Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 1 - New Book Funnel Month 1 Results
Synopsis:
Mike Shreeve opens the books on a fresh acquisition funnel launched Jan 7, 2021: a book + audiobook + 2 trainings, 2 order bumps, 1 upsell, driven purely by cold Facebook ads. In 22 days it sold 804 books (~30–40/day while scaling), generated 48 booked calls (~5% so far; expects ~10% as buyers finish a 220-page/8-hour book and with the 15/85 rule long tail), and closed 11 high-ticket deals (23% close; target 40% after sales enablement and messaging tweaks).
Ad spend: $30,510. Front end revenue: $27,787 → ~$6k loss on the book funnel alone.
Back end revenue: pushes total revenue to $99,087, yielding $59,993 after-ad profit in three weeks—despite a front-end loss.
Key lessons:
Treat the book as acquisition, not profit; the backend makes the model.
Expect lagging KPIs (read time → call booking).
Simple control math: ~1 high-ticket sale per 100 books.
Priorities: (1) lift close rate toward 40% (biggest lever = +$60k vs. shaving $6k FE loss), (2) nudge AOV to break even on the front end (small pricing/bump/email tweaks), (3) scale traffic (add YouTube/affiliates; aim for $100k/month spend by recycling dollars: $1 in → $1 out → redeploy).
Bottom line: a disciplined acquisition funnel plus a well-designed backend can go from $0 to ~$100k revenue and ~$60k profit in 3 weeks, with plenty of upside from sales process and spend scaling.
Transcript:
Peaceful Profits Review: New Book Funnel Month 1 Results
[00:00:00] Hello, my friends. Hope you're doing well. In this video, I want to give you some case study background information on a launch that we just had internally. So this is a book funnel that we launched in January of 2021, and I wanna make sure that I break down the actual data, the actual numbers, not just revenue, so you can see what it takes, what it looks like, what's possible, et cetera.
Now a few disclaimers here. One, [00:00:30] obviously your mileage may vary. And the reason for that is because we've been doing this for a very long time and we are, we've gotten very good at it. So please don't necessarily compare or feel bad or expect the same results out the gate, right? We've been training for this for a very long time.
We launch these funnels all the time at least once per quarter, sometimes once per month, just [00:01:00] depending on what we're up to. So please understand that before we get into the nitty gritty. Additionally your results may vary because of what your backend looks like, what your offer is, what the book is, et cetera, et cetera.
So this is just one example. From one team who has done a couple of these and is gonna share some results. Okay? That's all this is. But I want you to see what this looks like. So this is, [00:01:30] again, January of 2021. We didn't actually launch this particular book funnel until January 7th. It was your standard book plus, audiobook plus video training, plus another video training. It had two order bumps and one upsell. Okay. It launched January 7th. I am making this video, audio [00:02:00] on January 29th. So we are looking at 22 days of data. Okay, so first thing is that we sold 804 books between January 7th and January 29th.
So for us that's quite low. Our average was much less than a hundred books per day, and that's mostly because those of you who [00:02:30] are watching this in the future during this particular time period. Facebook has been quite difficult just meaning there's been lots of glitches and problems. So we've actually not been able to spend nearly as much as we would have liked to have spent.
Additionally we the 804 book total, which averages, about 40, 30, 40 books per day. It is something that we normally do in the [00:03:00] beginning of our process to make sure that the conversion from book sales to booked calls to closed high ticket sales is refined because we don't want to waste a bunch of potential buyers on bad calls or, bad systems or anything like that.
It's certainly a portion of what the book will end up selling. So hopefully, [00:03:30] very soon we'll get to a point where we're selling. 800 books per week rather than 800 books per three weeks. And all we have to do is just step on the gas with advertising. That's all we have to do. So it's not and tripling what we were spending as very easy, we're not talking about going from 10,000 a day to 30,000 a day.
And we'll talk about how much we've spent but it's very realistic for us to be able to at least double, if not triple [00:04:00] here in probably the next four to six weeks. Okay? So that is how many books we sold, 804 books in three weeks. Obviously we didn't, we're not stopping selling. If anything, we're selling more and more.
So if you were to look at a graph of how many books we're selling per day, it started with, five books the first day. Seven books the second day, 10, 15, 30, and it's just constantly going up. So with Facebook, you can't just go from [00:04:30] zero to a hundred books overnight without spending. Without unnecessarily spending more in costs per sale than is required.
Okay? So Facebook does not scale very nicely. It can scale, but there's penalties as you scale up, meaning it becomes more expensive to sell your books. So we slow roll into it. Again, we want to have everything refined. And then also the Facebook platform itself. We wanna make sure it's playing nice with us.
That's a realistic look at the first three [00:05:00] weeks of a book about 804 copies of those 804 copies. We had 48 booked calls so far. Now, here's an interesting thing about the booked call number. So that's about a 5% ish around there. So it's about five ish percent of all book buyers have booked a call with us.
Now, here's the interesting thing about that number. The reality is [00:05:30] that we're only three weeks into the promotion. Meaning the funnel has only been live for three weeks, which by definition means a portion of the book. Buyers haven't even finished the book yet, especially the people who just bought this last week.
And if you remember back to how we've been scaling the book, sales we sold last week. Almost as many books as we sold in the first [00:06:00] two weeks, right? Because we start slow. We scale up. This last week a lot more books. The people from the last week, certainly a large percentage of them haven't even gotten through the book yet.
If you remember. Or maybe, I don't know why you would remember, I didn't tell you this. This particular book was a bit longer. It's about almost 220 pages long, so it's about a seven or eight hour audio book. So this is not something that people necessarily sit [00:06:30] down and read in one day or listen to in one day.
So that five ish percent book buyer to book to call number. Is a lagging indicator, meaning it's telling me what happened a week or two ago. And then of course you have all these other unknowns, which is how many of the original buyers have finished the book so far, and et cetera, et cetera. So we still have, if we were to turn the ads off [00:07:00] today, we still probably have another 48 calls.
Okay. We find that on average it all tends to break down to 10% of book buyers will book a call. They just have to catch up, right? So if we were to shut everything down, we'd probably get another 48 calls. So that's just something to think about and something to know and understand.
Additionally, there's the 1585 rule, which is to say [00:07:30] that 15% of the people who are going to buy something do so in the first 90 days. 85% do so after 90 days. So there's that element as well as to how many of those book buyers will end up booking a call with us and buying something from us. Almost 6, 7, 8 times as many people as have done so now will do so 3, 4, 5, 6 months from now.
Generally speaking, that's how it works. They want the nurturing and the [00:08:00] relationship building and all that kind of stuff. Of the 48 calls so far. Again, I say so far, 'cause this is only three weeks old. It's January 29th now, so it's, this has only been going for 22 days. We have 11 of the 48 calls have purchased, so that's about a 23% call close.
Now, to be completely frank, that's much lower than I would like to see for our [00:08:30] backend. There's a couple of reasons for that. One is product education for the sales team. Another element is with this particular offer, there's a little bit more follow up required so it's not as quick of a close in some cases.
And there's some messaging tweaking that needs to go on as well. So it's 23% now, which is fine. I'd like to see 40. That's what I would be looking for. 40% is, I'm more comfortable with that, so that's great. First three [00:09:00] weeks we got 23% close. That's not too bad. I didn't take any of the close calls sales team did.
So that's pre typical with sales teams. You got, they need to familiarize themself with the offer and what the pain points are and et cetera. So I'm happy that we have room for improvement and that we will in fact, improve. So we made 11 high ticket sales off of the back of those 804 books, which is just a little over maybe one to 2%, right?
1% [00:09:30] of all book buyers, which means if you sell a hundred books a day, you get a high ticket sale per day, right? Simple math, that's what we like. Really simple math. So that means moving forward. We have a couple options here as our, as a team. One is obviously. Just get more books sold, which seems so obvious.
But one of the things obviously that holds you back is the limitations of your traffic. So we are going to be adding additional traffic sources. Right now, the only thing that is selling that [00:10:00] book is cold Facebook traffic, ice cold. We ran this from a cold account. Meaning it had no lookalikes, no data, no season pixels, none of that.
The page itself had zero likes. So that is that will improve over time. We'll be able to scale that up a little bit. In addition to that, we're adding alternative traffic sources. We'll get some YouTube, maybe some affiliate going. And then our goal, obviously is to get to a [00:10:30] hundred sales per day.
And you can see why if a hundred books equals one high ticket sale per day, you can see how this as a business is a very smart and a very strong. Funnel to have in your business. Okay, now let's talk the actual numbers. We spent $30,510 and 15 cents on the funnel itself. Okay, so that means the book with the order bumps and the [00:11:00] upsell, we spent $30,000 to sell those 804 books.
That funnel, which is just the book. The order bumps and the upsell, remember, which is there to offset ad cost, ended up only making $27,787 and 30 cents. Now when you take out stripe fees and then refunds, 'cause you always have refunds, [00:11:30] we ended up actually losing about $6,000 on the front end. Meaning the funnel, the book funnel itself lost money.
It lost $6,000. This is why I say again and again. Your acquisition funnels are not your main business. The purpose of the acquisition funnel is to fill your backend. 'cause here's what [00:12:00] happens when we add the 11 backend sales. Those 11 backend sales brought us up to $99,087 and 30 cents in revenue.
Okay? $99 87 cents and or $87 and 30 cents in revenue. So we were just shy. So today's the 29th, I imagine by the end of January. So by [00:12:30] February 1st, we will break a hundred thousand dollars in three weeks from this brand new book funnel with a brand new high ticket offer with a brand new everything in the first three weeks.
Now that's revenue. Okay. The actual after ad spend profit. So we take the $6,000 loss and we do our math and all that kind of stuff. So basically [00:13:00] we take away how much we spent in ads. We have an after ad spend profit. In the first three weeks of $59,993 and 47 cents. So three weeks after pressing the go button on the very first a Facebook ad to sell [00:13:30] our.
Book we are seeing a profit of $59,993 and 47 cents. I want to show you the difference, and this is so important that the reason this came out to a after ad spend profit of let's just round it up of $60,000 is because we had a backend, if you take the backend out, so the premium offer. [00:14:00] The reason for writing the book, if you take the backend out, we lost $6,000 to sell our book.
Now that's important to know, and there's a couple of things that's important to know about that. One is to understand that we didn't take a, like a loan or mortgage, our house or front the cash. For that $30,000 in [00:14:30] ad spend most days. Okay? Most days we would spend a dollar and get a dollar back, which means we would just take that dollar we got back and pour it back into ad spend.
There were a couple of occasions, a couple of days where we would get a dollar in and make 75 cents back. Now what happened? During that time is that [00:15:00] we were selling our high ticket stuff. So we might have spent a thousand dollars that we borrowed from the day before. Remember 'cause a dollar in a dollar out, we just keep it cycling through the Facebook machine.
So you say you spent $30,000? No, we spent a dollar and then just kept recycling that dollar over and over and over and over again 30,000 times. That's what we really spent. But on those days where [00:15:30] a dollar came in and 75 or a dollar went out and 75 cents came back in, we also made a sale for $8,000.
So we may have, quote unquote lost $500 on the funnel while also bringing in on top of the minus 500 plus 8,000. And that's how you're able to go from zero. To a hundred thousand dollars in revenue. Not in a month. In three weeks. [00:16:00] In three weeks from zero. Okay. And that's with the low sales conversion rate.
That's with the mistakes on the front end that we made, which I'm gonna talk about here in a second. That's with all the imperfect pieces. That's with people not having even read the book yet. Probably close to half of them only bought the book this last week. That's with a sales cycle that requires a little bit more follow up than [00:16:30] usual.
Et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so now what does this mean? And this is a very important lesson here. You have the data, you saw our results. What's important is not even the data that I just shared with you, but what we're going to do next. The first thing I want to do is improve that sales conversion rate. And you may say, but Mike, don't you wanna save?
Don't you wanna not lose six grand next month from the funnel? [00:17:00] And my response to you is, what are you talking about? I didn't lose anything on this funnel. I made 60 grand overall. See, that's the thing you have to think about when you're running these campaigns is what is your overall after ad spend profit?
In our case, it's 60 grand, but priority number one is to improve our sales conversion rate. I again, think. It is possible for us to get [00:17:30] above 40%, which if you do the math means we would've gotten closer to 110, $120,000 in after ad spend profit, right? Because just twice as many sales. Instead of 11, we had 22.
So that obviously is a bigger. Point of leverage in my business. Instead of [00:18:00] focusing on how can I save $6,000 next month, I want to figure out how can I add another 60. So I identify within my KPIs, my key performance indicators, the stuff I'm tracking, I identify what is that? Point of leverage. What's the button?
What's the lever? What's the thing I can focus on to add 60? That's [00:18:30] priority number one. Okay, so priority number one, that's what I'm gonna focus on. 'cause the funnel's profitable. I'm not losing money, I just lost money on that one part of it, which I quickly made up with the backend sales point of leverage number, or, sorry.
Priority number two then is once I figure out the sales process. Doubling those sales. The next part that I want to focus on is then getting the funnel to break even, [00:19:00] and I won't go too in depth here in this video about what we're going to do, but I can tell you it's going to be easy. Okay. A few adjustments here.
A few pricing adjustments on a few things here and there. Add a little bit of average order value, maybe add one more little order bump, or do something in the welcome email, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's a hundred different things I can do to increase the average order value so that I'm not only not losing money on that [00:19:30] front end sales funnel, but I might even be making some money, even just a little tiny bit.
It is gonna be nice because I'll be able to scale, but it's only gonna save me six or 12,000. You know what I mean? Like it's, again, it's not the same as focusing on finding another 60, bringing me to 120 after ad spend profit, bringing me to another 150. And then of course, the third priority. [00:20:00] In this process, and this is something that I would do while fixing the average order value.
So step number one is look at that sales process. Are we extracting as many sales as we possibly could be? And then the the second and third priority, which are on the same level, would be just increasing traffic. If I double the traffic that we did. So if I was spending on average about a thousand dollars a day, right?[00:20:30]
22 days or $30,500 in ad spend divided by 22 days, instead of spending about a thousand, I spend about 2000 naturally you would expect for next month to have. What would you have? $59,993 and 47 cents, and after add spend, [00:21:00] profit times two, and then we can try maybe, let's see if in March a month after we get it up to $2,000, let it spend, see how our sales are doing, see how we can tweak stuff, et cetera, et cetera.
Then in March, let's see if we can get up to. $3,000 a day in ad spend. Remember recycling that same dollar. So we spend that first dollar comes back, we push it back in, [00:21:30] push it back in, and we spend it 30,000 times. I would like to get to a point where this particular funnel is spending a hundred thousand dollars a month at least.
Because then that means for me, if all the other numbers stay the same, so whether that's a hundred thousand dollars just on Facebook or a hundred grand on YouTube and or between Facebook and YouTube, or maybe there's a third thing, maybe we get TikTok going or affiliates or something like that. If I can get to [00:22:00] a hundred thousand dollars a month in spending, then that's three times more than what we were doing.
Now, which you would expect to see generally with some improvements in the sales process. The same after ad spend, profit per dollar. So you multiply that by three and that's about $180,000 per month and after ad spend profit and [00:22:30] that's how you use these funnels to grow a business. It doesn't happen overnight.
You have to get the messaging right. Gotta write the right book. Gotta do all the stuff that we teach here. Your mileage may vary, as I mentioned there's still work to be done. There's still things to improve and things to tweak. We've been doing this for a little long time and there's still stuff we can improve, but that is the process.[00:23:00]
That is the pathway, that is the thinking patterns. That is the setup. That is how we do these funnels. It is so important to understand. You cannot do it without a backend. Don't even try it. It's just not worth it. It's just not worth. The struggle and stress of trying to eke out those extra $5 an A OV or constantly mess with your Facebook [00:23:30] ads or constantly mess with your YouTube ads or whatever it is you use to run traffic.
It's much better to set the front end up, say, this is what I get, and then get that backend selling. 'cause as you can see, even though we lost six grand. We made a hundred, nearly a hundred thousand dollars in overall revenue and then $60,000 in after ad spend profit. So that's it my friends, and hopefully this has been a helpful insight into what it takes to launch one of these things.
And so hopefully this will motivate [00:24:00] you to get yours done and you can get started, get working and get stuff rock and rolling. Okay? And that's it, and I'll talk to you later.