mo.
call costs are higher now, but they're still profitable.
so they try to scale to 400k.
whoops, they made the same amount of profit as they did at 300k. calls stopped converting for some reason? so they focus on sales culture again. fire some reps. hire some others.
they might keep a/b testing the funnel, dialing in some stuff like CRM + followup.
maybe they swap agencies a few times, thinking surely there's someone out there who is better at media buying and can get them past the "scale wall".
but here's what actually happened:
the market moved on.
that webinar format that crushed it 18 months ago has now been seen by the market 100 times. the hooks are stale. the objections have evolved. competitors copied the good parts and improved on them.
meanwhile, the winners never stopped moving.
while the first guy was perfecting his sales team and squeezing another 2% out of his webinar, the winners were testing:
- VSLs when webinars started getting saturated
- application funnels when VSLs got expensive
- advertorials when everyone was running video ads
- challenge funnels when automation got cheap
- low ticket tripwires to offset rising CAC
- youtube ads when facebook got competitive
they weren't better marketers. they just moved faster.
here's the pattern i see in every info business that scales past 8 figures and stays there:
they treat their entire front end like it's in permanent beta.
they're not precious about what's working. they know what works today dies tomorrow.
the biggest mistake i see is treating your funnel like it's your product.
your product is what you deliver. your funnel is just your current best answer to getting someone from stranger to buyer.
and that answer changes. constantly.
the businesses that fizzle out find ONE answer and cling to it like it's their identity.
the businesses that keep winning are already building the next answer before the current one stops working.
speed of iteration.
info is the wild west, and if you're gonna build a business on the back of it, you'd better be ready for some gunfights
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This is why most info businesses fail
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