Welcome to a year in review!
Yes, this is JJ actually writing 👀
PLEASE NOTE, THIS WAS WRITTEN ON BETTERTHANDATA WHICH NO LONGER EXISTS & IS NOW THE LAB
– JJ REYNOLDS
Businesses, regardless of size. LOVE To lie. You have heard it before. Our service generates X leads, we know how to do Y, or we can use BigQuery to build you reports.
One of the things, I personally love to do is sluth around on Open Start Up (Originally found this becuase of Nomad List. But, sadly they are no longer /Open) and the OG bloggers who would do income reports; Pat Flyn, Matt Giovanisci, Paul Jarvis, Jason Zook, etc. .
The transparency was truly amazing! Sadly, many do not still do this as much as they used to.
My Mottos is with transparency comes ACTION, so we are going to lead the charge. If we really are great Measurement Professionals, we should have this dialed to a science 🔬🧬
This is our 🔬science🧬 !
In all honesty, I finished writing this in March of 2023, but had been keeping notes about the past here.
The theme of 2022 was Sustainable Growth (Just JJ)
Starting 2022, it was just I (JJ) + 2-3 Contractors; Managing clients, contractors, & marketing. I was rocking client work for Mediauthentic (Agency) with a few contractors to help follow SOPs for GTM, UA set ups, BigQuery, while learning GA4 learnings.
The model I was shooting for was HIGH value HIGH strategy & HIGH impact. (Call me snoop dog, I was so high 🤣)
About the end of Q1, the goal shifted to build a full team to support clients as we grew & share along the way! I realized to hit the next level, I needed to build a small team of A+ players.
So I buckled up & worked a 💩 shit ton.
In order to go from I to we, we needed money in the bank. So that was the plan for Q1 2022, GET MONEY SAVED. It worked 🎉. I was able to save 6 months of runway at our new burn rate & hire fulltime (Stockton) & (Sophie) while still maintaining our contractors!
#Turned I into WE
Luckily, I knew both Stockton & Sophie before we hopped business together. We got busy creating the standard client service & sharing our combined skills inside of The Lab?
There definitely was a bit of a learning curve & I (personally) was taking less $ home, but was able to be home more & having a team of people who want the same goal it different than contractors.
Why Build The Lab?
ATTN: This question is what you should ask anyone who is teaching on the internet.
Why don’t you just do it & Make the $$$$.
The plan is to have revenue coming from the Agency side which covers everyones salaries then The Lab serve as extra learnings & fun! We want to make this a no brainer. This was the genesis of the ☀️Sunset Subscription (more on this later)
Three quick reasons why:
- It’s a heck of a lot of fun to teach🥳
- We get to share behind the scenes of the business 💪 (i’ve always wanted this)
- Share things we learn from clients we can try on ourselves!
- Building a community is something i’ve always wanted to do.
The goal is not to replace agency work, it’s just to have fun and do something worth sharing! I am sure one day we will have more $ coming in from BTD, but today (March 12) Is not that day.
We spent the first half of the year (Jan → August) getting things nailed down on the agency! That was it!
🤔 August 1 – The Idea of Education?
We started to think about what would be the ‘best’ solution to share what we are doing over at Mediauthentic.
We get to do a lot of fun and interesting things which we wanted to share with others.
Stockton & I are two sides of the same coin.
Stockton has a TON of great experience on Servers, Development, e-commerce & working with large teams.
I (JJ) have experience in Agencies, Data Visualization, Google Ads, direct response & strategizing measurement solutions with clients & teams.
After a POW-WOW We ended up deciding on two things.
- ACTION needs to be at the center
- DATA needs to be drive the “Action”
- It should be easy to EXPLAIN
SOOOOO birthed “The Lab”
We thought that was pretty good.
August 14 Two weeks later I bought the domain & we were off to the races
(Fun fact I now own 10 domains… I might have a problem)
Throughout August we basically fleshed out the idea. Pricing structure etc.
We were entering a market with a ton of long standing measurement educational companies.
If you don’t want to buy from us: Don’t worry, there are a ton of other great players in the market: MeasureSchool.com, MeasurementMarketing.io, AnalyticsMania.com, SimoAhava.com, LovesData.com,
Then there are marketing companies who “try to teach” analytics as part of their training. (digital marketer, cxl, etc)
Our Marketing Customer Profile Plan
So how did we plan on differentiating???
- We are Advanced
- Show real world applications – Heck we share our data
- Help consultants & agencies get to action faster!
- Don’t pull any punches on how to do something advanced & why
September 1 – Opt-ins, Plans & Content!
We had an initial idea.
The goal is was to not just share “what the buttons do, but how they work with each other”
To do this we broke the content up into sections.
I built an MVP of the site using Adobe XD, Elementor, WordPress, & a few other plugins! I am a big fan of our article template → The Lab
- Foundations: These are more button pushing, how to use the tool
- Action Paths: When multiple systems are involved, its an action path
- Strategy: How to think about things
- Resources: All the other stuff (SOPs, videos, etc)
- SOPs??: We aren’t sure what these are yet
This was the plan! Now we just had to build it
Then we built a quiz to have some sort of lead magnet while we build the content – /quiz
(in hindsite this didn’t work out too well for lead generation)
Marketing Plans
You can’t sell something to no one!
Currently we had 0 people that knew about Better Than Data. But, I did have some people who bout this sites future on LookerStudio.VIP/BTSF <- These people got the deal of a lifetime! (although they just had to wait a little bit)
Here was our general marketing plan:
- Youtube Channel = 2 videos per week – We needed some sort of hype
- Stockton on Monday
- JJ on Thursday
- LookerStudio.VIP Newsletter (600 people)
- Every Thursday I send a newsletter about looker studio
- The LookerStudio CheatSheet Optin that seems to convert well (quality is pretty low)
- Public Roadmap
- I am a huge fan of building in public (heck your reading this), it allows you to be authentic and not be a sleezy marketer → /roadmap
- Better Than Data Newsletter
- The idea is that every first & fourteenth we send out a state of affairs around BTD → First & Fourteenth
- Get Notified: Just a /Join Page goes live (this was just sharing what on earth we are doing
- Basic Foundation Courses Started!
By the end of September we had a marketing site, 2 lead magnets, a plan & the ability to launch!
October was all about creating the content!
- Foundations
- Google Tag Manager
- Looker Studio (then Data Studio)
- Google Server Side Tag Manager
- Value Delivery Strategy
- Conversion Tracking Action Path
- Foresight front end
- Action Paths
- Conversions
The Tech Stack
Next we needed to upload all that content & build the system!
It was a bit of work 😆 But luckily we were able to just build it. Between Stockton & I, we have built numerous sites on WP, Plugins, and other bits & bobs. This time we actually had direction though 😛
For everyone curious:
- CMS = WordPress
- Theme = Hello
- Builder = Elementor Pro
- Advanced forms = ConvertBox
- Basic Forms = Elementor Forms
- Course Post Types = CourseCurour
- Membership Management = WishMember
- Email Marketing = Active Campaign
- Cart System = Thrive Cart
- Community = Slack
- Plumbing = Pabbly & Zappier
The Launch & Marketing Plan
✅ Product – More or less figured out
✅ Marketing Plan – More or less figured out
😬 Sales Plan – No Idea
Personally I’ve always been a terrible sales person! But plan we can do!
Our plan was to launch → Nov 1-11 for $2k for all access to Better Than Data Unlimited.
Just to be 100% clear, these people who bought had basically NOTHING except a roadmap and a few other things we were able to put together. That’s it.
BUT (big but)
They were on a 🌇 Sunset Subscription?!!
What is that?
Introducing The Sunset Subscription Plan – Aka The idea that might backfire or is the most genius thing on earth!)
Our Hypothesis is that most people should be able to learn what they need to know with offering measurement & the tactics behind it within 20 Months. So why should you need to pay forever?
At the same time…. We were still figuring everything out!
The diminishing returns of something are important to notice. I wrote an entire article about it on visionlabs.com/utils its honestly one of my favorite theories (only thing I learned in college)
Three Options:
- $200/month for X months.
- Total Price / 3 (tri pay)
- Up front $2,000
The kicker is every time we re-open the doors is that it raises by $200 because there will be
(a) more content
(b) a better product!
So Join the waitlist to be notified.
The kicker is that there is no price break for paying up front! You simply can decide what works for you!
We do not want to penalize someone for not having the cash upfront therefor has to pay a larger amount of money over time. That just doesn’t make any sense.
Eventually we most likely will go to a full blown subscription. But until that time, we will see how things shake out!
The November 2022 Launch 🚀
We launched to everyone who had been either
(a) watching us build this
(b) knew me from before
(c) found the tiny youtube channel/website through the nominal SEO traffic.
I sent 11 Emails & we hopped on 1 live calls for 2 hour to a list of just over 600 people.
These were the 11 email subjects/themes I sent
- Announced it Nov 1
- What is BTD
- The Plan & Roadmap
- Why it will be different
- Live Call if you want to join
- We are live
- What people have said (reviews)
- How pricing works
- Impact we make with clients
- Doors close 12 hours
- Doors close 2 hours
My favorite part was our custom footers & drawing the user in the group photo 🎉 👇
Ta – Da~ That is what I sent! & Here were the results!
*****📊 573 People Saw the /Join Page 📊
****🎰 63 People saw the order form 🎰
***🎉 27 total sales 🎉
- 4 x $2,000 up front
- 1 x $666 x 3month (tripay)
- 22 x 200/month x 10 months
You can #Math the total launch value, but it was way better than I had thought for a launch!
Building a better system
What we had was really catching fire with the people inside of BTD. 🔥 Our BTDers are really popping off!
Our goal was to create a really helpful community to help people where they are & get to where they need to go!
Looking into 2023 🔮
Let me go ahead and pull out a crystal ball to see what 2023 holds!
The plan will be to open & close better than data more or less 6 times in the year. In an ideal world, we will be able to add a minimum of 10 people every time we open & close the program.
I’m sure some months we will be below that and some months above that benchmark.
Marketing plans will rely on 3 things
- Youtube Growth
- We are putting effort into organic YouTube Traffic. The Ambitious goal is we hope we will cross 10k subscribers in 2023
- Stockton & I alternate weeks to get the most impact during the week!
- LookerStudio.VIP Growth
- I wrote about 20 bombdiggity articles in 2022 I hope they start to gain more tracktion along side the older youtube videos.
- Affiliate Game
- We plan to have a sweet affiliate center to allow our members to make $ by referring other BTDers
- Partnerships/Speaking
- If we can get to speak on stages Virtual/Physical it will help to get more awareness for the BTD program (most likely will also refer new clients too)
- We are trying to get into bed with people in the online space which offer other services. But we are new so odds of great partnerships are low to start.
Alrighty!
That is all folks!
If you are a competitor, that is the marketing plan to follow 🤣 .
If you are a potential BTD member, feel free to Join the waitlist
Otherwise I’ll see you in 2024 review hopefully sharing even more fun stuff!
