Tom: We added a couple of hundred thousand dollars in cost.
Mike: Oh, yeah. Let me tell you something. The 7 Figure Code was all about branding. At the end of the day at one point $5,000,000 in sales, we probably netted, thank goodness for the upsells, because that’s where a lot of our profit came in. We probably netted about $425,000 out of the entire campaign where we were hoping for somewhere around $700,000 to $800,000. But it’s a learning experience.
Tom: Time crunch kicked in there and we even contemplated it because we had already prepped our affiliates saying the price point and things like that, just thinking it was a DVD course. And then when we added the transcripts and the additional shipping cost, we knew there would be a bump, but we didn’t anticipate that much. We factored in something that was about half of what it ended up being.
Mike: Yeah, and we kept blaming the fulfillment company because they were like, “Are you kidding?” We were like, “We understand. Don’t worry about the cost right now,” and they were like, “We have no idea what this is going to cost you. We’ve got to get off the phone now, Mike, if you want this thing ready.”
So like we made it difficult for them and then finally when they came back with the price…
Tom: It was double our anticipated price.
Mike: Yeah! Because we didn’t realize how expensive paper is.
Tom: Yeah, and to ship that heavy of a product.
Mike: And it increased our shipping costs.
Tom: We did strategize on it. In retrospect, if we had sold it at $777, the 7 Figure Code, we probably would have sold maybe 5% less. Maybe the same.
Mike: Yeah. That price is too low. The correct price is what it is now, $797 and we should have launched with the 7s at $777 and we probably would have sold maybe 2,200 units instead of 2,500.
The difference is our profit percentage doesn’t go up. It’s all profit. Anytime we would have increased the price from there, it would have been all profit at that point. It’s not that our expenses would have continued to go up. If we raise the price to $2,000, our expenses don’t go up. It’s a fixed expense and we left our fixed expenses too close to our selling price.
Tom: On the contrary, that took $200,000 right out of our pocket with that additional choice. But it was a choice and we contemplated it in the initial launch, we really wanted to give back to the marketplace. And we could have come out with a price point of $1,497 or $997, but we really wanted to establish a brand of value so that we could get a mass amount of purchasers.
So anytime we put a product out, they would know that we put out quality products. So that was the real purpose and we also had a back end strategy that we put in place which probably could be the next mistake. I mean we thought it out as far as the back end.
Mike: This is one of the reasons that I quit speaking, Jeff, between you and me is because it’s hard to run a business. What looks good on the outside, we know ourselves that we couldn’t properly set up back end strategies. We had an upsell. An upsell is a little bit different than a back end strategy where our leads maybe go to a call center.
We could have done that, but we didn’t like what the call center had to offer. But given more time we could have done a lot of this stuff ourselves. The important thing to remember is this. And this is a great expression. I love this expression.
“The life of your business is not a marathon. It’s a series of sprints.” So that was one successful sprint. But we’re going to have another sprint and another sprint and another sprint and another sprint. And at the end of the day we’ve got a lot of good things going on.
We’re just so happy that the 7 Figure Code just helped strengthen our brand. Now we have a product that we can create front ends for. We can create value. We can create offers at events or coaching programs or whatever the case is.
If you were ever to ask, “Would you do it again?” The answer would have been, “Oh, absolutely, yes. We would have just done it a little bit better.” But man it was a fun ride.
Tom: With the video streaming, that’s not a big problem. When it launched at midnight…
But we had a lot of people there. The anticipation had grown tremendously, so when you have that many videos on the sales page, we thought we’d be smart and say, “Hey, you know what? Let’s just use Google video.” I mean, whose going to crash Google video?” But what we didn’t know is how the code would really pause and really take a long time.