1000x Leads Case Study

by Matthew Larsen

Last edited 4 months ago

About This
  • About 60 minutes (I won't be stopping or answering questions during)
  • 15 minutes for questions if there are any
  • This will be recorded and sent to you after if you have to leave
  • I will sent you this document after too.
Who Am I?
My name is Matthew Larsen.
I currently live in Canada.
In the past 8 years, I have three agency exits, with two of them being multi-seven figures in cash, and the other one being over 10 million in cash.
The first two I was a minority/junior partner, but I owned 100% of the most previous one that sold for over 10 million in cash.
I have learned a lot since then.
All I really do in life is make an agency, sell it, wait for the non-compete to expire and do it all over again.
I am very confident that I could make any type of agency work based on what I am going to show you over the next 45-ish minutes.
The Result of This Case Study
This case study will show you how I went from $0 - $900k in monthly recurring revenue in just under 12 months.
I did so with a landing page and CRO agency that served eCommerce stores, mostly on Shopify.
That 900k is just MRR.
There was quite a bit of one-time revenue that doesn't count as MRR.
Like I said, I owned 100% of it, and ran it at over 50% profit margins, although I didn't run it for that long.
I ran it from early/mid 2022 to middle 2023, and for the first few months of it, I had a full-time job at an eCommerce startup as well.
The Goal of This Case Study
By implementing the things in this case study, you can turn your "offer" into a stable, sellable business.
99% of agencies are not real businesses. They are just "offers."
Table of Contents
These are the five main parts we will be going over in the next 45-ish minutes. There will be subcategories to each of these parts.
Part I: Creating My Offers
Part II: Creating My Lead Magnets
Part III: Creating My Conversion Mechanisms
Part IV: Driving Traffic
Part V: Putting It All Together
There will be time for questions at the end. I will not be answering them during, although you can put them in the chat as they come up.
Three Main Problems For All Businesses
All businesses, especially agencies, suffer from three main problems.
  1. They don't get enough leads
  1. All their clients are from networking and referrals and they cannot get clients from cold traffic
  1. 99% of their leads they generate are wasted because they aren't qualified and the business has nothing to offer them
By fixing these three main problems, you can "fix" almost any business.
I knew this going in because I have seen it happen many times before as well in my previous businesses.
1. Not Enough Leads
A lot of businesses will get one lead per day, maybe one lead every few days.
That's terrible.
Although it is obvious that more leads = more clients, here is why:
  1. When you don't have enough leads, you are desperate and needy and people can sense it
  1. When you don't have enough leads, you are prone to lowering your prices and attracting bad clients
  1. When you don't have enough leads, you are not confident enough to invest in hiring good people that could help you and you normally have to settle for low quality people and/or overseas VAs.
However, the opposite is also true.
2. Can't Convert Cold Traffic
A huge problem that 99% of businesses face is that all their clients come from referrals and networking.
Although there is nothing wrong with that, this maxes out at some point and is largely out of your control.
You need to take your future into your own hands and that means setting up cold traffic acquisition systems.
Don't fool yourself into thinking you currently have a great offer or that you are a great salesperson if you've only been selling to referrals.
This is a big problem that a lot of people face. They think everything about their business is much better than it actually is because they only sell to referrals.
3. 99% of Leads Are Unqualified
This is sooooo common.
Most businesses only revenue stream is their main, recurring service.
Of course we need this service. Of course it is important. Duh.
But if that is the only revenue stream you have, you will suffer.
In any given market, only about 3% of people are qualified, and that does not mean that 3% are going to buy from you. That is just 3% total.
You and all your competitors are fighting for 3% of people who could buy your services, and likely excluding the other 97%.
My Funnel
All of these problems can be addressed and overcome by building what we now call the 1000x Leads Funnel. Here is a picture of it…
The "Average" Funnel
Compare this with the "average" agency funnel that will look something like this for most people…
Or…
A lot of agencies will actually have no funnel at all. They will just have their recurring service and hope and pray someone finds them somehow
Part I: Creating My Offers
One-Time Service
In my previous agency, I offered landing pages as my one-time service.
This is very helpful because as you will see, I had a very expensive recurring service.
These landing pages offered them a nice "stepping-stone" where I could bring them in at "less risk" and prove myself.
I charged $2,500 for one or $5,000 for three.
If these landing pages helped increase their conversion rate and lower their CPA, I would pitch them on my recurring services.
Recurring Service
My main recurring service was CRO which stands for conversion rate optimization.
This basically means you run A/B tests on their site and hope to increase conversion rate.
If they do 10 million per year in revenue and you increase their conversion rate by 10%, that is an extra 1 million dollars per year you are making them, so you can see how valuable this service can be.
I charged between $8,000 and $15,000 per month for this, starting with a three-month commitment/contract.
You can imagine, this is very difficult to sell to someone who doesn't really know, like or trust you.
If I only had this service, my agency would likely have been a fraction of the size.
However, because I "proved myself" with a landing page already, it was much easier for me to sell.
Program
There will always be a percentage of the market that wants to learn how to do it, instead of having someone do it for them.
I catered to this part of the market as well with a six-week live CRO course.
This cost $3997.
They got:
  • Three live calls per week
  • Over 100 training videos
  • Over 60 templates
  • Swipe files
  • Help via Slack
and more…
This was a very profitable revenue stream (90%+ margin) that is more fun than doing DFY services.
Course
Of course, not everyone has $4,000 to spend on a program, so I also sold this as a course for $997.
It was essentially the same thing, but you didn't get any help via Slack and you didn't get to attend the live calls.
The videos, templates and swipe files were good enough that it was worth it for them.
Digital Products
But what about for the people who can't even afford $997 for the course and/or simply do not trust me enough yet?
What could I sell them? Like I said before, almost everybody just ignores this group of people, but I knew that was a mistake.
Here are the three digital products I sold (all for $97):
  1. 100 landing page templates built in Webflow
  1. A full sequence of AI prompts that makes your landing page copy VERY good
  1. A list of winning landing page offers and how to implement them
The important thing here is these products were all GOOD.
They weren't half-ass scam products.
The landing page templates sold way more than the other two, which I expected.
Overall, I was doing $60k per month in PROFIT from just digital products.
Affiliate Offers
The final "offer" I had was adding affiliate links to all my emails, content, website, and more…
I had:
  • Webflow affiliate
  • Jasper AI affiliate
  • Convert.com affiliate
And much more.
The reason for this is even if they can't afford to and/or don't want to pay me, they still need these tools.
If they click my affiliate link and end up purchasing, I get a recurring commission, usually from 12-24 months, but sometimes forever.
When you are hammering paid ads, cold emails, content and partnerships like I will show you in a few minutes, you can build up huge MRR from affiliate.
I had over $150k MRR at my peak, mostly from the three affiliate programs above.
When I sold my 100 landing page templates built in Webflow for $100, they obviously need a Webflow account to use them, and I always included my affiliate link.
That is where the bulk of the affiliate revenue came from.
Part II: Setting Up Lead Magnets
Brainstorming
Lead magnets are how you capture leads. If you don't have lead magnets, you will never get people onto your email list.
The easiest way to brainstorm what lead magnets to create is as follows:
  1. Find your niche
  1. Think of 6-9 "subcategories" or parts of your niche
  1. Make a lead magnet for each
An example for landing pages:
  1. Site speed
  1. Offers
  1. Social proof
  1. Copywriting
  1. Headlines
  1. Hero Image
  1. Normal images
  1. Types of landing pages
  1. Winning A/B tests to run
  1. How to A/B test
And so on…
These are all "parts" of creating a great landing page and I had a lead magnet to teach them to do each part.
Criteria For Great Lead Magnets
There are a few criteria for lead magnets:
  1. They actually have to be good. Bad lead magnets are worse than none at al. If it sucks, they will hate you.
  1. It should be a "complete" solution to a specific problem.
  1. You should have more than one (not every lead magnet will appeal to everyone)
  1. You should have your face and/or voice (ie. videos) in each lead magnet
  1. You should have video + written portion for each. Embed video in a document like the one here.
  1. They should follow the VAS formula.
Valuable
The first part of the VAR formula is valuable.
Your lead magnet should help them do something. If it doesn't, it is shit, and you should re-do it.
My lead magnets all helped them solve one problem of making a landing page.
The
Actionable
The second part of the VAR formula is actionable.
In its simplest form, this means…
"Can they implement this within 24 hours or less?"
If the answer is no (whether it takes longer than 24 hours or there is not a clear plan to implement), then the lead magnet is shit and has to be redone.
Readable
The final part of the VAR formula is signature.
This means unique.
All my lead magnets were written in my own unique way. I didn't copy or model them after anyone else.
This is a very important part of the equation.
There is no need to overthink it, but you should put some thought into it too.
Promoting Lead Magnets
I promoted each and every one of my lead magnets through both paid ads as well as content.
It is important to do so because you never know which one is going to appeal to who.
For example, if I only promoted my copywriting lead magnet, that would be interesting to people who need copywriting guidance, but if they don't, they simply wouldn't download it.
I would miss out on a huge percentage of the market who doesn't need copywriting help but still needs site speed, offers, design, image, etc. help.
Part III: Creating Conversion Mechanisms
The Purpose
In its simplest form, the purpose of the conversion mechanisms is to "convert" subscribers on your email list to actual leads that you can have a sales call with.
When people are just on your list, you only have their email and not much else.
Conversion Mechanisms capture their name, email, phone number, website, revenue, etc. and turn them from someone semi-anonymous to a real person who you can qualify.

Different Types
The main types that I use are:
  • Webinar
  • Live Workshops
  • Newsletter
  • Community
  • Appointment Setter
It should be noted that you want as many as possible. For each one you add, the others become more effective.
For example, your newsletter can promote your webinar or your appointment setter can tell them to sign up for your live workshops.
My Webinar
I had a webinar that was based on the same subcategories as my lead magnets.
It was titled "The Top 9 Things You Need to Build a Landing Page That Converts at 5%"
It went over the same things as my lead magnets, but put them all together:
  1. Copywriting
  1. Site speed
  1. CRO
  1. Offers
  1. Social Proof
  1. Hero Image
  1. Headline
  1. Design
  1. Testing
And so on…
The best webinars typically are "Top X Things" or "X Things to Avoid" in my experience.
My Live Workshops
Once per week (every Thursday at 2pm EST), I would run a one-hour landing page live workshop where I would build a landing page from scratch in front of everyone.
There was usually 30-60 people on there.
This was a real-time demonstration of my skills, and I would send everybody the landing page (and my Webflow affiliate link) for them to use and tailor to their own brand.
This typically converted people who were on the fence about me.
It was a very effective tool.
My Newsletter
I wrote a 3-5x weekly newsletter about landing pages.
I started at 3x per week and eventually increased it to 4x per week then 5x per week.
You can think of it as me teaching them about landing pages every single day in a way that is both interesting and easy to read.
There was knowledge, examples, tips, and more.
NOTHING is as good as a frequent newsletter to convert subscribers into clients.
My Appointment Setter
I had a few appointment setters at different times.
There job was to call, email and SMS leads in my CRM to try to get them to book a sales call.
Appointment setters are super super valuable and once you have enough leads, you should get one.
The difference between call-booked rates between having an appointment setter vs. no appointment setter is truly 5-10 to 1.
I never used to have one so I didn't know any better, but once I got one, the results began to skyrocket.
Their main goal was to get them to book a call, but like I mentioned before, if they weren't ready, my setters told them to sign up for the webinar or live workshops.
Part IV: Driving Traffic
Four Types of Traffic
The four main types of traffic that you can have are:
  • Paid ads
  • Content
  • Outreach
  • Partnerships
It is super important that you don't just settle for one, even if you are good at it.
Each type makes the other types more effective.
For example, who do you think you are more likely to get a response from when cold emailing…
A) Someone who has never heard of you before
or…
B) Someone who has seen your ads, downloaded your lead magnets, and follows you on Twitter and YouTube and has watched/read 50+ things from you before
The answer is obvious.
Paid Ads
Before I sold, we were doing either $6,000/day or $7,500/day in paid ads. I can't remember but they both come to mind. Regardless, that is still a high amount for an agency.
The thing that is important is that I was doing so profitably.
Even when you have $900k MRR, you still can't simply burn $6k per day in ad spend with no plan to get it back.
This ad spend was nearly 100% on Facebook.
My Paid Ad Offer
Like I mentioned before, I had a few different products.
Almost all of my ad spend went towards the 100 Webflow Templates for $100.
The key here is that it costed me less than $100 in ad spend to get one sale.
I believe it costed about $70 to get a customer, and I sold the templates for $100.
This means that I was making a profit.
More importantly, that is about 100 new "customers" per day.
I was able to upsell about 15% of these customers into one of my offers whether that be landing pages, CRO, the program or the course.
Because of this, I was essentially acquiring customers at a profit with absolutely no risk.
Because of this, I can spend $6k or $7.5k per day because I know that I will get it back right away via the sale.
Content
Content was super important to me both as a tool to drive traffic and get attention, as well as a tool to help prove that I know what I am doing so people would hire me.
I focused on three different platforms and did a good job of "repurposing" content across each platform so that I could be more efficient.
Twitter + LinkedIn + Instagram
I posted tons of written content on Twitter.
I did:
  • 3-5 quick value posts per day
  • 3 threads per week
  • 3 images/graphics/mindmaps per week
  • 1 "auto DM" per week
  • 2 "series" tweets per week (ie. Landing page hack #1, #2, #3, etc.)
This got me a good amount of attention and leads.
Then, I repurposed all of these tweets into carousel images that I posted on Instagram and LinkedIn. Carousels are the most popular content format on those platforms, so it was an easy way to repuprose the content to post on all platforms.
YouTube
I also made five YouTube videos per week. One every weekday.
I created these with a different mindset.
I was not looking for "viral" topics or to get "views."
I was looking to create super in-depth, technical videos that if someone already knew about me from my content, ads, email list, etc., they could go to these videos, watch them, and know that I know what I am talking about.
These videos got 100 views at most, but 1 B2B technical view is worth the same as 500 "normal" views.
You simply can't compare them.
No one is watching a 40-minute video on technical A/B testing for advertorial type landing pages for supplement brands when they are scrolling their phone in bed at night.
You simply can't get discouraged by a low view count.
The right people find these videos and they are a super super super effective tool for getting someone to take the leap and buy from you.
Outreach
I am not one of those people who thinks they are "too good" to do cold outreach.
Cold outreach literally changed my entire business.
It was one of my best revenue drivers and still is to this day.
Cold Email
The technology for cold email is quite good. You don't have to manually find leads and copy and paste your messages to them these days.
You can scrape tens of thousands of leads per hour, upload them to a software, write your script, click send, and off you are.
I sent over 20,000 cold emails per day at my peak.
It is a numbers game of course, but I typically got one call per 1000 emails sent.
Do the math.
That is 20 calls per day, and 100 per week as I only cold email Monday to Friday.
100 calls per week at a 25% close rate is 25 new clients.
Each client is worth at least $2500.
Cold email was making me $62,500 per week, not including anyone I upsold to CRO.
60 Minutes of Prospecting Per Day
Paid ads are good. Content is good. Cold email is good. Partnerships are good.
But there is nothing like 60 minutes per day of old school prospecting.
Pulling up Twitter or LinkedIn, manually identifying who might be a good fit for your service, messaging them, commenting on their stuff, getting to know them…
Until eventually, they reach out and ask if you can help them.
This is what keeps your pipeline full and will keep you "safe" against bad months.
It is boring. It is tedious.
But, if there were about 250business days from when I started my biz to when I sold, I did 60 minutes of prospecting at least 240 of them.
I was super consistent and it paid off for me.
Partnerships
Partnerships are the most valuable way to get new clients, but you have to do it in a certain way. There are a few types of partnerships that really matter:
  1. Whitelabel
  1. Referral
  1. Media
  1. Joint Venture
I really only focused on two of these.
Partnerships are so good because if you get a client, you get a client.
But, if you get a partner, you can get 5 clients, or 10, or 25, or 100, or even more.
Whitelabel
My business really took off when I changed most of my cold email from clients over to cold email for partners.
I thought "who needs landing pages besides my clients?"
And I came to the conclusion that paid ad agencies need landing pages for their clients.
If their landing pages suck, their ads will be trash, and they will get fired.
So, I started emailing paid ad agencies offering to make landing pages for their clients.
I didn't put really any thought into it, but decided to offer $5,000 for up to 6 landing pages per month.
They would deal with the clients, and pretend they are doing it, and I would just do the work.
Eventually at the peak, I had 77 partner agencies each paying me $5,000 per month for this which was $385,000 MRR.
This was also very very "sticky."
If they all of a sudden start offering landing pages to their clients, it is very difficult for them to stop.
$5,000 for up to 6 is good value and you couldn't hire someone internally for $5,000 and get the same result and quality.
Referral
There were a certain percentage of paid media agencies that did not want to do the $5,000 for 6 landing pages per month and instead just referred their clients to me.
I paid them a commission of $500 per sale.
I also expanded my cold emails to target email marketing agencies, SEO agencies, influencer agencies and more.
Basically anyone who sold to eCom brands, I tried to partner with.
I got about 50 referrals per month from these type of partners, and always paid them a commission which I truly believe in.
Part V: Putting It All Together
Top of Funnel
It would be best to make a summary of what I did for these:
  • Paid Ads: $6k+ per day towards my offer of 100 Webflow landing page templates for $100. This was a profitable funnel and I always broke even or made a small profit. I then upsold them to high-ticket services down the line.
  • Content: I posted 5+ times per day on Twitter, turned those same posts into LinkedIn and Instagram carousels, and posted 5 YouTube videos per week focused on very technical, detailed topics.
  • Cold Outreach: I sent 20,000 cold emails per day and did 60 minutes of prospecting per day from Monday to Friday
  • Partnerships: I sent about 6,000 cold emails per day to potential partners, mostly paid ad agencies to try to get referrals or whitelabel my services to them.
Middle of Funnel
  • Lead Magnets: I made 9+ GOOD lead magnets that each solved a problem with landing pages. I promoted all of these with paid ads and content.
  • Products & Affiliate: I stuffed them with affiliate links and links to my digital products to help me generate more revenue from people who were unqualified for my services.
  • Content: My YouTube videos are arguably middle of funnel because their purpose is not to drive traffic and get views, but to get people confident enough to book a call with me.
Bottom of Funnel
  • Webinar: I had a pre-recorded webinar that was "Top 9 Things For Your Landing Page." This webinar ran 24/7 and they could access it whenever they wanted to.
  • Live Workshops: Every Thursday, I did a live workshop where I made a landing page from scratch in front of everyone. I then send them the template so they could use it themselves and snuck in my affiliate link.
  • Newsletter: I sent a newsletter 3-5x per week talking about landing pages. All of these newsletters had links to sales call, my YouTube and my Conversion Mechanisms.
  • Appointment Setter: I had several appointment setters at different times whose only job was to email, call and SMS all of my prospects in my CRM and try to get them to book a call or attend my webinars.
Sales
  • Pre-Call Flow + Reminders: After they booked in Calendly, they were added to my pre-call flow which blasted them with case studies, testimonials, social proof and examples.
  • Sales Call: Because my funnel is complete and done properly, 95% of people were already "sold" by the time we got on a sales call. This should be the goal for everyone.
  • Presentation: I had a presentation that I went over on the call that pre-emptively overcame objections, was full of social proof, and made it easy for them to say yes.
  • Follow Up: I follow up 2-3x per week, forever. I had all my reminders set in Close.com CRM, and there was truly no escaping me. I tried to add value and give them extra lead magnets and advice when I followed up to try and be less annoying. I think it worked, but hard to measure.
  • Guarantee: When I first started, I had a guarantee "our landing page will beat yours by 10% or you will get a full refund." That was good, but eventually I had so many clients that I didn't need it.
Fulfillment
I struggled mightily with fulfillment.
This is one of the reasons I sold my agency.
Although I grew very fast and am great at getting clients, I am not the best at operations, nor do I enjoy it.
I had a team of 76 with about 60 being overseas and 16 being in Canada or the USA.
I did all the CRO myself with pre-made sections in Shopify and everyone else did all the landing pages using pre-built templates, so they were essentially just copywriters with the design + development already taken care of.