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In today's Guide:

• 👩‍💻 Dan Koe’s $2.6Million dollar setup

• 🚀 The growth distribution formula

• 🔥 The pricing structure for scale

• ⚙️ The Instagram Creator Course

• ✅ Referral program news update
  
  Read time: 20 minutes

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How To Reverse Engineer A $2.6 Million Business System In One Week!

Freaking awesome right!?

And guess what, one of the most glaring omissions you’ll notice is that there are no sponsorships within his business.

That is RARE.

It’s very well known many people in the newsletter space sponsor a lot of startups so that others can also build their audience and they can monetize theirs.

But the coolest thing is he has No newsletter sponsors, no podcast sponsors.

Talk about making a killing!

So, how do we put these into a more tangible perspective?

Well, we break it up into conversion metrics.

You could almost say, he’s making $1+ for every subscriber he ads to his overall social media channels through a 3.5-year span.

Note: this is not an exact number but it’s a rough estimate we can deduce from what we know stats-wise.

So how exactly does he monetize his audience then?

Sell Digital Products & Courses

Dan has a variety of digital products and courses that he’s sold over the years but the current ones he promotes are around this pricing:

Passive Affiliate Commissions

Dan promotes a few tools that he uses personally, which will add some additional revenue for him.

I don’t have any revenue numbers for these, but I wanted to show you the list of tools used in order to earn affiliate commissions;

• Website: Kajabi

• Scheduling: Calendly

• Content Publishing: HypeFury

• Payments: Stripe & Gumroad

• LinkedIn Analytics: Shield

• Twitter Analytics: Ilo.so

• Website Analytics: Fathom

• Community Memberships: Outseta

• Customer Docs: Notion

• Notifications: Slack

• Customer CRM: Airtable

• Integrations: Zapier

Media Service

Plus If you didn’t know, Dan also launched a new media service business called Keyframe.

They create explainer “visually abstract animation” videos sharing their perfective on self-development, business, and health.

I don’t have any insight into how well this is doing but people go crazy over these videos, so as you can see here…

Dan came into the market and just created his own niche by doing the following;

1. Developed his skill

2. Shared his perspective

3. Crafted his own niche

4. Created of small course sharing his skills

5. Consults on projects exercising his expertise

6. Launched a service to help others grow

Are you seeing a pattern here?

if in case you didn’t notice it, check out the breakdown below…

But naturally for Dan to promote these offers, or at least make them accessible publicly he needs to expose them to a larger audience.

Dan decides to go all in publishing youtube videos and leverage the algorithm focusing solely on sharing “value-driven practical advice and insights”.

So, let’s look at his revenues for youtube.

YouTube Adsense

Now that his YouTube channel is really taking off, YouTube ad revenue is some icing on the cake of his other revenue streams.

I used a YouTube ad calculator; here are the (probably conservative) estimates.

The Growth Timeline

In a graph by Growinreverse, you can see Dan’s growth timeline has a really consistent upward trajectory until it just explodes around May of 2022, and then again around the beginning of 2023.

There are two points on the timeline where things got a little wild. I’ll dig into each one throughout the rest of this deep dive, but I’ll refer to them as Explosion 1 and Explosion 2 to make it more fun.

The second explosion has to do a lot with the visual content he’s been creating posting on Instagram as reels. You’ve probably seen them – black-and-white animations that explain a deep concept in a super simple way.

I don’t recommend going into such video styles as super deep methodical subjects because I think the space is constantly changing/evolving and it’s not an easy thing to predict but the key here is,…

If you are presenting something unique to the market you will naturally create your own “blue ocean”.

Here are some of my own and how the beginning stages of success using the methods taught in The Instagram Creator Course 👈

below you can see what kind of momentum you can get with your content;

So opportunity is certainly at your doorstep, you simply have to start executing and get going following the formula below.

Let’s get started 💪

Growth Distribution Formula

Here are four key factors why Dan has been able to grow so fast;

1. Content promotion strategy. Talk about repurposing your content until you can’t squeeze any more juice out of it. Dan publishes across 7 channels leveraging his unique system that you can also apply.

2. Perfecting the no-sell approach. This is the exact opposite of what most creators are doing. Instead of shouting all about your products, Dan shouts about the free lead magnet he is creating and lets it speak for itself.

3. Iteration & experimentation. Dan has been iterating on his processes, and content types since he started. It’s one of the things he’s most consistent with. Even in the last month, he’s changed how he does things.

4. The $2.5 Million Offer Stack. Dan has a variety of products that he sells, so I wanted to walk through the full stack and show you how he’s upselling and cross-selling them within his ecosystem.

Now you know the four catalysts, lest break them down;

1. The Content Promotion Strategy

Dan has a really well-laid-out strategy for creating short-form content from the newsletter.

If you enjoyed the deep dive about Justin Welsh, you’re going to love the way Dan sets up his content strategy as well.

Dan has iterated on this over time, as you’ll see, he continues to do so. But there is a lot we can learn from this strategy.

Let’s walk through each piece so you can see it all in action. As a note, this isn’t the exact order they go in, but it seems pretty close to how he’s publishing them.

Here’s the birds-eye view overview:

Let’s break down his process,

Newsletter: Long-Form Insightful Guides

You may have heard other creators talk about starting with long-form content, but Dan takes it to another level.

He writes really in-depth think pieces each week, and they are quite different from some of the other “online business” stuff you’ll find online.

While he started talking about web design and marketing, now he covers all kinds of topics from health, relationships, mindset, business, etc. – and each piece has a philosophical angle to it.

He spends around 45 minutes a day working on his weekly, long-form newsletter piece.

Every Saturday, he publishes the article on his website and sends it out to his email list.

If you are wondering how you can do the same and publish your own insights, by executing the ScaleAcquisition Solopreneur Guide process you’ll be able to come out with many different topics you can create content on.

Below you can see how that is done, step-by-step…

YouTube: Newsletter Outline Video Script

After Dan publishes the article on his blog and sends the newsletter, he then takes that content and turns it into a video for youtube.

His method is to read through the first part of the newsletter, and then turn to the camera and freely share his insights on the subcategories. And then continue on down the script.

As you may have seen by his channel, most of his videos are talking head style – just him speaking into the camera. His editor then adds B-roll footage and music gets layered onto the video.

If you’ve never seen his videos, they might seem very basic but they are really well-edited.

One of the things I love about this strategy is that you can actually see Dan looking at this newsletter/YouTube script to find his next talking point.

It’s just a split second, but it shows that you don’t have to be perfect on every piece of a video. You can get almost 300k subscribers if you have good “insightful” content with a unique personal perspective.

He says that these videos take around an hour to record.

Podcast: Video Audio For Podcast

Once he has the video, his editor turns the full audio file version in various smaller sub-category files to publish it as a podcast.

He has gone through many iterations of the podcast, but now he’s just repurposing this video and putting it online.

But, he also posts the full video on Spotify so you can watch it there as well.

Twitter Tweets And Threads

During the week before a post goes live, he shares a tweet or thread teasing one of the topics in the upcoming newsletter. He doesn’t give away the meat, but he’ll talk about a story or insight he had around the topic.

So to give you a clearer picture here’s an example of how the process looks…

So the strategy Dan uses to promote the newsletter is that, on Friday (the day before the newsletter goes out), he’ll tease the topic of it by sharing the visual he’s created for that idea.

This is a segment or a sub-category of his guide structured into a tweet or thread.

Below you can see an example:

After he publishes the newsletter on Saturday, he’ll put out a tweet with a punchy idea or bullet points of what he covered in that article.

Throughout the week, he’ll share quotes and smaller bits of the newsletter as tweets. Then he links to the main article on his blog where people can become newsletter subscribers.

The tool mostly used by him is called TweetHunter to make this possible.

He schedules all of the tweets ahead of time so he doesn’t have to manually post them.

If you’re familiar with Tweethunter you can see below an example of how I schedule for days in advance so that I can focus on other activities.

But you might be asking,…

Does what the repurposing process then?

Well, below I’m going to break it down for you.

Instagram: Tweets Into Info Graphics

Similar to Dan, I also apply the same process of using the content from Twitter tweets to create carousels for Instagram, while relying more heavily on the visual side of things as you’d expect.

Here’s Dan and my examples;

As you can see here by the images, they are very unique and insightful.

This does not mean you have to be super perfectionist or unique but it does give you an insight into what people feel attracted to thus you might want to see within your desired industry you want to sell to what is popular and how you can come up with your unique style.

LinkedIn: Tweets Into Posts

He shares many of the same posts from Twitter, so I won’t embed them all here for you. But here is one example to show you that it’s the exact same post displayed above.

As you can see, nothing super complicated. You can also do it.

TIP: One crucial activity Dan and Justin Welsh also shared was that they make sure to MANUALLY ENGAGE with some of the comments as well for at least ONE HOUR, so it’s not like he’s just publishing an that’s it.

Since he’s using LinkedIn, there’s a decent chance he’s also using Taplio to publish and schedule these posts, which integrates with TweetHunter.

Note: since these guys are mostly trying to touch on topics that attracted their audience they have also expressed to using analytics tools such as;

Note: next month I’m also releasing the top 60 tools used by solopreneur to get systemized and automate their business faster so make sure you are tuned in for that.

2. Perfecting the “No-sell” Approach

Unlike a lot of creators, myself included, Dan doesn’t actually ask people to explicitly sign up for the newsletter all the time.

When I say the “no-sell” sell, I’m referring more to him mentioning his newsletter and courses in relevant places and letting people come to the decision to buy or not on their own.

Most of the time with his tweets, he’s just giving out deep insight on a subject, and linking to that specific blog post on his website. And then people will go sign up on their own.

The strategy here is smart for 2 reasons:

1. If people want to get more information, they’re going to find a way to sign up for the newsletter.

2. Within his articles, he links to his courses and products, so even if someone doesn’t sign up, he can still capture their attention in other ways.

Plus, by sharing an article people might be interested in, you’re going to get more clicks to the site, and more eyeballs on your content than just sharing a link for them to subscribe.

At the top of every page on his website, there is a strong call to action and a form to sign up for the newsletter. This is how he captures people’s email addresses.

And just in case you get to the end of the post and haven’t signed up yet, he has an opt-in form in the footer as well.

I only really see him telling people to subscribe in his pre-newsletter teaser tweets.

Essentially, he’s killing two birds with one stone and getting people to see his product offers AND his newsletter.

All along the way he’s building trust with his audience by giving away free content.

3. Iteration & Experimentation

Dan talks about iteration a lot, but he really does follow his own advice on this one.

He says he likes to move fast and break stuff to find out what works.

I managed to get a few different ways he’s done this along the way, as well as some more recent examples.

Iteration #1 - The Content Topics

Dan has been talking about building your own business online for a long time.

But it wasn’t until he started leaning into the “one-person business model” that his message started to resonate with more people.

He realized this when he interviewed Justin Welsh on his YouTube channel. That video got a lot more views and good feedback than he was used to.

You can see that it had 7k views compared to around 700 views on the others.

He realized that the notion of the “one-person business model” related to people more than the other topics he was covering.

That was insight #1 on YouTube.

So when someone goes back to his past content on YouTube, it’s not immediately obvious and kind of just looks like he started at that point.

The point here is that he had been doing this online content creation for a while before coming to this realization.

It wasn’t until then that he hit upon a message that resonated heavily with the audience he had built.

Iteration #2 - Video Thumbnail And Title

If you recall from the growth timeline above, May 2022 was right around the “Explosion #1” label.

At that time, he started changing up his thumbnails and leaning really heavily into the visuals many people know him for today.

The newer thumbnails have a picture of Dan, looking toward the visuals that explain the concept covered in the video. The visual is a bit hard to read on purpose, but they draw you in with the arrow and punchy tagline.

Take the “Copy Cat” video for example. The thumbnail calls the viewer out saying “You are a copy cat” alongside a picture of Dan looking at the camera in a way that strikes a nerve.

It almost makes you feel like he’s calling you out specifically.

But then the title of the video is “Stop trying to be unique…do this instead.”

You go from feeling bad that you are a copycat, to feeling like, “Wait, it’s okay to be a copycat? What should I be doing instead of trying to be different?”

The bottom line is that he always looks for ways to provoke your emotions and connect with you at a deeper level using trigger words or visuals.

Iteration #3 - Test All Kinds of Offers

Dan had been trying different ways to make money online for years.

In 2018, he seemed to be throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping someone would want to buy something. His website listed everything and anything he could help with.

Eventually, he started to narrow it down, but here are some of the other things he’s sold (or tried to sell):

• Digital art created with Photoshop

• Web design & WordPress services

• Dropshipping

• Minimalist wallets

• Blue light glasses

• Productized websites

• Funnels for service-based businesses

• Web design course

• Freelancing course

• Power planner

• Modern Mastery HQ (MMHQ)

• 2-Hour Writer

• Digital Economics

I’m sure there are plenty of others that no longer exist or that he renamed, but these are the ones I could find.

The main point here is that he’s tried a lot of things, failed at a lot of things, and is now seeing success with some of these.

Don’t give up when you try a few things and they don’t work out.

Iteration #4 - Podcast Variations

Dan has experimented quite a bit with the podcast as well.

He started it back in April of 2021 and was interviewing people who had interesting ways of doing things in business.

Most of the guests were people on Twitter who had decent followings.

Around August 2021, he started recording episodes with Joey Justice, who is the community manager for Modern Mastery. He also recorded “Friday Focus” episodes where he kind of ranted about topics he was writing and thinking about.

In January 2022, he started doing a lot more solo episodes, along with some interviews sprinkled in.

Dan was recording a separate podcast based on the newsletter topic but didn’t feel comfortable just pulling the audio from YouTube.

In May, he rebranded the podcast from The Modern Mastery podcast to the Koe Cast.

By November, I think he was realizing how quickly YouTube was taking off and he needed to focus on that and not try to record a separate piece of content.

He went back and uploaded all of the previous YouTube videos from May to November as podcast episodes.

While these changes might seem subtle, Dan was trying a ton of different methods and finally found one that worked for him.

4. Dan’s $2.5 Million Offer Stack

I mentioned above how Dan has tried a ton of different offers and iterated on the those but I want to walk through his current offer stack, because I think it’s really insightful.

I reverse engineered his funnel and offers to see how he’s cross-selling and upselling within each.

Free Opt-ins:

To start us off, Dan has a few free ways you can get started.

7 Days to Genius Ideas Challenge

With this challenge, Dan gives you a method to solve that problem.

It’s a course with a login, but you also get emails every day to keep you moving through the process.

How he promotes his other products within this free challenge.

On the thank you page immediately after signing up, you see an offer to get 2-Hour Writer, his $150 course.

He sends a welcome email with details about the course and how you can find the most success with it. It’s really a helpful email.

In the “PS” line of that email, he promotes an offer to join Modern Mastery HQ for just $5 for the first month.

Throughout the 7 days, he sends emails with prompts for you to come up with good ideas. In a few of those, he mentions MMHQ:

• On Day 2 he talks about Modern Mastery HQ, but doesn’t link to it.

• On Day 4 he links to Modern Mastery HQ.

At the end of those emails, he doesn’t really pitch anything.

You would almost think that he would use that as an opportunity to pitch modern mastery, but he doesn’t. It just ends with him saying this is the end of our time together. I hope to see you around.

But if you’re within the course platform where the videos and stuff are, he has a few upsells.

• On the Welcome page, he mentions 2-Hour Writer again

• In the “Bonuses” section, he gives you 7 ways to monetize, and talks about 2-hour writer, as well as gives the offer to join MMHQ for $5. It’s a longer post, so these multiple promotions don’t seem excessive.

Free Power Planner

Mid-Tier Products

2-Hour Writer ($150)

2-Hour Writer walks through Dan’s process for ideation, creation, research, and well, writing.

In the bonuses section of 2-Hour Writer is an upsell to join Modern Mastery as well.

D. Modern Mastery HQ ($29/mo)

All roads seem to lead to Modern Mastery HQ, don’t they?

There is a lot of stuff within this course, and it makes it super easy for him to causally bring it up as well.

I was listening to one podcast episode, and he brought up like 6 or 7 different trainings that he had. Of course, they were all inside of Modern Mastery so he kept bringing it up. He even apologized because it sounded so ridiculous, but it came off as really genuine.

Within the newsletter and podcast, he offers a $5 promotion to join Modern Mastery. After the $5 promo is up, it’s only $29 per month. Honestly, not a crazy price compared to some communities you see out there.

Once you’re in Modern Mastery, there are mentions of his other products as well as Digital Economics.

Higher-Tier Paid Products

On top of the mid-tier products, we then have a high-tier one with multiple pricing tiers within this one offering.

E. Digital Economics ($499-$8000)

Digital Economics is the highest-tier product that Dan has at the moment.

Digital Economics used to be a cohort-based course, and now it’s more of a self-paced one. Dan iterated on that as well 🙂

He may have done coaching in the past, but I think he’s been moving away from that to focus on the products at this point.

Here are the current price points.

There are 3 tiers to Digital Economics, and by the time this goes out, these prices will only be in effect for another few days (doubling on 5/15). But I wanted to get you a breakdown of what this looks like.

• Bachelors Degree – $499

• Masters Degree – $999

• PHD – $8,000

I think the college-themed names are brilliant. Where else can you get a Bachelor’s degree in online business, and for $499?

The best part is that if you sign up for the Bachelor’s degree and go through the whole thing, you get upsold the Master’s for the difference in price ($500) at the end.

If you made it through all of the content within the lower tier, chances are you got enough value out of it that there is a high chance you’ll take the upsell offer.

Digital Economics alone brings in over $150,000 per month for Dan.

How It All Comes Together

Dan has a lot going on, but it’s also not that complicated. I wanted to visualize it for you because I think that helps see the flow of things.

Dan has multiple tiers of products to offer people something at almost every price point.

The free tier stuff gets people in the door and onto the email list.

Once you’re on the email list, he promotes his community and the $150 course, which can be considered an “impulse buy” product because of its price point.

Once you get a feel for how his training works, you can then upgrade to Digital Economics which is the top-tier product.

He’s hitting people from multiple angles and gives you something bigger to look forward to as you move through the funnel.

How You Can Replicate Some of These Successes

Here are a couple of pointers to get started.

#1 - Try And Test A lot

Dan has tried all kinds of ways to make money online. Most didn’t work out, and/or he wanted to move past.

It can be really easy to give up after you fail once or twice.

By having an idea for an offer and actually putting it out there for people to buy, you’re ahead of a lot of people who are just lurking on the internet.

You saw the long list of things he tried to create above, so don’t quit if you don’t find something that works at first. Just keep trying.

#2 - Start Niched Down, Then Go Broad

He started talking on Twitter about web design and digital marketing. Then he expanded more to talking about online business, the health side of things, and mental frameworks.

Now he talks about improving your mindset, building a one-person business, and growth from a philosophical place.

Some people might be able to go straight to their interests, but from what I’ve seen with other creators, you have to niche down first before you can start experimenting with all kinds of other topics.

#3 - Be Consistent Producing Content

The overall key to making the entire machine work is to be consistent with everything.

While he may change topics, or change the way he’s promoting his content – at the end of the day he’s been writing a newsletter every week and posting content daily.

The iteration that comes due to massive content volume is what will be the catalyst for something to trigger or resonates with a group of people which will lead to massive growth.

#4 - Build Systems For Leverage

You saw how dialed in his content system is. Every week it’s the same thing, and that frees up a lot of his time to focus on that main pillar piece of content.

But Dan uses quite a few other systems.

One of the more practical examples I didn’t talk about above is how he’s automating his testimonials. Dan uses a tool called Testimonial.to which automatically adds approved testimonials to the landing and sales pages for his products.

Anyone that joins the Modern Mastery HQ after about 3 weeks or so, will get this email requesting a review.

#5 - Build Tiered Product Suit

It’s something that is very well overlooked but to monetize your audience you need to create Products at Multiple Price Points.

As you create raving fans, people are going to want to buy more products from you because they like your style and content.

If you only sell one course at $150, you’re severely limiting the upside potential of selling more to that person. But at the same time, you’re capping the amount of knowledge they can get from you outside of your newsletter and free content.

Dan Koe is a little “bro-ey” and masculine, but even if his content doesn’t resonate with you, don’t let that cloud your judgment of his business and concepts. I think we can learn a lot from all types of creators.

As you can see, many of the things I shared with you I have already implemented in my own one-person business, and that can easily be transferred and installed into yours.

The question is,…

Are you truly committed to constant implementation and iteration?

Resources To Grow Your Audience And Scale Your Brand:

Get the course here 👉🏻 The Instagram Creator Course

These are some results you can potentially achieve implementing the strategies inside The Instagram Creator Course:

Want to start making some money with your social media page and followers?

Get the course here 👉🏻 The Instagram Creator Course

YOU’RE NEVER ALONE, LET’S GROW TOGETHER

If you've made it this far, you're probably at a pivotal point in your career.

Ready to give entrepreneurship a shot but just feeling stuck.

Stuck because you've got responsibilities to take care of.

Stuck because you've got too much to do and too little time.

Stuck because you think you're good at social media, but you're not sure how to prove it.

I've been there. And let me tell you, it's way easier with a little help from someone who has done it successfully.

Five-figure months and a full calendar of sales calls are possible for you.

You do deserve it!

I believe in you! 🙌 

Want To Have Personal 1:1 Consultation To Grow Your Business? (book a call here) — Feel free to reserve your spot and let’s craft you an entire strategic business plan so you can start monetizing your audience asap!

REFERRAL PROGRAM UPDATE

As a final note, I wanted to update you on my latest project.

Till now I have received many requests via my consultation calls regarding “making money strategies” which I happily shared with many of those who booked a call, but I wanted to go a step further…

I decided to launch a new Referral Program specifically for loyal subscribers that want to contribute towards growing ScaleAcquisition newsletter in return you will learn;

• Learn how to systemize and produce daily content

• Edit amazing reels/shorts for your social media

• Build your own email subscription newsletter and…

• Monetize your audience with some cool products/service ideas

Note, there is no set launch date yet but it will be announced soon. As you’ve seen in the previous guide, The Solopreneur Kickstarter Guide Pdf 2.0 will also be released at the same time when the Referral Program goes live. 

I’m currently mapping out the process to see how I can better help you get faster results and also potentially make money, latest tools used, and some cool prizes in the process.

The entire program will last for 8 weeks (this will be a pilot program for the actual premium monthly membership) and will include everything you need to build your business by yourself or choose my upgrade option to qualify for the Done-For-You “Business-In-A-Box” package which will be an exclusive “by invitation only”.

Appreciate your support,

Let’s grow together 🔥🚀

🐦 My Most Inspiring Tweet On Twitter:

If you have any interesting projects or ideas, please reach out to us by responding to this email or by sending us a DM on Twitter: @renaldcroes, On Instagram: @renald.croes, OR email me at: [email protected]

As always, thanks for reading, and see you next time. 🫡

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