I come from nothing and even today I cannot even comprehend the numbers that we're doing right now. You just need one thing that will go well. What's your experience with like actually selling your first product? My very first kind of like paid product. It was a massive failure already. I had five 100K on TikTok and I think I sold $820 preset. I work way more than before because I decide to do that. We decided to test it and from day one it started going literally like crazy.
They will recognize me as the a studio guy. So when somebody comes in your mind who can make a studio like Built that guy, I joined forces with two other guys and these guys are absolutely killing it with ads. How did you go from like your friend asking you to set up a studio for him to like running a course now and having helped over 1000 people with that? After I started teaching, I learned about myself that I love teaching. Like I love seeing other people succeed with my help.
Like it's so it's, I don't know. It's amazing when they come to you and say, Oh yeah, this changed my life. And this happened with kids when I was swimming, when I was like teaching them how to swim and also with personal trainer, they changed the body go through a transformation thanks to your help. And they, they will always remember you, right. So it's something that I, I don't know if it's like egoistic or if it's like completely opposite egoistic. I don't know.
But it makes me feel very happy when other people succeed with my help. So when I switched gear and I went to social media full time, I had to abandon the, the fitness and the teaching also because it was paying incredibly low per hour. So it's just like it's not worth it. And then I decided to create courses about photography because I built an audience quite fast on social media thanks to TikTok. When I joined in 2020, it was like the early days.
It was very fast for me to grow. And then after I made the first course, I loved it and I saw a lot of interest. So slowly I built more courses, more courses, more courses. And then I had I think like 6 on Skillshare when Skillshare decided to cut the payouts like crazy. We're talking about a 70% decrease from one month to the next. And not only me, but everybody. Wow. So obviously the amount of money that I was getting from Skillshare was not really worth
it anymore. So I decided to kind of change approach and try to sell courses individually on, on my website as a platform through the audience. Then the first first course that I tried to sell was a course on how to create reels with your phone, which was the most popular one that I had on Skillshare. And it didn't go too bad, but it was not like extremely profitable and it was taking me a long time. So we decided to pause on that one.
And then that time I was building the new course of the home studio blueprint. Then even that one, the home studio blueprint, which is the current course that I have right now. It was meant to be on Skillshare. And then we decided with my previous agency to test it with my audience to just to see because again, all the content was going super well. And from day one, it started going literally like crazy.
Like from day one that we started posting, we did some ads, we did a little organic content. The response was unbelievable. So we decided to keep pushing, keep exploring, keep kind of expanding that the whole funnel behind the home studio blueprint. And then last month, I decided to part ways with my previous agency because I saw that they were amazing, but they were not what I was looking for in terms of partnership.
They're an agency and therefore they don't really dedicate as much time as I would like to to my personal brand and my products. And then I joined forces with two other guys that I met actually through the course, which is funny as well. And these guys are absolutely killing it with ads, with funneling, with e-mail marketing and all the stuff. And they're just taking the product to the moon. You open so many doors that I want to poke a little bit deeper into specifically the ads
perspective. But first I just want to go back to like the common creator struggle, right? Putting something on Skillshare and earning passive revenue under quotations is one thing, but a lot of people struggle to put something online and charge real money for that. Was it ever something that you've experienced? We're like, I don't know, hesitant. Does that make sense? What's your experience with like actually selling your first product?
I, I totally relate to that. It's, it was, it is still like some somehow difficult because with the guys now we are thinking about high ticket and we are charging very high prices for like custom studio setups and stuff. But then the way I think of it is like, it took me so many
years to gather these skills. Right now I'm putting everything I know that I've learned with a ton of mistakes and a ton of money wasted on useless gear and uses useless things on on on the background and shit like that into a very jam packed, value packed course that will cost you, let's say 20, fifty, $100. And it will save you so many hours and so much money spent on anything and the return of investments. It's huge. So I'm a big fan of courses in
general. I buy a lot of courses myself. I invest in coaches. We also have Nick as a coach, right? And for me, it's like the experience that somebody else has and then it's put into something that I can buy in a much shorter period of time. For me, it's amazing. So that's that's the way you should think about. And when I posted my very first kind of like paid product, it was a presets for portraits.
And it was a massive failure. Like I already had probably 500K on TikTok and I don't, I don't really remember maybe 100K on, on IG. So like big numbers, you know, and I think I sold I think $820 preset and it took me like 3 weeks to full, full day to, to put, to put them up and, and stuff like that, right. Reason being is because people don't really buy presets unless you are extremely famous for
your colors and your images. You know so the product should be extremely related to the organic content you create. I was doing presets, I was doing, sorry, portraits and photography, yes. But my colors, I was not famous because of my colors, you know what I mean? So it's just like it was not really a matching product. So that's like the the first kind of thing you need to understand is like if you can bring value to people and maybe save them hours and money and also have a return of
investments. Because now when you buy my course, you're going to look much better on camera. And then clients will pay you more, people will trust you more, you'll build authority. And that's the return of investments. That's why I think the price of what you pay is nothing compared to the return that you get. And that's why I was like, OK, I'm good to charge some money. Yeah. Love it, love it.
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At what point or what made you decide I'm going to run ads for this? Like I think most creators I have conversations with value organic content. They want to work with the algorithm, so to speak, to get the reach and then create a flywheel through that. But you just kind of, even though you have a lot of reach, bypass that with ads to drive people directly to the product. What was your thought process behind that and how did you get
there? So ads are just another way of reaching the right people faster. So yes, you can go by organic content and I really like an intense like a good reach. But then maybe with my organic content, I sell $2000 worth of products per month, maybe 3000 in a good month. With ads, there's no limit on how much you can sell. So ads is just a shortener of whatever kind of journey you're into.
And also with ads, it can be a good way to test things in a much faster way, which means, as I told you before, the the viral video group in the other course, it was not selling super well. Like the home studio blueprint. There are many reasons that we found out about. And like maybe we can go into that if if your interest. But the main thing is like we pushed it and we killed it very quick.
If you don't use ads and you try just organically, maybe it'll take you 612-2436 months to understand whether this product is actually a killer or not. So in business, if you want to succeed, you want to try things very fast and kill very fast, even faster, whatever is not working. So this is kind of like my my view on that with ads. There's so many benefits that I can see right now using ads.
We are spending a really, really high amount of money right now in ads and it grows my personal brand because I go in front of more eyes of my exact audience that I want more people seeing my content, which means that more opportunities are coming up. I've got asked to do a bunch of speaking gigs. I've got asked to go into companies to do workshops. It's just overall, it's just having more eyeballs on your content.
And the whole concept behind it is that if you spend 1:00, but you get back 2, that's worth doing. And then you can scale it up as well big time, because there's no limit on how much money you can spend with ads. And the good thing about ads on the digital space with digital products and courses in general, is that you see the return of investments on the same day, on the same minute, you know what I
mean? Because you can check that you spent 100 and you made 120. So that makes makes sense. And also what I noticed is that with ads you can sell way better than with organic content. Not sure why. I think it's a psychological effect that people think that whenever they see content wise scrolling that is not sponsored
that content should be free. Whereas if they, if they see that is sponsor like adv on, on the top left, whatever on Instagram, like paid, they are ready to purchase because they know that this is an ad that is going to sell you something. And therefore we found even higher success with ads than
with organic content. With organic content, it's still like necessary to create more touch points with the audience and just keep showing your face and keep showing what you're doing, keep showing that you know your stuff. But with ads, it's just like a it's a machine that can help a lot, a lot succeeding and just making happen in this space.
Fascinating perspective. You said that you see the results immediately if you spend 1 and you get to what happens between somebody seeing an ad and a purchase being made and like showing up on your dashboard? It depends on the kind of the product and depends on especially how expensive will be what you want to sell. For low ticket courses or low ticket products in general, you want to go for conversion directly.
Like you don't want to take them through a massive journey because for every step you might increase the chance that a certain person will convert, but for every step, you're going to lose more people. So if it's a low ticket, you just want to try to convert as quickly as possible.
So for us AD, you click the link, you go on my landing page, you buy the course done for high ticket products, for example, what you can do is that you have a lead magnet instead with the ad. So you're going to say, OK, there's a free training, 7 days free training, free master class. And then you make sure that you deliver a ton of value in that lead magnet and therefore people
will trust you more. And then with maybe webinars, maybe with follow up emails, with whatever you want, then you then upsell the high ticket after you demonstrated that you bring in a lot of value. There is a rule in marketing that says that the person before buying from you will need to see your product or your service at least seven times in seven different places. This is kind of like one of the rules that you see in books. And that's also true.
That's why it's so important to keep showing up consistently, non-stop, and not judge the success or the failure of a single product in a in a single day. And you know what I mean? If you launch it and it doesn't go well one day, then you need to kill it. That's not how it works. You need to give it a bit of time, enough time to have people to see it, understand it, so on, so forth. Yeah, so.
What makes a product succeed? Or you know what made the difference between continuing down, like putting money into it or promoting it versus killing it after like a short run? If you're positive or negative, especially with ads, you can spend. Let's say you spend $100 in ads for a product. If you make 99.9, it's not going to work because the more you spend, the more you're going to
lose. The way you should think about it is like as long as your profit and you're paying also yourself, which means it's worth the time that you're investing in into creating ads and to manage it back end and to doing customer support and everything, then you can keep going with
that product. And also you need to think about the fact that with time you will be able to optimize it even more to understand what are your needs of your customer, what are the right target, what people are not liking about the course and therefore you can adjust it and therefore make it better and increase in conversion rates. You can understand more about your landing page and gather all the data that is is good for just bringing the business forward.
There is a lot, a lot, a lot behind the scenes that my guys right now are doing to optim, to optimize small things. I, I am more the organic content face and I don't know much about the single data that we are gathering, but I know that that's like key. That's why also when you reach a certain scale, at a certain point, it's super important that you have somebody that understands the back end if you are the face and if you are the creator of whatever.
Has running ads changed how you make content? In terms of organic content, no, it's still the same with ads, though they're different. I don't use, sometimes I use the organic content and then I add maybe a CTA at the end for the ads. But sometimes we need to create bespoke ads for a certain target.
Because whenever you are using ads, you want to have a very specific angle, very specific target, and use words that are resonating with that target rather than just going general with, which is what you do when maybe you're creating organic content. You already dropped a lot of wisdom when it comes to like scaling as a creator, but if you have like one kind of lesson or one thing that more creators should know or think about when it comes to business, is there
anything that comes to mind? Try a billion things and fail with all of them but one. At the end of the day, you really need one thing and I think what I understood is that you want to be as specific as possible. Super important. Right now my product is extremely niche. I teach entrepreneurs how to build a look epic on camera, how to build their home studio look epic on camera. That's it.
Then I have other things, but the core product, it's that one bang on and I am known hopefully is the studio guy. So when somebody comes in your mind who who can make a studio like boom, that guy. So that's super important. Then test, test, test, test as much as possible and solve one problem. I think it's quite important to to just OK, is this a problem for a normal person with? In my case, yes. Is a problem because people just look not great on camera and they I'm pretty sure they want
to look better. To wrap things up, what does success look like to you? I come from a very small village where I had no idea that all of this was possible for me. What I've been taught in school is that you just need to find a full time job that pays you €1200 a month, keep it until you retire. That's what's been like what everybody was saying. And then a bit of luck, a bit of courage, a bit of, I don't know, I found out about a world that is much bigger than than I thought.
And even today I cannot even comprehend the numbers that we're doing right now. Like I, I, it's, it's, it's unbelievable how much money we are making and how much this is actually helping other people. So for me, success is has been already achieved years ago when I managed to go full time into social media and now everything that comes on top of whatever happened already for me, it's just a massive ultra E per something that I was not expecting before.
It's just super, super success. But in terms of what I would be happy with, obviously now because I have this and like I love working, I love building new things, so I'll keep doing and I don't have any target in mind. I just really enjoy what I do. But for me, success happened when I was able to live decent life without having to do a nine to five. That's like managing my time. If I want to go to the gym at 11, AMI can do whatever I want. If I want to take a day off, I do whatever.
You know what I mean? That's that's what success looks like for me. Super, super personal, but I I love the freedom and I love being able to do what you love on a daily basis. I wake up every day wanting to start work ASAP and I finish as late as I can because I just love it. As long as I can do my workout daily. Amazing. Well this was a great chat. If people want to know more about you, what's the best place they can follow you? How can people stay in your orbit?
You can find me on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube at Pharaoh 21. Just send me a message on Instagram. I try to get back to everybody. Sometimes it's not easy because it's just my chat is absolutely jammed, but I do my best I. Hope you enjoyed this video, leave a comment down below with your favorite take away. And if you want to hear more about Simona Studio Blueprint, how to make any space look epic, click this video right here somewhere. I'll see you over there.