What is going on? Uploading today? I'm excited for this podcast interview. I'm excited to have you on Tommy McGill. So I want to give a little bit of background for context on Tommy. And so Tommy has been working with paid ads since 2016. He co founded a startup studio called the Gexa, focusing on launching and growing elearning brands profitably. And so the portfolio, I believe, held about eleven brands with just about 100 million in ARR pace. And then that was sold. I believe Tommy, this got acquired and now you are an operating partner at Arising Ventures, which is a holding company that buys, incubates and operates high margin technology businesses.

You also helped Scaleconsulting.com from eight to 30 million with paid ads in one year and nine months. And you've even worked with Jay Shetty with his certification school. So there's a lot of ground to cover here. You've been in the course space, paid ads studio world. So I'm really excited to dive into this conversation with you. But first I want to kick it off for you to say in your own words what your background has been throughout your career.

Totally. Yeah, appreciate it both. Blaine Ramon, this is super awesome. Yeah. Quick background about myself. Just started out as an affiliate marketer for everybody that doesn't know what that is. Essentially you find a brand that has an offer that works and you say, can I monetize that offer effectively? Will I make a little bit of money with every single? And you can choose any channel for me. Specifically, I worked at a larger agency called DMs, which ipoed, I believe two or three years ago, and we did a ton of affiliate marketing across many different industries.

Found my way into courses because affiliate marketing keeps you sharp on just whatever marketing channel you chose. And we chose paid and the course game sort of fell into my lap through connection worked@consulting.com for about two years, did PPC, then became the head of growth, which I'll talk about probably later and then found an interesting playbook in unit economics that makes sense for creator life business. And so we started as part performance marketing agency, part online publisher where we launched these elearning courses. We ended up selling the online performance marketing agency, grew it to a little bit over a million in a little over a year. Those eleven brands that will do probably north of 100 million, I just couldn't grab the numbers we'll do. I think the pace this year is something like 125. And what the big goal is is north of 175,000,000. So yeah, that's a little quick.

And then now I'm with Horizon Ventures. We buy cool software. Businesses that raised venture couldn't hit their goal and for some reason or another want to sell. So yeah, I'm here and I'm loving.

How do you, I want to take it all the way back to how you mentioned that you ended up working consulting.com through. However, you know, you and I have talked in the past, you also grew up in a really small town in Ba called Ceilings Grove. Not the most optimal for connections with people embedded in media. So how did you end up connected to such an opportunity? And the reason I asked you this question too is I want people to learn how to set themselves up to be able to connect with anyone, wherever they are. So I'm curious on that side of your story.

Yeah, of course. So for everybody that doesn't know, which means everybody, Sealants Grove is in the middle of central Pennsylvania. It's like amish country, like literal horse and buggies. Town I grew up in was like 5000 people. It was crazy. It was like the neighboring town. Weirdly enough, there were about three of my friends who were in high school with me. They were seniors when I was a freshman, three of those people in that class ended up doing Internet marketing, for lack of a better word, a digital type of business.

And so I just kept in touch with them. They were like legit like my brothers in high school. And they were like, hey listen, I'm buying paid media and we're spending about two to $3 million a year on this, this and this. Does that sound exciting? And me just knowing the type of person that they were, I optimized towards will I learn a lot from this person and will whatever I do end up being able to fit in my narrative of what I want to do in my life? So yeah, networking was just keeping close to people, always being friendly, always just going out of your way and just trying to provide some type of value, even if you have none to give. I'm sure there's something you could pick up.

Yeah, for mean. Then always lean in with value, which I'm sure you did, and just remain a trustworthy person all the way up until that point. So, Tommy, a lot of the people that might listen to this podcast, just from the cast I did, customer base are courses, coaches, instructors. And so one of the ways to grow a course very rapidly is paid ads. Just the nature of the unit. Economics work really well, but this can also be really expensive to do if you do it wrong, if your offer isn't right, et cetera. What advice do you have for anyone who is thinking, I might want to try paid ads for my course?

Yeah, of course. So I like to split it up into like three different categories. Well, there are two different types of creators fundamentally, at least in my mind the way I think about it. There's the lunch money crowd and there's the I want to grow business crowd. So one's like, this is my full time thing. Another person is, hey, I'm doing other cool things, but I want to monetize what I'm learning. I'm going to focus more so on the full time creator when I'm talking about this, because it's been my experience more so than anything. And so when I'm looking at full time creators, there are sort of three products inside every single portfolio.

There's like the low ticket product, which is everything underneath. Like $197, which we found was like a consideration window from a click was like less than four or five days on average. There's what's called mid ticket, which is like that 197 to about 2000 ish dollars, where the click to purchase averages a little bit. I think it's seven days is what we found for the average. And then for high ticket, which is like anything 2000 plus, we see consideration windows of like 14 days on average. And so you just have to pick whatever products fit inside of your portfolio. Usually all three can linearly get somebody from what they want to their desired state and then just have to think about it from can I operate at maybe a 50% roas initially for like a low ticket thing? And can this feed into my other thing? Because every single goal within that product portfolio, or every single product within that product portfolio has a goal. And so just teeing it up nicely and knowing the expectation, I think is the first thing in order to actually formulate a good strategy that works out on paper.

Yeah, right. So that's the number side of things and that's just the price element of it. There's so many more variables. And I remember one time we were talking and you mentioned out of hundreds of courses that we've tried to scale, I think you mentioned only four to eight have really gotten really big scale. And so what are the dynamics of a good offer that make it allowed to scale? Not because it works in the beginning means that it has the power to scale. Is that right?

Yes, exactly. I call them the false starts with the stuff that maybe a creator has an audience. And so of course when they launch, it's going to be like, oh, great, we're seeing whatever relative dollar amount compared to the. So if they have 5000 followers, maybe it's like a 10,000, $20,000 launch that just scales up as you have more. But what we found to be particularly good is sort of the hormosi model to a certain extent. But it's like, is my offer almost too good to be true? And so as an example, there's one of the brands in our portfolio talks about business credit and helping business owners acquire credit at a 0% interest rate for twelve months. We launched that, I believe it was like three years ago, and it sort of was mind boggling. The main thing that we tried to instill and people hopping on the phones with us was like, hey, listen, this is actually a thing.

You can pay $5,000, and more than likely, if your business has been around and hit this revenue mark, you can get up to 75 grand in 0% interest business credit for twelve months. And so that's an example of like, wow, that sounds way too crazy to be true, right? Or it's like you have a number of different offers like that, but it's like, is it too good to be true? Is usually good, because then all you have to do from there is tell people the actual story, and the story and the narrative will help them understand that, yes, this is a real thing. And those types of products scale very fast, which is really nice. But also, I think they're more evergreen and built to last than some of the other types of offers.

Can you show us the nuts and bolts of how you test an offer? Like, how do you know you gave it your best? How are you looking at creative? How many types of ads do you need to try? How many campaigns do you create? How do you know? Okay, I know this offer just isn't set up and we've tried everything we could.

Yeah. Oh, man, that's tough. So what I would say is there's definitely a scientific way. The way I would break it down would be, we think about it from like, hey, let's dedicate, let's allocate some number in cash to this project. So right from the get go, we have, here's how much we're going to invest in it initially. Here's what we think the net loss is going to be within the first one month, two month, three months. We just put it inside of a spreadsheet, make sure that the numbers look around right from there. When we create the offer, there are as many as like three to five people just sitting around.

We'll probably have a meeting for like, 2 hours or so, and we'll talk about a lot of different offers we see in the market. Yeah, there's a really tactical way of how to do that, which not many people know. I'll just talk about it here. I think it's like this alone. I think this alone will provide a lot of value if you go to a tool called similar web and you just put in the website webinar jam, and webinar jam, for everybody who doesn't know it hosts a ton of webinars. And so if you put that into similar web and you look at the referring traffic, you can see effectively what are the best performing webinars right now, or over the past three months. So you can literally see and just go through their funnel one by one and be like, okay, accounting is hot. Maybe it's like starting a home service business is hot, but you can see exactly how they position their offer and frame it from end to end, which is amazing.

So we would do that. We'd go through other funnels, we'd pick out things we like, and then we had this thing called, like, an antifragile statement, where it's like, this brand that we create is the only brand in the world that can do this like this. And that statement should be like a ten or 20 year statement where no competitor can come in and immediately say, hey, listen, this is my USP now. This is what I'm selling as an example. It'd be like if we launched a brand in creative financing and real estate. Well, maybe our antifragal statement is we're the only creative financing real estate community that can connect 10,000 people immediately to get their first deal within 30 days. Wow, that's like, pretty incredible that you can do that. And a community only can get so large of the people in the community need to be that high value in order for that statement to be true.

And when it rings true, the great thing is, then there is a quote unquote flywheel of people talk about how easy it was and how engaging the communities and everything like that. And then we typically try about five to 15 ads initially, which is pretty solid. We pick, like, four or five themes, so each ad will be its own theme. And we just have frameworks that we've used time and time again in order to test those things. But again, you just start backwards, where if this one thing is true, then we are so uniquely positioned where everything else underneath it, if we can just show people strategically that our unique value proposition or antifragal statement works so well, then all we need to do is convince them that this is actually a thing. And you can do that so many different ways, but then it's a matter of them believing it. And then when they do, then they purchase, which is great. And so definitely in online courses, number one thing is credibility and trust.

Those are the two things that you need to get right whenever you do sell a course, just because there are grifters out there, or whatever you want to call them. And so, yeah, those two things, if you have those two things, they're already positioned in the top 10%.

So what are some of the best. Sorry, Blaine, if you want to go ahead. I just wanted to ask, what are some of the best ways, in terms of advice for content creators to establish that trust and credibility? Is it playing the long game? If there's any other ways for me to do that before I just go and lose $10,000? Testing this out, because in first place, I didn't have that trust and credibility.

Yeah, I think so. I would tell anybody who wants to do the course game or have that as a piece of revenue, they should set aside at least an hour per week. But really, I say, like four to 5 hours per week. So an hour per workday, so to speak, creating content for six months straight and do that every single day, and depending on your follower size, maybe that looks like Amas, maybe that looks like creating a Facebook group and just going in there and just talking about what you're got. I started in paid media. Maybe that'd be me coming in and speaking about paid media with a closed group. And that group, if you have enough information, is going to want to tell other people about it, because there's some social climbing that can be done because you're like the first person to discover this hot thing. So I would say do that.

That's the slow way to grow. But if you know your content is growing effectively and people maybe it's a Twitter follower list or a LinkedIn top voices list. When you start having that, I think there's enough content market fit where what you're talking about, you definitively have an audience. You definitively resonate with whatever niche audience you have and you understand them enough where you can start thinking about, I want to create a product because one and two are already done. So now it's just to step three. And how can I package that effectively? Yeah.

So, Tommy, would you say that creating content is in line with creating the course itself? Because you're able to identify the content market fit, you're able to flush out different concepts and it's almost like a raw testing ground for where people are going to want to buy your offer. Is that kind of how you think about things for people who are creating courses, they should be creating content as well to grow their offer and test their offers?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think of creating the content as sort of like almost interviewing customers. Like YC tells you, hey, go talk to your customers or go talk to people about whatever product concept you have. Very similarly with content, do you want to know that what you're doing is on point? And again, it resonates with people and engages them so that they do follow. And then as you create this course over time, you already know what the biggest pain points are and you can find other ways to structure curriculum. If that's the biggest problem, is structuring the curriculum correctly, then you're in a really good place. And then as this course starts, keep on going with the organic content because that's what got you the followers, that probably what got you the initial sales as well. And so continue that and it will snowball over time.

Ramon, it's kind of like how one of the things we always hear for people who are launching physical products brands is create organic content. And then the organic content that performs really well on Instagram reels or something, you can use that and turn that into your paid content. It's like almost the same thing for a course instructor, where you're testing the concepts on organic social, you're seeing what sticks and what resonates and then you're turning those into the value props and the curriculums and the different parts that you're covering in the course. So I really like that framework of thinking about things. Ramon, I think you were going to say something.

Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, it's almost along those lines. Know there's two ways of selling an offer. A, you create the offer, or b, these offers might already exist out there and you can just tap in and sell them. And I think one of the most interesting things of your career, Tommy, is like, you're one of like top affiliates. So can you share more about that?

Think.

You know, I've seen pictures of you being invited into Google and all this stuff. So Shopify, top ranked affiliate. So you've done both where you're, you know, I like creating offers, but I also know a good offer when I see one and I know how to scale it.

Yeah, exactly. I think that's important, knowing a good offer when you see it. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. That's like one of the highest forms of compliments in the world. Yeah. So for Shopify, yeah, the thing is, for courses, it's always trust and price. Trust, price and credibility are usually the top three things that hold people back in terms of objections for buying equips for a SaaS, maybe price is one.

Like if it's like enterprise Shopify, where you're paying like five grand, ten grand a month for sure. But I think, again, they don't have the problem of, is this too good to be true? Type of thing? And so when you don't have that element, it's a lot easier to sort of use what you've learned while you're running through paid media. And so, yeah, we've been able to grow. We started last year and it's with a couple of previous clients from my performance marketing agency and then two people who work with me. But yeah, we've been able to grow from $0 in ad spend to over a million a month in ad spend. And Shopify did confirm that we were the number one affiliate in the world for them, which is a really cool thing to hear. And it's all through sort of the guise of a course funnel that turns into a Shopify funnel, which is really interesting. I think.

I never really thought about things through that lens of like, oh, cool courses to Shopify. Great. It's a good mix. But when I look back in my time@consulting.com and working with other course creators, oftentimes you would see this weird line item as affiliate revenue and you would think traditional affiliate stuff. But those creators would get five, six, sometimes seven figure payouts monthly from being an affiliate because they would plug clickfunnels in their course. And if you have 20,000 people sign up for clickfunnels, that's a recurring payment in your bank account, which is absolutely wild. But, yeah, so that's, that, that reminds.

Me that is the exact playbook that Alex Becker ran with Hiros, right?

Yes, exactly. So there's a lot of that in there where it's like you build your own ecosystem. I worked as a GM for an online course studio that wasn't a Dexa, it was called growth screen. And the whole thesis was like this course creator had about 5000 buyers and she would go buy projects off of indie hackers or product hunt and then she'd bring them to the community and she would grow their MRR super fast. And then she had the optionality of like, do I flip this? Because growth trajectory looks amazing. And now MRR turned from maybe five grand a month to 2030, 40 grand a month. And you just created all of that enterprise value really quickly. So it's a really interesting thing.

And I think course creators or content creators in general are very uniquely positioned.

To do something like, yeah, and we're starting to see more of this with sort of like, as AI and SaaS progresses, the barriers to creating software gets lower and lower. And now you're starting to see, I think, what is this guy? Amen. God, he's starting to make SaaS products and you're starting to see content creators make more and more SaaS products. But I want to take a step back to how you scaled. I remember that era of consulting, that common samovins. If it wasn't Ty Lopez in an ad, it was him. And so how did you scale that from 8 million to 30 million? What did that look like? What did the team look like?

It was an absolute team effort and I definitively did help. Sam Albins, I still say to people, is like the best copywriter I think I've come across. But now he's a SaaS founder, funnily enough. But yeah, so what that was, is at a really high level. We did something where it's like we had consulting.com. Sam bought that domain, which in and of itself is like, wow. Consulting.com has an air to it spent very much into the mid six figures for a domain like that, which is crazy, but that had some gravitas behind it and it helped us rank for SEO, which is cool. But he took something very seriously that most people take as a joke.

Courses oftentimes are an afterthought. He took it very seriously. He had it dialed in way of like, here's what the product suite looks like. And at the end of every single product, naturally, if somebody had success, they go to the next product. Success to the next product. And so that was amazing. He also did things that were sort of like, atypical. He took like a month and a half to write a webinar.

He locked himself in his condo in New York City for, I think, four to five months while creating consulting Accelerator 2.0. He wouldn't talk to absolutely anyone, which is hilarious. Sometimes even his team, very oftentimes not his team, which is funny. And then from the paid ad side, it was a combination of the offer worked so well because Sam spent, I mean, two years doing it and works legitimately, 18 hours, days per day, where he would just work until he literally could not see a screen. And then he would go to sleep, wake back up, and it was just he and two other people. So he knew what that business got to just by three people. And so he invested in consulting.com. The marketing team was three people, which was really cool.

It was really small. And the things that really moved the needle forward for us was for specifically YouTube. It was like, we called it Operation Octopus, which is like people, a general person who likes business might like Warren Buffett, they might like Carl Icon, they might like Jeff Bezos, depending on what function you're in. So maybe if it's finance, you're going towards Carl icon, if you're more general management business, Jeff Bezos. And so what we thought is people aligned with those people. We saw that content going viral a lot. So for every single hook that we started with, with an ad, we made sure to mention a fact about those people and those ads. When we did that, I think YouTube went from like $20,000 in spent per month to $650,000 in spent per month.

And so we just found the right theme. And then we found, through testing different frameworks, the right sort of punches that go from hook to body, from body to how do you spin that in the consulting accelerator? From that, how do you get people to think about a webinar where it's like sitting there for an hour, 45 minutes to here's the call to action? And so that was really cool. And so at some point, I think for d to C brands, there's inflection points with seeding influencers and things like that. But for online info, I think you spend enough where people just see you. And we spent north of, I think it was $12 million in a year with consulting.com. So people just saw us enough and sawconsulting.com. And that's sort of how we became a brand man.

That's an amazing story. And it's funny how you were talking about hooks and everything back then. People are thinking they're coming up with hooks now with TikTok and all this, and you're like, nah, we did that way back in 2016. And so that's a whole nother conversation of how interesting it is that organic content is almost a new form, too, where if you nail this hook, body, et cetera angle, you might be able to create a course business without even paid ads and partnering with the right creators, et cetera. I know you have a lot of experience there as well, but before we go into a lightning round of questions, you're not a one hit wonder, because you helped Jay Shetty make under a month. How did that come about?

Yeah, it was through an introduction. It was really cool. Yeah. So that was through a performance marketing agency. And we worked with a couple brand names, like Jay Shetty. There was, like, Dean Grazioc. If people are in courses, that's a relatively big name. Russell Brunson, like, all those subsidy people, which is really cool.

But, yeah. So we got an intro we made for agency pitches. It's all about just, like, how can you connect with a person? What do you offer that no other agency can? And, like, as an agency with four dudes just sitting around in Boulder, Colorado, it was really tough to figure that out. But when we did and they said yes, it was great. And I think the main takeaway from the Jay Shetty launch is when you have an audience, ads become like, probably it's just so easy. The effort that you put in, when somebody has an audience where you can start out with maybe tapping into your warm audience with ads, get some sort of, like, content market fit for the paid side makes it so much easier to save so much money. Where then you can play in the cold category. Since you have a follower, since you have some students already in, then that helps essentially and effectively scale paid for you to a certain extent.

So it was honestly one of the easiest things that we've ever done.

Sweet.

Yeah.

Blaine, you want to take it away for the lightning round?

Yeah, let's do it. All right, Tommy, so I have a couple questions for you for the lightning round. So let's hit them. So who is a creator course instructor that you admire the most and why?

Yeah, so I think it's Danielle Leslie. People may not know her. She's a friend of mine. We worked when we had an agency. She's so incredibly talented in so many facets. She went to Berkeley. She's incredibly smart. She had a beautiful business which grew from zero to, I think it was like over 6 million at one point.

Worked with a really lean group and lived her life and made that the focus rather than the business, which was really interesting. So, yeah, I think just being principled like that made me respect her a lot, and she has really interesting things to say.

Love it. What was the first piece of content or campaign you worked on that really popped and just tell us about it.

Yeah, so it was the Jeff Bezos ad for Sam ovens that literally transformed the YouTube ad. So the ad just starts out talking about, like, $1,186,000 a day or dollars per hour per day. That's how much Jeff Bezos makes. And that hook literally took everything and just put sort of fire on everything that we were doing, and it was amazing. So that piece of content, we are reading the everything store by Brad Stone at the time. So I think that's where sort of the inspiration was from. And so we just took that, and that piece of content had made the business a lot of money.

I love it. If you had no followers and you were creating a course and looking to grow, where would you be creating content? Would you be on LinkedIn? On Twitter x on TikTok, where would you go?

Yeah, probably twitter. I like Twitter the most. They have the most thought leaders. So if it's like, can one customer turn into a hundred type of thing, I'd go to Twitter. LinkedIn, it seems like, has a lot more reach, from what I've heard. I haven't dabbled there. I do dabble in Twitter quite a bit, and reach is pretty limited there nowadays, which sort of stinks. But it'd probably still go Twitter and maybe TikTok.

I've had a couple of friends go from zero to, like, 30,000 followers in three months, which is a little weird.

It is. And then next one is, who's an upcoming creator course instructor that you've got your eyes on that you think is really going to make it. And why do you think that?

Yeah, so I wrote two threads on them. So I think of creators as just like, creators can also be like operators of d to c companies. There are two kids who are selling sunflower seeds on TikTok Live and have TikTok organic content as well. That's just blowing up right now. I wrote a really long thread about their business. They are the smartest kid. I'm 30 years old, but they're kids to me. Like, they're probably like 23, 24.

But the way they pair their product with TikTok and the simple question that they ask you can just go to their social. I want to just pull this up really quickly. I think it's called, like, smack and sunflower seeds. But it's such an incredible thing that I think everybody can study and I'm still learning from them, so I think they're going to blow up. But it's also, they're a different type of content creator than probably what you thought I was going to say.

I love that. And last one here is, what's one thing you're focused on nailing for your 2024 content strategy?

Yeah, I think it is being present and writing just really interesting pieces. I think right now, what we're seeing along, just like social in general, is like, fundamentally every single platform, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, they incentivize organic because they need to monetize. And the way they monetize is through paid ads. And there is a study know, it used to be every five posts organically. Then comes a Facebook ad, then slowly four, then three, so on and so forth. And Facebook tries to find inventory based off of all of their content, which is interesting. So, yeah, it's tough. What was the original question, like, the.

One thing that you're focused on in your content strategy for 2024?

I'm thinking that creating long form content where there's a lot of fast fashion content. It seems like nowadays, if you go to TikTok, everybody talks about the same case study about Jeff Bezos. I'm thinking writing something nuanced, differentiated, based off of your perspective and your experience, I think will create a stronger brand. But stronger doesn't mean more followers. I think you're more well known to good people.

No? 100%. And as we wrap up here, Tommy, where can our audience connect with you and learn more? Why don't you shout out your LinkedIn? And.

Yeah, of course. So it's at Tommy underscore McGill. M A as in Apple. G-I-L-L. Lowell. I tell every single barista that because everybody throws McGill on, but that's it on Twitter. Come find me. I have a background of the Aspen mountains, so that's me.

Just click on my profile. Give me a follow if you want. Tell me anything that you want to learn in terms of the content creator or course creator business. Happy to open up and talk to pretty much anyone, hopefully in a group manner. And, yeah, if you guys facilitate that, happy to come on and do an AMA or something like that. Awesome.

Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. We had a great time.

Thank you, Towrid.