The most popular video on my YouTube channel is one going over how I went from 0 to $900k per month in 11 months.
At this time, the video has about 230,000 views.

The interesting thing is that I made the slideshow for that video in about 25 minutes as a presentation for a last-minute webinar I was doing and put almost no thought or effort into it.

It clearly worked as that video has made me millions of dollars but it left out a lot of stuff that may be good to know or to replicate in your business.

I was doing a landing page and CRO agency for eCommerce stores, around the perfect time right after iOS14 came out and tanked ad performance.

That, combined with very little competition at that time surely helped me, but I did many things that, at the risk of bragging, were brilliant.

So, today I’m going to go over what I think are the top five things that led to such a great success.

Let’s get started.

A lot of people are skeptical that a business (of any type) could grow that fast but after seeing what I’m about to show you, you may think that the result should’ve been much better.

I’m going to go over them one at a time as simply as I can.

So, what is the first one?

The first thing that I did that led to a tremendous amount of growth was partnerships, specifically, whitelabel and referral partnerships.

These were almost all with other agencies, and in a couple cases, SaaS platforms.

When making partnerships, I think all you need to do is ask yourself one simple question:

“Who sells to the same customers as me, but is not selling a competing service?”

It really is that simple.

For me, I was doing landing pages and CRO for eCommerce stores. E-commerce stores need a lot of different services like Facebook ads, Google ads, SEO, email marketing, influencer marketing, UGC and so on.

It wasn’t around at that time, but nowadays, TikTok shop would be a great example too.

I had referral partnerships with all types. I had three go-to options at different price points for every service. They would refer clients to me and I’d refer clients to them.

I was sending thousands of cold emails per day to all types of eCommerce agencies trying to forge these partnerships.

In general, I think every good partnership pitch has a few things:

Referral fee or incentive
How this will help their LTV/CAC
Special offer for their referrals

Most people get this wrong and will only focus on the referral fee.

Stupid.

Anyone will give them a referral fee. That doesn’t make you special. I made it a habit to pay everyone’s referral fee within one hour of closing. Too many people either forget to pay or make it so tedious that it leaves a bad taste in the referrer’s mouth. Not me.

So, I was receiving about 40 referrals (booked calls per week) at my peak here, and closing over 50% of them.

I’m going to talk about how this helped their LTV/CAC and the special offer in a minute when I talk about whitelabel partnerships, but it was the same offer for both whitelabel and referral.

This referral partnership strategy was really strong for me, but the whitelabel version of this was even better.

I listed out all the different services that e-commerce stores needed earlier, but of course, one stands far above the rest and that is Facebook Ads.

I’ve run my own eCom stores before so I knew this, but even so, it’s not rocket science. Most brands have 90%+ of their customers coming from Meta.

That is why landing pages and CRO are so valuable. They are part of the process of making meta ads work.

I had a great offer to Facebook ads agencies:

Pay me $5,000 per month and I will make you unlimited landing pages for your clients (max two at a time, so in effect, it was like 4-8 per month)
This will improve your LTV because your ads will actually convert and clients will churn less
I will do a free above the fold mockup and offer plan for all of your clients while pretending I work for you

How well did this work?

Well, let’s just say at the peak I had 77 Facebook ads agencies on this, all at $5k. If you do the math, it was $385k per month in recurring revenue with low churn.

This was much easier for me than getting an equivalent $385k/mo directly from clients. I would say maybe 5-10x easier.

I also probably got between $100-200k per month from the referrals although much of this was one-time revenue from landing page builds.

So, that is the first thing that I did much differently than everyone else that led to great success, but what’s something else I did differently?

The next has to do with something that is true in every industry, but especially true and difficult in eCommerce which is getting people to respond to and book calls from cold email.

I view eCommerce as the most difficult industry to book meetings from cold email. This is for a few simple reasons:

They receive SO many cold emails. I have a Shopify store that hasn’t done a sale in 3 years, and I personally receive about 30 cold emails per week still, so I can’t even imagine how much legit founders receive
It is so easy to find their emails in comparison to other industries. Technology used = Shopify, and you have a perfectly accurate list.
There are so many stores that need so many services so there is just huge demand and the supply reflects that.

These things make it very tough to do cold email successfully in eCommerce.

However, I was booking sometimes as many as 100 calls per week from cold email and I attribute this to one (and a half things).

Any time someone responded ANYTHING to ANY cold email, my appointment setting team would call them and text them right away. We had their number from when we enriched the list, and if they responded, they would be called and texted right away.

This was the difference maker.

How is this possible 24/7?

This is the extra (half part when I say one and a half things).

At any given time, I had three appt setters in Mexico and South America, three in South Africa or Eastern Europe and three in Indonesia and the Philippines so that three people were always working around the clock and available to call anyone who replies.

I was sending huge volumes of cold emails, so I had three people at a minimum, both to handle the volume, as well as for redundancy because we all know how unreliable some people are.

If there was a reply, notification in Slack, instant call and text.

Text message sent first with name so that it would say Maybe: Matthew Larsen instead of an unknown number and then double call which gets through a lot of the weaker DND features on phones.

I truly feel this is the main difference between people who have mild cold email success and those who have a ton of cold email success. You have to call.

So, those are two things done, and there are three left. What’s the next one? The next one perhaps made almost all the difference in terms of how rapidly I was able to grow.

This is one that I’m very proud of and applying this concept is one of the first things I do or engineer in every business.

I have completed this objective in both Lead Generation Academy and the pay per lead agency I’m a partner of, as well.

This concept is driving CAC down to zero (or even negative in some cases)

If you could only choose two metrics, you’d probably choose CAC which is customer acquisition cost and LTV which is lifetime value.

You want your CAC to go to zero and your LTV to go to infinite.

That is how you hyper scale a business.

Unfortunately for me, my LTV was not great in this business, so I focused on my CAC, and again at the risk of bragging, I did a great job with this.

There were multiple components to this. I have one component that I’m going to talk about as the next point and go specifically in-depth on this, but I’m going to talk about it very generally here.

I ran a ton of ads, and did a ton of outreach to grow the business, which made ad spend, outreach infrastructure, as well as appt setting and closing costs (and payment processor fees) the biggest expenses in my business.

In general, my intro offer had about a $3,300 value at 80% gross margin. This meant I had about $2,640 of margin to acquire customers and then repeat business or upsells to recurring CRO was where all the profit was.

I went back over all of my data in preparation for this and found my exact costs:

CAC through a book a call funnel: $1,988
CAC through cold email: $680
CAC through outbound setters: $575

These are inclusive of all costs, with the outreach ones mostly being appt setting and closing costs.

I even went so far in preparation to weight these out to accommodate for volume, and I found that my overall blended CAC was $1,077.

This is not bad at all, at a $2,640 profit per job. I could’ve been very happy with this, but I wanted it to go to zero.

Here was what I did, simply as possible:

Remember how I said I had referral partnerships that booked me tons of meetings? Well, the inverse and opposite were also true.

I referred HUGE numbers of people and always got a referral fee (and made a lot of friends and allies).

What I’m about to tell you was heavily concentrated in the onboarding process for each client, but was also ongoing 24/7/365.

In each client onboarding document, there was a form with what intros and other stuff they need. Here are some examples:

Facebook ads
Google ads
TikTok ads
Influencer marketing
SEO
Email marketing
Accountant
Bookkeeper
Lawyer
Retail broker/agent
Tracking/attribution
Agency ad account
AB testing tools

Think about this. I had this all in the onboarding process and they would just say yes or no. These are not made up. These are things that these clients actually need.

I negotiated with all my referral partners to give me 100% of the first month retainer, then nothing after that. This gave me tremendous cash flow.

For an eCom SEO agency for example who charges $5k/mo, instead of a standard, recurring 10% referral fee which was $500/mo, I got it all up front. This would be a $5k referral fee and they’d keep the rest.

I had between 10-15 referral options in my onboarding process and some people would request referrals to 5 or even 10 things at a time.

Basically, with an average payout from the other agencies of $3,500 per referral, which would be a $3,500 commission and a $1,077 CAC for me, I’d need just one referral to completely eliminate the CAC for over three customers.

Not everyone converted of course, but some clients actually got multiple referrals and I remember several times where I got over $15k in referral commissions from one client.

This process completely eliminated my CAC and all I had to do was increase volume of outreach and my ad spend. The budget and worries around acquiring customers and how much it cost no longer applied to me.

This was the number one thing that allowed me to scale so quickly. If I actually had good LTV and a lower monthly churn, I’d probably have gone from 0-$5 million per month but that’s a what if story for another time.

So, that’s the big one but I also alluded to something else that is related so I will talk about that now.

It was a specific type of funnel where I had a zero CAC even without doing this and that was a low ticket product.

Not a lot of agencies do this and that’s usually because the offers just aren’t that good.

My low ticket offer eventually settled on being 100 landing page templates for $97.

I actually started with three for $17, and then just added more and more.

At one point, I tried 1,000 Webflow templates for $97, but it didn’t perform any differently than 100 so we decided to just make the 100 better.

Essentially, what I was doing was making a sale for $97 (minus fees), then running ads for these templates to eCommerce Stores. If I was able to get someone to buy for $97 or less, I was breaking even, and then could relax and try to upsell them over time.

This went well for me for a period of about 7 months, in addition to all of my other efforts, including eventually the book a call funnels.

I am in no way trying to claim that this worked permanently, and the cost per purchase of the templates continually increased over time until the point where it was no longer worth doing and I shut it down.

The key metric here is about 2.1% of customers upsold from the templates to a landing page DFY package with my agency (average $3,300 price). This meant that from a certain point of view, these customers were worth $69.30 each to me on top of the $97, and then whatever they were worth if they upsold to recurring CRO.

This was so powerful for me because I could advertise so heavily without any risk, even more so than in the previous point. The referral fees from the previous point still applied here, which meant I was profiting fairly heavily.

At my peak, I was spending $7k per day on these ads, and getting between 60 - 100 purchasers, who would eventually convert to landing page clients at a 2.1% rate.

This was a lot of profit for me with those referral fees, because it was like having two systems designed to reduce CAC to zero stacked on top of each other.

In addition to that, these templates were built on Webflow, which is a somewhat uncommon platform to build them on, but in my opinion, the best one. Most people who bought did not have Webflow, and almost all used my affiliate link.

Webflow doesn’t have the greatest affiliate program out there, but thousands of people doing this stacked up to a tremendous amount of recurring revenue over time, and I poured all of this cash flow back into more ads and outreach.

So, the first four things that I did to get from 0 to $900k per month all had to do with acquisition. That makes sense. 0 to $900k per month takes a lot of acquisition, especially when you take into account my higher than desired monthly churn rate for my CRO services.

But, one might ask, and trust me, I asked this during this process, how is someone supposed to hire, train and fulfill this volume of work so fast?

That is what my final point is going to be about.

My final point which is all about fulfillment is something of a factory or assembly line approach to making landing pages and doing CRO.

This was the only way for me to do 200+ new landing page clients per month, 75+ partners, and 45+ CRO clients. I tried everything, and leaving people up to their own projects lead to failure, very, very quickly.

Here is how it worked for me for my landing page team.

I had three templates of each kind of landing page. There are three. Sales pages, advertorials and listicles. These templates were hyper-optimized and kept getting better and better over time from incorporating new learnings from A/B tests for each client.

Once you actually put people’s colors, logos, pictures, and overall branding on each page, you would never be able to tell they were templates.

I had a team of about 60 in Pakistan and India, who would use pre-made AI copywriting tools (prompts, projects, examples, etc.) that I had made and perfected myself from all of my previous clients.

With this method, they were able to take the assets from the onboarding form, develop an offer using my AI version of myself, and then build the desired page type with all of the assets filled in and copy filled out within 24 hours.

When they did, they would pass it off to one of my team of 15 in America where they would act as something like the editors at a newspaper and fix it all up and make it perfect. It was their job to take it from 80% or 90% to 95%+ and ensure it looked good, was functional, and there were no mistakes.

After they reviewed it, another team of about 5 in the Philippines would essentially act as the QA team, going through a checklist and making sure it was absolutely perfect.

Then, the account manager would present it to the client.

With this method, we were able to get the first draft to the client within 48-72 business hours, which was great time to value which is an important metric for client satisfaction.

Normally, there were 1-2 days of changes and revisions asked for by the client, and then we were able to go live in less than seven business days.

With this method, we were able to almost infinitely scale and fulfill, but definitely had our problems with quality and consistency along the way.

With this method, about 55% of our landing pages beat the original/what they were using before in an A/B test which in my opinion, is very good. Many of the clients were very, very smart and optimized which made it hard to beat.

There were pros and cons of this system, but it easily handled 200+ clients per month, with most of them being happy. I tried to avoid/discourage the people who I could tell are very, very focused on brand from buying during the sales process, but they often slipped through.

So, these five things are what allowed me to scale from 0 - $900k per month so quickly at this agency.

I think these are all things and general concepts that can be applied by anyone.

If you want me to help you build your business, book a call with Lead Generation Academy and I will see if you qualify.

https://leadgenerationacademy.ai