Jim Huffman 5:24
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s, it’s very like intangible like, Oh, do you have product market fit or not? There are some metrics you can look at for signals, right? So let’s look at both examples of b2b or b2c with b2c, it’s like, Hey, what’s your purchase conversion rate? If you have a price point, that’s even like 100 to 150 bucks? Is it? Is it over 2%? Or one and a half, even with a funnel that hasn’t been optimized? And if it’s a product that has high repeat purchases, that could be a consumable? Or it could be something that’s maybe in like fast fashion? Is your retention strong and other ways you can do it as if you’re doing surveys with net promoter score? And if people are referring it, that’s one thing on the b2b side with SAS, you know, it’s, it’s it really is like, if are people switching from other products to it? And do you have a really low churn rate? And are people using it even despite some of the issues or features you haven’t built out yet? And like, how hard is it to close? Again, it depends on the price point with b2b, but if it’s self service, that people are just throwing money at you, you haven’t optimized your pricing page, that’s quite exciting. Or if it’s going from marketing to sales, if you find that the sales isn’t, even the most sophisticated person can do it. That’s always a good signal. But I mean, those are some kind of like quantitative things, but also things that are a little warm and fuzzy, or you just have to start to get that feeling. And you start to see wow, this is starting to take off.
Jeremy Weisz 6:52
Yeah, I asked that not just for my understanding, but from a company’s understanding if they’re like, it’s nuanced a bit in the, you know, companies out there me be like, are we hitting product market fit? How do we know when we’re hitting product market fit? If someone is not quite at that product market fit? Stage? How do you decide, you know, we’ll take this person on, because obviously makes your job more difficult?
Jim Huffman 7:17
Yeah, we will be very honest, because if we take on someone pre product market fit, sometimes all we’ll do is help them fail significantly faster. So we’ll just call it out, like, Hey, we’re not going to be ROI positive, we might show you that this isn’t working. But we should do it really fast. So we worked with the craft disruption team, where they’re standing up and piloting brands. And so we set up three brands with them. And a lot of startup studios have this idea of a validation machine or a validation team where you’re like, alright, in the most cost effective and fastest way possible, how can we get traffic to a site and try and get a signal that this will work? And the best signal is, will they give you money before that? It’s like a waitlist or pre order. And so, yeah, we have to be very transparent with the clients. And sometimes that occasion, it might be over in three months. But we knew that other times, we can get lucky. And those can be amazing clients, where we work with them for for multiple years, like we had one universal standard. We literally met them as they were just two founders trying to figure out if they had something special there now at over 40 people did over, I think, like 20 million in funding, but we got lucky that we caught them right as they’re getting traction. So we love it. When we can catch companies at that inflection point.
Jeremy Weisz 8:35
Yeah, that’s a great way to use it is a testing ground to see what is going to hit the market, I think. I think it was Tim Ferriss who split tested his title that way of his book, I can’t remember maybe, you know, better than me where he had a couple ads on and he chose the highest converting one just to choose a title.
Jim Huffman 8:54
Yeah, it’s funny. I think that is so smart. Because it’s easy to just like be in your own mind. Like, oh, this is a great idea. But the more you put it out there and let the data drive you is huge. I forget what his other titles were. But it’s funny. It’s one of those titles, like it’s a little cringe, but it’s also I want to read that book. You know, it’s very aspirational.
Jeremy Weisz 9:17
Totally. And you did this, you know, as far as the testing ground for your company, which which I mentioned your product company, what made you decide to start that?
Jim Huffman 9:29
Yeah, so we have a startup studio with growth that one product is One day design that is web pages. The other I think you’re alluding to is Handsome Chaos, which is a direct consumer men’s pomade. And so it’s in it’s actually working. I’m a huge fan of the book, The 22 Immutable Laws of marketing. And in chapter two, it talks about category creation. If you can’t be number one and a category creator and it sounds like alright, you know, I am a dude with long hair and my hair gets oily because of these other products. What if there’s a dry I shampoo and pomade form. So stealing my wife’s dry shampoo, getting powder all over my black shirt, I look stupid. Like there has to be something better. So I was like, what if this existed? So I used a poll, I spoke to 1000 people, and I said, Hey, you gotta find your hair. Is this a problem? One and two, would you pay for a solution? 70% of people said it was a problem. 45 said they would pay for it. The other 40 said, they’d be interested in trying to see if they would pay for it. Because I was trying to see loyalty to a brand and switching costs and see if there was a true problem. So that was enough signal for me like, alright, I’ll test this. So I then set up a landing page ran ads, we got 1000 people on the waitlist, pre sold 25 products that don’t exist, I shut off the ads. I’m like, Alright, I think it’s worth trying to manufacture this and see if we can deliver on it. And that’s where you so I think we’re we’re very good as a marketing agency. And making websites and running ads, where we are not strong is manufacturing real product. So we’re like, 14 months in, we’ve done like 17 variations, we finally nailed the product. Now I’m trying to get it made. And unfortunately, we’re a small fish in a big pond. And our manufacturers like we can’t get you on the line until December, January. So we’re, we’re in the waiting game right now.
Jeremy Weisz 11:21
I want to hear, it’s pretty amazing what you could do. And you know, what I love about your philosophy and your mentality is testing, right? Is there a problem? And will people pay for that problem? And then you recreate the solution instead of create, try to create the solution first, and then failing, right? Spending a lot of time and money. What made you decide to start the startup studio? Yeah, well, it
Jim Huffman 11:47
goes back to like starting an agency, I didn’t want to start an agency or be an agency owner, I wanted to have the big idea. And like, you know, because this is a time, it’s like I’m reading about like, soccer ever again, like the only path is to have that DNA in your dorm room. And then fast forward, you’re a billionaire. So it’s like, oh, I’ll just wait for the idea. But I was, you know, working with a few different startups. And I was consulting on the side, all of a sudden, I’m an agency owner and a consultant, which, to be honest, I do love because I get to work with so many impressive founders doing insanely interesting things. But I always in the back of my mind is like, if we’re such a good growth team, why can we grow our own stuff. And that’s what gets me really fired up. And so as I read about a tuck VC out of Miami, who has a startup studio or Pioneer Square labs in Seattle, and their startup studio, I was like, hey, what would that look like, with an agency model? And so that’s, and it’s something that even my partner at the agency, we were very aligned from the start, the agency isn’t the end goal, the agency is the launchpad to allow us to do the startup studio. So I know if that answers your question. But we, we’ve always wanted to kind of do that. And the agency was the the the mechanism to get there.
Jeremy Weisz 13:05
How do you structure and segment the startup studio from your company? Because I know growth, it is kind of funding. I mean, even Google has, you know, as you know, its own, you know, growth studio or whatever you want to call it, but growth hit funds it your startup studio, what’s the format? How do you decide, listen, this team is going to work a percentage of time or do you segment people are only working on the startup studio? How do you kind of structure that?
Jim Huffman 13:36
Yeah, a couple different ways. Well, first, we had to get the agency in a place where I wasn’t the product, my partner wasn’t the product. And it can really run like a business and not be as dependent on us. We’re still trying to land that plane, but we’re getting better. So that was the first thing that way, we could dedicate time to standing these things up because I love going from zero to one. As far as structuring the agency. There’s kind of two different things we’re thinking through. One is what is a shared resource for the agency versus what is a resource only growth it can have and then only like one day designer handsome casket have the shared resources, kind of obvious. It’s the growth team. So we put people on the startup studio projects that treat one day design treat handsome chaos, like a client. And I’m very involved in those kind of like the growth lead on that. And so that’s one component. And the second thing is, you know, we have to get people that will take ownership in these and push these forward because I can’t be the chief everything Officer of every company that would fall apart. And so we’ve created a role at the agency called like at a VC firms. They have an EIR the entrepreneur in residence. So we have an agency car where we’re very different agency in that we’re very we’re not remote. First, we’re remote only a lot of part time and contract workers that are hourly. And we’re able to get really talented people because it’s like, hey, yeah, you can work for a VC back startup or go to I’m in Seattle, you can go to Amazon, or, Hey, come work with us come work on some really cool clients. And by the way, we have a startup Studio, you can be an entrepreneur residence, if you have an idea, let’s validate it, or we have some ideas, would you like to have some significant upside and potentially run it or become a GM, we’ve we’ve successfully done that with handsome chaos, where our creative director is also a founding member of that entity. We’re working on it for one day design as well. And so those are things we’re trying to figure out. But um, the key thing, though, is like the agency has to be profitable. And it has to sustain to enable those ventures because like, one day design doesn’t necessarily need funding, whereas handsome cast does. And so we will draw the line at a certain number to where it needs to pay for itself. Or we’d look for other sources of funding.
Jeremy Weisz 15:59
Talk about culture for a second, because you mentioned something cool, you probably attract a lot of Intrapreneurs, right? Because they have the structure of the agency and getting paid, but they can also, you know, have some of the creativity of working on and starting a new business. Yeah, I
Jim Huffman 16:18
don’t know about you. But like, when started my business, I was like, culture was a footnote on what was important. I look at business in a spreadsheet, right? But then as you try and grow something, you’re like, oh, wow, people are the most important thing. Who would have thought? Because the right hires are transformative, you know, and we kind of accidentally created a culture that we were proud of, and then you had to be very intentional with that. And it started because my partner and I, when we were starting out, we’re like, what’s the end goal here? What are we trying to do? And we’re on the same page, like, first, like, there’s there can be a lot of shade on the idea of a lifestyle design business. But we’re like, no, let’s lean into it. Let’s make a business that’s designed for the lifestyle we want. And we want to build other businesses and do this startup studio model. So the fact that we were on the same page helped us attract the right people. And then we started doing from the book traction called ELS, the entrepreneur operating system. And we’re like, oh, let’s be intentional with culture. Because if you don’t create it, the people that you hire will and it might not be what you want. So I do the first screening call for culture. Our my first call with them, once they work with us is going over like our values, and the values aren’t like integrity or diversity. It’s, we found people at our company that are rockstars. And we’re like, what traits do they do they have that we want replicated. And that’s what we highlight, and it is the most important thing, and we’ve been able to get really talented people, not necessarily pay them cheaper than what Amazon would pay, because that will that is true, we hope to give them upside that will make them very, very happy. But we’re able to get them from competitive places like that all because of culture and values. And it’s something that I that’s kind of my biggest role is to be the person that’s spearheading culture at the company.
Jeremy Weisz 18:10
Jim, what are a few of those traits you look for? I want to point out, you know, Gino Wickman, author of traction Eos, you could you check out the episode we did of Inspired Insider, but also just get his book, traction. And he’s got a book Rocket Fuel, with Mark Winters as well, which is also really good. But what are some of the traits you look for?
Jim Huffman 18:30
Yeah, we have a no jerks policy, where we don’t settle for any office drama. It’s just, we’ve all been in those toxic environments, and one person can ruin everything. So that’s number one. Second is speed wins. We do speed over perfection. 10 out of 10 times. We also have think like a founder, not just working with CEOs at our agency, but for the startup studio, like, don’t just come and be like, Oh, here’s what we should do. It’s like if you’re the CEO of this company, what do you care about what matters? We also have this idea of being decision makers, not order takers. Because you know, especially when we’re supposed to be thought leaders, people need to look at us to be those decision makers and not thought leaders. And then the final is like relentlessly raise the bar. We want people that are on there in their free time devouring podcasts on business, or watching YouTube videos on how to do the latest and greatest thing. And if we can get aligned on those values, then we feel really excited about the team we put together.
Jeremy Weisz 19:32
Jim, thanks for that. Jim, how do you from startup studio came one day design. I’m sure there’s a lot of ideas that come out of startup studio and you decide to just not go with them. So how did it work when you first started one day design?
Jim Huffman 19:48
Yeah, there’s this blog post called the value of wealth creation by Nathan Berry. And he talks about how to essentially ladder up with your businesses use started as an employee, and then you can sell services and then productized services, then products and then SAS. And as we looked at that, we’re like, what’s the next rung up, and it was really a productize service. And the thing that’s magical about a productized services, it takes, you know, you know, what, what’s nice about the agency, like being able to quickly stand it up and get money up front, but you productize it, so it’s not custom work, you know, it’s something that’s much more predictable. So like, Okay, what is something we could productize out of growth and and make its own thing? We’re like, actually, we’re, we’re quite good at like, designing for things like convert and doing webpages or ads or emails, or like, what if we had this like, hired gun of a design team? We’ll call it one day design. So we talked to leads that came into growth hit that couldn’t afford growth, they’re like, Hey, cannot afford this service. But would you be interested in that? And like, actually, that’s super interesting. So out of the gate, we even have a website, we got clients, and we tested it. And then we just recently did a launch on Product Hunt. And it’s been so exciting to see that work, because anyone that runs an agency, you know, the trials and tribulations of you close a client, and then they’re calling you, you have all this stuff going on. And you know, you might have to bend over backwards for them. And with productized service, it’s like, this is what it is take it or leave it. And it’s kind of magical, not as magic as as a medical as a SaaS company, but But it’s up there. And so, you know, we weren’t transparent, we build them public. We publish all of our stuff on Twitter, like we launched two or three months ago, and we’ve had 60k in sales. And we’re like, wow, this is, this is super interesting. But it’s a hobby because we learned the hard way running an agency.
Jeremy Weisz 21:42
Love it. You mentioned your partner, I want to dig a little bit into that. And how did you meet? And you know, how did you decide to form this partnership?
Jim Huffman 21:51
Yeah, it isn’t traditional, like, we were like in a dorm room together and lightning struck and we pulled an all nighter and came up with an idea. I was a freelancer, I created growth. And I was grinding for two years. And yes, I was in quote unquote, agency owner. I was a glorified Freelancer with people helping me write and we got to a decent size, but I definitely plateaued and I was burnt out. I was about to pass out from exhaustion. And I here’s like, the main takeaway from one about to say is, I have a weekly newsletter, there’s not that many people and I had like a meetup group. And I would just send out weekly updates about what’s going on. And this guy was following me for a while. And I had a job post for a junior CRO analyst. And he reached out he’s like, Hey, find out the right guy for the junior position. But let’s talk. And we what was interesting about me building and public hearing you everything about me, we he came in for an interview, he interviewed me, I didn’t interview him. And he totally flipped the table. And he’s like, this is why I think we would work well together. And he worked for free for a month. And after seeing what it’s like to work together. I was like, name your price. What do you want? Let’s go. And yeah, that’s how we found each other like I was already two years in, then the thing I did that was accidentally smart was just building in public and letting people know what I’m doing and the talent can find you. So that’s how we met when he
Jeremy Weisz 23:16
came on. Jim, I think you’re talking about I don’t know, if you browse it Jana Finn. Correct. When he came on, what changed?
Jim Huffman 23:26
Everything. And what’s nice is when you’re trying to find a partner, it’s like, do you have overlapping skills or complementary skills or competing skills. And by the way, all of those can work. In some scenarios, I’m more of a fan of complementary skills, because we’re I’m like the dancing monkey that’s generating business, and I’m doing a lot of the deliverables. He’s very strong at process and systems. So he’s like, I can’t believe you built this agency with the way it’s being run. And he came in and really took it to that next level from productivity and efficiency and operation standpoint, and allowed me to get out of the business to help run the business and focus on some of the key things. And so that literally got us over the the hurdle to seven figures was was just operations and efficiency there.
Jeremy Weisz 24:16
I want to talk about a few success stories so I can understand and people can understand more about what you do. Specifically, there was a b2b company in kind of marketing software. Love to understand what you do with them.
Jim Huffman 24:34
Yeah, what’s super interesting with them is they came to us they had a really cool kind of hardware product for SMBs and then a software component tied to it. But they’re like, you know, what’s working right now is just cold outreach. How do we actually get people with with marketing? And so we look at their funnel and they literally just have like a contact us page. It’s like we haven’t even thought about how do we activate these people? Do we Need to activate them with content before you can sell? Let’s give them downloads, let them know like the value that you offer the problem they solve. They weren’t doing any webinars, they didn’t even have a pricing page to help people do that evaluation. And so just by coming in, we ran some experiments on, hey, what are the different ways to activate people with marketing? Is it get them with content? And do email drip campaigns? Is it going for the jugular with a pricing page? Or is it you know, do a webinar and then to a sales call. And once we started to uncover what works there, what’s nice about this product, it was wide appeal to SMBs, we started actually doing social ads that outperformed their Google ads that showed like the before and after of using their their hardware product that showed kind of like the the ROI you could expect. And then we had really good kind of ebooks and content we put out there. And what’s exciting is, we’ve been able to get them to find a channel outside of cold email to have marketing work to where they’ve doubled the amount of people they have as a sales team, where we’re just trying to feed them leads. And so that part’s really exciting when you see a company where it’s going well, that you help them find like repeatable and scalable growth.
Jeremy Weisz 26:19
So for them, you found that education was really huge for for the nurturing process.
Jim Huffman 26:27
Oh my god. Yeah, absolutely. The other thing to think about before you get into a sales call, or you perceived as a salesperson, or a thought leader, because if you can arm them with all this content, so they look, you’re like, oh, wow, you guys know your stuff, those sales calls aren’t sales calls their onboarding calls, because you’ve pre sold them. And so from getting them with content to the drip series before they get on that sales call, it can really help with your sales velocity. And with your, your close rate.
Jeremy Weisz 26:56
How did you use those findings? Jim, in the in the social ads?
Jim Huffman 27:02
Yeah. So one thing that’s a little tricky with b2b is if you don’t have a product that can appeal to a lot of people, you can be kept on your your product or scalability, what was nice is kind of all SMBs could use this, this product and software. And since the iOS update, the most important lever you can pull for a creative is not custom audiences, those haven’t been updated for years, it’s not look alikes, those aren’t as impactful. It’s your creative, your creative, find your audience. And because we are learning what content works, and we learned on those sales calls, what the person cares about, we made ads that talked about the pain, we pour salt in the wound of what’s not working, we also play to the aspiration with the clients where it’s working well, here’s what they’re seeing. And we’re able to have visuals with before and afters and have data that showed that and then the content lead into the the salt in the wound or the aspiration.
Jeremy Weisz 27:59
Love it. You also helped an edtech SAS company as well.
Jim Huffman 28:04
Yeah. What’s interesting with this, that’s kind of the opposite of the SMBs was a very narrow audience. And they thought they had to grow what they long closed cycle, they thought they had to grow, just with a sophisticated almost like, like bottoms up approach, which the what’s cool is they can create a spreadsheet of their 2000 or nine 2000 extras put like 1000 customers and just go after them. And that would probably work. But what we found was because they had so many amazing simulations, their biggest asset was their product. And they weren’t showing people it, they were telling people about it. And so we kind of flipped their activation model on its head where instead of having a behind a paywall, and going for the jugular with a sales call, what if we tested a freemium version? What if we tested a free trial, and so really changing how you can activate because they had such amazing simulations, we were able to do experiments where, hey, here’s the product for free or sign up for a free webinar, where we’re going to walk you through it, or here’s a free trial. So we tested those three different ways to activate because sometimes your product is your best marketing when you can put it out there for free. And so that allowed us to uncover two things. Sometimes we couldn’t get to the decision maker at the company but we could get to the evangelist who would get to the decision maker at the company. And so that was super exciting to do the ads and then the landing page and help not just transform their marketing but their product roadmap on like Hey, what should be free what should not be free? That’s great for activation, but this is what’s great for retention and for getting them to be a paying customer. So that one was was pretty exciting.
Jeremy Weisz 29:49
No, I know Jim, you’ve helped a lot different types of companies and the DTC space as well and there was specifically addresses company
Jim Huffman 30:00
Yeah, so this one was in the bridal space, they have private equity back, they came to us with this idea. And they’re like, Okay, we want to own the bridal space, you know, let’s do this. And so we’re like, alright, if you’re a b2c company, and you’re about to launch your brand almost doesn’t matter, it does. But the tip of the spear is your flagship product. So it’s like, what’s your flagship product or category. So we had some assumptions on what that could be. And they spent a lot of money on some fancy videos. But here’s the big insight we launch. And we’re like, one dress is doing okay, but it doesn’t have those signals. But as we start to see some orders come in, and we actually talk to customers. What was interesting was, we found out the reason why people bought this one dress like, oh, it has pockets, it has big pockets. So at the wedding, I don’t have to have a purse, like, oh, wow, what you care about is this use case in this feature, we’re going all in on it. So it was literally a campaign around, you know how to use this dress, why it’s great. It’s about the pockets. And that’s what got the attention. Yes, there’s other reasons on like shipping and price they got the conversion across. But as we’re working with influencers and user generated content, it was all about pounding the pavement on that, that key use case and feature that literally got them to seven figures, obviously. And then we design a funnel on the website around, you know, that kind of flagship product that had that use case. And so it’s amazing. Even looking at something like Spanx, I got to eight figures on the back of one use case. So DTC brands were obsessed with flagship product, main use case problem we’re solving, because that can open up a lot of doors.
Jeremy Weisz 31:36
Jim, that’s awesome. I love it. Who are the thought pocket? Mentors, some of your mentors, I know you mentor people in TechStars. And in some of these other places, who are some of your mentors, maybe it’s just him from a book or something else? Or actually someone you know, personally?
Jim Huffman 31:57
Yeah, I haven’t mentors that I’ve never met that I really follow and look to and then I have, you could call them mentors, but it’s people that I’m friends with that are older than me and what I call founder years where they can be my same age or younger but they’ve had a business longer than I have. And so I really look to them. So in that first category, I think Andrew Wilkinson of formerly Mehta labs, and now tiny capital, he’s a guy who’s gone from agency to having essentially like being the Warren Buffett, the internet, like a micro private equity firm, is super inspirational. As far as peers, like I think you and I both and EU entrepreneurship organization, my buddy Adam Wyler who has sunken stone, extremely impressive Amazon agency that is like more than two, three times the size of us. I learned a lot from people like him. But yeah, like Nathan Berry, someone I love his content. He’s very much an original thinker, I think already spoke about that I that I look to for inspiration. He’s the founder of
Jeremy Weisz 33:03
ConvertKit. So who are your favorite podcast? guests? I know I mentioned the beginning some of the favorites. Who are some of your favorites on your show? Yeah.
Jim Huffman 33:14
Tommy Griffith is a complete rock star. He is the CEO of ClickMinded. And they do SEO courses, but they also do SOPs, standard operating procedures for agencies like the documentation on hey, how to update your Facebook pixel now that the Facebook ad manager has changed and why he’s my one of my favorite classes. He’s a former Airbnb guy ran SEO for Airbnb started his own agency. They’ve gotten into well into seven figures, they have like under five people insane margins, and he’s just done it differently on how to run a business. He’s very much from the Tim Ferriss Four Hour Workweek, you know, ideology and he’s done it really well. So he’s been a great guest, Rob sobers, the CMO of Verona security software, why he’s impressive as he’s another original thinker, former developer turn marketer who is just so on top of that when it comes to to marketing and growth I was able to have Mike McCalla wits on who is you know, he wrote profit first and I love his content so he’s been a great one.
Jeremy Weisz 34:28
Yeah, there’s some great ones if you are watching the video, I’m just gonna bring it up on screen. So you can see this but there it is. If I was starting today and because I wanted to look at growth it for a second and Jim and look at these funnel tear downs because it’s so cool and people should check it out. But so you can go to you’ll see on the screen if you are watching the video growth a.com You can check it out and I like to learn from people. Not only what they say but what they’re doing and you can see kind of eat their own dog food with their website. I’m sure they have I carry those learnings on to one day design. But you can see kind of how they’ve designed this site and the different elements here and case studies, insane growth. And if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, so that you check, you know, people check it out for themselves. But you could see there’s a funnel tear downs here at the bottom. So I wanted to pull up, you know, you can go to this page, but I have one of my favorites. And I like this company, you can see you did a teardown of convert, Convert Kit Kajabi. And there’s like lots of one Zoom is on here. Personally, I just wanted to pull up this one because I like the product and maybe just have you walk through this as far as the thought process goes with, but masterclass. And so, because, you know, some of these elements, of course, all of us, myself included, should be using what you are teaching and what you’re breaking down on these particular companies as well. So what did you find with it? We’ll just go cycle through a few of these with masterclass.
Jim Huffman 36:06
Yeah. So I’ll even start with the bottom of the funnel masterclass. What’s genius about their funnel is actually how they price it. Because a lot of times when you’re thinking through, you know, subscription products, you have to do monthly, they don’t do monthly, they do annual, and it totally changes your psychology. Because when you’re like, Oh, it is like 299 or whatever. But after you pay for it, you’re like, oh, I have a year to use it. Whereas if you do it monthly each month, you see it hit your credit card, you know, like Wait, do I still use it? Do I still use it. And it’s genius, because from a cash conversion cycle, you’re getting the money up front, which is really nice. And so what they do extremely well as, like the amount of authority they have is quite insane. So they can hit you on top of the head with the stars they have coming in from Samuel Jackson to Dustin Hoffman to Steph Curry. But then they quantify it with 75 courses, 20 lessons, you know, 10 minutes on the average per lesson. And then they’re playing to the aspirations. So they’ve got the social proof, they’re quantifying the value. And then they’re talking about hey, you want to learn photography? Literally learn from the best and what you want to learn about fashion. Learn from Anna winter. So as far as you know, I
Jeremy Weisz 37:24
think they have Steph Curry teaching basketball, Serena Williams teaching tennis and the list goes on and on.
Jim Huffman 37:30
Yeah, because with any funnel, there’s like seven reasons why people don’t convert and it’s like price trust, value, confusion, urgency, and they’re just knocking off so many things you’re going through in your decision journey. Like oh, wait, quality, check, you know, social proof value check. You know, the only thing it’s like urgency like is that there? I’ve seen them do some like promos and discounts. And but from a comparison standpoint, it’s really hard to to match up with them in a production quality’s insane. But it’s, yeah, they’re their funnels, quite impressive.
Jeremy Weisz 38:07
Love it. Yeah. Like the some of the main takeaways on here. And we’ll just look through a few because I think this applies to to websites, which is like you start off with this powerful and simple clear
Jim Huffman 38:21
messaging. Yeah, no. And, I mean, it’s like literally learning from the best of the world 15 A month billed annually, the 15th a month, that doesn’t really happen. But then they’re planning on your head, because they want you to view this as a Netflix subscription. So they’re anchoring against that price. But when you throw the education component to it, and the value is higher, and if you look at their top channels for growth, it’s interesting, because YouTube’s number one, which isn’t what surely makes sense, because their production value is so high. And they actually give away the first class or the first lesson for free. And they put so much into their trailers, because if I’ve learned anything about selling digital, like video products, the longer the more you can get someone to watch the host and relate to them, the more likely you are to close them. And they do that extremely well with you know, YouTube being their, their their top driver.
Jeremy Weisz 39:16
So this one’s got the powerful, simple, clear, the social proof, obviously there. And then the next one, would you talk about the famous faces?
Jim Huffman 39:25
Yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s hard to dispute this one. It’s also what they’re doing well is, you know, if you have a great product, show the product, don’t tell people about it. So it’s very visual with the people, they’re letting you jump in to see the trailer where you can kind of get lost in it. So that part’s huge.
Jeremy Weisz 39:44
And then you have the what you were talking about before about the benefits and value. Yeah.
Jim Huffman 39:49
So like, the other thing is like how do you like reinforce benefits and value you can do with taglines second person language you can do with data which they’re doing here. Also, this is is really good on mobile, which what this one doesn’t show, but that sticky foot our navigation is always present. So it’s easy to jump in whenever you want.
Jeremy Weisz 40:08
Yeah. And I’ve gone to sites and you know, I’m by time I get down. I’m like, Okay, wait, what am I supposed to do here? And like you said, right here, it’s just, it’s floating with you. New content being added. You have more details there. And then this is one thing you mentioned too, about checking it out.
Jim Huffman 40:30
Yeah, it’s a previous masterclass. So you can actually like sample it. But the other thing you hit on is, they’re really trying to educate you that they’re going to have new drops of content. So they talked about ones that are coming. But then they also showed the robust library with the filtering. So you can quickly kind of like, put yourself in the shoes of having this subscription.
Jeremy Weisz 40:53
Then the next thing is something for everyone.
Jim Huffman 40:56
Yeah, just kind of showing those categories. So you’re anchoring it in the head, in the head of the consumer, everything that they would have. And you’re making it easy to filter in and out of and even on mobile, it’s very easy, because that’s as they’re going through the decision journey people would have for this. That’s a natural question of like, oh, wait, but are they going to have the categories that I want?
Jeremy Weisz 41:17
Yep. And again, more social proof more faces, people would know, there are front and center. And then social proof. Yeah, I
Jim Huffman 41:28
mean, look at the names on there, right. It’s like Gordon Ramsay is Maril Stein. And he Liebowitz and so it it’s pretty cool to see like, the heavy hitters they have come in. I mean, that’s just next level.
Jeremy Weisz 41:41
Yeah, I mean, but if you look at it, I mean, you look at the same idea with your site, right? I mean, if you look at this, you have case savings and growth, right. And you have these, you do have Netflix, you have some of these that are recognizable, but it’s not everyone can have a James Patterson or something like that. But you’re still using this and everyone, you probably recommend all your clients use us, as far as, you know, social proof and credibility.
Jim Huffman 42:10
Yeah, and like, with any website, there’s five things you have to get across. And this is actually proven from Optimizely, looking at 2000 websites and the top performing ones. The first is your headline should not talk about your product, it should be benefit focused, and in second person with the word view. The second thing is your hero image or video should align with that benefit focus statement, either highlighting the aspiration of what they become after using your product or play to the problem that you’re solving. The third thing to copy below your headline, that’s where you can talk about your core product or core features, but do it in conversational language and under 12 words, the fourth thing is you need a call to action that is the next unique step in the journey. Don’t go for the jugular with like shop now or join today, get a free strategy call sample the content, whatever that is. And then the final thing, the fifth thing is social proof. Give it to people where it’s like, wow, this is what everybody’s saying. Or Wow, it has 1000 reviews that are five stars or above. If you could do those five things above the fold, you have a good shot at like having a great website that converts
Jeremy Weisz 43:15
well. And then we have email capture. Yeah,
Jim Huffman 43:21
this funnel even comparing it to Cureology, which that’s one of the best quiz funnels, I have seen, they raise $40 million. On the back of that quiz funnel, they capture the email very early in the journey. So when you drop off, they can retarget. And it’s something that you know, masterclasses doing as well here. But you can also log in with different social channels or with Google to easily authenticate. But it’s interesting, they’re doing this before or after you can view the content. I think they tested this actually.
Jeremy Weisz 43:54
And then we have the annual billing, which we talked about.
Jim Huffman 43:57
Yeah. And notice at the very bottom, that 100% guarantee, like going for that risk reversal. So really letting people know like, hey, you know, if you’re not happy, like let us know they have a phone number here. They have all the trust badges and signals. So risk reversals is a big thing. Love it.
Jeremy Weisz 44:16
And then this is just for more tear downs. You could check it out which were your on bigger also go to the bottom of growth hit.com to check out more. You know, Jim, I just want to be the first one to thank you. This has been fantastic. And I want to encourage anyone to go to growth hid.com Check out more about what you have going on. Check out the podcast and one day design. So any other anywhere else we should point people online?
Jim Huffman 44:43
No, that’s per I’m on my emails. Jim at growthhit.com I’m on Twitter. I’m quite active there, Jim W have been but yeah, I would love to connect. But Jeremy, thank you so much for having me on. I mean, your podcast is phenomenal. So really appreciate it.
Jeremy Weisz 44:58
Thanks, Jim. Thanks, everyone.
