The Art of Selling Online Courses
The Secret to 4 Million Followers Without Showing Your Face With Sami Syed (Project Van life)
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Sami Syed is a 22-year-old entrepreneur known for his remarkable success in the social media world. Without ever showing his face or creating original content, Sami organically grew a following of 4 million across various platforms. Starting his journey at just 15, he now dominates the van life niche with his brand, Project Vanlife.
Sami excels in converting followers into loyal subscribers through strategic marketing and content collaboration, leveraging the power of user-generated content and partnerships with influencers in his field.
Sami's Website: https://projectvanlife.com/
Sami's Instagram: / project.vanlife
Sami's YouTube: @ProjectVanLife
Subscribe for more strategies on digital marketing, audience engagement, and course sales.
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Check out our YouTube channel for more tips, techniques, and hacks: https://www.youtube.com/@Theartofsellingonlinecourses
Want to get 2 of our best email marketing templates that generated up to 6-figures in revenue for our clients in 2023? Download our FREE email template 👉🏼 http://datadrivenmarketing.co/templates
Sami Syed is a 22-year-old entrepreneur known for his remarkable success in the social media world. Without ever showing his face or creating original content, Sami organically grew a following of 4 million across various platforms. Starting his journey at just 15, he now dominates the van life niche with his brand, Project Vanlife.
Sami excels in converting followers into loyal subscribers through strategic marketing and content collaboration, leveraging the power of user-generated content and partnerships with influencers in his field.
Sami's Website: https://projectvanlife.com/
Sami's Instagram: / project.vanlife
Sami's YouTube: @ProjectVanLife
Subscribe for more strategies on digital marketing, audience engagement, and course sales.
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Check out our YouTube channel for more tips, techniques, and hacks: https://www.youtube.com/@Theartofsellingonlinecourses
Hello and welcome to the Art of Selling online courses. We are here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is Monica Abadio and today's guest is Sami Saeed. Sami is a young, 22 year old entrepreneur who grew 4 million followers organically and dominated his niche without ever showing his face or creating any content himself, and today we're going to talk about how Sammy has managed to build and monetize his large social media following. But before we jump into today's episode, I have something exciting to share with you.
Speaker 1:If you want to grow your email list quickly, you need to check out our Double your Email List guide. Having a bigger email list makes everything else in your business easier. It means that every time you do a promotion, you'll make more sales, make more revenue and help more people, and with this guide, you'll get a step-by-step process to everything you need to do to grow your email list. So if you follow it, you'll very quickly experience a boost in your lead magnet conversion rates and see more people joining your email list. We typically see an increase in new subscribers each month of between 2 and 10x. So grab your copy of the Double your Email List Guide right now at data-drivenmarketingco, slash double and watch your email list transform. Now let's get into today's episode. Sami, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Monica. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:So I'm actually very excited to talk to Sami today, because we've worked together before and I'm really curious to ask him some deep questions. So first of all, tell me what it's like to be 22 and own your own business.
Speaker 2:It's amazing because, if I compare myself to a lot of other 22 year olds and even a lot of my friends, currently they're getting out of university and college and they're in a lot of debt and they're just now starting off their career, whereas I've been in my career for almost like seven years, since high school, because I started this when I was 15. So I built some pretty good foundations, I would say.
Speaker 1:I mean, I was pretty impressed with your determination back when we worked together. You were what? 21? You just turned 21, right?
Speaker 2:When we were working together, I was 21,.
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, and you were kind of one of our best students. I mean, you were showing up on calls, you were doing the work and it wasn't just like hey, do this, because we said so. You had a lot of marketing and business knowledge that many people who are established right now they don't have that yet.
Speaker 2:So I was pretty like taken back by that yeah, I'm just eager to learn right, because ultimately, that's what's going to make me successful. There's a lot of stuff I don't know, and you guys were obviously teaching me a bunch of new things that I had no idea existed in this world, because I was so deep into just growing on social media and then, all of a sudden, you guys taught me conversion rate optimization and email list building and stuff like that, and I was like this is a thing. And so once I found out it was a thing and you know, yosef on your team showed me how the numbers were broken down and he showed me like, practically this is what's going to when this Increases by 1% or this decreases by 2% or whatever, and so I visually saw it and I'm like this makes a lot of sense. This is the key that I've been missing.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Do you remember what, like how you found this or how, how you decided that, hey, I'm gonna try this program.
Speaker 2:Yeah so I was watching. I have my website built on thrive themes and I was watching one of their videos and I think john was on there talking about conversion rate optimization and at the time I was really new to that world. I had just learned about the term and I was just kind of dabbling in it and his video made a lot of sense, because not. I watched a lot, a lot of other videos about conversion rate optimization but they were just like do this, do this, do this right? But john was like do this first because it's going to make the biggest impact, and then do this, and he was listing it out in terms of priority, so that really stuck with me. And then he was like click the link in my or or whatever, if you want a free audit of your sales page.
Speaker 2:I was like, of course I want that. So I got the audit. You know, the audit was amazing. And then, obviously, everything else from there was amazing. Everything you guys said made sense. I, I signed up, got amazing results. I learned a ton and it still pays dividends till today, the stuff I've learned from you guys very, very cool.
Speaker 1:Do you remember what was the first thing you implemented and improved at?
Speaker 2:The very first thing I did was the headlines, because I didn't understand how important having a good headline was. So I started split testing the headlines firstly, and then the second one was order bumps and then upsells. The order bump was shocking because it was so easy. Like 33% of people started taking it as soon as I added it. I remember like 30 minutes after I added it, literally a sale came in and someone took the order bump and I was so happy.
Speaker 1:Instant gratification right yeah exactly yeah.
Speaker 1:The order bump is one of the easiest things we can implement in any business and to the people who are listening right now, you can watch John explain how to add an order bump and it actually takes a very, very short amount of time. I think we've had people who implemented one in like one hour. All you have to do is figure out what's logical product, I mean what makes logical sense to put on your checkout page after someone already invests in, you know, commits to buying something before, and that's it. And we're seeing 40%. And we're seeing 40% take rate. We've seen 80% take rate in some cases. So the options are insane and the potential is out there. I mean, all you have to do is give it a try.
Speaker 1:And I remember you testing the headlines. It was so cool to see that and I didn't know. I think you were doing it with Th right? Yeah, I was doing it right. Yeah, I didn't know. Thrive allowed you to do split testing on the page. I was thinking, okay, we have to do something complicated for split testing. Very cool, yeah. So I'm curious what have you been up to in the meantime? You think it's been almost like six months since we last worked together.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I've tried switching to a subscription model and to increase our LTV and honestly that has worked really well, because previously we were selling a one time course for $97 and our average order value on that was like 120 bucks. And then obviously there was no recurring because I also didn't have anything to ascend them into, and so we switched to a subscription model where it's $37 per month but the upsell on that is $370, because it's like prepay for a year and get two months free, right, and because the upsell is more expensive, the average order value actually went up to like $140. So that's like the first month and then obviously people are recurring month to month. So I'm still trying to see what our retention is going to be, but so far it's looking really good Like people are sticking. But so far it's looking really good Like people are sticking.
Speaker 1:That's so smart, yossip and John would be proud, and I remember you did have that issue and you also. You've been creating a lot of content with the summit right, so you're using some content to basically say we have new content. So the subscription is worth it right. A hundred percent. So the summit is worth it right 100%.
Speaker 2:So the summit has been amazing because the very first time I ran the summit, we managed to get like 40 of like the biggest influencers and experts within our space. Everyone came and delivered a presentation on something they specialize in. And then I also got because I was scared to invest in ads with it because I didn't have too much money at the time I got sponsors involved, so they paid me up front and then I used the money I got from the sponsors and put it into ads and then the ads also ended up performing at 1X ROAS, so I basically just got free buyers and then so I kept running that summit and we ran it like four times. So far we have another one coming up in September.
Speaker 2:We managed to get like 10 to 20,000 leads in a month off of those summits. So I'm running them twice per year. And then on top of that, we get so much content Monica like literally like 20 to 40 different like high quality presentations that I can just drip into our subscription. So it's a great way to generate content. It's a great way to generate content. It's a great way to build relationships with people in your niche, because you automatically become an authority, no matter who you are, because now you're the one bringing together this mastermind or this group of people, and you generate tons of leads from it too.
Speaker 1:Very, very smart. Let's give some context, because we kind of jumped into it. So tell us a little bit so who you are, what you do, who you serve and how you got here. How did you choose this specific niche?
Speaker 2:yeah. So let's start with how I got here, because it'll kind of make make everything make sense. So when I was 15 years old, I started off by buying and selling Instagram accounts. So similar to how you would flip anything like flip a house or flip a car you kind of buy it, fix it up and sell it for a profit, right? So at the time, a friend of mine introduced me to a few online forums where people were like literally making money online and so I started reading a lot of those and they also introduced me to making money off growing Instagram pages. So I started growing my own Instagram pages from scratch, got really good at it and started selling those pages.
Speaker 2:I think at the peak I was literally growing like 30 accounts simultaneously at one time in so many different niches literally niches that I didn't even really know about because we would reshare other people's content and we would just give them credit. Know about because we would reshare other people's content and we would just give them credit. But as I was kind of doing that, I started buying and selling Instagram accounts. And then I also had my marketing agency because I got really good at growing Instagram accounts, so people wanted to hire me to do it Right. So I end up acquiring this account in the in the van life niche, which is called Project Van Life, and my original intentions were that I'm going to buy this account and I'm going to sell it, because that's just what I've been doing, right. But as I bought this account, I got to truly experience what raving fans are, because the community was like super, super engaged and it was also the biggest account in its niche at the time, even though it was like a super specific niche, right. So I'm like, let me keep this account for a little bit.
Speaker 2:There was a bunch of people asking for shout outs in the dms. I'm like, let me make some money off, you know, promoting other people's stuff. And then I end up attending this webinar where they're talking about drop shipping and how you can take products from aliexpress, put it on shopify, blah, blah, blah. And then I'm like you know, there's a lot of people in my dms asking to promote products all of a sudden, right. So I go back to my dms and I look and I'm like and then I search them up on aliexpress and I'm like all these people are drop shipping. And then I also realized that a bunch of them. When I promote them on my page, they come back like they want to buy again and again. So I'm like something's working for them. So I'm like what if I just do this, you know, instead of promoting them, they're clearly making a profit. So I launched a Shopify store within like two weeks. I think took me a while, should have been faster, but anyways, in two weeks I launched Shopify store and promote off one image post to like a link in bio and I made like $2,400 USD in sales within 24 hours.
Speaker 2:At like 16 years old, so that was a huge thing for me. I was like I was like so scared to tell anyone because I'm like they're going to think I'm doing something illegal. So I mostly kept it to myself. But at that point I realized like there's a lot of potential here. I can build this into a brand.
Speaker 2:I did drop shipping for a little bit more after that, but ultimately I didn't enjoy it because lower profit margins and then also I knew I was selling stuff from China and it was lower quality, so I didn't feel good about it. So I stopped doing that and then I eventually switched to digital products and obviously I'm not a van lifer? I'm not. I'm not a van lifer. I'm not knowledgeable enough to even teach people about van life. So what I do is we'll collaborate with van life content creators to create our content and then we'll collaborate with, like, expert van builders and people who actually, like, specialize, have been living van life for five, 10 years, sometimes to teach in our courses. So I'm essentially just like the behind the scenes operator. You won't see me on any of our social media pages or anything like that.
Speaker 1:That's a smart way to build the business and I know we've worked with people who had lots of traffic and big followings but they didn't have a really good course or a course that had product market fit, and we've we've recommended this option. So go find someone who has the authority or visibility and try and create the course together and see how that works and, um, some people managed, other people just got like one person and I think that was still not enough to kind of, you know, transfer the authority like the social proof, but what you have, you don't have just one you have.
Speaker 2:I think it's 40, right um pages you're talking about no, no about, uh, the experts in the course.
Speaker 2:So yeah, basically created by other people and it's sold under your brand exactly, yeah, so there's probably, like I would say, like three to four main people and then, obviously because of the summit, there's so many different like probably more than 40 different experts in there teaching different topics and we just kind of the three to four people are the one who really lay out the course in like a chronological order, and then everything else. Just kind of the three to four people are the one who really lay out the course in like a chronological order, and then everything else just kind of supplements it. Like if you want to go deeper, you can watch these master classes.
Speaker 1:Essentially, what are some downsides to this model?
Speaker 2:so downsides are when I wanna, let's say, do a webinar, or if I want to create a VSL or like simple things like that, like just creating a video, it's sometimes hard for me to get people to do it and then also get them to do it on like a script, because not everyone's good at following the script. They just want to speak kind of naturally. So I would say those are some of the downsides. The other downside right now it's actually a big one. So up until recently, we've been resharing our content on Instagram. But Instagram recently announced and, by the way, like we do it in a way that's like very, very ethical like a lot of people send us DMS on Instagram and they want to be featured on our page. Think of it, like you know, people getting featured on Forbes or CNBC, like they take pride in getting featured in on Project Van Life, because obviously they gain a ton of traction and followers and they get visible visibility in front of the community, right. So we make sure we give them full credit, share their stories and stuff like that announce that pages that are resharing other people's content they're going to start getting lower reach and they're going to give reach to the main creator who actually created that piece of content which, whatever you know, like obviously it sucks for us, but you got to kind of play by the rules, right? It's not your platform.
Speaker 2:So we're pivoting and now we are going to start working on creating more of our own content. So we have videographers in the states who some of them like live in vans and they'll go around and they'll film like mini documentaries of people and they'll share their stories and stuff like that. So that's one source of content. Second source of content is we have a social media manager. The third source of content is UGC and then the fourth one is going to be still collaborating with people in the community but asking them if we can post it with them in collaboration. You know how it's, like this person and this person posted it. So, essentially, like we, we have to change up our content strategy a little bit. So that's a little bit of a challenge right now interesting.
Speaker 1:So how big is your social media following at the moment?
Speaker 2:Across all of our platforms. It's around 4 million, including Instagram. We have like eight different pages in the Van Life Nation. Then we have YouTube, facebook, tiktok, Pinterest. I think that's it.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned a few ways to monetize that big following. You mentioned partnerships and like promoting other people's stuff. You have the course. Do you have any other ways you're monetizing that audience? Like are you generating money from Instagram or from other platforms? How does that work? I know generating money from Instagram or from other platforms, how does that work? How do you monetize like 4 million people or 4 million eyes, let's call them that? Yeah, I know we have. We have worked and we are seeing many course creators who have like large, massive followings on YouTube or on Instagram but they're having a hard time to monetizing that audience beyond what you're making from YouTube, paying them for ads or whatever you know that kind of business yeah.
Speaker 2:So what I'll say is, like our main following is on instagram and instagram doesn't do a good job at paying you for the amount of reach and and views and stuff you get. So I don't even bother with that, like it's an option, I can do it, and they also have like the subscriptions feature. But in all honesty, the way I look at it is like um adsense and like getting paid by the platform per view. Like if you're making money off that, you're really like scraping the bottom of the pot, like you're making the lowest amount of money possible for the audience that you have. And then I think a level above that would be like affiliate marketing. You know you're promoting other people's stuff. You're making a little bit better money if there's product market fit right.
Speaker 2:And then the ultimate you know the best way to monetize is obviously launching your own product, and that's kind of what you guys teach and that's what I've done and I've been at all three of those levels, including even sponsorships. The best way to monetize an audience, if you have one, is absolutely launching your own product and and people, especially a digital product, because they're literally like 100% profit margin, at least when you start out, when you have an audience built up already. So that's the way I'd look at it, because I've worked my way from the bottom, because I thought monetizing through views is the best way, and then I thought affiliate was the best way, and then I thought sponsorships was the best way, and then I thought affiliate was the best way, and then I thought sponsorships was the best way, and now I'm at like selling our own stuff, and I'm like, okay, this is truly the best way.
Speaker 1:So how do you go about selling your own stuff on social media? Do you, I know? Do you do like an indirect sales approach? Do you just go with a direct post that says hey, we're running this sale this week, go get in. How do you? How do you organize your content?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we post. I would say there's almost like a ratio, like a four to one ratio type of thing, where four value posts and then one promotion type of post. And then when we do our promotion post, we are never saying, at least on instagram, we never say, click the link in our bio because that automatically decreases your reach. Instead, we use something called many chat, which is an automation you can set up where you can tell people to comment a specific keyword, so like comment um free or or comment ebook in the comment section, and we'll DM you a free guide on whatever. And so when people comment, that ManyChat will automatically DM them and the open rates on the DMs are literally like 99%, because everyone opens their DMs. So you get 99% open rates and people can either submit their email right on the many chat dm or they can click a button and they can land on your opt-in page and they can opt in there. It's up to you how you want to set that up.
Speaker 2:Some people say having them send you the email on dms works a lot better, which makes sense because there's less friction, they don't have to leave the platform right. So you'll probably get more opt-ins that way. So. So that's what we do on Instagram for low ticket offers and then for high ticket offers. What I've noticed is working really well is similar concept. You know, you post something, you invite people to DM you and then you qualify them on DM so you want to figure out where they're currently at, where they want to be, what's holding them back, and then whether or not they actually have the money to kind of invest in your high ticket offer. And you wouldn't directly ask them if they have the money. You would kind of beat around the bush and just get a sense of if they have the affordability and then, if they do, you invite them to schedule a sales calls with you and then that's where you actually close them. So I've seen that funnel working really well for a lot of people who are selling high ticket on Instagram.
Speaker 1:That's very cool. So you're taking kind of like the indirect approach, like lead with value, focus on giving them something free, collect that email, collect that email. So how, like, what's your conversion rate from social user to email subscriber like on average? Do you know?
Speaker 2:so if you're asking for like total, you know followers or total reach versus how many opt-ins we get. I don't know. John actually asked me this question like two days ago and I'm like I'm going to get back to you because that's a really good metric to be tracking, but I have no idea what it is. Honestly, I do know that when people come from our Instagram page, our opt-in rates, conversion rates, are always higher because we built up that trust and value with them, and so on our opt in page, it's like minimum 60% opt in rates. On our sales pages, it's like 3% conversion rates. So the metrics are a lot better as compared to like paid ads.
Speaker 1:Nice, because social media is usually like top of the funnel stuff, maybe middle of the funnel, but you'd be using that top of the funnel market to kind of move them into your email list middle and bottom of the funnel, and I know a lot of people are struggling there. So it's interesting to hear that. But your Instagram account is very for me, it's very interesting to see it as a case study, because you've built that basically using the niches kind of appeal and other people's social proof, basically to build a brand that doesn't have a face. And that's the major issue for so many course creators who kind of either they bought the business from somebody else or they have this large volume like authority website and they're struggling to like put the face behind the brand. But for you that's not a problem because you already have the faces of all the people who are in your mission creating content.
Speaker 2:So that's an awesome workaround 100% and I would say anyone can can do this, like even the people you're mentioning that are struggling to kind of put a face to it doesn't have to be their own face, they can hire. There's called UGC content creators. Ugc stands for user generated content. If you literally go on Instagram and you start searching for it and you start looking at content creators in your niche that are already posting content, maybe they have a lower following like you can pay them to literally just create, you know, reels and posts and stuff like that for you and then you can use that to build your brand that's so cool.
Speaker 1:That makes things so much easier yeah so let's go back into how you're monetizing this audience, specifically to your course. So you mentioned that you had your course initially and then you moved into a subscription-based model. Do you remember your first launch for the course, not the subscription model? How did it go? Did it go as well as you expected it to go? What were some of the mistakes you've made?
Speaker 2:so there was a lot of mistakes. Firstly, um, before I even launched a course, I was basically launching an ebook and I hired a van lifer to write that entire ebook and it took a really long time, um, just because they were super busy and they were treating it like a side project, so it really delayed the launch by a lot. So that was the first thing. And then, um, eventually, like, I got on the call with someone and he was also like some sort of like course creator, expert or something like that. He's like, instead of branding it as an ebook, you need to brand it as a course, because the perceived value is going to be a lot higher. And then I'm like that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:So then, by the time the ebook was done, and then I'm like, now we need to make it into a course, and I didn't even launch it as an ebook, which I should have done to, like, test the water, see what people are saying could gather feedback I was like we're not going to launch you and I'm like we're going launch a course instead. Then we spent another bunch of months trying to launch a course. And then I'm like, now that I'm launching a course, it can't just be text, it needs to be images and videos. And then I went out to like van builders and I'm like, can you guys help me create a course on building vans and stuff like that? And then, whatever, I finally got the course created and then I'm launching it and then I I'm like, okay, what are the elements that I need? The first one is a sales page. I didn't even bother with an opt-in page, I just went straight to the sales page and I'm like I don't know how to create a sales page, like I've had experience creating websites and stuff like that, but I was like I need to apply the who, not how, mindset and I'm like I need to go out and hire someone to create the sales page for me, even though I didn't have a lot of money and obviously I don't know the elements of a successful sales page. So I go to a web development company and they're just good at designing really good pages. They don't know conversion rate optimization or anything like that either, and neither do I, right? So I let them build out the page and it looks beautiful. It looks really cool.
Speaker 2:We go through like a bunch of different revisions again like a long process shouldn't have been that long, um, but they finally do it. And then I finally launch it. And then I'm like, cool, you know, a few sales are coming in here and there. And then I start learning about conversion rate optimization and I realized that this page has like zero conversion optimized elements in it, like if if it does have any, it's just by pure luck. And so I'm like I can either, you know, depend on these web developers, because everything was written in like HTML code and I know how to do it. But I'm like it's not worth the time to constantly go in there and try to change stuff, right? So I'm like, instead of depending on these developers to make every little tweak I make and having to pay them over and over, I need to figure out a better solution, right? And that kind of forced me into the world of learning how to build the sales page and how to, you know, optimize it and things like that. And so I ended up building my own website, then ended up building my own sales page.
Speaker 2:So, overall, it was a very painful and time consuming process, took a lot of iterations, even after I launched my own sales page. It was a very painful and time consuming process Took a lot of iterations. Even after I launched my own sales page it wasn't a success. I think I had to go at it like at least another three times for it to finally start working. So lots of time, lots of mistakes, lots of money spent like unnecessarily as well. But I would just say like the biggest lesson there is, just learn first, because if I just spent an extra month of time learning, I could have spent another month just building it and that would have been two months and I'm ready to go, whereas that whole process took me like half a year.
Speaker 1:Wow, A lot of determination. A lot of people quit after the first launch. That doesn't go as planned. So what are you doing now in terms of promoting your subscription?
Speaker 2:basically, yeah, so I'm using a tripwire funnel to mainly promote that subscription model.
Speaker 2:I think we are getting similar conversion rates just by sending them straight to the sales page as well. But at the same time I also kind of want to collect their emails in case they bounce. So I don't know, I might just continue promoting both of those on the front end. On the front end and then on the back end I really want to launch a higher ticket offer, because there's a segment of our audience that's spending more than 100k on vans, and these are mostly people who are over the age of 45. And they they're nearing retirement or they're trying to do some early retirement and they have some disposable income. So they're buying these 100k plus vans, and so I need to figure out what I can do to kind of support them before they buy that and then also afterwards, so that we can continue to either put them into some subscription or, you know, sell them something high ticket upfront and then subscription on the back end or something like that. So that's kind of what I'm working on right now.
Speaker 1:Interesting. We had a consultancy client who was teaching people how to renovate and design their houses in a specific style, and everything they were doing was high ticket. A product that's similar to that, like how to design the interior of your van to match maybe either specific styles or specific needs. That could be cool yeah, 100.
Speaker 2:There's a lot we can do, um, even helping them find, because a lot of these people they're just hiring van builders, which is why they're spending 100k plus. So we can even help them find those van builders and then probably even get a commission from those van builders who are charging. So we can almost like double dip. I think so. And then obviously there's a lot of other problems I think that they have before they buy the van and even after that. I need to explore a lot deeper with some market research and figure those out.
Speaker 1:What are you doing to find that information? I mean, how did you discover that your audience has this specific segment of people, 40 plus, who are looking into buying vans that are over 100K?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So first of all, it was because of a mistake I made where for the longest time and this is also because I was distracted, like I still had my social media marketing agency going at the time and I've just now decided to kind of go all in on project van life but because I wasn't super well connected with the market because I'm not doing it myself, right. Um, I launched a course on how to build a van, but the problem with that is most people who are building their own van like 80% of them are doing it because they can't afford to hire a professional van builder, and so budget constraints is their biggest concern. I think you might remember this from our customer avatar, and it's very hard to sell to people like that who don't have money. And when you do sell to them, it's very difficult to maintain them and there's a lot of complaints, there's a lot of objections to handle, and so it's made selling very difficult, even though we've sold a lot of it. But it's not something that I necessarily want to continue selling to. Like I'm selling to like a lower tier of our market and then I'm like, ok, who else can I sell to in this market? Right, and I'm realizing, like there's these huge brands that are literally selling hundred thousand dollars plus vans, and there's people who are buying them, right, and I realize this a lot because of our sponsors.
Speaker 2:Um, for, for the van life summit, right, because they would come on and they would tell us, like, most of our audience is 45 plus. They mostly spend like 100 k plus. They have disposable income. This is why they're doing it, and I kept hearing that over and over from different van builders. And then I'm like maybe I should just go after this audience because clearly they have more money and they can probably pay me something a lot more high ticket, right.
Speaker 2:And that's another thing. Like with selling low ticket, I've noticed it's very difficult to scale. It's almost like I'm hitting a ceiling, whereas I'm seeing people who have a fraction of very like one percent of the audience that I have and they're selling high ticket and they can make more money than me, right. So that's a big like mindset shift that I'm going through right now too, because I was kind of like no one's going to buy something expensive from me, but then I'm seeing all these other people literally selling courses on, you know, maybe anxiety for like 5k Someone else is selling to an audience of people who are employed and they're trying to get a better job. So they're literally selling to people who have nine to five jobs and they're again same thing a 5k ticket. So why can't I charge that amount for something that literally changes people's lifestyle, help helps them travel, improves their relationships, improves their finances in a lot of cases as well.
Speaker 1:So that's what I'm diving into now that's exciting and I yeah, we did talk about that I. I remember you were thinking about creating a course that. I remember you were thinking about creating a course. I think it was teaching people who are now camping in their regular cars how to adapt it to be able to live in it, or something like that and yeah, that was a specific discussion right like okay, what is the type of student buyer you want going forward?
Speaker 2:because this looks to me like it's someone who's even before he's even considering buying a van because he doesn't have the money to buy the van right now yeah, I'm glad you talked me out of that, because what I, like I said, I'm right now hitting like a the lower segment of our audience in terms of like income and their buying power. And if I had gone that route because basically what we were talking about was going after people who are car camping and that was even lower than that in terms of buying power, because they're doing car camping because, again, they can't even afford the van or they can't even think about Affording the van like they're super passionate, so but the problem is they don't have buying power, so you can't build a business off of that so what's your plan for hitting that specific segment?
Speaker 1:I mean, do you know on your email list how many of those people would be in that segment, or how are you gonna find them? How are you gonna talk to them?
Speaker 2:So when I look at our email list and our customer avatar and just the responses overall that we've been getting from people, the first thing I've noticed is that there are people who have income of over 100k like there's a decent amount of them, and so we have naturally just attracted those people, even though we've only been mainly talking about building your own van, so we have been attracting those people. And then also, when I look at their ages even though all of the content creators that I've been hiring are literally like in their 20s, mid 20s when I look at the people on our actual email list and our buyers, they're all 45 plus, which is very interesting because you would think, you know, 20 year old would attract more 20 year olds, but obviously 20 year olds aren't actually living this lifestyle. It's people who are 45 plus. So firstly, I need to shift our front end marketing as well to more so be someone older, so that we attract more of those types of people, because that is our ideal client.
Speaker 2:So I'm basically looking at our customer avatar and I'm seeing the problems and the objections and I'm noticing that we do have that segment of the audience already kind of captured.
Speaker 2:I just don't know what their exact problems are, because I can't segment the data right now, right, so, like I can see, like overall, our audience is saying they want to know how to make money, they want help building their van, which, again, we're not doing much of anymore.
Speaker 2:There's people who want help finding a van builder, there's people who want help with like life on the road related stuff, and so I'm seeing all of these things, but I don't know what that specific segment wants, because I've never segmented our data based on that, I've never asked questions based on that. So I think the next step for me to really figure it out is number one I can just go to a van life event and survey a bunch of people there, because there's van life events that happen where, again, like, these huge van builders come and they're again, they're all selling 100k plus vans, and so those are the types of people who are interested in buying those vans, are the ones coming to these events. So I can go, I can talk to a bunch of people and probably get my answer immediately, which is probably what I'm going to do, because there's one coming up on in like a week.
Speaker 1:Customer interviews are awesome and yeah, so in I live, live in Europe, and in Europe I've been seeing a lot more vans used than you know RVs. We own an RV, but we do it because we need the space. We have a kid, but older couples, like retirees or people who are 50 plus they're not necessarily old, senior people, but they do prefer the van to an RV because it's easier to move around. And in Europe we have cities where the streets are very, very narrow and you can't get in with an RV.
Speaker 1:Plus, they have specific limitations and you can't enter specific areas of a city with an RV or you can't park it, so a van is much more preferable. That's just like an insight to help you on your journey, because you might be, looking at 50 plus rather than 40 plus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I'm saying 45 plus, 45 plus, but honestly, if I was to really look at I I don't know the exact percentage, but the the older it gets, the higher the percentage of people are there. So you're right, it is a lot of 50 plus, even 65 plus, which is very interesting.
Speaker 1:So yeah that is absolutely the market we're targeting that's gonna be very interesting to see how you, how you adapt your current even like social media content right now, because a lot of it. I mean, I've seen people who maybe they're 50 plus maybe one post every now and again by someone who's like showing the interior of their own van, but the majority of people they're like young people, right, and they're like kind of leaving the Bohemian life. So I assume you would have at some point to change. You know, some of the faces you're showing there, like hundred percent slowly that this is an awesome idea.
Speaker 1:You could have an entire account for older people who are traveling with a van and they're you know they have all these questions. How do they? I choose something that's comfortable for my back. How do? I choose one that is easy to drive around, because the older you get, your vision becomes worse, so all those things could be very interesting.
Speaker 2:That's a really good idea.
Speaker 1:I like that very interesting to tackle. Okay, sami, thank you. I have one more question, and you're 22. You've built this business for many, many years. You've tried so many different things. I think it's so interesting that you're going at this with this whole idea of I keep learning, and that's the major value of what I'm getting out of this. So what would be your best piece of advice to the course creator who's listening to this episode right now and who might feel stuck about where they're at? Maybe it's not knowing how to monetize your audience, not knowing how to build a really good course, not knowing how to sell that course or how to reach buyers who are more affluent. What would be your advice?
Speaker 2:I would say don't give up too soon. Um, that's probably the main thing. Almost everyone does like 90 of people do and if you just continue trying different things and testing different ways to accomplish whatever goal you're trying to get to, you will eventually succeed. It's literally inevitable, because you will eventually exhaust all the available options and, from the learnings that you get from each failure, it's going to accelerate you even further. Right, and that's been a really big thing for me as well. I talked about it a little bit on here and I'm even experiencing it right now, where literally our entire social media is young people, whereas our actual target market is a lot older people.
Speaker 2:I've been selling the wrong product when I should have been selling a different product, right. I've been targeting the wrong audience, right. So there's constant learning. That's going to happen. It's even once you start seeing a little bit of success, you're still going to experience failures, and so the biggest thing is just don't give up too early. Seek out help for sure. Seek out, help for sure.
Speaker 2:That's been a really big thing in my journey as well. Like, specifically, like with data-driven marketing. I've learned so many things that I still use to this day and, honestly, if I learned about something even as simple as like how to set up a customer avatar. If I learned that earlier and I truly understood the importance of it, I would have realized way sooner that I'm targeting the wrong audience, whereas, you know, I just went in and I just guessed. I'm like, let me just create this thing because it logically makes sense in my mind, but obviously that's not necessarily what the market wanted.
Speaker 2:And now, you know, two and a half years into monetizing my page, I'm realizing I went a completely wrong route, and that's just a part of the learning process, right? So like I could have given up earlier because I wasn't seeing success for so long. There were so many launches I had done that didn't see success. There were sales pages I launched that didn't see success. There was, you know, social media profiles I launched that didn't find success. But I just kept going and eventually you will land at the perfect product, market fit or the perfect solution that's going to really, you know, blow up your finances and help you achieve your goals.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Thank you, Sami.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Monica, if people want to check out your course or they're into van life and they want to see your social media, where should they go?
Speaker 2:So if they want to see my business, they can go to project van life on any platform. Just search that up, you'll find it. And then my personal profiles. I mean, there's not much on there at all, but you can obviously follow me there too. Just send me say it fabulous.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. So, before we wrap up this specific episode which which was amazing I just wanted to remind you, the listener, of how much your support means to us. We are here to make your podcast experience even better, and you can help us with just a quick favor. All you have to do is take a moment to rate and review our podcast. You're giving us priceless feedback that helps us shape future episodes. So has this show helped you grow your business or improve your courses? If it has, please share it in the reviews. Go to ratethispodcastcom. Slash onlinecourses. Thank you for listening.