Hello and welcome back to my channel. My name is Evan Li. I have generated over 8 million online, over 61,000 customers, and over 34,000 paid subscribers so far. And in this video, I am going to show you the eight steps that I took to start a completely new school community from scratch without any audience and how I made my first $,000 in sales. Okay, so step number one was actually to gain clarity. I spent a good month to think about what type of community I truly want to create. And here you see my vision board. This is actually building up on the video that I shared with you. If I had to, like if I was to start a membership from scratch, here's how I would start it. And it really ignited a fire in me to start a community around something that is much much closer related to who I am right now. For a full month, I would build out my vision. I would journal. I would collect insights and I would also start to make the first progress in this area. So, I did change a lot of things in my diet, in my nutrition, and I basically also kept a daily tracker of that. So, here you can see I set an ambitious goal for myself, ambitious sub goals, and I started to implement and track every single day my progress in this regard. So, I really took a month to identify what is my northstar vision. What is that ambitious society accepted goal that I want to work towards? If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch my video about my one pager business plan. So, I spent about one month just gaining clarity. Once I had done that, it was time to create the offer. I personally think that school is so perfect and it's the easiest way, you know, that I found in 5 years of doing this to build an online education offer. So, I basically started a community. I used the 14-day trial and I worked through the typical community setup steps to gain clarity as I went. Right? It started with the name and then filling in the graphics that I needed for my community, starting to set up the classroom and the community. And so basically what I decided was that I want to structure it with a foundational course. I always teach that you want to have a transformation walk through and I knew what the before and after needed to be based on that month of clarity work. I defined the before and after. I broke it down into steps and that became the outline for my foundational course. I then also added a tool vault and so these tools I just filled up over time. In the beginning, I had just the placeholders in there with little locks. So, here you can still see some of those. They're not even filled up just yet. It just was that I knew I want to have a foundations course and then I want to have quick win tools in there for people. So, when I started, all I really had in here was three classrooms, one that laid out the trans transformation that I wanted to offer in there. Really, really short. So, all of the videos when we go through them. So, this is 28 minutes long. This is 21 minutes long. I always listen on to X speed 13 minutes 28 13 and then 25 right so it's about 2 hours worth of content just walking people through the transformation for everything else I basically just had placeholders I delivered one item which here was the wardrobe makeover and here I just planned one talk and scheduled it on the calendar for the future for when I want to host this talk. So that was all that I had in the community to begin with. And then I created the mockup here, took a screenshot of what was in there and I recorded a video walking them through what was there and basically sharing my vision here. And that was how I created the offer. I just brought it together on school. And this is one of the things that I so love about school. It gives you the system and the structure that forces you to have all of the right elements ready. So basically this was step two. I created the offer. In the next step I tried to find out the best way to promote this since I was starting with zero audience for this. Right? So I didn't allow myself to use my existing social media or my existing email list or my YouTube channel or my connections in school. Since I was not allowed to use any of that and I basically had zero audience, I said, "What's that best way to build my audience?" And I wanted to test it. Meta ads, they are just the quickest way to get market response. And so I tested three different theories. The first theory was if I use an instant form, a lead generation campaign with an instant form, I can grow my email list first by promoting what I have now in the community as a course using that as a course. And then I can first collect the email, set that up into Mailite, and then from the email get them into the community. So I get the email address first and then if they also want they can join the community. But I thought that I would be able to potentially build my audience for cheaper because I just needed their email address first. Now I also tried the complete opposite of that to go with instead of the least intention which Facebook lead forms is basically when people see your ad, they click on your ad and then they're presented with an opt-in form that lives on Facebook or Instagram. So let me show you this here. So basically this pops up. Hey, you know where should I send your invite to the free course and other valuable resources. Then they agree to the privacy policy and then great job. Just one final step. Your invite to the course was sent from school. So I integrated that with Sapier. Check your email and spam folder just in case. I also just launched a new Instagram account where I'm sharing value insights behind the scenes tips and bonuses. Just click the link below and say hi. I'd love to connect with you there. So, I wanted to use this to grow my email list and the free school community and my Instagram account. And because this form lives on Facebook and people can prefill this information relatively quickly, this is the lowest friction way that I know of to grow your audience and it has like this double whammy, triple whammy effect of you get the email and then you grow your community and then you also grow your Instagram. So, I was like, this is probably the cheapest way to grow my audience. This kind of goes with the lowest friction, lower lowest intent. I also wanted to test highest friction, highest intent, right? So I said, what if instead of a leads generation campaign, right, which is further up the funnel, which is why it's a cheaper campaign objective, I go all the way down to the funnel and I actually optimize for a purchase using a sales campaign. So I would basically go for the highest quality leads to build this. So in order to make this happen, I set up a sales campaign that I optimized for purchase. And here you can see I just used advantage plus and then I set website and I set up a completely new pixel. So I also couldn't leverage any existing data and I put the purchase event uh on the page and basically just left it open targeting top four countries. And then I used the exact same ad as for the lead generation campaign because I really wanted to isolate the variables but instead of having them go to an opt-in form, I sent them to an actual web page with an opt-in form. And here on the web page, I did Tripwire 7-day WhatsApp accountability support for $7. 7 days for $7. Get support for only $1 a day. And actually, two people took me up on it. The first one didn't register because I had an issue with my pixel setup that I only was able to fix after. But here you can see the So, you can divide this by two. So, it cost me roughly €40 to sell two $7 WhatsApp supports. Now, some of you might say right now, Evelyn, this is crazy, right? So, why would you pay so much for a $7 purchase, right? So, you're basically losing $33 on the purchase. Well, if somebody is booking 7 days of WhatsApp support with me, chances that they want to become an ongoing one-to-one client of me is relatively high. Even if I'm losing a little bit of money on the front end, if I'm now putting myself in the shoes of somebody who has to get their client base and business off the ground, this is actually not a bad option. At the same time, right, we were just getting a lot less volume. So, when we're now also looking here to the amount of leads that we got, I'm just custom customizing the columns here and I'm looking for the amount of leads. So, then we can see we got 15 leads. So, our cost per lead from this campaign that got us two purchases, our cost per lead was 78 divided by 15. So, five, we paid about €520 per lead. When on the leads campaign with the instant form, we only paid €132, right? So, the cost per lead was actually significantly lower on the instant form. And you know, for somebody that wants to grow their audience, get it off the ground, I think that's a more realistic version, right? And especially if you also want to grow your Instagram, like this is really, really good for you. But at the same time, if you potentially want to get a client as quickly as possible, using a website and tripwiring support for a course is actually a good option because when you have somebody on WhatsApp support for 7 days, the likelihood that they become a paying one-to-one client and you can first sell a paid session and then a package for them is relatively high. So, I actually do still consider this a a huge success, especially for people that want to build a one-to-one client base and sell into higher tickets and not necessarily have a school community. So, I think both of these when I just look at the cost per result and the opportunity itself, I have to say both of them worked. Now I did try a third option which was I wanted to try running ads directly to the school community using school's conversion API and basically setting up a sales campaign optimizing for complete registration. Right? So I again took the exact same ad creative and I set up a sales campaign. In this case with my new pixel I used the complete registration event. And this is really where my mind was blown because this was the first time that I saw a sales campaign optimizing for complete registration outperform a lead generation campaign. So this was so interesting for me to see because typically the lead generation campaign with the instant form is the cheapest format. It took me €62 here and €78 here and about the same here to figure out that this is actually the idealist way to grow my audience and so I doubled and tripled down on this which is what you can see here with the ad spend. I spent most of my money here. Now I did also try other ways to grow this community faster. So once I had identified that running ads directly to school works the best and I had my winning creative, I took this and I basically grabbed the ID of this post. So I have all this beautiful social proof here as well. And what I did after was I did a country expansion campaign. So what's a country expansion campaign? It sounds uh fancy, right? So here you can see this one here. It says tier one expansion. So in Facebook ads there are countries we can target and advertisers like to categorize these countries by purchasing power. It's just an informal categorization but you know I've been doing Facebook ads so long that they just have become second nature. And so I expanded from the top four countries which is United States, Australia, United Kingdom and Canada into all of these other countries. Right? So basically from here I excluded those top four and I ran ads directly to those other countries. And as you can see, sometimes these other countries that also have a lot of purchasing power, they can actually help you to build your audience for cheaper. And so when I now break this down, we can see by the country where people were coming from. So here when we're looking at the tier one expansion, you can see the countries where people are coming from. Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, right? So it was all over Europe. And this was really good information for me to know because it also gave me an idea for my following purchase campaign as in should I only target the top four countries or should I also expand into other countries. Right? So this gave me a really good idea. So it was absolutely worth testing this and as you can see I started to spend quite a budget on this as well. I also tried to instead of running ads just to the community to promote what I had created inside this community. So at this point I had delivered my first training with the first resources and I basically productized that into a course offer as well. So here you see I used again the sales campaign objective optimizing for complete registration because I identified that as the winning strategy when it comes to building my audience for as affordable as possible. So that's why I used this again, but instead of com promoting the community as a whole, I decided to promote the course in there specifically. And so I created a mockup for it. And then I want to show you the ad copy. Most of our identity isn't consciously chosen. Instead, it's shaped by these things, right? And here is the key of what I want to show you. Here's what's included. Hi, this is me. I'm Evelyn. Here's my background. After building my business, I'm now following my passion for using AI to grow as a person. And this is exactly what I'm sharing in my community. Practical tools and insightful training for self-development junkies. Get it here. But I'm leading with the course and then I'm fueling my community. And here you can see this also got quite a bit of love. This also worked. Now when I look at how much did this work, right? Compared to this here, I still had a little bit higher cost per registration. But with Facebook ads, scalability always is a topic. Just a certain amount of daily spend. I can scale this too without increasing the cost. So by adding more pathways into my community, I can spend more in total while still keeping my cost per registration and then later on sales low, which is why it's worth testing different materials from your community. And it might also as well be that it actually outperforms your current winner, right? So don't think so black and white. Don't think in either or. Think of different pathways into your world. So that was basically me finding my best way to grow my audience. In total, I did spend €583 to grow my audience. 67193. This is my audience growth cost. And I just quickly want to also take you into the cost. Audience growth cost $671. And for that ad spend, I got a total of 500. Um, let me actually come in here. 505 free members. So, what was our cost per audience member? It is this divided by 505. It cost me a $133 to get a member into my audience to to grow my audience. That was the next step was to just find out the best way to basically promote my offer and then double down on what's working which I did. So I did double down on the direct to school strategy and it allowed me to grow an audience from scratch from zero to 500 people. Also those people are on my email list now right? I did collect the emails and I can on the optin and I can also email them from the group. So I now have a list and an audience of 500 people and it cost me on average $133 for a highly qualified and targeted group member. Now the next step was to get the engagement in the group off the ground. And here I don't want to bore you because I actually already created a detailed video tutorial for you guys specifically around this. So in here I have broken down for you every single step that I took to get this community engaged. So I would highly recommend that you check this one out as the step to get the engagement off the ground. That was the fifth step that I did. Now the sixth step was to make my first dollar with this new community. Where did my first sale come from? My very first sale actually came from the website. like what you just saw here. That was the first $7 that I had connected. The next one was coming from the community. And here you see the different offers that I had in the community. I did offer 7 days WhatsApp accountability support. And I actually need to unpublish this because I don't want people to book it. I just activated it to be able to extract the numbers for this video. And then I did offer a 60-minute clarity call. And then I did offer 30 days of support with an initial kickoff call, a check-in, and then a debrief call at the end. And so the first sale that I made on school was a $7 sale here in the community. And I think I also celebrated it here. I got my first customer for my new business. So this was on the 17th of May. Now is the 18th of June. So exactly one month ago I got my first customer in school which was like so so cool to happen. Now what did they buy? They purchased the WhatsApp support and this is an something that I can just highly recommend. It is one of the easiest things to sell if you are a complete beginner. If you are in Grow with Evelyn and and watching this, we do have a complete WhatsApp support planner in there or I call it asynchronous support planner because you could even do it through school, you can do it through Telegram, you can do it through Voxer, but it really will allow you to map out how you want to serve them. And so this is what I offered. And my first sale from the website as well as the first sale in school and then also the next sale in school were WhatsApp support offer sales. So that was the first ones that started to get going and then one of those converted into the 30 days of support. So that was also really cool that really helped me with the ad spend and you know not to freak out that I spend so much on growing my audience. So that was how I basically made the first dollar. I did offer these upgrade offers inside of school and this is something you can super easily set up in a free school as well. So all you need to do is create a new course. Then you say, you know, what's a support offer. Then you have buy now. Then you can give it a price like however much you want. And then you can add it here. And you upload an image and you give a description. So here you can see the description that I had here. We need to blur out my number for the YouTube video. Ben, please. But here you see 7 days WhatsApp accountability support. You already know what to do. You just haven't had support to follow through. This is that support for 7 days. I'll personally check in with you on WhatsApp, respond to your updates, and answer your questions via voice message. It's low pressure but high impact. The daily touch points you've been missing to finally commit, stay consistent, and make real progress. So that was the description of the course. Then I just AI generated this text here, the banner, and then inside of the course, and again, we need to blur this out. I just said, "Hey, next steps. Thank you so much for booking the 7-day WhatsApp support. I'm so excited to get started. Please send me a message with let's go to my number or simply click the link." You can set it up in WhatsApp in a way that they can just uh chat and it will automatically send uh the message to them. That's how I had set it up. And then I did a similar offer for the 30-day one. So this this these are unlisted now, but I just had personalized support to help you stay steady and aligned. It includes a 60-minute kickoff call, a 30inut midpoint check-in, a 60-minute debrief. You'll get ongoing WhatsApp access for guidance, feedback, encouragement, plus custom tools and resources. based on your goals. This isn't a one-sizefits-all. It's tailored um support, right? And so I'm like super aware that these are very lowc cost for service- based offers, but it also is that we need to start working with people onetoone to really understand what is needed. Then I also had a clarity call here for 60 minutes here. Again, um you see you can't become what you don't see. This one session is a focused space for you to explore how you currently see yourself and what image is shaping your actions, limits, and potential. will get clear on the version of you you're ready to grow into, uncover what's getting in the way and begin crafting a more self-aligned image to live into. So, it's all to support actually what is in there and help them to use the course better. Right? So, it's not necessarily coaching. It is just accountability and support to use the resources in the course better. Now, how did this actually go from making my first dollar to making a total of $76? You can see the one-time sales in this community added up to $76. So, here you can see how it's distributed. I did sell a total of five clarity calls for $33 totaling up to $165. I sold two after I increased the price to 97 totaling up to 194. So as soon as I started to see okay I'm getting really the bookings are start to come in because the engagement got off the ground we grew I was helpful in the community people started to get the first results more people wanted to get access to me right so then they were basically skipping from the WhatsApp to oh I want more proximity to you um and then you see that it basically flipped people didn't book this anymore they they basically started to book the clarity call more and then from the clarity call I had two more people purchasing ultimately the $111 $7 offer. So that totaled up to the $76 in sales in the community and it really helped me to offset the audience growth cost. So as you can see the one-time sales in the community already allowed me to basically offset the cost of triing and erroring and fig figuring out how to grow my audience. All right, so the next step for me was to actually turn this community from a free to a paid community. I always knew that I don't want to build a one-to-one coaching business, right? Also, because I don't want to coach in this area. I just want to create content and share what's working for me in this area. I do create a ton of solutions and processes and prompts around it. And I'm so enthusiastic about optimizing myself using AI that I just want to share what I'm doing there. And I don't want to be a teacher. I just want to be the best student with them and most enthusiastic about it and the the person always exploring around it. So that's why I decided okay let me turn this into a community where I can be a part of it rather than me trying to to build myself up to like an authority or something in this space. I just want to be with them and do the work with them and share what I create. So I decided once I reached the 500 members that I want to turn this community paid. As you can see you know it has became 55 free members. So, still a few trickled in, but basically on the 4th of July, I decided to turn the community paid and to run my first ads to build up the community. So, now we are in these campaigns here where I started to run ads directly to the community. So, in school, it's actually super easy to switch from free to paid. All you need to do is come to pricing, add price, and then put a price tag on it. So, I only added the annual option today. I only had the monthly option for the $7. So, I turned it paid, updated, slightly updated my about page copy. So, it said that it's $7 per month and not free anymore. And I did go ahead and I adjusted my winning visuals and basically leveraging the social proof that I built forward. So, this was one of the I again tested both against each other directly promoting the community versus promoting the course inside the community. This was the campaign promoting the ad in the course inside the community. So as you can see I took the mockup that I had created but I just supercharged it a little bit with the social proof and the credibility that I had built throughout the month. So I just was able to now say join 5005 plus members becoming their best selves with AI tracking discover and overcome relationship based identity blocks using AI and then turn old patterns into this. And I was basically promoting this using the very same copy as for the free community, but just now mentioning that it's paid. And this actually did quite decently. So I got two purchases for €19 $21, which honestly is not that bad for a membership ad directly. But of course, you know, I was wondering if it's not possible to have it cheaper. So I also did create a new ad variation of the ad that went directly to the community. And again, I used the proof that I've built to basically give it more credibility. So, I also updated the mockup to have the price on there clearly. And also here in the headline, I made sure to add the word new, which is a great trigger word, little flame emoji, and then immediately have the price visible. And then just name what it is, dollar 7 AI powered identity alchemy course. And so here you can see it already built up quite a bit of social proof here. This ad was actually doing better right out the gate. So here we can see I started the ad on the 5th and it got two purchases. So this was €18 and the other one on the 5th didn't get a purchase right away. It took a little longer for the other ad to really take off. And here you can see the first 7 days of it where we ultimately landed. Right? So this got two purchases which again at that point it got for 10 years. So that was still very acceptable. But this in this time already got 37. So this was really taking off. So I decided to just consolidate these two because the other one was not necessarily a loser, but it also wasn't the best winner. So I just pulled again the ad ID as an existing post with the social proof in here and let Facebook distribute the budget. And so this was really really cool because within my first week I had 37 members and the cost per purchase was almost the cost of the monthly membership. Right? So, if we now put this here, cost me around $860 to get a $7 member. And so, I was really extremely happy about that. So, then I started to try to scale this up. I just started to increase the budget. So, for the first 3 days, I had it running at €30 a day. Then I started to, and this was the lowest cost I had. Then I started to increase the budget. And with the budget here, the cost started to come up. I increased the budget more. And of course, the cost started to come up more and more and more. So, which is super normal to see with Facebook ads is the more you spend, right, the the higher the cost. Now, here I started to add and these are image based ads, right? So, they're very much bottom of funnel. So, they tell you exactly what it is and and to buy. Now, it's almost like a front-loaded about or sales page. Now, in order to feed this, I added a explainer video in short form. And here you can see what happened when I added this video in a separate campaign. So this video got really great CTR all. So here this is basically a video of me explaining telling my solution discovery story right my founder story if you want to. And here you can see if we're comparing this ad with the mockup ads then we see that this ad has much better CTR all comparatively. So this means out of 100 people here only four stop the scroll and here 13. And here on the link 5% like five people out of 100 click and here less than one person and here about 1.3 people. Now, here's the really interesting thing, right? This generated much cheaper clicks and much more higher volume. But look at the purchases, right? So, this has a conversion rate of we have about a 6% conversion rate. And now the other one that has less clicks. So, we have 35 link clicks and six sales. This has 17% conversion rate. Now, the cool thing is that now these ads are working together because you can clearly see this by the cost per purchase here coming down. Right? So before it was much higher and now the cost per purchase is coming down here because this campaign here with the short form is feeding it. Right? So people see this ad first and then they get double head hit with this and this is how I'm able to maintain a lower cost as I'm scaling now. And this is basically where we are with this. I've been able to now grow this paid community since the 4th of June, which is 14 days ago, two weeks ago, I've been able to grow it to 94 members and $658 in monthly recurring revenue. So, I generated a total income of $1,364 and I spent a total of $1,62 on ads. So, I'm only from that marketing perspective $238 in a whole when it comes to building my membership up to $658 in my recurring revenue. Right? So, already in the next month I will be profitable with this venture in theory. Right? So now I'm really really happy with that and I also want to just be transparent about the $1,000 earned does not mean that the revenue does not equal the profit. Right? And so I think for a lot of people I think it would be helpful to understand how somebody who treats this as a passion but also as a business is approaching these type of things. So I did have additional expenses that I want to mention. You saw me doing that a website test. For that website test I actually purchased a conversion blueprint funnels uh on WordPress which is a complete template solution and setup including upsell plug-in. Right? And so I wanted to have that. And again, I only got $14 worth of client from there, but I didn't push actually one client upgraded to the 111. So it's it's actually more than that. But I didn't want to push for more onetoone because at the point where I am in my life and in my business, I don't want to do more onetoone work, right? It has the lowest lever for me. I do want to have it to a certain extent to understand my ideal client, but I don't want to make my money with onetoone. I want to make my money with low ticket one to many many many as low ticket as I can like with the $7 add as many people as I can. This was a onetime expense, right? Um the the 97 for the abset plugin is once a year and of course I did have the cost for my school community. So in reality the expenses are a little higher, right? And so we also have to take this into account. So it is this minus this as well. So actually I'm about $900 in investing into this business if you take all investments into considerations. I wanted to divide it up because it is optional, right? You don't have to build a website right away. If anything, if you're going with the minimal version with just school, it's about 333 down in the first month to build up 658 in monthly recurring revenue. So, you know, still breaking even in the second month. Now, what's my goal right now? I'm spending $100 a day on ads and I'm growing relatively fast, right? So here you can see with the $100 ad spend, I am able to get a cost per purchase around $10. So what I want to try to do is to keep this ad spend up for the next month so that I can grow my members count to around 394, so around 400 members, and get my monthly recurring revenue up to 2,750. So that would still leave me in a slight deficit in a month because I just want to go as heavy as I can on ads. But then you can see if I keep this up in the month after I start to be quite positive in here and if I should be able to you know keep this up in the month after currently my turn is you know 0% of course it might it might come up then I would be already very very much in the plus right if I'm doing a really really good job and I can keep up the ad spend around this area of scale and of course I can also keep my churn low now currently my churn is saying 0% which is great and I have been able to keep a really low churn. Also, for example, in my $97 community, you can see I only have 2.88% churn. So, if I can keep this up, I would absolutely love to, but this is kind of the plan. So, I hope, you know, month four, we're getting somewhere around 1,000 members. Obviously, this is a very ambitious plan. Ads don't necessarily scale like that, but it is the vision that I'm holding right now, and it is the plan to go from there with the community. And I just wanted to also show you the numbers behind it super realistically. Right? So this is obviously here like a best case scenario if I can make it happen. All right. So this is how I go went from free to paid and then I just showed you how I want to go about scaling. Now there's another thing that I want to do for scaling which is also going to put this website to use. Again, I'm currently working on another offer within this which will be around willpower and using AI basically to acquire the skills that we are mistaking for willpower. I'm just putting the finishing touches on it and I actually want to create a selfquidating offer around this that lives on a separate page. I'm doing this for my other businesses. So you can see for example one that I'm running for mine and Jess Bellman uh because I have a beautiful business partner in this for our PLR membership these front-end offers that also lead into the memberships. And the way that I'm planning this out is I want to do something like this for my school of will SLO and offer it for $9 or for free in the membership. That's going to be another way for me to hopefully very profitably scale up my ads and reach this goal of a thousand members faster. So that's the vision for scaling. I hope you found this insightful and helpful. And uh if you have any questions, drop them below. If not, we're going to send you to some video right here.