speaker-0: Welcome back to the Two Comic Club Podcast. Today I am here with a Forbes 30 under 30, Johannes Flaudenhofer. I'm super excited about this episode. He's got some really cool stuff kicking in the AI space around sales funnel optimization. So without further ado, Johannes, if you wouldn't mind kind of telling us a little bit of the ⁓ entrepreneurial background that you have and kind of where you started your entrepreneurial journey, that'd be awesome.
speaker-1: Yeah. Happy, happy to be here. Thanks for having me. ⁓ it's a pleasure. mean, yeah, my entrepreneurial journey was pretty, pretty crazy. ⁓ I would say it was a lot of, a lot of changes in direction. It actually started when I was like 15. ⁓ it was a, it was a pretty good software engineer. I started doing it when I was 13, I think started writing programs and programming. And I started making my first money with 15 like that. I've seen a YouTube video by coincidence from a guy from Austria that was talking about being self-employed, starting your own business when I was 17. And I was like, the guy is right. I should do that. That's a way better path than being employed. And I did that. I originally started creating homepages for businesses, local businesses. And after some time I realized that the pages are looking pretty good, but they don't have any traffic, you know? And then I was starting to getting into online marketing, digital marketing, stuff like that. ⁓ And taught myself first SEO and afterwards ads, funnels, stuff like that. Read books from Russell ⁓ and got into marketing like that. And after some time we pivoted the business model from just doing pages to doing performance marketing on a shared deal basis. And that pretty much was a huge breakthrough. We built some of the biggest campaigns in German speaking market. ⁓ All were on a profit share basis. And two years ago we started a software business, which is going pretty good. And that's my main project right now.
speaker-0: Wow, that's awesome. It sounds like you ⁓ really had that entrepreneurial bug bite you when you were really young. That's fantastic. ⁓ was that something that in your was in your environment pretty regularly that you saw modeled, be it ⁓ either family, friends, ⁓ you know, kids of school or or even just stuff you consumed online?
speaker-1: Not at all, actually. ⁓ Both my parents are ⁓ normal employees. My mom is a state worker. My dad works in fabs. He produces like paper and stuff. ⁓ So from that side, not at all. I just saw the YouTube video, which inspired me to do it. Actually, crazy story. The guy from the YouTube video, ⁓ a few years later became my biggest client. We did the biggest campaigns with him. That's a huge story for itself, but no, actually all my friends were just normal employees somewhere. My parents were, I was the weird guy doing business stuff. After some time, the French group changed, you know how it is. And then it was different, but at the beginning I was the weird guy in the group.
speaker-0: Sounds about sounds about right for all entrepreneurs. So how did you go from ⁓ watching this guy's YouTube video to acquiring him as your biggest client?
speaker-1: That's a crazy story in and of itself. So I watched his YouTube video that inspired me to start my company. started building web pages with WordPress and I was like, this guy talks to business owners. So he has an audience of business owners and he also has like videos about digital literacy. So that you need a good homepage that you need to know about online marketing, stuff like that. And people watch it, are business owners, and then maybe they ask, where do I get a good homepage from? And I wrote him an email and said, I want to sponsor you. So he should recommend me as the guy to build homepages and get the cut from it. Basically. And he actually answered me. I was 18 years old. He answered me. I drove to Vienna, met him and we were figuring out a deal. Ultimately. It didn't really work and never really came from it, but we stayed in contact. And after I pivoted my, my business model, it was like two, two or three years later, we met up again. I told him about it and he was like, that sounds great. Because my offer was we build all your funnels. We do your marketing. You don't pay anything upfront, but we get a cut of the profit. A rather high cut, but it's. No risk at all for you. You just pay what we additionally bring in. And he was like, that sounds great. Let's try it. He gave me one product. He has like 10 products. He gave me one. I made campaigns for that one product. And back then it was seminar tickets or physical seminars where you sit and he talks to you. was like between a thousand and 2000 euros in price. And we sold like 20 in the first week. And that was like record breaking for him. from that on, we built more and more campaigns for more and more products. After some time, we had a profit share on the whole company basically. And we built some of the biggest campaigns in the German speaking market with him. We had a lot of webinars with like 20,000 registrants. We did big challenges. had one of the largest book launches where we collected 16,000 leads. Stuff like that.
speaker-0: Heck yeah. That's awesome. Man, what an offer. Knocking it out of the park.
speaker-1: Yeah, the idea for it was great. And I was always a guy who had a hard time talking to people, like doing sales. I'm very bad at sales, but I'm good at marketing. And that offer actually solves that for me because everything off the offer depends on my marketing techniques and nothing on how good I can sell someone on trust. And he has to pay me 5k a month and he has to trust that it works and stuff like that. So it was the Grand Slam offer for me.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, it sounds like that. I love ⁓ it sounds like one of the big takeaways there is really leaning into your strengths, you know, and making sure that like you follow the path of for lack of better words, I'd say like least resistance in the respect of making sure that you're optimizing to those strengths that you have. Cause I think that a lot of times, something that you're able to do like ten out of ten on your skill set is gonna perform a lot better than something you can only do like a five out of ten with a lot of effort. So yeah, that's really cool. For sure. ⁓ yeah. So it sounds like if I understood correctly, the offer at the time was offering to ⁓ for a profit share, build the funnels and do all that. What about the traffic side of things? How is that handled?
speaker-1: Actually, the offer was, I hate, I hate full service agencies, just to clarify, but, I would describe it as full service performance marketing. ⁓ so what, what does that mean? Basically we did everything you have to do to have success with performance marketing. So we, ⁓ actually we came up with this strategy. So how do you actually sell the product? Do you. direct sales, book a call and whatever. We then built the funnels for it. We, for example, we scripted the webinars, we did the whole technical setup for webinars, the tracking setup. We scripted the ads, we filmed the ads, we cut the ads, we did the media buying. We did everything from A to Z. We also did the email sequences and the newsletter broadcast and everything, everything. And we just got a cut from what came in with those measures.
speaker-0: Heck yeah. That's awesome. Let's go. Okay. ⁓ so now if I understand correctly, where you guys have pivoted from the days of manually building the funnels and things, you guys are now optimizing it with AI. Can you kind of tell me how you went from doing what you were doing with that offer to this new offer and then kind of break down ⁓ how the AI like operates within that system?
speaker-1: Sure. Yeah. so yeah, with the agency, had a lot of different clients. We built a lot of campaigns, ran a lot of ads. ⁓ but we never really had the time to test every little detail on every landing page and improve the conversion rate from, from time to time. And it really bugged me for years actually, because I have a very high awareness for missed potential. And I was like, yeah, how do we do that? Because. Yeah, instead of just optimizing every small thing, you build the next campaign as an agency. You always have a lot to do. You have too much to actually. So that was a huge problem for us. And as a programmer, I came up with the idea to combine AB testing infrastructure. So the whole thing about changing the element, showing different versions to users, tracking the conversions with AI. And actually the idea... was conceived before JetJuke PT launched. So we were a little too slow to be super new, but it helped us a little bit. And we did that. We built it in-house for our own clients. It took us like two years. So it was a pretty complicated process because back then we didn't have cloud code. But even now, actually cloud code doesn't help you that much with tracking infrastructure. because there are so many edge cases that it takes you just as long as building it manually probably. And the other thing is we put a lot of SOPs from our agency in there and our improvements are way better than what you would get if you just ask Claude. And after we were finished, we tested it with some of our own clients and had really crazy results. So for the one client that we were talking about from the YouTube video, we put it on a webinar page and we doubled conversions after like four months. So we improved it from 13 % to 28%, which is a little over 200 % in conversion rate increase. So we made like double in revenue just from the conversion increase. But of course, if you have more conversion rates and more AUV or more revenue per click, we scale the ads. So it was a huge, huge lever for us and we were like, we can't just do that for our own clients. have to build another company just with the software and put in external clients and stuff like that. So we did that. We did that in May last year. And since then we have seen some crazy client results from all over the German speaking place. Right now we are just, we are focusing on the German speaking market. Basically every big coaching info business player in the German speaking market is already using it. And we are thinking about going to the US right now. We have some pretty good cases already, but it could be better. So yeah, we're trying to expand right now because it's working really, really good.
speaker-0: Heck yeah, no, that sounds amazing. I think ⁓ you know, I hear about ⁓ like the funnel games and things, for instance, where people are trying to optimize like the conversion rates of different things, and those are some significant numbers, especially when you can back it with being able to increase the ad spend and everything else there too. That's that's wild. so in your experience, what have been some of these ⁓ major or the the highest impact tweaks that somebody can do in like an A B testing scenario? Quick question for you. If you're listening to this show, it probably means you're interested in learning how successful entrepreneurs are growing their businesses. And while there's a lot of strategies we talk about on this podcast, one of the biggest lessons I've learned is that growth often comes down to getting in front of the right people. The most powerful way that I've discovered to do that is with a podcast. That's why I created the Podcasting Release Challenge. It's a five day coaching experience where we'll design and launch a podcast that positions you as the Go-to authority in your niche, creates unlimited content for your social media platforms, and consistently generates qualified leads for your business. So if you want to build a trusted personal brand that opens doors to speaking opportunities, have daily content scheduled to go out on every platform, and fill your calendar with qualified leads, then check out the Podcasting for Leads Challenge. The link is in the description down below. Now let's get back to the conversation.
speaker-1: That's such a great topic because ⁓ our software ⁓ prioritizes what it tests. So it does everything fully autonomous. It looks at your page, it understands everything, it comes up with improvements, it prioritizes them, it tests it, it inserts it in your page and increases conversion rate over time. And the prioritization is pretty interesting because most people want to test super fancy stuff. They want to test, I make the fire design or the water design, stuff like that. They want to test, do I put five testimonials or 20 testimonials. But all those fancy improvements, most of the time, if it works, increase conversion rate by 5%, maybe. But if you change the headline. We see time and time again, 50%, 100%. We had a case just last week who had 238 % increase in conversion rates just from another headline. We increased it from seven to 21 or something like that. Math doesn't really add up, but it was something like that. Just the headline. So when you prioritize what to test, what to improve, We look a lot of at what's the above the fold area on your page. So what does the user see before he scrolls? It's a different area for desktop and for mobile. And then we look at what's in the above the fold area, what's the most important element in there. So most of the time it's the headline. For VSL funnels, for example, it's headline, then it's video, then it's call to action. ⁓ Yeah. And that's actually how we, how we prioritize it. So we have, of course we know which elements can yield which result and we prioritize database, but there are, there are also a lot of studies what, what you can improve with, with which element and the headline is a huge lever. You can test like 50 headlines and that's time better spent than if you make the page like do a different design or something. ⁓ So that's a huge topic for us.
speaker-0: Yeah, definitely. No, I could I could see that 'cause it really ⁓ it boils down to the communication of like the very first thing that somebody sees in their first impression, they're likely looking at the headline before they look at the video or the call to action, like you said. ⁓ and so yeah, that's really interesting. So I guess one of the the other topics I'd love to ask is like in terms of the ⁓ the avatar specifically that you guys are looking to work with ⁓ for this software, is it mainly like speechures ⁓ speakers, ⁓ coaches, ⁓ consultants, other agencies maybe. and then like how does how does the AI go through split testing the the headline and coming up with the different variations and things of that nature for those potentially different niches?
speaker-1: Yeah, our target audience is basically everyone that uses real landing pages ⁓ to sell his products. So most of the businesses ⁓ just run traffic on the homepage, which is not really conversion efficient. But if you use a real landing page, ⁓ we can optimize your pages. ⁓ and the second qualifier is that you have enough traffic, enough conversions that you can run a B tests. so we say like you need to run about 100 conversions a month from then on, can a B test properly. And those two factors are actually what makes it work. If you have both, we can, we can help you. ⁓ the yeah, the biggest bracket in this target audience are. coaches, returns agencies for businesses. But we also have a lot of e-commerce stores that run editorial funnels, for example, or pre-landing pages. We also have like SaaS companies that ⁓ just have landing pages for free trials or something. ⁓ So that's how you can imagine our target audience mainly. And our software, how does it actually work? ⁓ Like before you start, it makes a huge analysis. So you put your page in there. It looks at what is your company, what do you actually do? What's your offer that you want to sell on the landing page? Who is your target audience? Stuff like that. It looks at brand voice, which words do you use that it really fades in your page when we rewrite it? Which design elements do you use? It looks at which elements are on the page. And then it comes up with which elements on a page have the most potential for improvement. And afterwards it really builds improvement for your page. So you don't have to do anything. It comes up with a better headline, a different call to action button, whatever. And it builds improvements. It conducts A-B tests. So it shows 50 % of users the original, 50 % improvement. It tracks the conversions. It ends the test. It looks at the results. If the improvement is better, it inserts it in the page. It does that with every element one after another and improves and improves the conversion rate like that. It also learns from every result. So it doesn't matter if the test is negative or positive. It draws learnings from it. It comes up with better and better improvements over time. And this way we can We can test super rapidly, improve it, and that's how we get great results.
speaker-0: That's really awesome. So it's making me think like, ⁓ does this work for every ⁓ platform, like ⁓ click funnels, high level WordPress, all the things?
speaker-1: Yes, that's right. We integrate with the page ⁓ through JavaScript. And so you can imagine it like Google optimized back in the day. Where you put the JavaScript in there, you change the elements and then it, with JavaScript, it puts it in front of the right visitors. So we integrate with the landing page with JavaScript and we also check the conversions with JavaScript. For the conversion tracking, we use a very similar tracking mechanism than HiROS. So we use local storage, fingerprinting and stuff like that and have a very, very accurate ⁓ tracking like that.
speaker-0: That's awesome. No, that's super slick. I can think of a a handful of people that I want to recommend you to, but ⁓ we'll talk about that after. ⁓ with that being said, one of the things that I am curious to know about is is like in your own like sales process of things, one of the things that we like to to dive into in terms of the marketing strategies is like once you have the offer and you're sending traffic to it, like how are you ⁓ nurturing those leads in order to actually get them to convert? And how do you how have you in your own experience kind of built systems to help make that happen?
speaker-1: You mean for the software or for our clients with the agency?
speaker-0: We could break down both if you want. Either one works.
speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, it, it depends a lot on the offer on the funnel. ⁓ I mean, we ran a lot of webinar funds. ran a lot of automated webinar funnels. ⁓ and with those it's. It's kind of funny. had a client that didn't have the best sales team. So the sales team was always the bottleneck in the whole operation. So that's why we built a lot of mid ticket funnels. And we built webinar funnels that directly sell mid ticket offers. So maybe around like $700 or euros. ⁓ And for that, you don't actually need that much of follow up. You just send the traffic on the webinar page, they register, they go into the webinar, they get persuaded to buy the offer. Then they buy it. after that, you of course have a replay sequence of a few mails ⁓ and then broadcast mails follow up like that. But funnel is very short. But if you have a VSL funnel, for example, you run the ads to the VSL. You try to build a lot of trust in the VSL itself. They book a call and in the the time between the call and between the booking and the call, that's where the magic happens, right? So you can, you can do a lot of the on the thank you page already. You can do a lot of retargeting. You can send some mails. You can prepare a lot of assets that form a lot of trust in them. for example, that's one of the biggest mistakes I see, ⁓ marketers make. They don't use the thank you page. If you book something. And then you get on a page and they just say, thank you for booking or successful stuff like that. For example, for the webinar funnel, we use the booking page, the thank you page to sell a high ticket, funnel, a high ticket offer. So if you go to the webinar, you opt in, you go to the, you come to the thank you page. There it says while you're waiting that the webinar starts, you can book an appointment with one of our experts. He shows you a personalized roadmap on how you can. achieve your goals. And in those calls, we sold high ticket offers. And actually, I think the automated webinar made like 2 million in revenue a year with like 1.5 in ad spend. But the thank you page made 4 million in revenue with pure profit. So actually, most of the people would say on the thank you page, ⁓ thank you for signing up, your webinar is about to start and stuff like that. But we made all our profit just from the thank you page. So that's an example of how we do that. But on VSL Fund, on VSL Fund for book a call, would, I would, ⁓ on the thank you page, try to handle a lot of objections. I would try to set expectations. I would try to answer questions that they have. ⁓ You can, that you can do it with a lot of ways. can, you can put a FAQ section there. You can put a lot of videos there that explain stuff. I would. I would then remarket ⁓ with retargeting. I would put a lot of short videos, of long videos and try to get them to consume as much content as possible before the call starts. And per mail, you can do the same thing. You can show testimonials. You can list studies that prove the efficiency of your offer. ⁓ handle objections, you can tell them what the process will be like. And you do all of that before the call happens and the salesperson just has laid down these. They know everything that the lead knows, every objection, they know how the product works, they don't have any questions. If something is not answered, the salesperson can answer it, but they have a very easy time closing the deal.
speaker-0: Man, that's that's so awesome. I love ⁓ I love what you're calling out there about people not properly utilizing thank you pages because there's a lot of ⁓ a lot of upsell opportunity there that's that's just being missed, you know? Like, ⁓ I don't know if you ever follow or listen to ⁓ Myron Golden. He's always talking about the idea of making more offers. It's how you make more money. And that sounds like exactly what you guys are utilizing on the ⁓ the thank you page there. So that's fantastic. I love that. That's so cool. Thinking about implementing that myself now. I'm like gotta add that book a call to the thank you page. So yeah, good gold nugget. okay. So in terms of ⁓ what you guys are doing now in the the AI software side of things, how are you guys currently going about like finding the the traffic and nurturing those relationships to a point where they're now ⁓ doing your software?
speaker-1: To be honest, mean, we sell most of the selling happens through my network because from agency days, know pretty much everyone in the German market that's a potential client for the software. We're just ramping paid ads right now. And with that, I have a layered approach. I have... I don't even have a name for it, but I came up with this strategy that utilizes the Andromeda update to the fullest extent with lead magnets. So you kind of build a lead magnet, a micro lead magnet for every segment of your audience. For example, if you look at the ads from Hormozi, he always has an ad and he films it like 10 times for different avatars, you know. Yes, like if you're a plumber, then ⁓ I have this for you. If you, if you're an HVAC, I have this for you. And it's basically the same principle just with lead magnets. ⁓ So we, we use that to attract a lot of leads through lead magnets, which are like, would say second to cold. They are cold. They have, but they have a touch point with you that you can reference in an opening call. We do that. We are building a VSL. which will work just like I described to you. will like explain the software, how it works. You can book a call for a free demo. And between the time that you book and the demo, you will get hammered with trust and assets and testimonials and results. And then we have the usual book a call funnel, which is just an ad on the homepage, which sells the demo call.
speaker-0: Heck yeah. Nice. That's pretty clean cut. I like the idea of the ⁓ the network play there. when you were first starting out on your entrepreneurial journey, what were some of the biggest ⁓ doors that got opened for you that kinda helped you to build the network that you're now ⁓ a part of today?
speaker-1: Results and like everything. Yeah. I think, lot of people start the business and think, man, if I had the network, I would be successful, but it's usually the other way around. You should do, you should just do the work. Get results, be an interesting person and people will come to you. ⁓ after that, I I'm actually not the greatest network. I have a hard time like. Going out to people, speaking to them. It's not really my thing. ⁓ But if you have the results, if you are kind of an interesting person, if you know stuff that others want to know, they will come to you and talk to you and talk to each other that have you talked to this guy and stuff like that. And that's, that's actually how you build a network. Be an interesting person. would say.
speaker-0: Heck yeah. It's like ⁓ it's like being ⁓ like a magnet attracting all the opportunities to you by ⁓ being interesting enough and having the results that are attracting others to wanna come into your ecosystem.
speaker-1: Yes, actually a little nugget is I'm always invited to all kinds of masterminds and I'm not the guy to go to every one and introduce myself. Hey, I'm this, I do this. I don't know. My strategy is I try to get a speaking gig in the mastermind as early as possible. And then I present some kind of case study and our campaigns are pretty, pretty well thought through and executed. And I just show a campaign that we did and everyone is amazed like at the level of detail these things are built and then I get ⁓ everyone wants to speak to me. And so that's how I get to know everyone. Everyone knows who I am and I don't have the problems of going to talk to everyone.
speaker-0: Yeah, that makes total sense. It's like ⁓ being able to capitalize on the opportunity of everyone's attention as you're up there speaking and and sharing all the awesome case studies and stuff. The one to many play versus the one to one. Yeah, that's awesome. So that actually begs another question. ⁓ how do you personally go about getting those ⁓ speaking opportunities?
speaker-1: practice. Man, sometimes they just invite me because they know me. Sometimes I see it on Instagram, like we are looking for people to attend. write them, I would be interested. And then it worked like this. ⁓ but usually actually it's not, I never apply to anything. So, so I don't do that. ⁓ and most of the masterminds where you just have open access and run ads on them. I'm not a big fan of so. Most of the time I'm either invited or write someone on Instagram that I know either way.
speaker-0: Yeah. Sounds like it's ⁓ kind of since you're already in the know in the network, it makes it a pretty easy easy lever to pull, so to speak. That's awesome. Cool. ⁓ okay. So let's ⁓ dive into like a little bit more of the ⁓ I guess like mindset side of being a business owner and stuff. Like, ⁓ can you share ⁓ maybe a time where there was like some obstacle that was in the way that seemed honestly like It was gonna be impossible to overcome, but you guys managed to kinda persevere and and break through that that obstacle and kinda what that mindset side of things was like as you were going through the process and how you persevered.
speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, a few examples come to mind. ⁓ I think one of the biggest obstacles that we had is we were always doing the biggest and best webinar campaigns. And we had a lot of success with that. Most of it during COVID. But in the last, I would say two years, they really got very difficult to master. most importantly for us, because we, ⁓ sold mid ticket. So don't, you don't have that much leeway in the elite costs because usually a raw is like between one, two or three. And just, just last year in like between January and March, ad costs for us in the German's weekly market doubled.
speaker-0: Holy cow.
speaker-1: So we had like CPMs go from 20 euros to 40 euros and now in the US CPMs are different league. For us 20, 30, 40 is normal. And we didn't know webinar campaign was profitable anymore. And we had to, we had to find other ways to make a profit. We tried everything. We tried low ticket offers. We tried quiz funnels. We tried, yeah, just book a call funnels, but nothing really hits that much. And we started doing challenges again. So we, we set up a big challenge. I promoted it, it's basically five webinars in a row. And we ran that and that works really, really well. So you can imagine the situation for one client. We ran webinars, it was super profitable in January, in February, in March, everything crashed. Ad cost super high, never went down again. I don't know why, maybe it's, it's Gien or Timo or something in Europe. have to huge problem. problem that the Chinese companies are advertising so much and it's getting more expensive for everyone. ⁓ And we tried everything for months. And in October, we did the challenge in October, November, and we did like 2 million in revenue in a week or something. ⁓ And that's how we, we cracked out of the, out of the misery. That's yeah, that's definitely one situation that comes to mind. When you asked it.
speaker-0: Yeah, it you know, it's interesting as I'm hearing that story, what's kind of unfolding in my mind is I would imagine that you're experiencing a lot of a lot of frustration or doubt in those rising costs of ad spend. And, you know, where my mind would go if I was placing myself in your shoes would be like, you know, are are ads dead? Like, do we need to change to a different platform or things of that nature? And I'm I'm curious to know what made you so ⁓ capable of, you know, continuing to take the the at bats and knock it out of the park once more in the same ⁓ same situation.
speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, the most difficult thing about situations like this is the uncertainty, I would say. And actually, if you're a business owner, if you're an entrepreneur, the uncertainty, I would say is the hardest part about the whole thing. Because, for example, we run the ads, it doesn't work. You don't know why. You think, is the offer not working anymore? Is the market not working anymore? Do we have to go to the U S ⁓ is, is the ads? Yeah. You said it. Do ads still work? You, you you dot everything. but it doesn't help you. You just have to test rapidly, iterate fast. and for me, I was just calculating how we can get the revenue per leads or the revenue per click up. So can afford the higher prices and challenges are perfect for that. And we also changed the offer from just mid ticket direct sale to book a car. Even with a sales team that's not so great. And the math was working. We executed on it. It worked. Which was great, but it could have been that it doesn't work again. And we have to, we have to go back to the drawing board again. But luckily it did. I think that's the most important part. If it doesn't work, you have to try, you have to try again. If you don't try, you, you give up.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. It's interesting. It's like ⁓ the sentiment that came to mind was the idea that it's like you know, to take it very literally, like adapt or die. Like just you know, it's like keep pushing through the ⁓ the uncertainty and the craziness of it. ⁓ 'cause, you know, this is this is the way forward. You just you have to, you know? It's interesting. That's true. Yeah. ⁓ Okay, so I'm also curious to know like ⁓ what have been some of the like highest highs that you've experienced on the journey of ⁓ entrepreneurship.
speaker-1: Highest, highest. For me, actually, we didn't have a breakthrough or anything. So it wasn't like hockey stick, let's go. It was, we were working on it. It was working better. We increased ad spend. We made a little more and it was very gradual. So it got more and more over time. And after some time, the numbers were completely crazy. During COVID, we did webinars. We sold tickets to webinars. So we, I don't know, we sent an email. You can buy a ticket to the webinar. How you, I don't know how you do stock investing during COVID or something. And it was 50 euros apiece. We had like 3000 registrants just from this email. And then we had 95 % show rate. We had like 20, 30 % upsell rate on the mid ticket offer. We printed money. That was a crazy time. ⁓ But apart from that... It was always, always, yeah, pedal to the metal, full steam ahead, doing everything that it gets better. But as always, if it goes the best, you should give the most ⁓ because there's always to be, there's always coming, ⁓ there's always bad times coming. And when you have those, then it's too late. Usually when it's easy going, everything is good. You should work the most, I would say. And from experience I that it's really hard to actually do it because you give everything, it's hard and then you have good results. Then you want to rest a little, but there's actually the time to speed it up even more.
speaker-0: Yeah, that's that's very interesting. I've heard that same that same concept once before. ⁓ I listened to these like YouTube compilations of like motivational speakers and stuff when I'm at the gym. That's just my go-to personally. ⁓ but it I think it was ⁓ I think it was a clip of ⁓ maybe Eric Thomas, ⁓ the motivational speaker who was talking about the idea that it's like I'm I'm paraphrasing it, but it's like you've made it to the big leagues now and now you wanna rest. It's like you're you're here now. Like this is what you asked for. Like you gotta you gotta step up and actually play at this point. And it's it's so funny because I know ⁓ from the entrepreneurial journey and I'm sure you can ⁓ understand this as well, it's like it's it's such a it's such a game that requires consistent discipline that it's like you gotta stay on top of it all the time and then finally when you start to get those good results the temptation of like, okay, well now that I I have the thing working and we've got it going well and I'm starting to collect ⁓ the kind of money that I was hoping for, the temptation is now to take that break and like slow down and just like enjoy the good times. But to your point, like, you know, there's something lurking around the corner. ⁓ so you gotta make sure that you optimize the the success at the top, so to speak. Interesting. Yeah. Huh. Okay. ⁓
speaker-1: Yeah, for sure.
speaker-0: So one of the things that has been a common theme that I've seen along the the podcast as I've done it throughout the past couple of years is there seems to be a lot of ⁓ emphasis on like mentorship and people who have had ⁓ like key relationships in their life where it's been like the life changing relationship more or less. They either got the gold nugget or they introduced them to the right person or opened the right door for them. ⁓ what have been some of those relationships in your life?
speaker-1: ⁓ Yeah, to be honest, I never had real mentorship, I would say. are always some people that I would like to get more in contact with. It never works. So actually I, I just listened to a lot of podcasts and long form content of people that are where I want to go. I learned a lot from that and. The one client I was telling you and that introduced me to entrepreneurship through his video, he's a pretty successful investment banker. he's a really funny guy. He's very famous in the German speaking market now after our campaigns and everything. He's a Harvard educated investment banker who is from Austria, but is also a punk. So that's a weird combination. And he invested a lot of money in real estate, does a lot of big deals, investment banking stuff. That was actually our offer, how to invest in real estate, of course. ⁓ And I learned a lot from him during the time working with him. ⁓ Like how to structure contracts, how the legal system works, tricks there. ⁓ Also ⁓ how you negotiate, stuff like that. I learned a lot from him there. But apart from that, I wouldn't say that I'm in mentorship.
speaker-0: Yeah. That's that's cool. ⁓ it it does it does sound like he was ⁓ key in learning some of those things. Like I'm I'm really interested to dive into this ⁓ negotiating stuff. What was it that he he taught you in that realm of things?
speaker-1: ⁓ Our negotiations were very funny because he has a very methodical and tactical way of negotiating. So he uses the flinch a lot, which I hate. I don't do that. And I immediately recognize it and I'm just getting pissed off because he's like acting and not being with me, you know. And I have a very strategic way of negotiating. So for example, ⁓ if you, if you wanted to be my client, when I had my agency, you ask how, yeah, how much share do you want? And I would say something like, yeah, so the share is usually between 20 and 50 % of profit. It depends on how much effort you have after the sale I generate. So for example, if you're in an architecture office, it would be 20 % of profit. But if you are an online course that's automatically served and placed, it's 50 % of profit. So that's the spectrum. And for you, I would say it's 35%. The problem for you now is you can't argue with that. You know how the system works and where you are and it... Every single time it hits right there. What is it? So you have to frame where you can't ⁓ come out and I don't have to use any tactics to, I don't know, low ball you or something like that. And his approach was more like, ⁓ yeah, what's the price? ⁓ Yeah, tell me. He never said the price. He always wanted to know from other person what his... Intended prices. So he always said so what do you think and you say it doesn't matter what you say if you say 10,000 euros, he's like Okay, I wasn't expecting that I'm a little I'm a little shocked to be honest I think you insult my intelligence with that offer I will go out of the room calm down and you think of an of different offer So it's very intimidating at first, but our negotiations were funny as hell. can tell you because I have a hugely different style of negotiating. But we got along well over the years.
speaker-0: Yeah, that that's really funny. I think ⁓ I think context matters in that and like, you know, in in your context, like I can see how yours works really well and in his that that it's honestly it's very funny, but in the world of investment banking, it's like, you know, there's some some big deals going on, some big transactions, and it's like you gotta be able to you gotta be able to stand out and make a difference. So that's that's like strong arming in a way. That's that's hilarious. That's wild. ⁓ So what have been ⁓ what have been some of your ⁓ favorite clients that you've had the opportunity to work with throughout the years and what made those relationships kind of stand out more than others?
speaker-1: Man, I have a couple. I mean, I love mid-ticket info business products. So you have the course between 300 and a thousand euros. I know the perfect funnel to build and ⁓ the fulfillment is easy. You don't need a sales team. You can, you can run it. Right now, probably not. Right now you probably need a high ticket offer front end to be profitable in any way. But that used to be my favorite. And another offer we had was like solar, full service solar ⁓ construction. So for B2C actually, so you want a solar roof, something like that. ⁓ You fill out the form, you get called, you get sold ⁓ and a team comes to you, builds the whole thing. You don't have to do anything. And the offer was actually, example, you pay 200 euros a month for energy. Our offer was that we sell you a solar roof where you don't have to pay for any electricity after that. We finance it and the rate is the same as what you pay for your electricity. So you get this solar roof. for free and after I don't know 10, 20 years it's yours and you have free electricity. That was the offer, which was a crazy offer. I think in Germany there is a company that does a million in revenue, a billion in revenue a year right now with that offer. Same in Austria, basically. I built a funnel, which was a new twist on a quiz funnel, I would say. And we ramped it.
speaker-0: Holy cow.
speaker-1: Like in after 30 days, we had enough leads to do like 75 million a year. So that was a crazy offer. After some time it fell apart because the fulfillment was too complicated. ⁓ so that was a bummer. And the third offer that would come to mind is, ⁓ We have like very high tech terrace roofs. So a roof for your garden area, kind of with ⁓ the roof like being electrically adjusted. And that's actually one of the highest margin businesses in all of construction. And you can sell it B2C pretty easily. We have a very similar funnel for that as for the solar business. And we have been running that for. Almost 10 years, maybe eight years. I built a funnel back then. It's still running. It's exactly the same. Same ads, same everything. It has a rows of 10 and it's going pretty well. More and more people are catching up with the idea to build roofs for terraces. But it didn't hurt us at all. So that's a really great offer as well.
speaker-0: That's fantastic. Heck yeah. Well sweet. ⁓ those are some great examples and some really cool offers. I never would have thought about that with the the terrorist ⁓ concept. That's so wild. ⁓ okay, so ⁓ as we're coming ⁓ toward the end of the podcast, ⁓ a couple of my final questions. ⁓ you know, we're in the second half of twenty twenty six now. What are what are some of the big goals that you have before the year is over?
speaker-1: Yeah, we are just building out paid ads for our software solution. ⁓ We want to get that running up and running. We want to have about 600 active clients by the end of the year. ⁓ So that's the goal for the year. One of the biggest challenges for that is actually the sales team. We need to find good closers, good setters and Maybe we will try to get into the US market, which is a whole different story. have to build a sales team in the US and everything. So that's on the menu as well for this year. But let's see. Yeah, we have a lot of campaigns running already, not at scale, because we need to dial in the sales scripts and the fulfillment. That's the goal for this year and we're on track to hit it.
speaker-0: Heck yeah, congrats. That's awesome. Let's go. I'm rooting for you guys. so the final question that I like to ask on the podcast is, given like all of your experience to date so far, ⁓ you know, we live in a unique time and age where we have the ability to record a moment in time for future generations to see. ⁓ what would be the one piece of advice that you would like those future generations to to hear?
speaker-1: You mean, you mean life in life or in business context? Yeah. In life. Actually, it's the same. I actually it's the same. It's the same advice. would say provide value. That's, that's such an important thing that's overlooked ⁓ by, by young people. I think everyone wants to get rich. Everyone wants to.
speaker-0: Could be both.
speaker-1: get successful, but they forget the providing value path. So they want to get rich and they look at videos how to day trade. But how is that helping anyone? mean, yeah, economically, maybe you do price discovery or something. I don't know, but why don't you just go out, talk to people, find out what the problems are and solve those problems for the money. You will probably be. Pretty happy, pretty successful if you just do that instead of trying to get rich fast or don't know, scam people or I don't know what. Yeah.
speaker-0: Yeah. A hundred percent. Awesome. so first of all, thank you so much for your time today. This has been a lot of great insights and I love that final ⁓ piece of advice there. I think it's it's very much the giving mentality versus the taking mentality, which is great. ⁓ but for anybody who's been following along and is interested in checking out your software, where can they do that?
speaker-1: yeah, to be honest, our page is still in German. So if you visited, just translate it to English with Google Chrome. Our software actually works for every language. We have clients in the U S actually pretty big clients in the U S in Slovakia, in Dubai, everywhere. ⁓ but the homepage is in German. the home page is OptiMind.so. ⁓ so it's OptiMind, in one word, ⁓ .so. and can find me on Instagram at ⁓ Jay Vladenhofer. ⁓ That's the best. That's the best spots to find out more.
speaker-0: Heck yeah. Awesome. Well thank you so much for your time today. This has been a great episode and I appreciate your time and insights.
speaker-1: Thank you for having me.
speaker-1: Yeah. Happy, happy to be here. Thanks for having me. ⁓ it's a pleasure. mean, yeah, my entrepreneurial journey was pretty, pretty crazy. ⁓ I would say it was a lot of, a lot of changes in direction. It actually started when I was like 15. ⁓ it was a, it was a pretty good software engineer. I started doing it when I was 13, I think started writing programs and programming. And I started making my first money with 15 like that. I've seen a YouTube video by coincidence from a guy from Austria that was talking about being self-employed, starting your own business when I was 17. And I was like, the guy is right. I should do that. That's a way better path than being employed. And I did that. I originally started creating homepages for businesses, local businesses. And after some time I realized that the pages are looking pretty good, but they don't have any traffic, you know? And then I was starting to getting into online marketing, digital marketing, stuff like that. ⁓ And taught myself first SEO and afterwards ads, funnels, stuff like that. Read books from Russell ⁓ and got into marketing like that. And after some time we pivoted the business model from just doing pages to doing performance marketing on a shared deal basis. And that pretty much was a huge breakthrough. We built some of the biggest campaigns in German speaking market. ⁓ All were on a profit share basis. And two years ago we started a software business, which is going pretty good. And that's my main project right now.
speaker-0: Wow, that's awesome. It sounds like you ⁓ really had that entrepreneurial bug bite you when you were really young. That's fantastic. ⁓ was that something that in your was in your environment pretty regularly that you saw modeled, be it ⁓ either family, friends, ⁓ you know, kids of school or or even just stuff you consumed online?
speaker-1: Not at all, actually. ⁓ Both my parents are ⁓ normal employees. My mom is a state worker. My dad works in fabs. He produces like paper and stuff. ⁓ So from that side, not at all. I just saw the YouTube video, which inspired me to do it. Actually, crazy story. The guy from the YouTube video, ⁓ a few years later became my biggest client. We did the biggest campaigns with him. That's a huge story for itself, but no, actually all my friends were just normal employees somewhere. My parents were, I was the weird guy doing business stuff. After some time, the French group changed, you know how it is. And then it was different, but at the beginning I was the weird guy in the group.
speaker-0: Sounds about sounds about right for all entrepreneurs. So how did you go from ⁓ watching this guy's YouTube video to acquiring him as your biggest client?
speaker-1: That's a crazy story in and of itself. So I watched his YouTube video that inspired me to start my company. started building web pages with WordPress and I was like, this guy talks to business owners. So he has an audience of business owners and he also has like videos about digital literacy. So that you need a good homepage that you need to know about online marketing, stuff like that. And people watch it, are business owners, and then maybe they ask, where do I get a good homepage from? And I wrote him an email and said, I want to sponsor you. So he should recommend me as the guy to build homepages and get the cut from it. Basically. And he actually answered me. I was 18 years old. He answered me. I drove to Vienna, met him and we were figuring out a deal. Ultimately. It didn't really work and never really came from it, but we stayed in contact. And after I pivoted my, my business model, it was like two, two or three years later, we met up again. I told him about it and he was like, that sounds great. Because my offer was we build all your funnels. We do your marketing. You don't pay anything upfront, but we get a cut of the profit. A rather high cut, but it's. No risk at all for you. You just pay what we additionally bring in. And he was like, that sounds great. Let's try it. He gave me one product. He has like 10 products. He gave me one. I made campaigns for that one product. And back then it was seminar tickets or physical seminars where you sit and he talks to you. was like between a thousand and 2000 euros in price. And we sold like 20 in the first week. And that was like record breaking for him. from that on, we built more and more campaigns for more and more products. After some time, we had a profit share on the whole company basically. And we built some of the biggest campaigns in the German speaking market with him. We had a lot of webinars with like 20,000 registrants. We did big challenges. had one of the largest book launches where we collected 16,000 leads. Stuff like that.
speaker-0: Heck yeah. That's awesome. Man, what an offer. Knocking it out of the park.
speaker-1: Yeah, the idea for it was great. And I was always a guy who had a hard time talking to people, like doing sales. I'm very bad at sales, but I'm good at marketing. And that offer actually solves that for me because everything off the offer depends on my marketing techniques and nothing on how good I can sell someone on trust. And he has to pay me 5k a month and he has to trust that it works and stuff like that. So it was the Grand Slam offer for me.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, it sounds like that. I love ⁓ it sounds like one of the big takeaways there is really leaning into your strengths, you know, and making sure that like you follow the path of for lack of better words, I'd say like least resistance in the respect of making sure that you're optimizing to those strengths that you have. Cause I think that a lot of times, something that you're able to do like ten out of ten on your skill set is gonna perform a lot better than something you can only do like a five out of ten with a lot of effort. So yeah, that's really cool. For sure. ⁓ yeah. So it sounds like if I understood correctly, the offer at the time was offering to ⁓ for a profit share, build the funnels and do all that. What about the traffic side of things? How is that handled?
speaker-1: Actually, the offer was, I hate, I hate full service agencies, just to clarify, but, I would describe it as full service performance marketing. ⁓ so what, what does that mean? Basically we did everything you have to do to have success with performance marketing. So we, ⁓ actually we came up with this strategy. So how do you actually sell the product? Do you. direct sales, book a call and whatever. We then built the funnels for it. We, for example, we scripted the webinars, we did the whole technical setup for webinars, the tracking setup. We scripted the ads, we filmed the ads, we cut the ads, we did the media buying. We did everything from A to Z. We also did the email sequences and the newsletter broadcast and everything, everything. And we just got a cut from what came in with those measures.
speaker-0: Heck yeah. That's awesome. Let's go. Okay. ⁓ so now if I understand correctly, where you guys have pivoted from the days of manually building the funnels and things, you guys are now optimizing it with AI. Can you kind of tell me how you went from doing what you were doing with that offer to this new offer and then kind of break down ⁓ how the AI like operates within that system?
speaker-1: Sure. Yeah. so yeah, with the agency, had a lot of different clients. We built a lot of campaigns, ran a lot of ads. ⁓ but we never really had the time to test every little detail on every landing page and improve the conversion rate from, from time to time. And it really bugged me for years actually, because I have a very high awareness for missed potential. And I was like, yeah, how do we do that? Because. Yeah, instead of just optimizing every small thing, you build the next campaign as an agency. You always have a lot to do. You have too much to actually. So that was a huge problem for us. And as a programmer, I came up with the idea to combine AB testing infrastructure. So the whole thing about changing the element, showing different versions to users, tracking the conversions with AI. And actually the idea... was conceived before JetJuke PT launched. So we were a little too slow to be super new, but it helped us a little bit. And we did that. We built it in-house for our own clients. It took us like two years. So it was a pretty complicated process because back then we didn't have cloud code. But even now, actually cloud code doesn't help you that much with tracking infrastructure. because there are so many edge cases that it takes you just as long as building it manually probably. And the other thing is we put a lot of SOPs from our agency in there and our improvements are way better than what you would get if you just ask Claude. And after we were finished, we tested it with some of our own clients and had really crazy results. So for the one client that we were talking about from the YouTube video, we put it on a webinar page and we doubled conversions after like four months. So we improved it from 13 % to 28%, which is a little over 200 % in conversion rate increase. So we made like double in revenue just from the conversion increase. But of course, if you have more conversion rates and more AUV or more revenue per click, we scale the ads. So it was a huge, huge lever for us and we were like, we can't just do that for our own clients. have to build another company just with the software and put in external clients and stuff like that. So we did that. We did that in May last year. And since then we have seen some crazy client results from all over the German speaking place. Right now we are just, we are focusing on the German speaking market. Basically every big coaching info business player in the German speaking market is already using it. And we are thinking about going to the US right now. We have some pretty good cases already, but it could be better. So yeah, we're trying to expand right now because it's working really, really good.
speaker-0: Heck yeah, no, that sounds amazing. I think ⁓ you know, I hear about ⁓ like the funnel games and things, for instance, where people are trying to optimize like the conversion rates of different things, and those are some significant numbers, especially when you can back it with being able to increase the ad spend and everything else there too. That's that's wild. so in your experience, what have been some of these ⁓ major or the the highest impact tweaks that somebody can do in like an A B testing scenario? Quick question for you. If you're listening to this show, it probably means you're interested in learning how successful entrepreneurs are growing their businesses. And while there's a lot of strategies we talk about on this podcast, one of the biggest lessons I've learned is that growth often comes down to getting in front of the right people. The most powerful way that I've discovered to do that is with a podcast. That's why I created the Podcasting Release Challenge. It's a five day coaching experience where we'll design and launch a podcast that positions you as the Go-to authority in your niche, creates unlimited content for your social media platforms, and consistently generates qualified leads for your business. So if you want to build a trusted personal brand that opens doors to speaking opportunities, have daily content scheduled to go out on every platform, and fill your calendar with qualified leads, then check out the Podcasting for Leads Challenge. The link is in the description down below. Now let's get back to the conversation.
speaker-1: That's such a great topic because ⁓ our software ⁓ prioritizes what it tests. So it does everything fully autonomous. It looks at your page, it understands everything, it comes up with improvements, it prioritizes them, it tests it, it inserts it in your page and increases conversion rate over time. And the prioritization is pretty interesting because most people want to test super fancy stuff. They want to test, I make the fire design or the water design, stuff like that. They want to test, do I put five testimonials or 20 testimonials. But all those fancy improvements, most of the time, if it works, increase conversion rate by 5%, maybe. But if you change the headline. We see time and time again, 50%, 100%. We had a case just last week who had 238 % increase in conversion rates just from another headline. We increased it from seven to 21 or something like that. Math doesn't really add up, but it was something like that. Just the headline. So when you prioritize what to test, what to improve, We look a lot of at what's the above the fold area on your page. So what does the user see before he scrolls? It's a different area for desktop and for mobile. And then we look at what's in the above the fold area, what's the most important element in there. So most of the time it's the headline. For VSL funnels, for example, it's headline, then it's video, then it's call to action. ⁓ Yeah. And that's actually how we, how we prioritize it. So we have, of course we know which elements can yield which result and we prioritize database, but there are, there are also a lot of studies what, what you can improve with, with which element and the headline is a huge lever. You can test like 50 headlines and that's time better spent than if you make the page like do a different design or something. ⁓ So that's a huge topic for us.
speaker-0: Yeah, definitely. No, I could I could see that 'cause it really ⁓ it boils down to the communication of like the very first thing that somebody sees in their first impression, they're likely looking at the headline before they look at the video or the call to action, like you said. ⁓ and so yeah, that's really interesting. So I guess one of the the other topics I'd love to ask is like in terms of the ⁓ the avatar specifically that you guys are looking to work with ⁓ for this software, is it mainly like speechures ⁓ speakers, ⁓ coaches, ⁓ consultants, other agencies maybe. and then like how does how does the AI go through split testing the the headline and coming up with the different variations and things of that nature for those potentially different niches?
speaker-1: Yeah, our target audience is basically everyone that uses real landing pages ⁓ to sell his products. So most of the businesses ⁓ just run traffic on the homepage, which is not really conversion efficient. But if you use a real landing page, ⁓ we can optimize your pages. ⁓ and the second qualifier is that you have enough traffic, enough conversions that you can run a B tests. so we say like you need to run about 100 conversions a month from then on, can a B test properly. And those two factors are actually what makes it work. If you have both, we can, we can help you. ⁓ the yeah, the biggest bracket in this target audience are. coaches, returns agencies for businesses. But we also have a lot of e-commerce stores that run editorial funnels, for example, or pre-landing pages. We also have like SaaS companies that ⁓ just have landing pages for free trials or something. ⁓ So that's how you can imagine our target audience mainly. And our software, how does it actually work? ⁓ Like before you start, it makes a huge analysis. So you put your page in there. It looks at what is your company, what do you actually do? What's your offer that you want to sell on the landing page? Who is your target audience? Stuff like that. It looks at brand voice, which words do you use that it really fades in your page when we rewrite it? Which design elements do you use? It looks at which elements are on the page. And then it comes up with which elements on a page have the most potential for improvement. And afterwards it really builds improvement for your page. So you don't have to do anything. It comes up with a better headline, a different call to action button, whatever. And it builds improvements. It conducts A-B tests. So it shows 50 % of users the original, 50 % improvement. It tracks the conversions. It ends the test. It looks at the results. If the improvement is better, it inserts it in the page. It does that with every element one after another and improves and improves the conversion rate like that. It also learns from every result. So it doesn't matter if the test is negative or positive. It draws learnings from it. It comes up with better and better improvements over time. And this way we can We can test super rapidly, improve it, and that's how we get great results.
speaker-0: That's really awesome. So it's making me think like, ⁓ does this work for every ⁓ platform, like ⁓ click funnels, high level WordPress, all the things?
speaker-1: Yes, that's right. We integrate with the page ⁓ through JavaScript. And so you can imagine it like Google optimized back in the day. Where you put the JavaScript in there, you change the elements and then it, with JavaScript, it puts it in front of the right visitors. So we integrate with the landing page with JavaScript and we also check the conversions with JavaScript. For the conversion tracking, we use a very similar tracking mechanism than HiROS. So we use local storage, fingerprinting and stuff like that and have a very, very accurate ⁓ tracking like that.
speaker-0: That's awesome. No, that's super slick. I can think of a a handful of people that I want to recommend you to, but ⁓ we'll talk about that after. ⁓ with that being said, one of the things that I am curious to know about is is like in your own like sales process of things, one of the things that we like to to dive into in terms of the marketing strategies is like once you have the offer and you're sending traffic to it, like how are you ⁓ nurturing those leads in order to actually get them to convert? And how do you how have you in your own experience kind of built systems to help make that happen?
speaker-1: You mean for the software or for our clients with the agency?
speaker-0: We could break down both if you want. Either one works.
speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, it, it depends a lot on the offer on the funnel. ⁓ I mean, we ran a lot of webinar funds. ran a lot of automated webinar funnels. ⁓ and with those it's. It's kind of funny. had a client that didn't have the best sales team. So the sales team was always the bottleneck in the whole operation. So that's why we built a lot of mid ticket funnels. And we built webinar funnels that directly sell mid ticket offers. So maybe around like $700 or euros. ⁓ And for that, you don't actually need that much of follow up. You just send the traffic on the webinar page, they register, they go into the webinar, they get persuaded to buy the offer. Then they buy it. after that, you of course have a replay sequence of a few mails ⁓ and then broadcast mails follow up like that. But funnel is very short. But if you have a VSL funnel, for example, you run the ads to the VSL. You try to build a lot of trust in the VSL itself. They book a call and in the the time between the call and between the booking and the call, that's where the magic happens, right? So you can, you can do a lot of the on the thank you page already. You can do a lot of retargeting. You can send some mails. You can prepare a lot of assets that form a lot of trust in them. for example, that's one of the biggest mistakes I see, ⁓ marketers make. They don't use the thank you page. If you book something. And then you get on a page and they just say, thank you for booking or successful stuff like that. For example, for the webinar funnel, we use the booking page, the thank you page to sell a high ticket, funnel, a high ticket offer. So if you go to the webinar, you opt in, you go to the, you come to the thank you page. There it says while you're waiting that the webinar starts, you can book an appointment with one of our experts. He shows you a personalized roadmap on how you can. achieve your goals. And in those calls, we sold high ticket offers. And actually, I think the automated webinar made like 2 million in revenue a year with like 1.5 in ad spend. But the thank you page made 4 million in revenue with pure profit. So actually, most of the people would say on the thank you page, ⁓ thank you for signing up, your webinar is about to start and stuff like that. But we made all our profit just from the thank you page. So that's an example of how we do that. But on VSL Fund, on VSL Fund for book a call, would, I would, ⁓ on the thank you page, try to handle a lot of objections. I would try to set expectations. I would try to answer questions that they have. ⁓ You can, that you can do it with a lot of ways. can, you can put a FAQ section there. You can put a lot of videos there that explain stuff. I would. I would then remarket ⁓ with retargeting. I would put a lot of short videos, of long videos and try to get them to consume as much content as possible before the call starts. And per mail, you can do the same thing. You can show testimonials. You can list studies that prove the efficiency of your offer. ⁓ handle objections, you can tell them what the process will be like. And you do all of that before the call happens and the salesperson just has laid down these. They know everything that the lead knows, every objection, they know how the product works, they don't have any questions. If something is not answered, the salesperson can answer it, but they have a very easy time closing the deal.
speaker-0: Man, that's that's so awesome. I love ⁓ I love what you're calling out there about people not properly utilizing thank you pages because there's a lot of ⁓ a lot of upsell opportunity there that's that's just being missed, you know? Like, ⁓ I don't know if you ever follow or listen to ⁓ Myron Golden. He's always talking about the idea of making more offers. It's how you make more money. And that sounds like exactly what you guys are utilizing on the ⁓ the thank you page there. So that's fantastic. I love that. That's so cool. Thinking about implementing that myself now. I'm like gotta add that book a call to the thank you page. So yeah, good gold nugget. okay. So in terms of ⁓ what you guys are doing now in the the AI software side of things, how are you guys currently going about like finding the the traffic and nurturing those relationships to a point where they're now ⁓ doing your software?
speaker-1: To be honest, mean, we sell most of the selling happens through my network because from agency days, know pretty much everyone in the German market that's a potential client for the software. We're just ramping paid ads right now. And with that, I have a layered approach. I have... I don't even have a name for it, but I came up with this strategy that utilizes the Andromeda update to the fullest extent with lead magnets. So you kind of build a lead magnet, a micro lead magnet for every segment of your audience. For example, if you look at the ads from Hormozi, he always has an ad and he films it like 10 times for different avatars, you know. Yes, like if you're a plumber, then ⁓ I have this for you. If you, if you're an HVAC, I have this for you. And it's basically the same principle just with lead magnets. ⁓ So we, we use that to attract a lot of leads through lead magnets, which are like, would say second to cold. They are cold. They have, but they have a touch point with you that you can reference in an opening call. We do that. We are building a VSL. which will work just like I described to you. will like explain the software, how it works. You can book a call for a free demo. And between the time that you book and the demo, you will get hammered with trust and assets and testimonials and results. And then we have the usual book a call funnel, which is just an ad on the homepage, which sells the demo call.
speaker-0: Heck yeah. Nice. That's pretty clean cut. I like the idea of the ⁓ the network play there. when you were first starting out on your entrepreneurial journey, what were some of the biggest ⁓ doors that got opened for you that kinda helped you to build the network that you're now ⁓ a part of today?
speaker-1: Results and like everything. Yeah. I think, lot of people start the business and think, man, if I had the network, I would be successful, but it's usually the other way around. You should do, you should just do the work. Get results, be an interesting person and people will come to you. ⁓ after that, I I'm actually not the greatest network. I have a hard time like. Going out to people, speaking to them. It's not really my thing. ⁓ But if you have the results, if you are kind of an interesting person, if you know stuff that others want to know, they will come to you and talk to you and talk to each other that have you talked to this guy and stuff like that. And that's, that's actually how you build a network. Be an interesting person. would say.
speaker-0: Heck yeah. It's like ⁓ it's like being ⁓ like a magnet attracting all the opportunities to you by ⁓ being interesting enough and having the results that are attracting others to wanna come into your ecosystem.
speaker-1: Yes, actually a little nugget is I'm always invited to all kinds of masterminds and I'm not the guy to go to every one and introduce myself. Hey, I'm this, I do this. I don't know. My strategy is I try to get a speaking gig in the mastermind as early as possible. And then I present some kind of case study and our campaigns are pretty, pretty well thought through and executed. And I just show a campaign that we did and everyone is amazed like at the level of detail these things are built and then I get ⁓ everyone wants to speak to me. And so that's how I get to know everyone. Everyone knows who I am and I don't have the problems of going to talk to everyone.
speaker-0: Yeah, that makes total sense. It's like ⁓ being able to capitalize on the opportunity of everyone's attention as you're up there speaking and and sharing all the awesome case studies and stuff. The one to many play versus the one to one. Yeah, that's awesome. So that actually begs another question. ⁓ how do you personally go about getting those ⁓ speaking opportunities?
speaker-1: practice. Man, sometimes they just invite me because they know me. Sometimes I see it on Instagram, like we are looking for people to attend. write them, I would be interested. And then it worked like this. ⁓ but usually actually it's not, I never apply to anything. So, so I don't do that. ⁓ and most of the masterminds where you just have open access and run ads on them. I'm not a big fan of so. Most of the time I'm either invited or write someone on Instagram that I know either way.
speaker-0: Yeah. Sounds like it's ⁓ kind of since you're already in the know in the network, it makes it a pretty easy easy lever to pull, so to speak. That's awesome. Cool. ⁓ okay. So let's ⁓ dive into like a little bit more of the ⁓ I guess like mindset side of being a business owner and stuff. Like, ⁓ can you share ⁓ maybe a time where there was like some obstacle that was in the way that seemed honestly like It was gonna be impossible to overcome, but you guys managed to kinda persevere and and break through that that obstacle and kinda what that mindset side of things was like as you were going through the process and how you persevered.
speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, a few examples come to mind. ⁓ I think one of the biggest obstacles that we had is we were always doing the biggest and best webinar campaigns. And we had a lot of success with that. Most of it during COVID. But in the last, I would say two years, they really got very difficult to master. most importantly for us, because we, ⁓ sold mid ticket. So don't, you don't have that much leeway in the elite costs because usually a raw is like between one, two or three. And just, just last year in like between January and March, ad costs for us in the German's weekly market doubled.
speaker-0: Holy cow.
speaker-1: So we had like CPMs go from 20 euros to 40 euros and now in the US CPMs are different league. For us 20, 30, 40 is normal. And we didn't know webinar campaign was profitable anymore. And we had to, we had to find other ways to make a profit. We tried everything. We tried low ticket offers. We tried quiz funnels. We tried, yeah, just book a call funnels, but nothing really hits that much. And we started doing challenges again. So we, we set up a big challenge. I promoted it, it's basically five webinars in a row. And we ran that and that works really, really well. So you can imagine the situation for one client. We ran webinars, it was super profitable in January, in February, in March, everything crashed. Ad cost super high, never went down again. I don't know why, maybe it's, it's Gien or Timo or something in Europe. have to huge problem. problem that the Chinese companies are advertising so much and it's getting more expensive for everyone. ⁓ And we tried everything for months. And in October, we did the challenge in October, November, and we did like 2 million in revenue in a week or something. ⁓ And that's how we, we cracked out of the, out of the misery. That's yeah, that's definitely one situation that comes to mind. When you asked it.
speaker-0: Yeah, it you know, it's interesting as I'm hearing that story, what's kind of unfolding in my mind is I would imagine that you're experiencing a lot of a lot of frustration or doubt in those rising costs of ad spend. And, you know, where my mind would go if I was placing myself in your shoes would be like, you know, are are ads dead? Like, do we need to change to a different platform or things of that nature? And I'm I'm curious to know what made you so ⁓ capable of, you know, continuing to take the the at bats and knock it out of the park once more in the same ⁓ same situation.
speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, the most difficult thing about situations like this is the uncertainty, I would say. And actually, if you're a business owner, if you're an entrepreneur, the uncertainty, I would say is the hardest part about the whole thing. Because, for example, we run the ads, it doesn't work. You don't know why. You think, is the offer not working anymore? Is the market not working anymore? Do we have to go to the U S ⁓ is, is the ads? Yeah. You said it. Do ads still work? You, you you dot everything. but it doesn't help you. You just have to test rapidly, iterate fast. and for me, I was just calculating how we can get the revenue per leads or the revenue per click up. So can afford the higher prices and challenges are perfect for that. And we also changed the offer from just mid ticket direct sale to book a car. Even with a sales team that's not so great. And the math was working. We executed on it. It worked. Which was great, but it could have been that it doesn't work again. And we have to, we have to go back to the drawing board again. But luckily it did. I think that's the most important part. If it doesn't work, you have to try, you have to try again. If you don't try, you, you give up.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. It's interesting. It's like ⁓ the sentiment that came to mind was the idea that it's like you know, to take it very literally, like adapt or die. Like just you know, it's like keep pushing through the ⁓ the uncertainty and the craziness of it. ⁓ 'cause, you know, this is this is the way forward. You just you have to, you know? It's interesting. That's true. Yeah. ⁓ Okay, so I'm also curious to know like ⁓ what have been some of the like highest highs that you've experienced on the journey of ⁓ entrepreneurship.
speaker-1: Highest, highest. For me, actually, we didn't have a breakthrough or anything. So it wasn't like hockey stick, let's go. It was, we were working on it. It was working better. We increased ad spend. We made a little more and it was very gradual. So it got more and more over time. And after some time, the numbers were completely crazy. During COVID, we did webinars. We sold tickets to webinars. So we, I don't know, we sent an email. You can buy a ticket to the webinar. How you, I don't know how you do stock investing during COVID or something. And it was 50 euros apiece. We had like 3000 registrants just from this email. And then we had 95 % show rate. We had like 20, 30 % upsell rate on the mid ticket offer. We printed money. That was a crazy time. ⁓ But apart from that... It was always, always, yeah, pedal to the metal, full steam ahead, doing everything that it gets better. But as always, if it goes the best, you should give the most ⁓ because there's always to be, there's always coming, ⁓ there's always bad times coming. And when you have those, then it's too late. Usually when it's easy going, everything is good. You should work the most, I would say. And from experience I that it's really hard to actually do it because you give everything, it's hard and then you have good results. Then you want to rest a little, but there's actually the time to speed it up even more.
speaker-0: Yeah, that's that's very interesting. I've heard that same that same concept once before. ⁓ I listened to these like YouTube compilations of like motivational speakers and stuff when I'm at the gym. That's just my go-to personally. ⁓ but it I think it was ⁓ I think it was a clip of ⁓ maybe Eric Thomas, ⁓ the motivational speaker who was talking about the idea that it's like I'm I'm paraphrasing it, but it's like you've made it to the big leagues now and now you wanna rest. It's like you're you're here now. Like this is what you asked for. Like you gotta you gotta step up and actually play at this point. And it's it's so funny because I know ⁓ from the entrepreneurial journey and I'm sure you can ⁓ understand this as well, it's like it's it's such a it's such a game that requires consistent discipline that it's like you gotta stay on top of it all the time and then finally when you start to get those good results the temptation of like, okay, well now that I I have the thing working and we've got it going well and I'm starting to collect ⁓ the kind of money that I was hoping for, the temptation is now to take that break and like slow down and just like enjoy the good times. But to your point, like, you know, there's something lurking around the corner. ⁓ so you gotta make sure that you optimize the the success at the top, so to speak. Interesting. Yeah. Huh. Okay. ⁓
speaker-1: Yeah, for sure.
speaker-0: So one of the things that has been a common theme that I've seen along the the podcast as I've done it throughout the past couple of years is there seems to be a lot of ⁓ emphasis on like mentorship and people who have had ⁓ like key relationships in their life where it's been like the life changing relationship more or less. They either got the gold nugget or they introduced them to the right person or opened the right door for them. ⁓ what have been some of those relationships in your life?
speaker-1: ⁓ Yeah, to be honest, I never had real mentorship, I would say. are always some people that I would like to get more in contact with. It never works. So actually I, I just listened to a lot of podcasts and long form content of people that are where I want to go. I learned a lot from that and. The one client I was telling you and that introduced me to entrepreneurship through his video, he's a pretty successful investment banker. he's a really funny guy. He's very famous in the German speaking market now after our campaigns and everything. He's a Harvard educated investment banker who is from Austria, but is also a punk. So that's a weird combination. And he invested a lot of money in real estate, does a lot of big deals, investment banking stuff. That was actually our offer, how to invest in real estate, of course. ⁓ And I learned a lot from him during the time working with him. ⁓ Like how to structure contracts, how the legal system works, tricks there. ⁓ Also ⁓ how you negotiate, stuff like that. I learned a lot from him there. But apart from that, I wouldn't say that I'm in mentorship.
speaker-0: Yeah. That's that's cool. ⁓ it it does it does sound like he was ⁓ key in learning some of those things. Like I'm I'm really interested to dive into this ⁓ negotiating stuff. What was it that he he taught you in that realm of things?
speaker-1: ⁓ Our negotiations were very funny because he has a very methodical and tactical way of negotiating. So he uses the flinch a lot, which I hate. I don't do that. And I immediately recognize it and I'm just getting pissed off because he's like acting and not being with me, you know. And I have a very strategic way of negotiating. So for example, ⁓ if you, if you wanted to be my client, when I had my agency, you ask how, yeah, how much share do you want? And I would say something like, yeah, so the share is usually between 20 and 50 % of profit. It depends on how much effort you have after the sale I generate. So for example, if you're in an architecture office, it would be 20 % of profit. But if you are an online course that's automatically served and placed, it's 50 % of profit. So that's the spectrum. And for you, I would say it's 35%. The problem for you now is you can't argue with that. You know how the system works and where you are and it... Every single time it hits right there. What is it? So you have to frame where you can't ⁓ come out and I don't have to use any tactics to, I don't know, low ball you or something like that. And his approach was more like, ⁓ yeah, what's the price? ⁓ Yeah, tell me. He never said the price. He always wanted to know from other person what his... Intended prices. So he always said so what do you think and you say it doesn't matter what you say if you say 10,000 euros, he's like Okay, I wasn't expecting that I'm a little I'm a little shocked to be honest I think you insult my intelligence with that offer I will go out of the room calm down and you think of an of different offer So it's very intimidating at first, but our negotiations were funny as hell. can tell you because I have a hugely different style of negotiating. But we got along well over the years.
speaker-0: Yeah, that that's really funny. I think ⁓ I think context matters in that and like, you know, in in your context, like I can see how yours works really well and in his that that it's honestly it's very funny, but in the world of investment banking, it's like, you know, there's some some big deals going on, some big transactions, and it's like you gotta be able to you gotta be able to stand out and make a difference. So that's that's like strong arming in a way. That's that's hilarious. That's wild. ⁓ So what have been ⁓ what have been some of your ⁓ favorite clients that you've had the opportunity to work with throughout the years and what made those relationships kind of stand out more than others?
speaker-1: Man, I have a couple. I mean, I love mid-ticket info business products. So you have the course between 300 and a thousand euros. I know the perfect funnel to build and ⁓ the fulfillment is easy. You don't need a sales team. You can, you can run it. Right now, probably not. Right now you probably need a high ticket offer front end to be profitable in any way. But that used to be my favorite. And another offer we had was like solar, full service solar ⁓ construction. So for B2C actually, so you want a solar roof, something like that. ⁓ You fill out the form, you get called, you get sold ⁓ and a team comes to you, builds the whole thing. You don't have to do anything. And the offer was actually, example, you pay 200 euros a month for energy. Our offer was that we sell you a solar roof where you don't have to pay for any electricity after that. We finance it and the rate is the same as what you pay for your electricity. So you get this solar roof. for free and after I don't know 10, 20 years it's yours and you have free electricity. That was the offer, which was a crazy offer. I think in Germany there is a company that does a million in revenue, a billion in revenue a year right now with that offer. Same in Austria, basically. I built a funnel, which was a new twist on a quiz funnel, I would say. And we ramped it.
speaker-0: Holy cow.
speaker-1: Like in after 30 days, we had enough leads to do like 75 million a year. So that was a crazy offer. After some time it fell apart because the fulfillment was too complicated. ⁓ so that was a bummer. And the third offer that would come to mind is, ⁓ We have like very high tech terrace roofs. So a roof for your garden area, kind of with ⁓ the roof like being electrically adjusted. And that's actually one of the highest margin businesses in all of construction. And you can sell it B2C pretty easily. We have a very similar funnel for that as for the solar business. And we have been running that for. Almost 10 years, maybe eight years. I built a funnel back then. It's still running. It's exactly the same. Same ads, same everything. It has a rows of 10 and it's going pretty well. More and more people are catching up with the idea to build roofs for terraces. But it didn't hurt us at all. So that's a really great offer as well.
speaker-0: That's fantastic. Heck yeah. Well sweet. ⁓ those are some great examples and some really cool offers. I never would have thought about that with the the terrorist ⁓ concept. That's so wild. ⁓ okay, so ⁓ as we're coming ⁓ toward the end of the podcast, ⁓ a couple of my final questions. ⁓ you know, we're in the second half of twenty twenty six now. What are what are some of the big goals that you have before the year is over?
speaker-1: Yeah, we are just building out paid ads for our software solution. ⁓ We want to get that running up and running. We want to have about 600 active clients by the end of the year. ⁓ So that's the goal for the year. One of the biggest challenges for that is actually the sales team. We need to find good closers, good setters and Maybe we will try to get into the US market, which is a whole different story. have to build a sales team in the US and everything. So that's on the menu as well for this year. But let's see. Yeah, we have a lot of campaigns running already, not at scale, because we need to dial in the sales scripts and the fulfillment. That's the goal for this year and we're on track to hit it.
speaker-0: Heck yeah, congrats. That's awesome. Let's go. I'm rooting for you guys. so the final question that I like to ask on the podcast is, given like all of your experience to date so far, ⁓ you know, we live in a unique time and age where we have the ability to record a moment in time for future generations to see. ⁓ what would be the one piece of advice that you would like those future generations to to hear?
speaker-1: You mean, you mean life in life or in business context? Yeah. In life. Actually, it's the same. I actually it's the same. It's the same advice. would say provide value. That's, that's such an important thing that's overlooked ⁓ by, by young people. I think everyone wants to get rich. Everyone wants to.
speaker-0: Could be both.
speaker-1: get successful, but they forget the providing value path. So they want to get rich and they look at videos how to day trade. But how is that helping anyone? mean, yeah, economically, maybe you do price discovery or something. I don't know, but why don't you just go out, talk to people, find out what the problems are and solve those problems for the money. You will probably be. Pretty happy, pretty successful if you just do that instead of trying to get rich fast or don't know, scam people or I don't know what. Yeah.
speaker-0: Yeah. A hundred percent. Awesome. so first of all, thank you so much for your time today. This has been a lot of great insights and I love that final ⁓ piece of advice there. I think it's it's very much the giving mentality versus the taking mentality, which is great. ⁓ but for anybody who's been following along and is interested in checking out your software, where can they do that?
speaker-1: yeah, to be honest, our page is still in German. So if you visited, just translate it to English with Google Chrome. Our software actually works for every language. We have clients in the U S actually pretty big clients in the U S in Slovakia, in Dubai, everywhere. ⁓ but the homepage is in German. the home page is OptiMind.so. ⁓ so it's OptiMind, in one word, ⁓ .so. and can find me on Instagram at ⁓ Jay Vladenhofer. ⁓ That's the best. That's the best spots to find out more.
speaker-0: Heck yeah. Awesome. Well thank you so much for your time today. This has been a great episode and I appreciate your time and insights.
speaker-1: Thank you for having me.
