This week has been one of big wins, great excitement, important validation, big $$$ and marketing momentum…
That’s a lot of buzzwords.
I’m excited to be writing this one, because starting any new business initiative, whether an app or otherwise, is mostly a lot of dull hard work behind the scenes.
So you kinda live for these moments where it feels like an entire year of progress happens in one week.
Let’s get into it…
The Numbers
Before we get into it, here are some key numbers…
- Active subscribers: 1,409 (1,089) (656)
- MRR: $17,304 ($12,652) ($6,260)
(This is after churn, which is far, far too high. But that’s a story for another day. Today, I’m gloating.)
Validating a Key Principle
When I first thought about the StoryLearning App, one of the biggest things on my mind was avoiding cannibalising the existing business.
In fact, that was one of the main questions I’m getting from entrepreneurs around this whole project:
“How are you going to avoid disrupting your existing business while still growing the new thing?”
Good question.
Because, after all, I have over $1 million of costs to meet inside StoryLearning, so I can’t exactly down tools and sabotage the existing revenue generation, now can I?
So my strategy was quite simple:
Don’t touch our existing lead generation or marketing funnels.
Instead, I’d have to find other ways to promote the app.
In the last few issues of this newsletter, I’ve been outlining what some of those things are: AEO, SEO, partnerships, etc.
But one of the main things I’ve been doing is simply dropping mentions of the app into my existing content.
If you’ve watched any of our recent YouTube videos or podcasts, you’ll see me mentioning the app as part of the content. But I do it in a highly contextualised way (linking it to the topic) usually halfway through the video, so as to leave the main call to action (which usually comes at the beginning) untouched.
Up until last week, YouTube had already proven to be one of the main drivers of sales, as you can see from this tracking data that I’ve been collecting.
But then, last Friday, we put out this video…
To say that this video went bananas would be to give bananas too much credit.
Because this video popped off like a pack of Mentos in a bottle of Coke…
At the time of writing, the video is only 4 days old, but it has generated well over 500,000 views and shows no sign of slowing down.
There’s a technical term for this kind of video…
A banger.
Now, this video has already generated over 7,000 leads, which I will gladly take with a nod and a smile.
But what’s been most interesting is what’s happened on the app side of things.
As per my highly sophisticated drawing above, I gave the app the briefest of mentions about halfway through the video…
And people watching this video seem to have responded like bulls to a red rag, and have been buying in droves.
In fact, we’ve made hundreds of sales of the app from this very briefest of mentions since last Friday.
We don’t really have a good sense of LTV at this stage, but my best guess is that this will be worth $37,000 over the lifetime, assuming numbers hold up.
What’s crazy to me is that such an extremely brief mention can generate so much revenue.
But it’s also super validating for my main internal growth strategy:
Simply mentioning the app contextually around our existing content.
Whether this has any negative impact on our other product sales remains to be seen.
But it certainly hasn’t had any impact on leads.
So this is great.
Needless to say, I don’t expect we’re going to get videos popping off like this every week (although we’ll try our damnedest).
But it does demonstrate very clearly one of my other premises for creating the app:
In a world where people are buying fewer and fewer courses…
And customer behaviour is skewing in a K-shape towards either very low or very high ticket…
One of the best ways to monetise a high-volume audience like ours is going to be with low-ticket subscription products.
And that’s exactly what’s happened.
The lesson here:
Make use of extra capacity inside your content.
Don’t assume that you can only have one CTA.
You can mention a whole bunch of things.
Your audience is paying attention.
And if you make useful things, then mentioning them very briefly, in context, can drive direct sales.
I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures from the Creator Empires mastermind that I ran in Tenerife last week.
I’ve been on the road a lot this year, which has been exhilarating but also quite draining.
(And I’m not done yet!)
This event was fantastic, though.
And if you’re reading this as a language learning influencer, then you really should join us at a future event – here’s the link to find out more.
Next week:
- Releasing a new higher tier
- Launching a new marketing push
Namaste,
Olly
