🟢 How we earned $5K per client without offering 1:1 services

The mental shifts that helped us 10X our prices

Ryan Walsh 🟢

Feb 10, 2024

(4 min read)

Welcome to the 62 people who subscribed since Jan 29! 🤩

You want a comfortable lifestyle where you can enjoy yourself while helping others at scale.

Me too.

And I’ve gotten a taste.

Let’s talk about the 5 magical moments (stages) of being a solopreneur running an online business.

I’ll refer to my own past coaching businesses, one of which I ran with my partner Katie.

(Those are what I’m most familiar with.)

Earning the first dollar
Investing in growth (ads)
Scaling up (becoming more efficient)
Switching to premium pricing
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ (see below)

1. For me, earning my first dollar from a stranger online was such a magical moment!

There was Ryan “before” and Ryan “after”.

It’s silly, in a way.

I had been earning much more in a conventional 9-5 software engineering job.

So why get excited about the first time I got paid for coaching?

I felt so empowered.

That moment in 2015 was evidence that I didn’t depend on big infrastructure or teams to make a living.

And I could do it from anywhere.

Just me on a phone call (or video chat) with a client.

Sharing what I know. Offering encouragement and accountability.

I recommend to everyone to try selling something.

Even for $1. Even offline, if necessary.

It changed how I saw the world.

I wish I had started as a kid instead of in my early 30s.

2. I remember feeling beyond hesitant to pay for any ads (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Google).

“Wait, I just hand them my wallet and trust them? And maybe I won’t get any clients?”

It felt insane. To pay even $1 for ads was so uncomfortable. I kept delaying it.

Paid marketing is wild.

You don’t know ahead of time which strategies will work, so in a sense, some of them are “wasted”.

But the ones that work can make all the difference.

We started small.

Once we started experiencing success with it, we realized that running these ads wasn’t an expense.

It was an investment.

The more money I dedicated to ads, the more we could profit.

I (currently) can’t imagine paying for freeway billboards or TV commercials since evaluating their performance is probably quite difficult.

But for those Facebook ads, I was able to build systems that helped me feel comfortable that I knew which were attracting paying clients.

We noticed that (for us) the best-performing ones were on Saturdays and Sundays from noon to midnight Eastern Time.

So we turned off all the rest.

Eventually (after Magical Moment 4), we poured in as much as we could emotionally handle: $2K per weekend.

We knew that those ads would bring in multiples of that in revenue.

(Well, nothing is certain, but we’d gotten comfortable with the patterns.)

3. Getting more efficient (switching from 1:1 to group coaching)

The typical hesitations are:

Won’t I get overwhelmed trying to help everyone at once?
Won’t clients prefer 1:1?

I realized that we wouldn’t need to jump straight from 1:1 to something huge like 1:100.

We could start small, like 1:2 or even 2:2 or 2:3 (since Katie and I could both be on the call).

Bit by bit, as comfort allows, we could increase the group size.

Maybe we can handle 10 or 20 or more clients at a time!

And if we never start in that direction, we’d never know!

Side note: I’d paid to be a member of Frank Kern’s group coaching, and it was so inspiring to see him serve the group and witness people raving about his efforts (which he made look so easy).

I don’t know that I’d have been able to run a group if I hadn’t already seen it modeled.

The clients ended up appreciating the interactions of the group!

Individual clients aren’t always going to know all of the right questions to ask.

It’s helpful when they can hear others’ worries, successes, ideas, especially if the other clients started before they did.

What a relief.

Switching to group actually made our program more valuable (while making it more efficient to deliver).

Do I regret starting out offering 1:1 coaching instead of group?

Not necessarily, but I feel less sure of this answer.

People who are already comfortable managing group discussions could consider skipping the 1:1 phase entirely.

For me, it was fine that I started with 1:1.

I probably could have switched to group sooner, in retrospect.

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4. Switching to premium pricing

Ok, we’ve reached the main part of today’s post.

Going from <$500 to $2,000 and then $5,000 per client felt … like an earthquake in our stomachs.

I’ll never forget the first client we enrolled at our new $5K rate.

It happened to be on my mom’s birthday, so I even remember the date.

Katie and I danced around the house that September, almost in disbelief.

This changes everything.

When you position yourself as a premium option for serious clients who are ready to work hard and begin a real transformation, yes, you put more pressure on yourself, but you attract much better clients!

Who are less needy and much more appreciative, too.

However:

I don’t regret starting with low prices.

Don’t underestimate the power of validation, encouragement, and momentum.

If you start with a low price, if you get a small win, you can always adjust from there.

Consider the alternative:

If your first-ever price was accidentally too high, maybe you’d miss out on attracting any clients.

You wouldn’t feel the magic.

If you were to completely whiff, you wouldn’t necessarily know that the reason was because of your (too-high) price.

You might quit even though you were millimeters away from momentum.

In any case, plan to raise your prices continually.

5. What’s my next magical moment?

Katie and I saw peers profiting hundreds of thousands of dollars per year (sometimes millions) using the same approach I just described.

It was so inspiring to see, and it was thrilling to experience a bit of success ourselves.

However, there were some drawbacks, too.

With this newsletter, I’m now trying to achieve a new shift, which I’ll write about next!

🔜 Coming up (next Tuesday’s email):

Lessons from earning $41K/month online

🖥️ Want personalized guidance about how to earn $5K per client?

This is so awkward.

I keep deleting this section because offering something like this probably only makes sense once I have thousands (or at least hundreds) of subscribers.

But I need to get in the habit of asking what people want.