I come from nothing and even today I cannot even comprehend
the numbers that we're doing right now.
You just need one thing that will go well.
What's your experience with like actually selling your first
product? My very first kind of like paid
product. It was a massive failure
already. I had five 100K on TikTok and I
think I sold $820 preset. I work way more than before
because I decide to do that. We decided to test it and from
day one it started going literally like crazy.
They will recognize me as the a studio guy.
So when somebody comes in your mind who can make a studio like
Built that guy, I joined forces with two other guys and these
guys are absolutely killing it with ads.
How did you go from like your friend asking you to set up a
studio for him to like running a course now and having helped
over 1000 people with that? After I started teaching, I
learned about myself that I love teaching.
Like I love seeing other people succeed with my help.
Like it's so it's, I don't know. It's amazing when they come to
you and say, Oh yeah, this changed my life.
And this happened with kids when I was swimming, when I was like
teaching them how to swim and also with personal trainer, they
changed the body go through a transformation thanks to your
help. And they, they will always
remember you, right. So it's something that I, I
don't know if it's like egoistic or if it's like completely
opposite egoistic. I don't know.
But it makes me feel very happy when other people succeed with
my help. So when I switched gear and I
went to social media full time, I had to abandon the, the
fitness and the teaching also because it was paying incredibly
low per hour. So it's just like it's not worth
it. And then I decided to create
courses about photography because I built an audience
quite fast on social media thanks to TikTok.
When I joined in 2020, it was like the early days.
It was very fast for me to grow. And then after I made the first
course, I loved it and I saw a lot of interest.
So slowly I built more courses, more courses, more courses.
And then I had I think like 6 on Skillshare when Skillshare
decided to cut the payouts like crazy.
We're talking about a 70% decrease from one month to the
next. And not only me, but everybody.
Wow. So obviously the amount of money
that I was getting from Skillshare was not really worth
it anymore. So I decided to kind of change
approach and try to sell courses individually on, on my website
as a platform through the audience.
Then the first first course that I tried to sell was a course on
how to create reels with your phone, which was the most
popular one that I had on Skillshare.
And it didn't go too bad, but it was not like extremely
profitable and it was taking me a long time.
So we decided to pause on that one.
And then that time I was building the new course of the
home studio blueprint. Then even that one, the home
studio blueprint, which is the current course that I have right
now. It was meant to be on
Skillshare. And then we decided with my
previous agency to test it with my audience to just to see
because again, all the content was going super well.
And from day one, it started going literally like crazy.
Like from day one that we started posting, we did some
ads, we did a little organic content.
The response was unbelievable. So we decided to keep pushing,
keep exploring, keep kind of expanding that the whole funnel
behind the home studio blueprint.
And then last month, I decided to part ways with my previous
agency because I saw that they were amazing, but they were not
what I was looking for in terms of partnership.
They're an agency and therefore they don't really dedicate as
much time as I would like to to my personal brand and my
products. And then I joined forces with
two other guys that I met actually through the course,
which is funny as well. And these guys are absolutely
killing it with ads, with funneling, with e-mail marketing
and all the stuff. And they're just taking the
product to the moon. You open so many doors that I
want to poke a little bit deeper into specifically the ads
perspective. But first I just want to go back
to like the common creator struggle, right?
Putting something on Skillshare and earning passive revenue
under quotations is one thing, but a lot of people struggle to
put something online and charge real money for that.
Was it ever something that you've experienced?
We're like, I don't know, hesitant.
Does that make sense? What's your experience with like
actually selling your first product?
I, I totally relate to that. It's, it was, it is still like
some somehow difficult because with the guys now we are
thinking about high ticket and we are charging very high prices
for like custom studio setups and stuff.
But then the way I think of it is like, it took me so many
years to gather these skills. Right now I'm putting everything
I know that I've learned with a ton of mistakes and a ton of
money wasted on useless gear and uses useless things on on on the
background and shit like that into a very jam packed, value
packed course that will cost you, let's say 20, fifty, $100.
And it will save you so many hours and so much money spent on
anything and the return of investments.
It's huge. So I'm a big fan of courses in
general. I buy a lot of courses myself.
I invest in coaches. We also have Nick as a coach,
right? And for me, it's like the
experience that somebody else has and then it's put into
something that I can buy in a much shorter period of time.
For me, it's amazing. So that's that's the way you
should think about. And when I posted my very first
kind of like paid product, it was a presets for portraits.
And it was a massive failure. Like I already had probably 500K
on TikTok and I don't, I don't really remember maybe 100K on,
on IG. So like big numbers, you know,
and I think I sold I think $820 preset and it took me like 3
weeks to full, full day to, to put, to put them up and, and
stuff like that, right. Reason being is because people
don't really buy presets unless you are extremely famous for
your colors and your images. You know so the product should
be extremely related to the organic content you create.
I was doing presets, I was doing, sorry, portraits and
photography, yes. But my colors, I was not famous
because of my colors, you know what I mean?
So it's just like it was not really a matching product.
So that's like the the first kind of thing you need to
understand is like if you can bring value to people and maybe
save them hours and money and also have a return of
investments. Because now when you buy my
course, you're going to look much better on camera.
And then clients will pay you more, people will trust you
more, you'll build authority. And that's the return of
investments. That's why I think the price of
what you pay is nothing compared to the return that you get.
And that's why I was like, OK, I'm good to charge some money.
Yeah. Love it, love it.
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Thanks for being here and now let's get back to the episode.
At what point or what made you decide I'm going to run ads for
this? Like I think most creators I
have conversations with value organic content.
They want to work with the algorithm, so to speak, to get
the reach and then create a flywheel through that.
But you just kind of, even though you have a lot of reach,
bypass that with ads to drive people directly to the product.
What was your thought process behind that and how did you get
there? So ads are just another way of
reaching the right people faster.
So yes, you can go by organic content and I really like an
intense like a good reach. But then maybe with my organic
content, I sell $2000 worth of products per month, maybe 3000
in a good month. With ads, there's no limit on
how much you can sell. So ads is just a shortener of
whatever kind of journey you're into.
And also with ads, it can be a good way to test things in a
much faster way, which means, as I told you before, the the viral
video group in the other course, it was not selling super well.
Like the home studio blueprint. There are many reasons that we
found out about. And like maybe we can go into
that if if your interest. But the main thing is like we
pushed it and we killed it very quick.
If you don't use ads and you try just organically, maybe it'll
take you 612-2436 months to understand whether this product
is actually a killer or not. So in business, if you want to
succeed, you want to try things very fast and kill very fast,
even faster, whatever is not working.
So this is kind of like my my view on that with ads.
There's so many benefits that I can see right now using ads.
We are spending a really, really high amount of money right now
in ads and it grows my personal brand because I go in front of
more eyes of my exact audience that I want more people seeing
my content, which means that more opportunities are coming
up. I've got asked to do a bunch of
speaking gigs. I've got asked to go into
companies to do workshops. It's just overall, it's just
having more eyeballs on your content.
And the whole concept behind it is that if you spend 1:00, but
you get back 2, that's worth doing.
And then you can scale it up as well big time, because there's
no limit on how much money you can spend with ads.
And the good thing about ads on the digital space with digital
products and courses in general, is that you see the return of
investments on the same day, on the same minute, you know what I
mean? Because you can check that you
spent 100 and you made 120. So that makes makes sense.
And also what I noticed is that with ads you can sell way better
than with organic content. Not sure why.
I think it's a psychological effect that people think that
whenever they see content wise scrolling that is not sponsored
that content should be free. Whereas if they, if they see
that is sponsor like adv on, on the top left, whatever on
Instagram, like paid, they are ready to purchase because they
know that this is an ad that is going to sell you something.
And therefore we found even higher success with ads than
with organic content. With organic content, it's still
like necessary to create more touch points with the audience
and just keep showing your face and keep showing what you're
doing, keep showing that you know your stuff.
But with ads, it's just like a it's a machine that can help a
lot, a lot succeeding and just making happen in this space.
Fascinating perspective. You said that you see the
results immediately if you spend 1 and you get to what happens
between somebody seeing an ad and a purchase being made and
like showing up on your dashboard?
It depends on the kind of the product and depends on
especially how expensive will be what you want to sell.
For low ticket courses or low ticket products in general, you
want to go for conversion directly.
Like you don't want to take them through a massive journey
because for every step you might increase the chance that a
certain person will convert, but for every step, you're going to
lose more people. So if it's a low ticket, you
just want to try to convert as quickly as possible.
So for us AD, you click the link, you go on my landing page,
you buy the course done for high ticket products, for example,
what you can do is that you have a lead magnet instead with the
ad. So you're going to say, OK,
there's a free training, 7 days free training, free master
class. And then you make sure that you
deliver a ton of value in that lead magnet and therefore people
will trust you more. And then with maybe webinars,
maybe with follow up emails, with whatever you want, then you
then upsell the high ticket after you demonstrated that you
bring in a lot of value. There is a rule in marketing
that says that the person before buying from you will need to see
your product or your service at least seven times in seven
different places. This is kind of like one of the
rules that you see in books. And that's also true.
That's why it's so important to keep showing up consistently,
non-stop, and not judge the success or the failure of a
single product in a in a single day.
And you know what I mean? If you launch it and it doesn't
go well one day, then you need to kill it.
That's not how it works. You need to give it a bit of
time, enough time to have people to see it, understand it, so on,
so forth. Yeah, so.
What makes a product succeed? Or you know what made the
difference between continuing down, like putting money into it
or promoting it versus killing it after like a short run?
If you're positive or negative, especially with ads, you can
spend. Let's say you spend $100 in ads
for a product. If you make 99.9, it's not going
to work because the more you spend, the more you're going to
lose. The way you should think about
it is like as long as your profit and you're paying also
yourself, which means it's worth the time that you're investing
in into creating ads and to manage it back end and to doing
customer support and everything, then you can keep going with
that product. And also you need to think about
the fact that with time you will be able to optimize it even more
to understand what are your needs of your customer, what are
the right target, what people are not liking about the course
and therefore you can adjust it and therefore make it better and
increase in conversion rates. You can understand more about
your landing page and gather all the data that is is good for
just bringing the business forward.
There is a lot, a lot, a lot behind the scenes that my guys
right now are doing to optim, to optimize small things.
I, I am more the organic content face and I don't know much about
the single data that we are gathering, but I know that
that's like key. That's why also when you reach a
certain scale, at a certain point, it's super important that
you have somebody that understands the back end if you
are the face and if you are the creator of whatever.
Has running ads changed how you make content?
In terms of organic content, no, it's still the same with ads,
though they're different. I don't use, sometimes I use the
organic content and then I add maybe a CTA at the end for the
ads. But sometimes we need to create
bespoke ads for a certain target.
Because whenever you are using ads, you want to have a very
specific angle, very specific target, and use words that are
resonating with that target rather than just going general
with, which is what you do when maybe you're creating organic
content. You already dropped a lot of
wisdom when it comes to like scaling as a creator, but if you
have like one kind of lesson or one thing that more creators
should know or think about when it comes to business, is there
anything that comes to mind? Try a billion things and fail
with all of them but one. At the end of the day, you
really need one thing and I think what I understood is that
you want to be as specific as possible.
Super important. Right now my product is
extremely niche. I teach entrepreneurs how to
build a look epic on camera, how to build their home studio look
epic on camera. That's it.
Then I have other things, but the core product, it's that one
bang on and I am known hopefully is the studio guy.
So when somebody comes in your mind who who can make a studio
like boom, that guy. So that's super important.
Then test, test, test, test as much as possible and solve one
problem. I think it's quite important to
to just OK, is this a problem for a normal person with?
In my case, yes. Is a problem because people just
look not great on camera and they I'm pretty sure they want
to look better. To wrap things up, what does
success look like to you? I come from a very small village
where I had no idea that all of this was possible for me.
What I've been taught in school is that you just need to find a
full time job that pays you €1200 a month, keep it until you
retire. That's what's been like what
everybody was saying. And then a bit of luck, a bit of
courage, a bit of, I don't know, I found out about a world that
is much bigger than than I thought.
And even today I cannot even comprehend the numbers that
we're doing right now. Like I, I, it's, it's, it's
unbelievable how much money we are making and how much this is
actually helping other people. So for me, success is has been
already achieved years ago when I managed to go full time into
social media and now everything that comes on top of whatever
happened already for me, it's just a massive ultra E per
something that I was not expecting before.
It's just super, super success. But in terms of what I would be
happy with, obviously now because I have this and like I
love working, I love building new things, so I'll keep doing
and I don't have any target in mind.
I just really enjoy what I do. But for me, success happened
when I was able to live decent life without having to do a nine
to five. That's like managing my time.
If I want to go to the gym at 11, AMI can do whatever I want.
If I want to take a day off, I do whatever.
You know what I mean? That's that's what success looks
like for me. Super, super personal, but I I
love the freedom and I love being able to do what you love
on a daily basis. I wake up every day wanting to
start work ASAP and I finish as late as I can because I just
love it. As long as I can do my workout
daily. Amazing.
Well this was a great chat. If people want to know more
about you, what's the best place they can follow you?
How can people stay in your orbit?
You can find me on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube at Pharaoh
21. Just send me a message on
Instagram. I try to get back to everybody.
Sometimes it's not easy because it's just my chat is absolutely
jammed, but I do my best I. Hope you enjoyed this video,
leave a comment down below with your favorite take away.
And if you want to hear more about Simona Studio Blueprint,
how to make any space look epic, click this video right here
somewhere. I'll see you over there.