281: The Funnel Behind a Free Summit, Numbers and All
A free summit does not make money. The pages behind it do. Registration page, VIP pass, order bump, upsell, membership, and a downsell if they say no to the annual.
In this episode Steph walks me through the whole thing and I give her the actual numbers. What each piece is priced at, what percentage says yes at every step, what the ads cost me, and how much of the revenue goes back out to affiliates.
In This Episode
- The difference between an order bump and an upsell, and how I price each one
- The conversion rates I expect at every step of the funnel
- Why I use a dollar amount off instead of a percentage above a certain price
- The annual first, monthly as the downsell test that surprised me
- What a $37 VIP pass looks like against a $17 cost per conversion
Resources mentioned
- The B2C brand we spend the episode on: HobbyScool
- Find your weakest flywheel stage: The Creator Growth Scorecard
If you want to know which part of your own funnel is leaking before you build another offer on top of it, start with the scorecard.
Take the scorecard →Episode Transcript
00:00Hey, Destini. So glad to be here with you talking all about HobbyScool, talking about funnels, talking about money, all of it. This is going to be such a good conversation. In this episode specifically I want to talk about funnels. So can you walk me through what it looks like when somebody signs up for HobbyScool? What is the process they go through?
Really good question, and we can definitely get into some of the numbers and how all of it works. When we do our events, we have a registration page. This is a page we promote ourselves, and then all the speakers promote it, and it is the same page all the affiliates promote.
They sign up for the free registration for that event, and then on the next page we have a special offer. At the top it says something like, looking forward to seeing you at this event, we have this special offer we think you would be interested in.
01:00Basically it is lifetime access to all the workshops they are getting in that event, and we also give away some really cool speaker bonuses. That is our VIP pass. When they go to checkout, we send them to a ThriveCart checkout page. On that page they get a little more information about the event, but it is a fairly streamlined checkout page. Then we have an order bump, and from there we have some upsells.
On that checkout they put in their name and their credit card information and their email address. They purchase, and then we keep it going. We will have an upsell there. Generally that upsell is the workshops from the previous year's event, if we ran that event the previous year. If not, we typically put together a bundle related to that event, just to keep them moving along the customer journey.
02:00And then the next upsell is our Craft and Create Club membership. That is the funnel we have set up, and that is really the engine of how we make money in HobbyScool.
I want to take it back to that first checkout page, because you mentioned a couple of things some people may get confused by. A lot of people listening probably understand these, but I want to clarify the terms. The order bump on the checkout, and the upsell. Can you clarify the difference between the two, because I think a lot of people confuse them?
They do, and that is a really good point. On the checkout page, I like to keep things fairly streamlined. There is a little information about the VIP pass, what they are saying yes to. And then there is a little area that says, click here to add this to your order. What I like to include for order bumps is something that is a very easy yes.
03:00Let's say for that order bump we were giving them a digital sticker pack, or a coloring book pack, something like that. That is generally what we put in those order bumps. And it is something cheap, generally $7 or $9. In my B2B brand it might be a little more expensive, like 17 or 27, but in HobbyScool I like to keep it under $10.
So it has a little image and a blurb about it. It is not a full sales page. You want something where they think, oh yes, this is easy, I do not mind clicking to add it. And then from there it goes to the upsell. Generally I like to price my upsells a little higher. Our upsells, when we include the previous year's bundle of workshops for that event, I generally price around 27.
04:00So more expensive than the order bump. And there is a longer sales page there to give them more information about the upsell. That is how I look at the difference between order bumps and upsells.
You briefly touched on this, but the key with bumps and upsells is that they have to connect. They have to make sense together, or you are just throwing random offers together. And the whole intention of these is increasing the average order value. So do you know offhand what your average order value is for one of these events, if they get the all-access pass, the bump, and then the upsell?
I can walk people through the numbers. Let's say we have 10,000 people sign up for the event. Generally, depending on the event, we are going to see a conversion rate for the VIP pass of 6 to 8%.
05:00In general we see about a 30% uptake on the order bump. So of the people who purchase the VIP pass, 30% of them say yes to the order bump. Sometimes more, but 30% is typical of what we see. And then going down to the upsell, a slightly lower percentage. Fewer people say yes to the upsell. I do not have that number in front of me right now, but historically what you would see is around 20% for that upsell. It is generally a lower number than the order bump.
06:00The thing I like about your funnel is that you also have your membership in there, so you are not only getting one-off sales. I am assuming that membership is recurring revenue?
It is recurring revenue, and again, you are bringing up another good point. We have tested different things in that funnel. We tested having just the monthly option. We also tested having the annual there, so they can say yes to the annual, and if they do we close out the funnel. If they say no to the annual, we have tested a downsell to the monthly.
07:00That is something I have been testing the past couple of months. I would like to see a bit more history before I decide what we are going to do for some of our summits in the fall. I actually got that idea from a skill where people were giving opinions from Alex Hormozi and a couple of other big names.
I put it in there and said, here is what I would like to do, what are some different ways I could test my membership in this funnel? And all of them came back and said, start with the annual, and if they do not select that, downgrade to the monthly. And I thought, that is brilliant. I had not even thought about it. I started testing it and it is actually going well. I have been surprised.
08:00That is interesting. I briefly remember that conversation. That was a couple of months ago, before I started my membership, so I tuned out anything membership related. But that makes a lot of sense. Correct me if I am wrong, I am assuming the strategy is that we obviously want to grab as much cash as possible upfront. So you offer the annual and they are getting it at a discount.
That is the other piece I want to add. Whenever you are creating these order bumps and upsells, this is not the normal price people would pay. These are always discounted. So for the annual, for example, you would offer it at 50% off the normal price, or whatever it is. Have you noticed any discounts that work better than others? Is there a specific number, like 50% off or 70% off, that performs best in your funnels?
For the annual discount, generally I like to use a number, not a percentage. If it is something I am selling that is under $100, I will do a percentage off.
09:00If it is something over $100, I will do $20 off, or 30, or 50, whatever it is. So for the annual membership I will include a number like $50 off. Generally the research has proven that is a better way to do discounts. So look at your price point and decide whether to use a percentage. If it is $100 or below, do a percentage. If it is over, do 50 or $30 or whatever makes sense.
The thing I always go back to, and I am assuming where you are you have Kohl's locations, is Kohl's cash. People always get excited about the 30 or 40% off Kohl's cash, and that was the frame of mind I took when I would discount.
10:00If it is 40% or more, that is when I will typically use the percentage instead of a number, because there is something psychological about it. People see a big percentage off and they think it is going to be more than a dollar amount off. It is so interesting how that works.
The next piece I want to talk about is the revenue behind this. You have these events every month, but you also have your membership, Craft and Create Club. So different revenue streams. You are getting cash in from these events and this monthly recurring revenue, but can you break that down? Is there anything else we are missing?
Yes. We have the membership. We have the monthly events. We also have our Shopify store, which surprisingly brings in revenue even though I do not do a lot of marketing for it. On the Shopify store we have a lot of low-cost digital products, like our coloring books, digital stickers, planners, journals, all that type of thing.
11:00We also have bigger ticket items there. On the Shopify store I have our annual workshop pass, which is all the workshops we are doing every single month. The difference between that and the VIP passes we sell is that it does not include the speaker bonuses. It is literally just the recordings of the workshops.
We also sell lifetime access to our Craft and Create Club on the Shopify store, and that is a hot item people snap up, because it is such a great deal to get lifetime access.
12:00That is the other revenue stream we have. I do sell some of this too, like the annual workshop pass and the Craft and Create Club, in our Skool community. That is not something we promote a lot, but we do get some sales coming through there.
So essentially the goal is to get sales every day, whether or not you have an event, correct?
Yes, absolutely.
So whether you are promoting an event live for a week or two out of the month, that is where the majority of the sales come in, the VIP passes and the funnel. And outside of that, do you have any promotion plan for your Shopify store or your annual passes?
Here is our promotional calendar, and this is what I stick to. We generally do our events the third week of the month. We start promoting three weeks prior to that.
13:00What I like to do is start promoting organically. I will email our email list, and I like to do that a day or two before we release it to the speakers and affiliates, because I want to make sure everything is working properly. If something is broken, I want it to be broken on me and not on them.
So that Sunday we generally start promoting. On the Tuesday around three weeks before the event starts, we have the speakers and affiliates start promoting. We send them the information and tell them, go ahead, you have got this. So that is three weeks out of the month.
The week after the event, a few days after, we are still promoting the VIP pass for anybody who missed it. But then we generally have a challenge or something in our Skool community related to the workshop we are releasing in the Craft and Create Club.
14:00So the week after the event is generally when I am promoting the Craft and Create Club. And in there I might do some affiliate work. There are events out there we are affiliates for. People promote our events, and some of our bigger affiliates, I like to promote their events when we have the opportunity.
I might run a flash sale here and there, either to the Shopify store, or promoting the annual workshop pass. I know we did that this month. But in general, that is our promotional calendar every single month.
I love that, and I know we are going to dive into how it all works together in another episode, so we do not have to go too deep now. But one piece you mentioned was affiliates, and I know they generate a lot of leads and revenue for you. Can you break that down? Do you know offhand what the split is between leads and sales that affiliates bring in versus internally and with speakers?
15:00I actually do know the answer to this, and I have seen a change over time. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that we bring in $30,000 in revenue in HobbyScool for the month. Percentage-wise, the majority of that, around 70%, is money that is for me, and the rest of it I am paying out to affiliates.
As we have grown our audience and our email list, and because I have been doing paid advertising for our events this year, more of the revenue from that pie is being generated by us. It was something I had not really done in the past, but in late 2025 I started, and now I do it basically every single month. So more of the revenue is ours, just because of the Facebook ads and because we have grown our audience so much.
16:00That makes complete sense. And I am glad you mentioned Facebook ads, because that is one of the final pieces I wanted to touch on, which is cold traffic versus warm traffic. Even with affiliates you can technically say that is cold traffic, because although they know the affiliate, they do not know you or your brand. So do you use different landing pages for cold versus warm audiences?
For the Facebook ads, absolutely. We have a separate landing page for them. The traffic we are sending from our email list, and the traffic the speakers and affiliates send, all goes to one place.
Generally that page converts, depending on the event, around 60 to 65 or 66%. Facebook ads are always lower than that. Depending on the event, what I generally see there is around a 45 to 50% conversion rate on the landing page for cold traffic. You can definitely tell the difference between warm and cold traffic in their conversion rates.
17:00Absolutely. And the follow-up funnels, are those the same as well? Are you presenting the same offers to cold leads from Facebook?
They are getting the same offer. And it has been kind of crazy. I have been pleasantly surprised at how our Facebook ads are converting. When I set them up I optimize for conversions, so Facebook is going out and getting people who are likely to actually purchase our offer. We get a very high conversion rate on those.
18:00Actually, for the event we are doing this month, it was kind of crazy. The event we did last month did not do well. It was the first time I had ever done it, and I am never doing it again. It just was not the right fit for my audience. I should have known better. I made a mistake.
This month is doing very well. I knew immediately, as soon as I sent out that first email to our audience and saw the registrations come in and saw the ThriveCart purchases start coming in, I knew within about 24 hours that this event was going to convert.
When I saw that, I decided to start the Facebook ads a week earlier than I normally do. I did not get them up quite that early, but I got them up pretty fast, and they are converting so well. Our VIP pass for this event is $37.
19:00I went into the ads yesterday and we have a cost per conversion in there of around 17. So I am actually making a good amount of money on those ads. Plus, even for people who do not purchase the VIP pass, we are getting leads from them.
That is crazy. And that is the thing too, you have been doing this for such a long time. This brand is almost four years old?
Yes, around four years.
So at this point, for anybody listening, Destini has been doing this a long time. Not just this business. She has been doing marketing and everything for a very long time. So there is a lot of testing and a lot of tweaking. And you are right, once you have a topic that really hits, in your B2B or B2C business, you know that it hits. It is a very clear night and day difference where you think, this is the thing we need to be focusing on.
20:00I think this was a great conversation and really helpful for everybody listening. Before we wrap up, was there anything else you wanted to touch on that we did not get to? Anything important people should know about your funnel?
Everybody listening is familiar with the Creator Growth Flywheel, because I talk about it all the time. So when you look at this funnel we are talking about today against that flywheel, you have the attract stage, where people are finding out about you. My Facebook ads, that is people finding out about us.
But how they actually engage with us and get into our world and onto our email list is through that registration page. And then we have the VIP pass. So we are not only getting them into our world, we are getting a small micro-commitment from them by offering that VIP pass.
21:00Then they are in our world and they can experience our events. We continue to market to them through the nurture stage with our newsletter. We retain them, because we have these events every single month, and it is crazy, the people who come into our events attend every single month. Some buy the VIP pass every single month.
And going into the advocacy stage of the flywheel, after each event we get testimonials from them. It is not unusual for us to send out that last email for our event and get 40, 50, 60 testimonials from that one email for that one event. So this is the Creator Growth Flywheel in action.
22:00I love that. Thank you for adding that piece, because it shows the very tangible places where you are using this flywheel. And the most important thing I want to reiterate is the testing piece. You could not even get people into the flywheel without really testing and refining, which you have done an incredible job at. So thank you so much for sharing all of this with me.
Thanks so much, Steph. Thanks for all your questions too.
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