I actually would discourage most people from being entrepreneurs because entrepreneurship is not an easy game, right? Entrepreneurship is not your nine to five. Entrepreneurship is not a, I can clock out as soon as I collect my paycheck and be able to chill and watch Netflix and like it's really tough and it gets harder as you keep leveling up. Maybe you solve the financial problem. Great. Now you've got an operational problem. Maybe you solve the operational problem. Great. Now you've got a scaling problem, right? There's new problems all the time.
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Should you be an entrepreneur?
How to find your passion for your business.
How to keep your marketing funnels full and flowing - and not pay for your advertising…
Lessons from a young entrepreneur who made $200K+ in 48 hours at launch and $2million each year thereafter - this is the story and insights of Mikael Dia, founder of Funnelytics software and the man with the midas touch!
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So what keeps you going?
The biggest thing for me is I love what we are building. I love our product. I truly believe that it helps a lot of different businesses. I'm maybe a little too obsessed with our own product. Like it's this thing that I envisioned for myself and now that it's coming to life and fruition, it's like that's what ultimately fulfills me. I remember I'll share this quick story. I had, it wasn't really a mentor, it was my best friend's, former boss. He used to run an advertising agency. This is back in university. They were doing about a few million dollars and I'm just finishing university. So I'm like, wow, how are you doing this? At the same time, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I knew I wanted to start my own thing. I knew I didn't want to be an engineer, even though that's what I studied. I was like, how do I figure out what my passion is? Everybody says you have to start a business that you're passionate about. And I'm like, I don't know. I like basketball, am I starting a business around basketball? I like music. I don't know. Like, what am I passionate about? I have no clue. So I sat down with him and I asked him, how did you figure out that advertising was your passion? And I'll never forget. He looked at me and he said, Mikael don't get it wrong. Advertising is not what I'm passionate about.
There are four things that fulfill me and fulfill me every single day. Number one, I love being in a room with people who are smarter than me and more creative than me. Number two, I love leading people. Number three, I love having a vision become a reality, right? Seeing something on paper, then seeing it in real life and having that happen. And number four is I love taking ownership of things and being able to control my time and my freedom and what I work on, what I don't work on. So those are the things that fulfill me. If I wake up every single day and I can check those four things off, then I get up excited. It just so happens that advertising checks off these four boxes, right? Having this advertising agency checks off those four boxes. But there's probably a lot of other things that I could have started that would have also checked off those four boxes.I just happened to have chosen advertising, but I don't focus on the advertising aspect. I focus on those four boxes. And that stuck with me a lot. Ever since then, I never sit back and say, man is the thing that I'm working on my passion? What I sit back and say is, am I building something that I enjoy? Number two is am I consistently learning? Number three is, am I able to advise? Am I able to share ideas and have these types of conversations, right? And ultimately these are the things that fulfill me? And the last one being innovative, am I doing something that's innovative and that's really kind of out there? The money aspect, the freedom aspect, all of that stuff, it falls into place when you can get up every morning and say, yeah, I'm just doing stuff that fulfills me. It just so happens that it's a software company that has data and a whiteboard and we've called it Funnelytics, but ultimately that's what keeps me going.
That's awesome. That's awesome. That's exactly the right response too, and I love that story you just told about finding your passion, because we talk to a lot of people, we talk about purpose and passion, and a lot of young people feel lost because like you, they didn't know. They don't know. You don't often know when you're younger. So figuring it out is fun. And becoming an entrepreneur is the greatest way to figure this stuff out, isn't it? Because it gives you that opportunity for personal development, for really soul searching and figuring yourself out. What's the best, absolute best part of entrepreneurship for you? What's the thing you love the most?
So I'm actually going to rebut what you just said, actually. So I actually think that entrepreneurship, I used to think this, I used to think that, man, I would go to my brother and be like, how can you work for the government and you're nine to five and it just seems so boring. You should start a business. Don't you want to aspire to do more? Don't you want to do something bigger? Don't you want to make more money? Blah, blah, blah. And at the beginning, 100% that was my mindset. Now I actually would discourage most people from being entrepreneurs because entrepreneurship is not an easy game, right? Entrepreneurship is not your nine to five. Entrepreneurship is not a, I can clock out as soon as I collect my paycheck and be able to chill and watch Netflix and like it's really tough and it gets harder as you keep leveling up. Maybe you solve the financial problem. Great. Now you've got an operational problem. Maybe you solve the operational problem. Great. Now you've got a scaling problem, right? There's new problems all the time. Now, if you thrive on that, if you thrive on this idea of, I want to constantly be able to challenge myself, solve problems, I'm very ambitious and I want to do, that's what also energizes me then 100% entrepreneurship is the path for you. But I actually push people away from it. I say to people, there's no point of trying. There's no, I'm going to try to be an entrepreneur. It's either you are an entrepreneur and you build a business and you want to keep going. And there's really no Plan B and Plan B is because you've gone to a stage where it's like, man, I really have completely shattered here and I don't have a choice, but really to me, entrepreneurship is a path that you take because you almost feel compelled and there's no other alternative just isn't good enough. But does that mean it's for everybody? No, there's moments.
Do you do it mostly with other founders? Do you do a lot of partnerships?
So I have, IIFYM was a partnership. Funnelytics is not a partnership. I am a solo founder, which talk about resilience and talk about this is what this is about. This is probably the hardest thing that I've ever had to do is being a solo founder in a tech company that tries to take data analytics and puts it on a whiteboard. When I think about it now, I think like, what was I thinking? This is stupid? Like just dumb. Yeah, being a solo founder is really, really challenging. When you go through the ups and downs. The ups are very lonely and the downs are also very lonely. So it's this weird feeling of, hey, things are going really, really well. Yay. Let's celebrate. Cheers. Cheers to you buddy. Like tap on your back and of course you do it with your team and all of that stuff, but it's not the same, right? And then when you're laying awake in bed at night because things are going south and payroll is challenging or financial or churn or whatever it is. And you're sitting by yourself and nobody to talk to, nobody to figure out and solution with. So yeah, that's, I mostly have done partnerships, but, Funnelytics and my agency, my agency, I had a partner as well on the sales side of things, but, Funnelytics has been solo.
I think people, hopefully entrepreneurs have heard what funnels are, but let's break it down really, really simplistic so that people get what they are and what the value to their business is. Because I think that's where people aren't quite sure how to put those two together.
I'll put it as simply as I can, which is really, it's a series of steps that you take a random person who's never heard about your business before to ultimately become a customer. That's really what you're trying to do with a funnel. Let's think about it in context of not the online space. Let's think of an offline kind of environment.
Well, a traditional store would basically be, I'm going to walk down the street and maybe I see the storefront and I'm going to go in and I'm going to browse around and maybe I buy something, maybe I don't and I leave and that's it, right? It's just, people come to us and hopefully they buy something. Now, if you wanted to flip that around, you could have somebody stand right on the sidewalk who would interrupt that person who's walking by, maybe with a little sign or something that leads them into the store. And then you could have somebody who's waiting for them in the front of the store, who then asks them a question around, what are you looking for? What are you trying to do? And then guides them towards that thing and then moves them towards the purchase. And basically we've architected a sequence to go from this random stranger to become a customer.
Now in the online space, that's all we're really thinking about. Most let's say e-commerce businesses, is let's send as much traffic to our store as possible and let's hope people buy whatever they buy, right? Well, when we think about funnels, what we're really trying to do is architect that journey. What ad are they clicking on? When they click on the ad, where are they landing? What is the purpose of that page? Are we trying to get their name and email? Maybe we get their name and email so that we can follow up with them. And then we send them to a page that talks about our product and then eventually they go to an order form and then they buy a specific product, right? We've architected that journey to convert them from this random stranger to become a customer. So I think most people think of funnels as these complicated systems and all that stuff, but it's really not, it can be as simple as I have a one-on-one conversation with you and eventually we jump on a sales call and eventually we have a follow-up call and boom, you've now become a customer. And that is a funnel, at the end of the day.
So this gives me the impression that all good business people with some sales skills are doing some type of funnel in their interactions. We're just not calling it that.
Exactly. We've kind of gotten to this stage with the Russell Brunson's of the world and the Clickfunnels community and kind of this idea that a funnel is this machine, this thing, but it's not, it's just, you've got this random person and I'm trying to get them here. What am I doing in between to get them to that stage? And maybe it’ll just be, yeah, I'm doing a very simple outreach on LinkedIn to my network, I send them a quick message and then they get on a call with me. I have a conversation and then they buy. That's a funnel, right? Can I do it again? Can I do that again and keep that process going?
Now, one of the keys to a funnel is you have to be able to measure it, right? So in other words, I had three messages that I sent out on LinkedIn, I got one conversation and I was able to close one of one. Okay, can I get three more conversations? Can I get one more, one-on-one chat? Can I close another one, right? So is it, can I measure those steps and actually even visually see what do those steps look like? And that's when we can start really thinking about, okay, this is a funnel. This is a sequence of steps that we can ultimately measure that drives somebody from here down to here.
And Mikael, my following question would be, we're a big proponent of know-like-trust. It's all about relationship building. We've had many conversations with sales experts on this show and what we've realized is it boils down to how good and how personal is your relationship with each client? How does this concept, this philosophy, fit in with funnel marketing?
So at every stage of that journey, at every stage of that funnel, you're trying to build that know, like, and trust aspect, right? So typically I think what they say is that it takes around seven touchpoints for somebody to go from a random stranger to then having enough trust and belief in what you offer to go and actually become a customer. Right? So, in all of those seven touchpoints, you are building trust. You are getting people to know you and you're getting to some degree, getting them to, like you, right and like what you offer. So when you think about the funnel and you think about these different touchpoints at some stage, you're going to have to introduce trust. Okay. Well, what's trust? There's proof. There's belief that you can deliver on what it is that you deliver. So somewhere in there, you're going to have to have a message that explains to the person in front of you that I understand your pain. I understand what you're trying to achieve. Here's some proof that I've been able to solve it. And then that will check off that trust box. Okay.
Know. Okay. Well, maybe you need to introduce yourself. People don't want to deal with companies. They want to be able to see themselves in that process. A big reason why,
Nike doesn't go and say, all we do is have shoes. The reason they have Cristiano Ronaldo or Michael Jordan or whoever is because as the consumer, I want to like and know and see myself in that person. I'm not buying the shoes because of the shoes. I'm buying the shoes because I want to be like Michael Jordan, right? I'll never be like Michael Jordan, but that doesn't matter, that's what I want. So when you're thinking about what are those different touchpoints, you're always trying to think about, am I building a little bit more credibility? Am I getting them to like me more? Am I getting them to trust me more? Am I getting them to know me more? Because then when it comes to the sale, it becomes super easy. It's almost impossible to have a sale where you've never heard of me before. Let me interrupt you in the middle of the street and let me try to sell you my random shoes, right? Like, no, nobody's buying them. People are probably going to think you're crazy. So yeah, you have to keep building those relationships throughout that process.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, big in agreement with you on that. What we often find people in the startup space is they're afraid to put themselves out there, call it imposter syndrome that they're dealing with or, you know, they just want their business to be their brand and they don't want to stand behind their brand. But we often recommend that people need to be out front and become their brand. And what you're saying, sounds a lot like what we're saying too in the same way like you've got to build trust by putting yourself out there. So talk about how new owners, new business owners can start to do that?
Yeah, I think the first thing that you have to come to realize is if you're really in the business of helping, and you're there to sell a solution that ultimately you have some expertise around. And even if you have a little bit more expertise than your prospect buyer, you're helping them. You're here to help them. Right. And if you think of any big company, it's hard to relate small business to big business.
If you think of, let's say cars, well, there's a reason why out of nowhere, Tesla just suddenly became the number one car in the US and that's because there's this person that everybody knows by name, his name is Elon and he's been on at this forefront of talking about tech and talking about everything that he does with renewable energy, blah, blah, blah, right? Meanwhile, when back in the day, Henry Ford and stuff like this, now they're so big. And they're at this point where you don't need that face to continuously propel that because it's gone past that tipping point. But at the very early stages, again, you're playing in a field where, if you're in a market that has any potential of growth, then chances are there's other players, right? There's other people playing in that space and vying for business as well. So if you can't find a way to stand out, then you just look like another me-too type of company.
The amount of, I'll give you an example, the amount of people that send me messages for SEO services is ridiculous, right? But they're all the same. You do web development. So does this other person, so does this other one. So why should I listen to you? Why are you different? Because a little message you put on your website? No, you're different because when I go on LinkedIn, I see that you're actually talking about development, you're actually talking about this thing that you are passionate about and why you started this business. So I'm going to start following you and then I'm going to go and start thinking about doing business.
I'm going to do business with you because I actually like what you talk about and I actually, you know, resonate. It's a reason why we host podcasts, right? Cause we want people to connect with us as individuals.
So what are some really good channels? I guess it depends on where does your ideal prospect hang out, right? Where does your ideal customer hang out? Do they hang out on Facebook? Do they hang out on LinkedIn? Do they hang out on Twitter or X? Do they use other platforms, Pinterest? Are they local, right? Are they, is it more of a local type of business where they're at local events? Well, you should be present in that space. So that's how I always think about it. You always wanna be at the forefront of where they hang out because you wanna hopefully stay top of mind and talk about the topic and the pains and the desires that they have.
Yeah. Raising your profile to being one of a thought leader in your arena, whatever the arena is, is huge. And I think LinkedIn is a very underrated platform. I think it's a great space to talk about important things and talk to your potential clients right there. It's a good top of the funnel space to be in, but often people overlook it. Do you agree?
Yeah, number one social media, if you want to follow me, I don't post on Facebook. I don't post on Instagram. I don't care about Twitter too much, although I Twitter's probably my guilty pleasure of just scrolling and wasting time to be completely honest, but when it comes to actually thinking about business, it's all LinkedIn for me. And the reason is because number one, people are there because they want to consume information related to business, right? So if you're in the space, if you're a B2B type of business and you're really going after other professionals and stuff like that, 100%, they're in that mind frame when they log in to LinkedIn. LinkedIn has gotten a lot more content heavy than it used to be. It used to be more corporate and now it's a lot more personalities and people coming out there and actually talking about business while Facebook is a little bit more casual, right? So again, if you're going, let's say B2C and you're selling, I don't know, dog leashes on Amazon, I have no idea why I thought about dog leashes, it's very random, but if that's what you're selling…
Watch this space, Mikael Dia, entering dog harness territory, next.
I mean, people who have dogs are very passionate, right? They spend a lot of money. However, we certainly aren't going to market to them on LinkedIn, right? Like that's not the right place. You're thinking maybe Instagram, maybe Pinterest, so you have to know your audience and you have to make sure that you're going after the right pool.
Can we talk a bit about your business and the software company and how it helps people with keeping funnels simple? And then I want to get a little further into your deeper business experience because there's some pretty impressive successes already under your belt. So let's talk about Funnelytics and go from there.
Sure. So let me give you a little context as to why I built Funnelytics. Cause I think that helps set the right tone here. So I started Funnelytics in, I came up with the idea, I think it was around 2016 or something. So I used to run a marketing agency and what I would do in my marketing agency is build these funnels for my clients. So the way I would do it is, I would take a whiteboard or a PowerPoint presentation and I would just show them, okay, we are going to advertise on Facebook and then I would draw a little arrow and say that Facebook traffic is going to this page, and on this page we're going to collect somebody's name and email, and they're going to get this little paper here, but then we're going to send them five emails and it's going to go over to this sales page. And I would just map out this in a diagram format, this strategy. And once they saw it, they saw the little page icons. They saw a little Facebook icon. They saw a little dollar sign at the end, they kind of understood how this strategy would lead to actual results. So it was really easy to convince them and to sell them on this. But then when it came to showcasing actual results and showing the performance of this strategy, the first thing I would do is I would build these little spreadsheets to say, okay, well, if we spend X amount of dollars on Facebook and these are the numbers we hit across all of these different touchpoints, then this is how much money you'll make at the end. So I'd build these little models to show them their ROI in a sense, a little ROI calculator in a sense. And then when we would build all these pages, we would log into Google analytics and we would log into Facebook and we would log into these other platforms and they would all give me little pieces of data that didn't really match and didn't really make much sense. So I would then build spreadsheets to try and see what was working, what wasn't, build little dashboards to showcase to my clients. And then they would glance over them and they would be, I don't really get what you're showing me. Are we making money? Are we not? What are you going to do next?
So the idea with Funnelytics was, man, wouldn't it be cool if I could just have this digital whiteboard on my computer where I could map all these same little touchpoints and draw lines and connections to them. So kind of like a Miro style or a diagramming tool, but then just click a button and overlay all of my data right there on top and literally see how are people moving through these different touchpoints and see little animations and see my conversion rates and all that stuff. So I could just quickly at a glance, take the same strategy, but overlay data on top. That's ultimately what Funnelytics is. It's a digital whiteboard that allows you to look at your marketing strategy, look at your marketing funnels, but then you can overlay all of your data right there on top of that same strategy. So you can merge these two crazy worlds. You don't have to look at charts and graphs and spreadsheets, you can just take this nice, beautiful picture and then put data on top to see what's working, what's not. That's the software that we ended up building.
That's fantastic. And I understand that Funnelytics gained 50,000 users and generated $1.4 million in revenue in 10 months.
Hmm. Yeah. So actually, I don't know if you can see it here, it's called the Funnelytics Chronicles. I wrote this book. I don't sell these anymore. I used to give them to our customers.
But that first year of Funnelytics was a whirlwind. Yeah. We ended up generating just over a one and a half million dollars in our first 12 months. It scaled to another 2 million in the following 12 months, an additional 2 million in the following 12 months. And, it was pretty crazy, it was nothing that I ever expected. The way I was able to do that was what we just said in the very beginning, which is how do I create, how do I make sure people know, like, and trust me before I ask for any money?
So what I did was I set up a landing page. I set up a page that basically, so I mentioned Funnelytics has this mapping component, you can map out your strategy and then you can overlay the data on top. So I figured, okay, what if I give people this mapping tool for free and I won't charge for it because ultimately the whole purpose of this is to overlay the data, but let me give them the mapping tool for free. And in the meantime, while we're building out the analytics tool, let me put them into a Facebook group and let me just give them value. I run an agency, this was for agencies. Let me teach them how I've been able to scale my agency and the challenges and some of the stuff that I've been able to solve. So let me just be the and put out some content throughout this process. So what ended up happening was, I think I spent about 10 or so thousand dollars, in about the space of two months advertising this mapping tool, about 6,000 people ended up signing up for the mapping tool and about 3,000 people signed up or went into the Facebook group. And over the course of two months, all I kept doing is just Facebook lives, posts just giving them value, right? Educating them. And then little snippets, I would tell them and tease them about this Funnelytics idea that I was building. It was, I think, almost to the day, two months after I started advertising this mapping tool, I decided to open up the first beta group for the analytics tool. And it was a paid beta, and I expected maybe 100 people would sign up, maybe out of the 3,000 who are in my Facebook group, the 6,000 who were in my email list, by the way, this was from scratch. Nobody knew me. I wasn't known at all. It was just all a hundred percent from zero. I expected maybe 100 over the course of a month - 300 people signed up within 48 hours. I made $210,000 in 48 hours, cash collected and I was like, holy crap. I’ve never experienced this before. It kind of showed, wow, when people do, when you take that extra time to get people to know, like, and trust you, they didn't buy because my tool was revolutionary. It barely worked, right? It was barely a beta! They bought because they knew liked and trusted me. I showed up every day. I was there and helping them. And I built so much reciprocity. I built so much goodwill in that group that they almost felt, man, I don't have a choice, but to give this guy $500. I remember some people sent me notes saying, “I don't actually really know what this tool does, but I felt like I needed to buy it and give you money.” So I was, I mean, I'll take it. I'm not going to say no to your money. It's a cool tool though. So you should probably try to use it. But, yeah, and then we kept scaling from there after that.
Yeah. How do you keep the funnel full to keep getting more people interested? It sounds like you started with a great base, but how do you keep adding to that? Because you started great. But then how do you keep adding to that? Do you do ads? Do you? Yeah.
So, the biggest secret to a scalable funnel is you have to find a traffic source that you could control, right? That you can ultimately ramp up. The problem with, let's say, tapping into my network or referrals, is I have no control over that. My network is finite. I have maybe LinkedIn, you know, 500 people or whatever. Once I tap into that, I'm done. It's over. I can't do much about that. Same thing with referrals. Like there's only so many times that my customers are going to refer somebody back to me. So I can't control that. Right.
So if you want to be able to scale, the first thing you have is some sort of controllable traffic source. Paid ads is obviously the most obvious one. It's the one where I can put in a dollar and no matter what Facebook will show or Google or LinkedIn will show my ad to somebody. So, as long as my pool is big enough, they will keep spending my money and they will keep taking my money and keep showing that ad. Now the challenge is how do I make my money back quickly enough so that I can keep spending more? Right? Because if I'm spending, let's say $10 ,000 on an ad and my sales cycle is three months long and I have to wait three months to make my $10 ,000 back, for example. Maybe each customer is worth 30. So for $10 ,000, I get one customer and I make $30,000 but I have to wait three months for that. That means I'm going to go broke pretty quickly. Right? There's only so much I can do. I have to play this game of driving traffic, stop, wait, come back. Well, the name of the game should be how can I get my money back within that first 30 day period, ideally sooner, but I want to be able to spend a dollar and get a dollar back as quickly as possible so I could keep spending a dollar, right? And if I can keep that engine going, then now there's no stopping, right? I just keep sending Facebook money and it keeps showing my ads to people and they keep coming into my funnel into my world.
So how do you do that? Well, what most people have in their business is we call them in my world self liquidating offers or you can call them tripwire offers. Basically a small little piece of your core offer, the thing that you ultimately want to sell. You take a little piece of it that solves one key problem that your prospect has. It doesn't solve the whole thing. It just solves one little key piece. And if you can take that out and sell it as, let's say a, I don't know, it could be a checklist. It could be a little mini program. It could be a series of resources or something that once they put in their name and email, they come in, they have the opportunity to just take that little commitment. Then you can basically play this little game of, okay, I spend X dollars on Facebook, I get the name and email, I get a lead to come in and put in their contact details, but then I'm selling them this thing that is almost a no brainer and it's pretty quick. They can just pay for that. Now all of a sudden I've recouped my advertising costs. So I've just broken even on that ad right there, but I've collected all these leads that I can nurture over time. And then I can eventually send them to my bigger core offer, etcetera.
So finding a way to being able to break even on your ads really, really quickly through kind of these self liquidating offers or these tripwire offers, is how ultimately we've scaled. At some stage, with us, Funnelytics has grown a lot organically. People know what we do. They talk about our mapping tool. So it created this viral loop and this viral effect, but that's because we have a software and it's a little easier when it's something that's easy to talk about like that. If it's, let's say a coaching program or something like this, that's not as easy, right? People aren't going to just all of a sudden be like, Hey, go and check out this $15,000 coaching program.
It doesn't create the same viral effect. My job is to figure out how can I find a traffic source that is scalable and then how can I recoup my money on that spend as fast as possible, even if it's not by selling my core offer. Make sense?
Perfect sense. Yeah. Now, this is not your first rodeo in business, Mikael. So tell us a little from an entrepreneurial journey side of things about your nutrition business that. Revenue figures from $25,000 a month to $5,000 a day, for instance. What's your secret to success in this?
So it's all again, the same concepts at the end of the day. Our job is if we want to scale, we don't have a choice, but we have to find a scalable traffic channel. We have to find where our dream customers hang out and we have to find a little system and again, we call them funnels that will bring those people in, but then we can make money as quickly as possible so that we can just keep bringing them in, right? That machine starts to come in and again, they buy the core thing down the line, right? So with IIFYM, which is the nutrition business that I helped scale, what was happening there is I actually was fortunate enough to come in and they already had a lot of traffic. So the founder had built this calculator that was basically there to help you figure out what your macros should be. IIFYM stands for If It Fits Your Macros. Basically the concept is you can lose weight by eating anything you want. You can eat donuts and burgers or whatever, as long as it fits your macros, your macros being your protein intake, your carbohydrate intake, and your calories and whatever. I'm not a nutritionist. So we already had the traffic. So I didn't have to figure out what to do on the traffic side. I had to figure out, okay, how do we now convert that traffic into customers? And he was doing the same thing I just said, which is he was selling this coaching program, on the backend he was getting all these people coming into the calculator, but they weren't buying anything right away. He was picking and choosing who's a good fit for my coaching program, trying to get them to do this. Meanwhile, there's all these people who are coming in who we could easily sell a $15, $17 ebook on how best to track their macros and how, you know, different recipes, etcetera. So that's what we did. We just bundled a little piece of his actual core coaching program. He would do this anyway for all of his coaching clients. So we just took a piece and we said, Hey, anybody who fills out this calculator on the thank you page, here's this offer for this little bundle. And it was, I think at the time, $27 or $47, somewhere around there and then boom, instantly overnight, sales started coming in and it just kept going. It didn't stop. Every time somebody used the calculator, we saw that, okay, a certain percentage are buying this. Okay now what can we sell them afterwards? If they're coming in now, they're a little bit more qualified. Clearly they took action. So now let's move them into the next offer. What else can we position and package before we sell them into the big coaching program? And that's fundamentally what we architected to take IIFYM from $25,000 a month to about $5,000 a day. And it was crazy. It happened pretty quickly. It happened within a few months of just establishing these little pieces.So that was the other one. I also started a Mandarin school and I don't speak Mandarin. I've done a lot of fun things.
That's the question I'm going to ask you two is the most recent time that you laid in bed awake at night because you had a problem that you needed to solve. There are those days where things don't go according to plan, where you are the only person who's able to solve this problem and it's on you. And sometimes you want to curl up and throw in the towel. Like this sucks. So tell me about the last time you had a day where you laid awake in bed at night, thinking about a problem that you just couldn't fall asleep. Cause you just had no choice. Like you were sitting there and trying to figure it out.
Okay. So my experience has probably been a little different in that when I lay in bed not sleeping, it's because I'm overstimulated and excited about wanting to get something done that I want it to be done now. I want it to be done by tomorrow morning, but it's actually probably a three to six month thing. So my brain, my whole body is just saying, how can I fast track this? I'm a very impatient person when it comes to business, not when it comes to people. Sometimes when it comes to people. Yeah. That's what keeps me awake at night. It's like, how do I get this done faster? How can I make this happen? I've got this big idea. Who can I draw in? Who can I connect? How are we gonna create this? That's what keeps me awake. The troubles don't keep me awake. Simply the troubles are obviously there's going to be challenges and things that feel crushing and I tend to personalize those things so it's just my style and I think everyone's different and when I personalize it, it becomes I'm the problem and then there's this bit of a dark spiral that happens and I start to feel overwhelmed and I just sleep a lot.
It's like, I want to sleep.
Yeah, I'm just gonna sleep this out and hopefully when I wake up, I'm good. And then I'll get a coaching session and work out what the heck is going on with my fabulous subconscious mind and carry on.
Okay, I like that. I mean, that’s a good answer. What about you, Laura?
Well, I don't know if it's just the stage of life that I'm in, but I hit that pillow and I'm out cold every single night. And I think I work myself down to that last minute of the day because that is exactly what you're saying about entrepreneurship and what it is. The mind is constantly going, I'm constantly got something to do. I'll tell you, I think one of the big things that probably make it easier for both Vicki and I is that we have each other. And when you have a partner and you have a problem in your business, having someone else to talk it through with, to make a decision with, makes that like staying up late at night, obsessing over a decision you need to make kind of disappear. Cause it's like, I just got to talk to Vicky. And the good thing is if it's late at night, Vicky's awake cause it's first thing in the morning for her and vice versa. So we're always awake when the other is going to bed. And oftentimes we will have a conversation, late at night that will be like, we've got this thing and it's not quite working. Should we keep going with it? Should we change it? What are we going to do? We need to figure it out and that kind of helps, kind of clear it and clear it out. So we're good at really talking to each other about the things that are going on in our business, which makes dealing with the business much easier. For me, this what keeps me awake is more things to do with my kids or life stresses that are harder to solve by myself as a single mom. Definitely bigger challenges there.
Hey, you know what? Those are part of, part of life, you know, having kids and, trying to build a business and trying to juggle those things. There's no binary where it's work and home and those things are separate, especially as an entrepreneur, those things are very much intertwined. Again, you can't just clock out at five o'clock and be like, I'm at home now. Work is gone. It's done. Right. So, that happens for us too, as my wife and I and our kids having a four year old who's a little devil sometimes and a sweet eight year old girl and a crazy four year old boy. Sometimes you're just like, yeah. And then you're stressed there, but then you also have this to deal with. So yeah, I really appreciate that dynamic between the two of you, it helps, right? It creates synergies and you can talk things through. Having a mentor also helps a lot, having an advisor. So going through those motions is definitely important.
1000% community is key. No matter how you build your community for your business, you need to build one. Whether it's a close confidant, a mentor, a coach, a therapist, a spouse, you need somebody that you can talk things out with, even if you're a solo entrepreneur, you're never really doing life solo. So we need to pull good people around us. Yeah, makes it so much easier.
That's right.
Thank you, Mikael. This has been a fabulous conversation. I guess we'll take it home.
It has been great. Yeah, I wish we could talk even more and keep diving into things, but I appreciate you having me on in this awesome interview.
