Monetizing Summits: $78k Revenue Detailed Breakdown + Strategy with Gemma Bonham-Carter

I love having her on the episode because she has been managing ads for you know about the past six months behind the scenes in the business and has like these nice really new , fresh perspectives as somebody who's newer to the ads management game . And so she's here . Thank you for being here , Jamie , Of course , and we are back with Gemma , who you know what ?

Gemma , how do you say your last name ?

In this episode , though , she's going to share behind the scenes , behind the figures , if you will , of her AI summit . This went on this past summer .

I actually purchased it and wanted to implement some new let's call it AI workflows into my business , and you're in for a treat , listener , because you're going to get to learn how she runs the summit , what kind of revenue it generated . We're talking also like how much it costs the order bump revenue versus upsell . Does she run ads to it , for example ?

If you've ever wanted to know behind the scenes about how to run a summit because maybe you're thinking about a summit that has to do with your area of expertise you're going to want to listen to this episode till the end and by the way who is Jemma ?

She's been featured in Entrepreneur , she's been featured in Inc , in the Globe and Mail , and she's been on over 40 podcasts , and she's just back from a one-year trip in France .

I think one of the things that is key to like remember , as we're going through these numbers and kind of talking about what , on paper , I think is going to look like a fairly successful event , is that I chose something that was very timely and very niched .

Like I think that what , what we're seeing with summits today is that they can be , you know , often they're just like very vague or too broad , and I think part of what the part of the success of AI Unlocked has been that I saw a gap in the marketplace and I act quickly to fill it . So people were talking about AI .

There were lots of people talking about AI in 2023 . No one really talking about it specifically for course creators and like how can we best use the technology as online course business owners ? So I sought to fill that gap .

So , having said that , I just think it's important to note if people then like , like , listen to this and then think of doing their own summit . I think those are some times like important questions to ask yourself Is it specific enough , is it narrow enough ? That kind of thing Is it , is it on trend ?

But , in 2024 , and I've got my spreadsheet up as we're as we're talking about this , so don't think I have all these numbers memorized but in 2024 , so second year of running it in terms of gross revenue , we did basically $78,000 . I'll tell you , though , that was down from around 90 K in 2023 .

So we were down a little bit , and I think there were a couple reasons for that . But , yeah , anyway , 78 K in terms of gross revenue , and if you want me to break it down even further , 65 K of that pot was revenue from the all access pass , 6,300 was from the bump and 7,200 was from the upsell .

There's some change in there , so if you add it up , it might not make a perfect total .

And then the number of people of the 21% who purchased 81% took the bump , which is huge Wait how many 81% Whoa Took the bump , it was 81% . Whoa , it was a low ticket bump it was only nine bucks , but still . And then 13% took the upsell and the upsell was the previous year's summit , so it was not new work on my end .

It was , like , you know , get last year . Oh no , sorry , I bundled a few things it was last year's summit and then an extra kind of like brand guide thing .

We basically offered a swag bag that was like a pdf , I want to say it was about 15 pages long , that had extra downloadables , like they were all free things that people had put into this kind of vip bag , and so it was different from like the lead magnets that might come with a presenter's talk and it was more like little paid products that they were getting

for free .

So if you wanted to just be a free attendee , you were needing to come and dedicate hours a day to consuming the content and then at the end of the 24 hours , you know , day one would be unpublished , day two would be published , et cetera , et cetera , and .

But the all access pass means you get this for life and I think that that , especially paired with my topic of like very tangible how to strategy videos around AI , was like a match made in heaven because , like you were saying , quajo , like you bought it and had your assistant go through some of it right To like implement .

I know a lot of business owners who bought and passed it to their VA or bought it and thought , okay , in a couple of months I'm going to really go ahead and I don't know , build out custom GBTs for my business and I want to like have these resources to help me do that at that time , et cetera , et cetera .

So , yeah , sure , I sell other things and maybe some of those summit participants will eventually buy my course or program or whatever it might be . That was separate from this .

It was embedded even into , like the , I host all my courses and programs on Tea Tree . So , like , on Tea Tree , the whole summit lives with all the stuff and there's a lesson dedicated to like hey , did you also want to grab this and this ?

But I would always be warming those people up before the summit like lots of email content that was very like educational and valuable .

And at the end of those emails not only were those emails getting them excited to attend the summit , but at the bottom of those emails it was like hey , if you haven't grabbed your all access pass yet , it's not too late , here's your chance to do so .

And I should also just mention we had built in some urgency , so I did have there was like a couple of tiers . Number one if you got on my early bird list , which was really just to people in my own audience , you could get I think I offered 20 bucks off of the all access pass for a very short window .

That always works well for my most loyal audience people . They like they trust me . They know my stuff is good . If they can get 20 bucks off , they're going to get 20 bucks off because they're buying it no matter what . So I did that strategy , and then I also had the all access pass be a certain price up until the day that the summit went live .

And the day the summit went live the price bumped up a little bit and then at the end of the summit , actually like a week after the summit ended , we officially bumped the price up to , you know , 297 or whatever , whatever it was going to end up , at which typically I'm not selling it at that point , you know .

It was indeed a summit and it was a paid summit , but since we were essentially pre-selling tickets to that summit for about six months going into the summit , prior to the summit , there were strategically placed price jumps and we really pushed ads right around those right before those price jumps with urgency , like hey , if you're considering it , it's about to jump

up by like another $50 or so , so we'll get it now . And that's indeed when we saw the biggest increase .

new customers .

Well , in 2024 , we had far more speakers , it was just like a more comprehensive summit . So I thought , well , I'm going to put the price up a bit this time . So I this time I did 67 early bird , 97 during event , and then it bumped up to 497 .

And I think , based on what we then saw in the conversion rate and stuff , our conversion rate went down slightly and I think , actually being at 67 , it was such a no brainer price that we had a higher conversion rate of people pick up the all access pass . And where I made more revenue the year before was in the bump , because the bump was 27 last year .

And so I I you know , for 2024 , I like increased the front end offer and decreased the bump , whereas the year before it was like a more mid range front end with like a slightly higher bump and I think actually in in the end that worked out to be more revenue . So in 2025 , I would probably go back to that model and play with the prices again .

And this is just an example of like when you do an event , a launch , any , any kind of campaign more than one time , you can play with these things a little bit and see what happens with the data and then use that to make better decisions going forward . So just highly recommend that to anybody listening .

So I really , at that point , had to tap into my existing personal network and I was actually on a trip at the time with my family , but I was like you know , when you're on trips and your mind goes like more blank , so new ideas can pop into your head . That was when this AI unlocked thing happened . I was like relaxing with my family .

It's like , okay , we got it . We got to . You know , here's this new idea and we got to act on it quickly . So I was like in my Instagram DMs , asking anybody and everybody I knew who was a course creator and they didn't have to be people who are B2B Like it didn't have to be people who are teaching about digital marketing .

I was like I just want to talk to actual course creators of any industry and ask them how they're using AI today and are they using AI in a way that's helping them make processes faster , smoother , you know , whatever it looks like .

And so it took a while , though it took a while of me like reaching out into my network and then asking my network to ask their friends . And then , kwejo , you and I are in the Mixer Mind together .

I was in the Mixer Mind year one as well , so I tapped into that network so that's like a peer network and I tapped in and said , listen , guys , I'm hosting this summit first time ever . Do you want to be a part of it ? I want you to talk about AI .

And luckily , after sort of two , three weeks of like kind of hitting the pavement every day to like ask people we had enough folks say yes , that they were in . We had about 30 speakers . Then what happened this year , second year of doing it ?

I had built up such a reputation from the first year like it had gone so well in year one and we had great numbers and great participation and attendees and the speakers were so happy with like the visibility that they got from it as well that I was able to put together an application form and I basically put it out to my existing audience and I think I

dropped it into like a couple of those peer networks I'm still in and said , listen , we're going to do an application this year apply and I actually did it first come , first serve . So it was just like rolling applications and I was blown away . We had like I think we had just over a hundred people apply and these were good applications .

Like I had a hard time creating like a curated list , so eventually we did have to like close down the applications and I just went through everybody and I really tried to create a list that felt I knew there would be like themes and so I just tried to figure out okay , how can we make the most sort of balanced days and invited those people to be speakers .

And it was so . I mean , it was so much easier year two with the application much faster for me . How many speakers total did you have ? We had about just over 50 . Okay .

No pitching , very succinct so that it could be this very applicable , you know , guide to using AI .

So within the first 24 hours of talking about it , we already had a thousand registrants , which was like it felt like an amazing kind of like way to kick off .

And then , over the course of the following kind of two , three weeks , as we were promoting , we ended up getting just over 5,500 by the end of the promotional period and that was really a team effort . That was not only me . But that's the advantage of having a lot of speakers , right Is that they are talking about it to their audiences .

And so I did a lot of work to put together a really comprehensive package of email swipes that they could use , of social media captions , of graphics . I really wanted to make it as easy as possible for them to share with their audience and they did .

And there were some lessons learned here , like I think one thing was we kind of got started a little late in the planning and preparation .

I've sort of realized with the summit , if you can be about two months ahead , you're far more likely to really give your speakers enough time to plan to promote it properly , your speakers enough time to plan to promote it properly .

But they did a great job and there were like as always happens , there were like a few speakers , like probably the you know five , who absolutely rocked it , like really took it on board to make this like a real campaign and drew , or like drove , a lot of leads and therefore also made a lot of affiliate revenue too .

That's really where I share the most behind the scenes about my business . I share the most numbers .

So , like , if you're into this kind of conversation , if you're into like the peeling back of the curtain and showing you what's what and what you know just as much of what did work , what didn't work , like I want you to learn from what , what we would change for next time .

I really do share that , both on my podcast , the course creator show , and , uh , on my email list . So I think , kwejo , you've got my , you've got like a freebie link for my launch emails . So if you want to like sign up for that , you can , and that way you're on my list and we can keep hanging out .

Gemma , thank you for being here and sharing like behind the scenes , behind the figures , if you will , of your AI summit . Thanks so much for having me . Thanks , gemma , thank you for being here and sharing behind the scenes , behind the figures , if you will , of your AI Summit .