267 From a €5 Ebook to €7,500 Coaching

Timotej Bonifer grew up in Slovenia, never studied English formally, and now coaches entrepreneurs around the world to sound like native speakers. His secret? Twelve years on a microphone playing video games. The same habit that probably worried his parents turned out to be the thing that built his entire career.

Dominik sat down with Timotej to talk about how he built Flip English, what it actually takes to turn an obsession into a business, and why he genuinely believes non-native speakers make better English teachers than the natives do. That last one tends to annoy people. Timotej makes a pretty good case for it.

They also get into the real stuff, the Facebook ads that do the heavy lifting, a Black Friday email disaster that tanked his deliverability for a year, why his School community experiments mostly flopped, how he went from doing every sales call himself to building a team of ten coaches, and the moment he raised his price to seven and a half thousand euros and a client just said yes without blinking.

There's a lot of honesty in this one. Timotej doesn't sugarcoat what went wrong, and his advice to his younger self, the kid with the headset on streaming to a few hundred people on Twitch, is just two words: sell earlier.

If you're building a course or coaching business and thinking about where to focus your energy, I think you'll find something useful here.

Check out Timotej's work:
🌐 https://timotejbonifer.com/
📸 https://www.instagram.com/timotejbonifer/
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@timotejbonifer

Transcript

Cold Open And Welcome

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The lower quality of paying, the more complicated you tend to get. The longer you're in the business, the more you want to remove yourself from the business. Which sounds wrong if I'm paying Mark Zuckerberg for all this cat, then let's make it a really long fun video. And what ended up happening is people watch the whole ad and then they're like, wait a minute, I just watched the whole ad. This was an ad. Wait, what's going on?

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hello and welcome to the Art of Stelling Online Ports. We are here to share winning strategies and secret acts from top performers in the online port. My name is Dominic Dragon and today's guest is Timothy Bonnet. Most people believe that if English isn't your first language, there is a stealing attack. Today's guest is the kit from Slovenia who put straight to that stealing. Sounds native to codes. He didn't learn it in a bad. He learned it playing video games. 12 years behind a microphone, commenting, gaming, talking for hours a day. The same habit his family probably wore it while doing in his life is the exact thing that built his career. So he gave his Ted X talk about it, he called it how my gaming addiction takes my life. Now he runs a course business with hundreds of clients, an AI code and a method, his squares can change how you sound intelligent. So how do you turn an obsession into an income? And what does a non-native speaker understand about it in English that the native speaker? Well, let's find

Gaming To Native-Level English

SPEAKER_00 1:22

out. So today we are going to talk about why he tells people to stop learning English from native speakers and learn from some actual. And what it takes to compress a decade of skill into a product, an ebook, a video course, and an AI code that you just gives method for him and so much more. Tima Dave, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Thank you, man. That was a really incredible intro. I keep thinking about every time people introduce me, part of my brain wants to like start speaking with Balkan X, and you know, just to make it a little awkward in the beginning. But I think we'll jump into that at a later stage. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Perfect, no worries, no worries. Uh so I want to start somewhere most people wouldn't expect. So you didn't grow up speaking English. Slovenian parents, Slovenian school, same lessons everyone else got. And yet you sound native. So let's go back. When did you first realize you sounded different from everyone else learning English around?

SPEAKER_01 2:15

I mean, it's not about sounding different, it's more about finding what you're good at. So maybe I can I can twist it in this sense and ask the question for the audience also. Like find what you're good at. I always knew that English was something I was naturally good at because I never had to like learn it. At a later stage, that proved to be a problem because when I went to university and tried to study English, I realized now I'm gonna have to learn it and I don't know how to learn English because I've never learned it before. I just used it. But what did happen is I started creating content online. And when you go through the process of recording yourself, listening to yourself, even observing yourself if you're on video, you realize very quickly that it's off. It doesn't sound that good. Then you start imitating a little bit, and you're like, hmm, what if I make myself sound more British? What if I imitate, I don't know, Jerry Clarkson? Like, does that sound better? Does it sound worse? Oh, better? Do I go with the glottal stock, which is a better? Because then it sounds too British. British? British. There's always like multiple ways that we can approach it. And I still swear to this day to follow the rule of what sounds good to me. So I often get comments like I'll give you a direct example of this. The word advertisement. Everybody uses it, everybody knows it. But the correct British pronunciation is not advertisement, it's advertisement. And it sounds horrible. So I'd never use it myself, but of course, somebody who's trained by the, you know, machine of schooling and they're theoretical, which is also why I don't like the school system that much, is that they they produce these people, end up talking like robots because they think this is the correct way to say it. Like, realistically speaking, nothing about any language is correct. Most of it is wrong because that's how languages get formed. If somebody just picked up a word, and we could talk about this, let's say, your creation, I'm Slovenian, we have some words that are similar, some words that are completely different. Sometimes I'm like, why do you guys call it like that? Then he'd be like, Why do you guys call it like that? So slang English comes into play, different subaccents come into play. So I was always more passionate about the accent. I was passionate about what makes me sound better. So it's not about, oh, do I sound different, but do I sound more enjoyable to listen to? Because let's be real, when you sit down with someone and they have a nice voice, it's soothing to listen to. Your favorite professors, I guarantee you, and there were a few of them, they had a good voice, a good story, good charisma, good energy. You know, if I walk into a classroom and there's a you know, high-pitched, squeaking Karen, I don't think I'm gonna be learning that much from that classroom. You know, I'll put my iPhone in, I'll be leaning on the wall and sleeping. So that's kind of where it started, I feel, is observing your own voice and saying, okay, I don't like this, let's change it.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

That's

Why Non-Natives Teach Better

SPEAKER_00 4:36

nice. Um, and then you flip it into a belief that genuinely, I think, annoys some people in your industry. So you tell learners that they should not learn English from a native speaker. So make the case. Why is a non-native a better teacher than someone who actually grew up with it?

SPEAKER_01 4:53

Yeah, so there's there's advantages and disadvantages. I want to clarify that I work with various coaches that also fulfill my service. Some of them are native. The reason I do this is because if you look at a language, it has to do a lot with culture. And a native speaker has the advantage of understanding the culture inside and out. Sometimes too much so. Sometimes we're very blind by what's actually happening around us. So I know, even though I've been speaking Slovenian for all my life, I couldn't in a million years teach someone Slovenian. In fact, two days ago, a woman reached out to me, sent me a massive message on Instagram. She said, Hey, I know from Slovenia, my cousin or someone in the family is there, and he's like learning and speaking on the radio. And he's like, Could you teach him Slovenian? And I was like, respectfully, no, I'm not even gonna think about doing that. Like you'd have to pay me a million pounds for me to even just think about proceeding through that process because I don't even know where to start. And it's because you're too involved in the culture. On the other side, when you have a non-native and they've overcome the accent, it's a copy-paste. So if I have a coach that speaks, let's say, with American accent, they sound like Matthew McConaughey, and they're from Croatia, and then you come to me and you say, Tim, I have Croatian accent. I want to speak more like American, I'm like, okay, I'll just put you to that coach. Because the coach will follow you to the same example. And look, obviously it's down to your work, but you can see it and you say, I think that's replicatable. And the same thing works in other industries. I mean, if you're a, I don't know, on the top of my head, I'm thinking of uh a woman who's selling courses to other women who just had their kid and now they're in their postpartum area and they want to get back into like looking fit and you know, bikini season and all that. If I want to buy that as a young mum, I want to buy from someone who's had a kid. I wouldn't want to buy from a an influencer from, you know, some other part of the world in one Bali that's never had a kid because that's not my demographic. It doesn't speak to them. And I think this is kind of also where I crack the case of marketing. I didn't even know it. Because everywhere I go, it's just native, native, native. And like, I'm gonna teach you how to speak like me. It's like, no, because you don't know how to get there. Because you you you that's where you started. You can't show someone how to get to a starting location. You can show them how to get to the end location if your starting location is somewhat similar. And that's why I think it works really well to work with non-natives rather than natives.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Yeah, yeah, that definitely makes sense.

The ARM Method And AI Detour

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Uh so let's get into what you actually build, because it's more than a course. You've got a master class, you've got a method a method with a name, you have an AI coach, and you also have a community. So start me at the center of it. So let's take the R method, for example.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

I'll break it down a little bit. So the ARM method is part of the 12-day English masterclass, which we can spend a little bit of time talking about because it's more than just an ebook. In essence, that's where it started. Then it ended up being an audiobook and has a video course. It's a video course that covers it, and then there's also video courses inside of it. So it's just it's dotted with materials. Um, the ARM method stands for action, repetition, mastery. And I didn't make that for the readers, I made that for me. Because I suffer from that. Even when in business, in everyday life, in in sports, in relationships, like the first step should always be just action. Just do it. Don't think about it too much, just get started. And then you want to just keep repeating that process. And you repeat and you make mistakes and you iterate and you correct and you fix and you improve. And that's that's like everything in life works like that. You could imagine Hermose here, you know, screaming from the top of his lungs, like volume, volume, and you're like, okay, yes, uh Hermose, I'll do it. And then the last step is you become a master, which is all about the hours. Because the more hours you put into it, again, volume, the better the results are gonna get. Now, what I will correct from you when it comes to the AI coach, the A coach was actually initially the idea that there's an app called Delphi or an AI service that allows you to clone yourself. And the first thing I did when I bought that subscription about two years ago is I thought I would sell it. I thought, hey, this is a great idea. I'll just clone myself and then my AI can do the work for me. Um the problem is I'm not really AI, an AI fan. I don't like AI. I don't use it that much. And the issue with the actual servers is it's very difficult to develop an AI that's gonna fix somebody's pronunciation. It's so nuanced that can it be done? Probably. But here again, you're running for a problem. People who are so good at designing AI are also the last people I would go to advice for when it comes to speaking. So that's where I think they're stuck in a loop. And people developing these bold voice apps and all the other copies that are gonna get formed from it, they will probably make some money. They will be selling to low-ticket clients, they'll be selling masses, they'll probably have to use influencers and UGC creators to get there. Um, and so what I did instead is I spoke to the CEO of Delphi and he said, Look, Tim, the reason I made this app, this program, is because I wanted to talk to my granddad. So he wanted to have a memory of him. And he said, Tim, I would suggest that instead of using it as a program you're selling, use it as like an assisted tool where people can get to talk to a copy of you, essentially. So um I think I ran it was a paid subscription for maybe like two months, and I think two women actually purchased it. I don't know why. Maybe because they like the voice, possibly a different, a different upsell that I could I could provide for them. But what I ended up doing is just making it free. So that's there as like a little gift. So once you fall into our email sequence, I think the very second email is like, hey, here's a gift, I'll link them the AI, and then they can use it. Truth be told, I haven't touched the AI in a year. So it's completely outdated. It probably has some of the wrong info, but to be honest, I can't really be bothered because most of our focus right now is on one-on-one coaching. And obviously, you're talking high-ticket, we're talking clients from all around the world, from Dubai, for example, entrepreneurs, business individuals, people you can really quote for nice sums of money, and you can actually get them to the result because they're committed. And then the issue I face there is that I'm just one person. So, yes, I would love to have 15 copies of me and be like a clone from Star Wars, but then the service would be very diluted. So instead, I started to look for great talent. And so I went from basically a digital product seller to a service provider to now being essentially like an agency. So we're trying to grow that model now. We have about 10 plus coaches from all around the world, and it's proven to be quite a challenge to find good talent, which I'm now I'm now understanding why this business model worked so well for me, why my advertisements speak to so many people. Because I went on Prep Lee, on iTalKey, on all these websites looking for tutors to steal, and I was shocked at just how bad the average tutor is. Um, most of them that are non-native unfortunately have the level of the accent that our clients have or lower, which is already pretty bad. And then the native speakers have the issue of not being presentable. So they have a weird voice, they haven't clearly haven't listened to themselves or worked on it. There's the occasional radio guy who is like, oh my god, this guy's like you know, 65 years old, has an incredible voice. But other than that, you'll find people sounding like Stitch. It's like, hey Naz, I'm uh I'm I'm gonna be coaching you. I'm like, I don't know if I want to take coaching from that. But again, I'm biased. I openly say that I am uh auditorially autistic, which I think is just a fancy way of saying that I'm triggered by different sounds. So I don't like birds chirping in the morning, I don't like when people are driving motorbikes around um our town. I like peace, I like people to have a good solid voice. And that's why also my voice has been evolved to a point that I think suits most people. Obviously, there's people out there that don't like my voice. They're like, oh, Tim sounds so arrogant, full of himself. Whatever. That's you know your personal preference. But I find that if you don't work on your voice, how are you gonna sell it? So you have to be obsessed with it. People that sell in the fitness industry, like I mentioned before, they have to be obsessed with their body. You know, they're obsessed with a diet. I used to work as a chef, for example. We can touch upon that as well. You have to be obsessed with the food you're making. Every single like grain of salt has to be perfectly placed on the plate, little green herb oil that you put around the plating, you know, it has to be immaculate. And so perfection is that ultimate trait that will get people not to come, but to stay with you, to stay with your brand and to follow that. So yeah, long story short to say, I'm now looking for the best talent. So if anybody listens to this, they're like, oh my god, I've also got an amazing accent. Welcome to apply. Um something that would be very, very helpful.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

Yeah, I'm sure someone who is listening either knows someone or is the person. So uh we'll see. After

Community Experiments And Agency Shift

SPEAKER_00 12:47

the uh this episode is out, uh, we'll make sure to reach out if anyone reaches out to us. Uh what about other products like uh school community, if I'm not mistaken? Uh walk us through that.

SPEAKER_01 12:59

I mean, I was one of the first people in my group of entrepreneurs that kind of like jumped onto the school community, and it failed. Like colossally failed. My first approach was public speaking. So I thought, hey, I love public speaking. I don't want to do something that's too English related because I thought it was gonna be boring. I made it free. I ran it through my TikTok account, I think, like two years ago. Basically nobody joined. Like 100 people got in, nobody was active. I shut that down. Then I try again, I make it like a flip English community, I tried something more generic. That flopped again. And then we saw a bit of success with the English for entrepreneurs. Idea being is to get people together that are in high-ticket sales or people that are trying to get with content. But I have to be very honest, um, I haven't spent a lot of time developing that. Unfortunately, when it comes to you know being a solopreneur, I think school is amazing. Like basically put all your courses, all your materials on there, run all the ads to school or all the funnels leading to school, do your couple of weekly or monthly calls, you'll be golden. But when you go in the direction of an agency, um, the school community will maybe generate from me on a monthly basis the same amount of money that I can collect from one client in like 15 minutes. So it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to spend too much effort on a machine that requires a lot of input. I have to get the coaches to also fulfill the service, to do the group calls, motivate these people. Again, it's also, I feel, a great low-ticket product. It's a great thing to do for free. But then you're serving a completely different demographic. And for me, I want to move into B2B, I want to move into public speaking, I want to move into doing webinars, conferences, mastermind events, like again, mentioning her mosey, you know. Hey, fly into a country, we'll do a three-day event, we'll we'll build out your, let's say, sales team if you're a big company. There's a lot of ideas there. And I don't want to be dealing with low low-ticket people anymore. And I have a lot of reasons for it. I feel like I've been on the customer side, I've been on the person providing the service. There's a lot of hassle for very little benefit. And you have to decide as a business if you want to go into high ticket or low ticket because you're not going to be able to do both. And for a long time I wanted to do both. So as things continue to move forward, we're going to start scaling down on the offer structure that we have because sometimes it doesn't make sense. We opened a secondary school community as well. We wanted to provide a lot of value for people, and they just didn't seem to respect it. They'd pay about 27 euros per month, which I think is nothing compared to what we're charging for a high ticket. That wouldn't even be like 15 minutes of a program in high ticket. And they were getting multiple calls per month, and they just were not joining, they were not active, they were not engaged. And I'm not saying that that's a responsibility of the clients. I believe that as a offer owner, we could have done a way better job at how we launched it, how we created challenges, got people engaged. But again, you're thinking huge amounts of effort for very little bit of reward. And so, school, I think, is something that I would really recommend for those entrepreneurs that want to do stuff solo, those of them that want to have like a bigger office that take moving into high-ticket. I just don't think it makes that much sense. And I also think that when somebody is making a lot of money and you want to target them as a client, I don't want them to be on school because they have other groups they can join and it just dilutes their focus. So I, as a high-ticket person, would rather have just a WhatsApp chat or a Discord group that is easily accessible, I can easily connect with the other members, do the networking. I would definitely prefer in-person events if possible. So you're servicing an entirely different clientele, and for that you need to have a different approach.

Long-Form Facebook Ads That Work

SPEAKER_01 16:19

Makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 16:19

So let's talk about how people find you because you've got the same raw material a lot of other creators have. So YouTube and Instagram, for example. But you came from a world where you already knew how to hold an audience with a mic, right? So what's actually bringing you the most um new people right now?

SPEAKER_01 16:39

Facebook ads, landslide victory. Um to be completely honest with you, I'm struggling with organic content because I don't really make it. What I do is I record YouTube videos, I take clips. Even from this conversation that we're having, I'm gonna take a couple of video clips as I'm talking. I use OBS to extract them, I send them to my editor, and then he's the one that schedules it all over the course of the month. I don't put focus onto organic content as much because I feel like it's a hit or miss. And in today's day and age, it's all about finding the algorithm. So everybody's trying to hack the code to go viral. And when they crack it, then they just keep making the same videos over and over again. And I find that it has two things. Can it grow your business? Absolutely. Can it also just create a bunch of useless, spammy, you know, entertaining content that doesn't really benefit anyone? Absolutely. And I feel that's what's happening with most creators is they're just trying to gain that popularity, but doesn't have any long-term traction. And it doesn't feel that fun for me to say, oh, I've got this script I'm gonna have to read, then I have to say this and record five different shots. Like, I can't be bothered. I would rather that people listen to me because of my voice for prolonged periods of time, and so I will consistently make more longer form content. And what I did in the very beginning was make Facebook ads that were seven, eight minutes long. Because I thought to myself, I'm paying for the ad anyways, might as well make it longer. Like, what's the point of a 30-second short? I can post that for free. I can repost it on all the other platforms. But if I'm paying Mark Zuckerberg all this cash, then let's make it a really long form video. And what ended up happening is people watch the whole ad and then they're like, wait a minute, I just watched the whole ad? This was an ad. Wait, what's going on? And I use a lot of different tactics to create it as unedited as possible, as spontaneous, using a Rubik scoop to motivate people, to distract them, switch between different accents. The first advertisements I started recording were in Slovenia, and I'll be switching mid-sentence from Slovenian to English so that people watching would go like, what the heck is going on? Um, I also pulled the Hermosy thing, you know, had the nose strip, partially because of marketing, partially because I realized, hey, makes me breathe better. Why not use it every once in a while? So anything to get that attraction going, I'd have been a game changer for it. But I do feel like we're lacking on organic. I do feel like there's stuff that we can do moving forward, but I'm just one person, and you know, you have to decide which piece of content, which piece of your business is going to get most of your attention. And I wagered that organic is the least important one for me. Um if I was in some get rich quick scheme, then yeah, you go out there, you rent your Lamborghini, you show people how amazing you are, and then you know, they buy into your basically multi-level marketing scheme or whatever it might be. And I I hate that. I don't like it. And I find that content on social media should be segregated into entertainment and into education, and they should be separate. And so it's it's a pain point of mine, and we could go into down to the rabbit hole, but long story short, most of our traffic comes from paid advertising.

Funnel Design And Lead Qualification

SPEAKER_00 19:25

And how does the customer journey look like from when they see the Facebook ads until they come become your buyer? And is there something that happens after that? Do you have something else to offer them?

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Yeah, for a long time that whole process was very, very bad. Um there was a moment where I was working everything on my own, probably about eight months ago. There was no emails, everything was kind of like dry. But the primary process is separated into two types of um ad structures. Now, admittedly, right now and for the last three months, my operations manager Nick has been taking care of everything. So I went from doing all the ads myself to completely letting go of it because he structured it in a certain way. I mean, if I open up my ad manager, I can see he's got some long form hammer than campaign, short form hammer than campaign, warm content cycle bit. Half of this stuff, I don't even know what it is. He explained it to me. I was like, look, if it works, it works. Well, my mentality with ads, and people laugh at me when they do when I tell them this. When I was doing ads, I ran a very simple Excel spreadsheet. And it said every day, this is how much I spent, this is how much we sold. That's the only metric I looked at. So I did not look at any client acquisition cost, LTV, all these fancy terminologies that marketers use. I literally just looked at how much I spent, how much I got. But to answer your question on the client's journey, we basically work it like this. We sell the ebook, and then whatever overlap we have that is being spent on the coaching ads. And then the coaching ads, if we can have a basically a net zero. So if ads are making either a profit or zero, we're doing really, really well. The ebook always has an upsell. We have two bump orders at the moment. So the grammar course, which is like, hey, if you're bad at grammar like I am, then I will explain grammar to you from the point of view of an idiot. I literally consider myself an idiot. I call the course an idiot's grammar guide by an idiot. It's a like it's a funny way to phrase it, but quite a few people buy that upsell. So 49 euro ebook, 19 euro ups uh bump order, and then I also have the storytelling course, which is also quite an eccentric one. And then after they come through the checkout, and this was a genius thing that I added um after chatting with a friend uh a while back, was um where he called, he said, Tim, make an auto. And I was like, Otto? Otto, who is that a name? What is an auto? He said, No, Tim, it's a one-time offer. And I was like, okay, what is that? He said, Okay, look. So somebody's already bought something from you, they're already paid you, and you already have their credit card. So just ask them for limited time only, you know, countdown time and all that fancy bit, offer them something. And that used to actually be the school community. That's how kind of how I started. I was like, hey, you've already done all this stuff. How about I give you a coaching call with me plus access to the community that otherwise costs this much for like, I don't know, 250 bucks. So they'll pay for that as well. And then we play around with how to structure that. And we ask them, Are you an entrepreneur? Because then it's like one community. If they're not, it's a different community. And that hasn't Been performing all that well, but again, both me and Nick are focused entirely on that other form, which is the coaching. And this is where the big money is made. So what we do is we send people to a landing page where they watch a video and then they fill out a relatively long form. The form collects their information. I want to know, you know, there's three things that are important for me from a client. Number one is their actual English level, which we haven't really done a good job of collecting, but it's very difficult because they'll they will they'll say, Oh, I have C2 level English. Then they come on a call, and I'm like, yeah, that's arguable. The second one that's important is their sort of cultural background, because working with somebody from Dubai who's got Lebanese roots is entirely different than somebody who's Russian or somebody who's, I don't know, living in the UK, but they're Polish. So understanding who they are, what their background is, that also addresses the problem who's going to be coaching them. So in the back of my mind, I have to think of a matchmaker. Because it's not like you join my program, I give you a copy-paste coach, they're all the same. No, it's like I'll find the best person for you, depending on what their background is, what languages they speak, what culture they understand. And then last but not least, finances. This pisses some people off, but we legitimately ask them, what do you currently do? Which business niche are you in? Are you an entrepreneur? How much money are you making? Because I need to understand also from the perspective of, hey, if you're in sales and you're making 5k right now, if I give you better English, you might be making 10, 15k. So it's important for you to know where that person is. And what's also worked for us quite well, I think it's a price drop feature. So there's a condition in the form which essentially says if they choose to invest, we ask them, like, how much money would you be willing to invest into this? Like realistically, right now, today, you know, is it like all the money in the world? I don't care, I just need my problem fixed, or is it like, ooh, you know, maybe a little small investment, little deposit, thousand euros? I'm like, okay, because for a thousand euros, I can't give you a full-fledged coaching, like, this isn't financially not going to work. So then we sort of prize drop and we say, look, our lowest entry point that we can kind of get you started off would be like, let's say two and a half K. Is that something you can work with? Because if they say no to that, then it's like, I'm not getting on a call with you, and my clothes is not getting on a call with you. Then we just send them to that community and we're like, look, join something you can buy, but you're not qualified. Because that was one of the biggest problems, is I used to take all the calls myself. So you can imagine I'm doing sales calls, I'm doing coaching calls, I'm building the products, I'm doing the marketing, I'm recording the content, I'm editing some of the basic content. Like it, it my brain was all over the place. And even now we have so much influx of these applications that you have to filter out the bad ones. Not to mention the no-shows, the ones that are just not serious about it. Um, then you'll get the my favorite one is when you have a potential closer that wants to work for your company. So they apply through your form, which is a really bad way to do it, is you're not going to get to talk to me, you're gonna get to talk to the closer. The closer is not gonna get you into the company, so you've used the wrong approach to get the job. But I digress. For me, that form then takes them through a call, whether it's with me or with one of my closers. And then if we can close them on a call, the coaching progress is actually pretty, pretty simple, but we have a couple of problems that we still have to fix. First, you get a 30-minute free consultation with that coach, and obviously, after you've paid something, so like we're like, please give me some deposit. I need some kind of financial investment before I spend the time of my coach to chat with you. And then the coach does a bit of a diagnostics on the call. You're like, oh, this is a good vibe, happy to move forward, reflect the full payment or the installment or whatever it is, and we get you started. If not, I'm always like, hey, if it doesn't work for you, we'll find you a different coach and a different coach and a different coach, or you'll get your money back. So it's also about filtering out the non-serious leads. Sometimes, unfortunately, whatever business you're in, you'll find leads who, yeah, I don't know what it is. Maybe it's they want the problem to be solved on their behalf. They feel like because I've paid, now somehow my English will magically get better. It won't if you're not consistent with joining the calls, doing the homework. You know, don't join on your phone when you're out at the gym or driving, that's really disrespectful. And then you tell them it's disrespectful, and they're like, oh, you're wasting my time. And I'm like, okay, yeah, this is not gonna work. The door is over there. Bye-bye. So the biggest issue really is qualifying

Low-Ticket Chaos And High-Ticket Ease

SPEAKER_01 25:51

leads. And again, what I've noticed to go back to the point I made before, the lower quality of um paying, the more complications you tend to get. And this hurt me because I used to, I used to be a you know, regular employee. I used to look at these uh hustlers and hormosis and Gary Vaynerchuk's and all these, you know, imangadzis or whoever is. I thought, man, these guys are such dickheads, they're making so much money and they're talking down on all you know, the average person. I want to help the average person. And then you realize that the average person is a moron. No offense, but the average person has no idea. I'll tell you a stuff I'll tell you a story. This is a true story. A woman once messaged me on Instagram. This was three and a half years ago. I was selling the ebook for five euros. Okay. So, ebook called 12 Day English Masterclass, five euros. She sends me an Instagram message. She's like, Yes, I was looking at this. I'm not sure if, you know, what I want to know is because it's 12 days. Does that mean that I get like a one-on-one call with you every day for 12 days? And I'm like, Yeah, absolutely. I come to your home, I give you massage as well, you know, I'm your private chauffeur. Like, how do you get to that? Like, how does that even come across your mind? And you realize as you work with with sort of low-paying clients that they're just causing you so much problems. Oh, I'm not happy with this, I'm not sure how this works. I sell my ebook in Google Drive. And I did this deliberately because I thought if I have a platform, if it needs a login, I'm gonna get five emails a day from someone like, oh, I forgot the email could end the password and it doesn't work. And like it's a link to Google Drive. You can't possibly screw it up. You can. Somehow you can. Some people just they don't know how to open Google Drive and just download the file. And so, like Cromosi said, and everybody else has said, you know, solve rich people's problem, they pay better, but also they complicate less. It just, it's like, I can do it for 500. It's like, oh yeah, but yeah, but I got it. With the moon is not in the right position. It's like, I want 5,000. Yeah, no problem. Here's my credit card. I remember my first high-ticket client where I was like, I raised the price. I went from like 4,800 euros to 7.5k. And I was like, there's no way you're saying yes. He's like, okay, I'll pay now, we get started in in February. I'm just there, like, uh, where's the objection? Where's the like uh what the f what's going on? And you realize how much easier it is to do business with them. And it has nothing to do with the money, it has all to do with how they approach it. And so it's again, I go I'll go back to fitness. Because if I was a fitness coach, if I was in that business, I'd rather work with people that pay a lot of money and then you put your whole attention to them as opposed to a gym subscription for like 30 bucks. Because they they show up when? They show up for the first week of January, and that's it. Rest of the year, empty. They might come in to take a free shower. That's about the best they'll do.

SPEAKER_00 28:22

If if so.

Email Deliverability And Retargeting

SPEAKER_00 28:25

What about your email list? Are you doing something with it? Not really.

SPEAKER_01 28:29

Um truth be told, I made a colossal error the year before last. It was Black Friday, and I had completely forgotten about Black Friday, and I I had no idea what is, you know, a marketing calendar, or this idea that you should prepare for Black Friday like at least a month before Black Friday comes. Obviously, what I did is what every young entrepreneur does, you wait until it's Black Friday, and they're like, oh, now I'm gonna do something. So I start spamming them with emails. And I was sending my emails to everyone, and I completely screwed up my deliverability. I think we're talking like 5% operator or no, 5%, 5% deliver. I don't know, whatever it was, it was so bad that I spend the next year slowly fixing the deliverability. Like I went through and I purposefully started to like delete people that were not active on the list, filtering through them. And for someone who enjoys writing, I don't like writing emails. And the reason is I don't have the time to do it. So then I have two options. Either I don't send the email or I have to send it with AI, or I have to have somebody else write it for me, which I don't feel too comfortable with. And so what's happened for even the last couple of months, I feel like I didn't write any email. So the sequence ended, that was it. My emails are mostly just hey, here's a link to the blog. Actually, the the mail is a short version of the blog, and the blog is a short version of the YouTube video. That's kind of how we wanted to structure it. Um yeah, I'm not a big fan of emails. Um, I'll change my mind in the future, probably because somebody else will take care of them. But the truth is, I've encountered maybe one or two, one or two online businesses where I enjoyed reading. And I know it's wrong because I'm what am I doing? I'm saying I don't enjoy reading emails. I would not convert from email, therefore nobody would convert from email, which is not true. So obviously it works. There are conversions that we can do, but this is the beauty behind having an operations manager who takes care of that. So in the future, I'm sure we'll have a webinar release or something, and I just want him to tell me, Tim, does this look okay before I send it? I'm like, all good. Because it just doesn't, I don't know, I don't derive pleasure anymore. Because it's no longer this personal conversation that you're having with the person. And because I'm not running a blog, I'm running a business. So again, how much time should I be developed devoting to writing a blog realistically? Very little. I feel like the actual outcome is is minute. But for some people, very, very important. And it's nice to have some retargeting, definitely abandoned cart stuff. That stuff has worked quite well. So as soon as somebody goes into the checkout, it's a two-form checkout. So the first step is to give you the information, then they see the price, and they're like, oh no, I gotta think about it. It's like, hey man, how's your English going? You know, two days later. English is still shit? Yeah, you might want to buy the product, you know. So you you slowly uh motivate them like that. And then obviously you need proper tracking to know which one worked, why it worked, how it worked. So the problem is you keep getting a lot of Indians that will be DMing you. Like, I won't fix your email sequence. I'm like, fine. I I let one guy once do the sequence. It was horrible. It was really bad. So now I was like, you know what? It's fine. I don't need your help.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

Yeah, thank you, but no thank you. And yeah, yeah, it's uh it's a problem most great uh course creators have. It's always the same kind of people. Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

Uh they I I get it, they need to also make a living. But this one guy actually, I kind of liked him. He was really good when he was writing stuff. And then we hopped onto a call and it was like potato camera, and most important, I couldn't hear anything. Because the problem with again, Indian speakers, I'm in this business. I don't know what the hell you're saying. Like, you say five sentences, I understand three words. I have the same issue with my accountants sometimes, because also they're Indian. So I'm like, you're gonna need to get a translator. Like, because I don't I don't know what you're telling me. So it's an issue and they should work on their accent. Again, the problem is that guy writing the email, part of me wants to help him. Part of me wants to go, like, come here, son, sit down. Let me tell you a few things. But I don't have the time to do it. And because of their level of English and and cultural difference, you'll spend an eternity fixing some Indian guy's English, and you'll get paid what, 50 rupees or whatever they've got. They cannot afford that price range. So unfortunately, if you go to serve their market, you have to serve massive. I mean, you have to go like really aggressive, very, very cheap. And it doesn't work. For a while, I even sold the ebook in India, and then it was really bad. Because immediately you start getting spammed. Suddenly, my email was overwhelmed by like fake applications of half of Bangladesh. And as soon as we raise the price from like five euros to 15, I immediately got a comment on Instagram like, oh, this is too much. We cannot afford this. And I get it. I get it. For them, that's that might be a lot of money. That might be their whole, you know, weekly salary or whatever. But I still have a business to run. I still have to pay the cost of the advertising, bear the cost of the taxes, the operations. It's a tough business to be in. Because again, you want to help the everyday person. But if their buying power is not there, or if they're a horrible customer to start with, or if they're causing you more complications than not, because it's it's we have an expression in, I think it's also expression in English, but like you give them a finger, they'll take it whole hand. And I've seen that especially in Slovenia. Slovenian clients are a lot like this. They just feel like you'll drop everything and help them, you know. Dear Philip. And I already know what I'm because Philip, you know, Flip, Philip, same thing. Like I'm advertising on maybe they come from Facebook, because it's not on Facebook, I advertised through the Flip English course name. On Instagram, I advertise through my name, my personal name. But I'm always shocked, like, so you're such a big fan, but you don't know what my name actually is. So dear Philip, blah, blah, blah. And then of course the email is in Slovenian language, which is always a great way to practice English. You know, the best way to practice English is to always be writing in your native language. To have your phone in your native language, to have your Google in your native language. I'm like, oh my God. Yes, I have this thing. It would be delightful to go on a call with you. You know, you take some time for me. I'm like, yes, you and half the world would like my time. Um, like, I can't, even if I wanted to, and I don't want to, because we'd be losing time. So it's setting realistic expectations. And I feel like the longer you're in the business, the more you want to remove yourself from the business, which sounds wrong, but essentially, I don't even want to reply to that email. I would rather have my DM setter get to her and say, Hi, I see that you're trying to contact Philip, by the way. His name is actually Tim. Tim is very busy right now. If you want, you can apply for the coaching here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because you give one of them the opportunity, then all of them are going to expect that opportunity. And that's just not how business works.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

Exactly.

Sell Earlier And Build By Iteration

SPEAKER_00 34:46

Um, loving what you know so far. Um, if you could go back and tell the kids uh with a headset on one thing, what would it be as an advice?

SPEAKER_01 34:57

Sell. I am so angry with myself because when I was doing that gaming channel, I had seasons. Um, there was a season of they called me the ego boy, because I was very arrogant at that time. There was a season um that they called me the uh the average because I was supposedly like not above average, but I was just average. And I was like, whatever, I'll play with that. But one of the seasons I had was called the sellout. And during that season, I basically took all the sponsorships I could. Um there was this free Golden Eagles application. So I put it as the intro. And as I was talking to them, there was a Russian company. They said, we will pay you 20 euros for every video that has that thing in front of it. I was like, fine. And then I uploaded one video a day for the whole month. I was like, I'm gonna make some money. Um and thinking back of it, like 20 bucks is nothing, like nothing for like a whole YouTube video being made. But I could make a lot of them because of the style of content that I had. I even sold a little bit of merch at one time, but I was an idiot. I had my uh ad revenue turned off because I wanted to turn off my advertisement. You know why? Because I wanted the person watching my content to have a better experience. Because I thought if you come to my YouTube channel and there's no ads, you will respect me for it. You'll say, Oh my god, it was so nice watching Tim's video, you know, because he doesn't have advertisements. Well, inadvertently, what I did was I just completely cut off any revenue that I would have generated. So sell. Like make a product and sell it. Whatever it is, you'll figure it out. Maybe the first one's not gonna be good. My first product was called 30-day online English course or accent course. And when I launched it, because it you, you know, you join today, you'll get the 30th video on the 30th day. So I have 30 days to make it. And so I recorded the first week, sold it, and then after five days I got the flu. And I was like, okay, now I've got a problem. Now I've got I've got to record the rest of it. And it was horrible. It was it was a really, really bad course, but it was a start. And then you take that and you iterate it and you make the version two of it. You're like, okay, I've taken what was bad about it and I've improved it. And then you approve it again. And then you take the ebook that I made, which was a separate product, and then you join the two things together, and then you you you put the third thing, and then you and that's kind of how a product gets developed. But people just see the end product, they want to have that perfection. Nothing's ever gonna be perfect. No video, no YouTube channel, no nothing. So I just just I wish I could go back in time and sell because I had a really loyal audience, I had a lot of people that I could have provided uh content for. Um, there was a lot of rich people. Look, I was streaming on Twitch. I had the highest I think I had was about 220 subscribers. Um, and you're getting paid, they're paying five dollars to Amazon or Twitch, you would be making about half of that. So two and a half euros per for that payment. So not a lot of money, but enough for a kid who's in high school to think, ooh, maybe I could do this full-time. I had guys in that stream that would donate ridiculous amounts of money. We're talking five, 10,000 euro together. If only I knew how to monetize to those, because that's that's a cash cow. That's a guy who's got a his mum's credit card, AMX or whatever, and he's just swiping. And for him, it's pennies. For you, that's that's literal survivability. If you can find those clients and sell to them, because you'll provide a service they're gonna be really happy with, they will pay you, they'll be happy with it. You'll I mean, it's a win-win scenario, but you have to find them. So again, we get to that unfortunate debate. The low-paying guy comes to your Twitch chat and goes, Hey man, can you play this song for me? And then he keeps spamming the same the same thing on YouTube, you know? And then this guy is like, five euros, play this meme song. Five minutes later, it's like five euros, play this meme song. You're like, dude, do it one more time. I'm I'm not gonna do it. And he just keeps spamming it because it's like, okay, then here's a hundred bucks. Play it. I'm like, oh my god, I have to play it. And it's like it's some some chicken meme that he just for whatever reason, because that was funny for him. Find those people that have the money and find the solution for them. And everybody, again, to cycle back to what I said, find one thing you're good at, drill it, become the best at it, then you can monetize it. And I always imagine how good it would a world be if everybody was skilled in one particular thing, be an incredible world. But unfortunately, most of us just say, and I it hurts me when they say I'm just average. I'm just average. It's like, what do you mean you're just average? If you just if you took one thing that you're a little bit above average in, or one thing that you're average in, and you drilled 10,000 hours into that thing, I was average at baking bread. And then I did it a bit more. And now it's like I can make bread without even knowing what I'm doing. People, what's your what's the recipe? I don't have a recipe. There's no method, there's no step-by-step program, just do it. But people want that. And this is again the difference between top dog and the small dog. Because the average day human being, they want the step-by-step program. They want, you know, hold my hand, take me to the gym, show me how to eat. Not what to eat, how to eat. They need like everything needs to be shown to them. That guy who's affluent and and has the right mentality, you just roughly show them the mode, like, oh, that's how I do it. Makes sense. And they just do it on their own. And you can see it because working with them is that their head works in a different frequency. And you see it. And again, I'm not judging the everyday person. I don't want this to sound like it's a rant, although I love ranting. But I've been there. I've done, I worked three years in the kitchen, I worked three years as a copywriter, sales agent, travel agent. I've had a regular job, I've I've done the business, I've done the contecration. I never talk about things I don't have experience in, but I always say the same thing. People working eight hours a day, being tired, not having the time. And then you're there as an entrepreneur. And they're like, What are you doing on the weekend? And I'm like, What is a weekend? It's a whole different ballgame.

SPEAKER_00 40:06

Whole different exactly.

Where To Start And Closing

SPEAKER_00 40:09

Uh Tim, thank you very much. This was uh really, really great conversation. Uh, where should people go to find you and get started?

SPEAKER_01 40:17

The easiest place is flip-english.com. We have a quiz you can fill out, you can fill out the form for the coaching inquiry, you can get started with the ebook. You can also DM me on Instagram, Timote Bonifer will be the place to find me. Um but I think if you've listened to this, you probably will start getting targeted by Mark Zuckerberg's advertising. So I think you'll see me around.

SPEAKER_00 40:38

Perfect. Thank you very much. Uh that's it for this episode. If you got something out of this, come find us at data drivenmarketing.co. It's where we help course creators turn an audience into the actual revenue. I'm Dominic. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you in the next one.