A Tale of Two Businesses
Part 1
Before I show you the Story Funnel that made my wife and I over $800K in 2020, I want to give you the origin story for how we came up with the idea of a story funnel in the first place. 

Back in 2017 I was doing lead generation for an industry in the medical niche.

I had a company that was one of the biggest sources of leads for the entire industry. It was extremely profitable.

Long story short… The industry I was working in dried up, practically overnight. 

The top 3 players in the game closed up shop and that essentially shut down the whole niche. 

It was a devastating blow. I thought I had it made… I thought I’d finally reached financial freedom and was on my way up in the world… And then out of the blue, the entire business we’d built just... disappeared.

This left us in a very tight spot.

Our fall from grace was epic.

My wife and I went from taking month-long vacations to Paris and Rome, eating at Michelin starred restaurants… to eating rice and beans every day. 

To make matters worse, we were practically unemployable!

I used to work in IT, but that was years ago (an eternity in that industry), and Rebecca was an artist… 

We spent most nights staying up trying to figure out how to bring in some income… We racked up an enormous amount of debt putting our Los Angeles rent on credit cards to keep us afloat a little longer… 

And I was down to my last credit card.

Grasping at straws, we turned to the world we knew: internet marketing. We made a last ditch effort to stop the bleeding by creating a sales funnel to sell some art lessons Rebecca recorded.

To our surprise, it worked!

The first month we ran the sales funnel, we were able to cover our rent… which meant we didn’t have to move into her parents spare bedroom when our lease ran out. 

We love her parents, but that was a big win… 

So, we decided to really lean into this. 

We created a membership website that we charged $19.99/month for, called the RTY (Rebecca Tillman-Young) Art Club. In it, people got access to all of her art training and tutorial videos, and she would add content every week.

And the first few months were GREAT...

We were finally making enough money to pay our bills and stop putting things on credit cards…

But I had just been in a situation where I had all of my eggs in one basket... and that basket broke. So, I decided that I NEVER wanted to be in a situation like that again…

Once I saw that money coming in, I immediately decided to start a similar tripwire funnel for another business.

I helped my brother, Noah — a horse trainer in Texas — start his own online, horse-training-education business using the exact same model we had for RTY Art.

It was called the Steady Horse Club.

But something weird happened around the 4 month mark for both businesses.

Our monthly revenue stopped growing. It seemed to hit an invisible ceiling. We capped out around $12k/month for Steady Horse, and $5K/month for RTY Art.

We started losing new subscriptions faster than we were adding them… It was as if we had tapped a well dry.

On top of that, it quickly became an administrative headache. And the problems kept piling up...

In addition to people cancelling, we had people disputing transactions (which cost us money), and people demanding refunds after being a part of the club for months because they “forgot they signed up,” among other things.

Now, in both of these businesses, the funnel I used started with a Free + Shipping offer ($2.95). 

I tied that with a $27 order bump (a mini-course) that led to a free 14-day trial of a $19.99/month offer. I then had an upsell for them to convert to an annual plan for $147 — all said and done, the average cart value was around $87.

But despite all our initial success, RTY Art and Steady Horse turned into a nightmare almost overnight! 

We would wake up to daily emails of people yelling at us (some of them really wrote their emails in all caps) — calling us a scam because they were having login issues, or because their FREE product was taking too long to ship… 

It was super frustrating!

It didn’t feel like we were running a business, it felt like we were working terrible jobs… and we didn’t feel like we were actually helping people, either.

That’s when a convergence of events happened that changed our lives forever.

Right around the time things were going nuts with RTY Art and Steady Horse, I started listening to this marketer named Jay Abraham.

If you’ve been in the internet marketing world for long, you’ve probably heard of him.

He’s famous for his strategy of preeminence — which basically comes down to positioning yourself in front of your customer as the best (and only) solution — basically, it’s about solving their problems first, and then asking for money…

Jay has a very low-pressure approach to selling. He believes that a customer that is naturally attracted to you is 100x more valuable than a customer you force through a funnel.

I remember listening to him on a podcast, and I was really impressed by what he had to say. One of his huge things was knowing your numbers… 
And that’s when I had the breakthrough I had been needing. I realized, if you can measure it, you can fix it, and if you can fix it, you can grow it.
So, that’s exactly what I did.

I sat down and really looked at our funnels — I looked at our customer service requests and where our time and money was going. 
I discovered three simple things that blew my mind.

Only about 1 out of 8 people who went through our funnel bought all of our upsells, and that small percentage accounted for about 80% of our revenue.

About 90% of our customer complaints came from people who had bought our cheapest offer (usually under $7).

Our businesses weren’t growing! Both RTY Art and Steady Horse were actually slowly shrinking… And with the rising cost in ads, we had to do something about it now!

With those numbers staring me in the face I decided it was time to shake things up. 

The only problem was I didn’t know what to shake it up with.

Here’s the one thing I knew for sure — tripwire funnels weren’t working. 

They have momentum initially, but after a short while, you burn through your audience, and your ad-costs go up.

And… if you have a membership site on the back end (like we did) you have to fight churn (losing customers). That means you basically have two jobs — get more customers, and keep the ones you have…

For any new business that’s bootstrapped like ours was… that’s simply unsustainable.

Around the same time as I was uncovering all this I started seeing a bunch of stuff in my news feed about High-Ticket Coaching.

I literally couldn’t scroll for more than two seconds without seeing some guru touting the benefits of High-Ticket Coaching, and how much money they were making.

So, after two years of running tripwire funnel businesses I decided to run an experiment.

Right at the beginning of 2020, I decided to convert Steady Horse to a high-ticket business… 

I mean it made sense… 

People in the horse world were used to paying thousands of dollars for training — so making a high-ticket coaching offer wouldn’t be that hard.

So, I set Steady Horse on the path of high-ticket coaching — we enrolled in a guru course, got our systems setup, got our automated webinar setup, got our calendar setup…

Basically it was your standard, run of the mill automated webinar-to-sales-call funnel.

We charged $6,500 for coaching… 

Just like that, we had Steady Horse’s plan for 2020.

But I wasn’t confident we could do high ticket coaching for art lessons… we thought, who was going to pay $6,500 to learn how to draw?
So, I decided to do something different with RTY Art

I still had Jay Abraham’s concept of preeminence bouncing around in the back of my head… 

It kind of reminded me of a dating technique I used to use when I was single.

For me, getting the first date wasn’t too hard… but it was getting the second date with a girl I really liked that was the real trick…
And I figured, I have to make the first date so amazing that the second date is a no brainer.

I’m going to let you in on the secret I discovered. It’s pretty much a sure-fire way to get that second date…

You have to make the first date feel like several dates. The goal is to get over that second date hump before the first date is even over.
Ok, so this was my strategy…

I would plan multi-event dates, where we did 4 or 5 different things before the date was over.

So instead of the normal dinner and a movie, we would meet for drinks at a bar, then do a movie, then maybe dinner, then go to a different restaurant for dessert, and then finally we’d end the night with a walk or a fun activity like cocktails.

I’d make sure all the places we went to were in different locations — different neighborhoods — because there’s something special about moving from one location to another (changing the scenery). 

So, even though it was only one evening, it felt like we had gone on several dates by the end of the night. 
Honestly, it worked wonders. Just ask my wife!

So, I took that idea and Jay Abraham’s idea of preeminence and applied it to the sales funnel for RTY Art. 

And this funnel broke all the rules. 

Basically, we turned the funnel on it’s side. 

All the things we would have packaged up as mini-products and charged for before even offering our main product (the old-style of funnel) — we just gave those away... for free... before we ever asked for a dime.

But we did it in what I like to call, a Story Funnel.

See, a story funnel is kind of like that dating strategy in that, instead of having a brief interaction and then immediately asking for a commitment (a second date, or a $7 tripwire, either one), it takes the customer on a journey that builds trust and establishes a connection. 

And it’s up to the customer to choose whether they’re going to continue with you — just like your date could opt out after any one of those activities. But each time they opt-in with you, that trust and connection deepen.

We divided the Story Funnel into 6 parts. Each of those parts offered a solution or guidance on overcoming a particular obstacle that stood between them and their goal (the goal our product would solve). Some were mindset problems, others focused on a fear they had, or a skill they needed to learn.

What’s so cool about this is that, is that by the time they got to the last step of the story funnel, we’d already delivered a ton of value. We’d already answered their objections… 

Because of that, the last page where we offered our main product converted at 25%. Meaning 1 out of 4 people who got to the last page became customers…

And here’s the beautiful part… Our main offer in this Story Funnel wasn’t a $19.99/month membership, but a $300 course.

So not only did we double the conversions on our sales page, we also more than doubled the average cart value. BIG win.

And it gets better, because not only did that sales page convert super high, but for every 100 people that entered this story funnel, 8 of them would buy our main product. 

That’s an 8% conversion rate on COLD TRAFFIC… that’s people who had never heard about us before going through our Story Funnel, and who wound up buying our MOST EXPENSIVE product…

No tricks, no tripwires, no scarcity, no slimy marketing… We told stories and we delivered value.
But let’s take a step back and put all this in perspective…

The whole purpose of a tripwire funnel is to attract as many people as possible in the hope that some of your customers get to the end of your funnel and buy everything you have… 

But, if only 1 out of every 8 customers buys what you wanted them to buy… you still have to deal with 7 people who aren’t your ideal customers.

That’s more customer service requests, more time trying to satisfy people who aren’t going to buy from you, and more money spent on ads trying to attract the WRONG customer.

But with a story funnel, you only get customers who actually wanted what you had to offer… you attract the people that actually convert…

That means you can spend more time actually offering them value, AND you can charge more for your product because they actually want to buy from you.

Are you starting to see how incredible and powerful this is?

Check out the next page for a deeper dive into the RTY Art funnel…