Jen Casey (JC): For those who don’t know you and haven’t been stalking you for as long as I have, how did you get started in the online world and what brought you to where you are today?

 Zach Spuckler (ZS): Totally. So I really started in the online space 12 years ago when I was fascinated by the idea-

 JC: When you were how old?!

 ZS: I would’ve been 13 at the time. I know this because I started when I was 12 and a half because I had to be 13 for my first online money making scheme. I pretended to be my dad and used his Social Security number to get paid, with his permission of course! I started way, way back in the day. I was just fascinated by the idea that you could make money online. One of the first things I ever did was what was called PAID-TO-CLICK advertising, which you guys are familiar with PPC, but this is PTC, where you get paid to click on advertisements. I used to get paid to click on these ads and then you could hire people to be your referrals and click on ads under you.

I basically built up this small empire where I was making like, 20, 30 bucks a day when I was 14 or 15 years old. I ended up making thirteen thousand dollars doing that.

So, that’s how I started. I was just fascinated by this idea and it evolved into everything you can imagine. I’ve done paid surveys, affiliate marketing, niche blogs, direct sales, and services. When I started this business, I started by doing Facebook ads for people. I also started talking on Periscope about how I was leveraging Facebook ads. What ended up happening was, our email list started growing and people started asking me how we were getting clients with live streaming, so I created a live streaming course, which ended up being our first six figure course, and then I pivoted to start talking about Facebook ads because that’s really where my passion was.

After doing that for a couple of years, we started  questioning how to make a launch that’s more effective. So after 10 years of dabbling online, we started to be successful with online courses. Our online courses were working, but we were killing ourselves to launch them. I remember back in 2015, we launched my Facebook ads course and it took us about three months to actually launch the dang thing, which was so much time. I remember being like, “this is not sustainable. I can not spend three months launching my content.” It was so much work. I was exhausted.

I was staying up all night and I remember finishing that launch and being like, “oh my gosh, I should be so happy.” It was a twenty thousand dollar launch and I was just exhausted.

JC:  What did you guys do during that launch that it took three months?

ZS: We were planning and outlining and prepping and doing webinars. It just took months to plan and execute, create the content, and try to build the email list. A few months later, I met up with a friend in New York City and she was like, “You should try a challenge.” I met with her for five minutes and ended up doodling this little piece of paper, I call it the six figure doodle. We doodled this thing out and ended up running a challenge, and in two weeks, we matched the profits that we had done in our three month launch.

So we sat down, reverse engineered it, and did another challenge. We really refined it into this unique system that leverages email marketing, Facebook advertising, Facebook groups, and Facebook live streams to actually create a cohesive system where we can actually track what’s happening. We’ve now coined that into the Five Figure Challenge System and we’ve helped people from every space you can imagine, from finance, to dog training, to manifestation, to Instagram, to green smoothies and everything in between. It’s been so stinking cool to watch our students run successful challenges and thrive. Now we teach that as our signature offer and that brings us to where we are today.

JC: I love it. So have you seen the same type of results with a lot of your students, where they had tried other launches in the past, but once they lock into this specific system, things just kind of shift?

ZS: Totally. We have a student who had actually run a challenge with our system and she essentially doubled her sales. I’m just going to be really candid. It’s not challenges that are the secret. The reality is, webinars work, challenges work, everything works. The thing that we find for most people is that they’re not working from a system and they tend to think, “Well I’m going to do a webinar or a challenge and I’m going to just offer lots of content and then I’m going to sell.”

Whether you’re doing a webinar or a challenge or a video series, the reality is there is structure and systems to the content and the promotion that need to be in place. For the person I’m thinking of, they doubled their sales because they changed the positioning of their challenge. One of the big things we talk about is your positioning and your message and so many people go into a launch or a promotion without a message or a position and that’s what ends up costing them sales, even if they get a certain level of success.

JC: It’s so true. Oh my gosh. I’ve seen this happen in my own business and for so many of my students. People will come and say, “I don’t know, I just modeled what I saw this other person do on social media.” But they’re not really getting the behind the scenes. They’re not seeing the pieces that are what’s making that machine work. So what are some of the other big mistakes that you see people make when they’re approaching a challenge launch?

 ZS: I think one of, if not the biggest mistake, is that they think that by delivering lots and lots of value, they’re going to create trust, authority, and connection with people. What happens is a lot of people over deliver in their challenges, and I think it’s about making this mindset shift that you’re not shortchanging people by giving them less information. You’re actually shortchanging people by giving them too much information.

So there’s three things you have to keep in mind. Number one, people didn’t pay to be there so they have less skin in the game, that’s just the reality. The second thing is people are busy! They’ve got other stuff going on. We like to think that this challenge is the only thing that they’re invested in, but it’s not. The third thing is that they’re trying to get results, they’re not trying to learn, and by over delivering value, you get people stuck in this learning mode. So you have to peel back the layers of content that you’re providing and say, “What is the minimum amount of content I can provide to get people some sort of tangible result that shows them what’s possible?”

For example, if you’re teaching people Instagram and you’re going to do a five day Instagram challenge, that’s dramatically different than a “Five days to your next hundred followers on Instagram” training. So many people are like, “I’m going to do a challenge and I’m going to provide information and people are going to respect me and love me because I gave so much away for free!” The reality is, they want to get a result, and if you show them the minimum they need to do to get, say 100 followers, they’re going to trust their own results because there’s two types of trust you have to build and a challenge. You have to build trust in you as the teacher, but you also have to build trust in themselves as people with the ability to actually do it.

Most business principles apply to everybody so you need to prove to them that they can actually get results. So, to bring it back around, this big mistake that people make is they think they can just deliver lots of value and that builds connection, but the reality is showing them a result delivers a lot of connection. One of the best parallels I can explain is webinars. I can’t tell you how many people I see complain that the first 60 minutes of webinars is a bunch of framing before the content. But the reality is, we’ve done it both ways, and our webinars convert better when there’s introduction.

You can be by the numbers or you can be by the fear of criticism. I’d rather operate from the numbers because I am running a business., so don’t give away so much that you overwhelm people and you stop them from getting results.

JC: I experienced this first hand with a challenge launch that I did. I went into it from a lack mindset and I was just going to over deliver. The content was awesome and people still ask me about it, but I FIREHOSED people with 30 to 40 minute live videos because people just kept asking questions on live and then I gave exercises at the end. Basically, it was all about storytelling and I could have just taken that very first video that I did and made up the entire five day challenge, but I gave them five full days of 40 minute videos and exercises. So when I finally got to the damn pitch, people were like, “Oh, I’m still on day 3.” So I got them totally stuck in learning mode and they didn’t buy because it didn’t get them the result fast enough. I over delivered, but not in the way that gets somebody to take action.

 ZS: I think the other thing to remember is that most people deliver content, but leaders deliver transformation. If you can deliver that transformation people are going to trust you way more than if you teach them the theory of anything.

 JC: Yes, and I think sometimes we get stuck in that idea that it needs to be like a certain length, but why? If I can explain something in five, why stretch the video out? What do you think it is that gets people stuck in that? What do you think is the belief behind that?

 ZS: Well, I think the belief is twofold. One, they have a fear that people aren’t going to learn. I think that the big thing that gets people stuck is this fear that their audience is going to say they didn’t learn anything. The other thing that really gets people stuck is they hear online to lead with value and people will buy. But think about infomercials. Is it really packed with value or is it really illustrating why you should buy this thing? There’s a reason the infomercials work and there’s a reason that there’s multimillion dollar companies running infomercials. They’re really just illustrating their vehicle to solve your problem.

You really have to get in that mindset of I’m solving problems, not teaching.

JC: So freaking good. So then, what is the shift that people need to make, whether it be in their own beliefs or in the way that they’re approaching their challenge, so that they are effectively getting people that transformation versus just bombarding them with more content. How do you determine the distinction between a lot of content and a transformation?

ZS: Totally. There’s something called the PSP model, which is not something I created, but it’s called the Problem-Solution-Problem. A lot of times we shortchange ourselves and we follow the problem-solution model, but we don’t think of the next step. One of the best ways to illustrate this is to give you an example. We used to have a FB ads program and when we started her promoting the program with a challenge, we didn’t do a challenge on Facebook ads, because the problem our audience was telling us they had is that they’re not making enough sales. What I knew, as the leader, is that they really don’t have a sales problem, they have a traffic problem. They’re not putting their offer in front of enough people and that’s why they have a sales problem. But they’re so busy saying they have a sales problem that I’m not going to convince them they have a traffic problem.

So I ran a challenge called ‘How to Build Your First Sales Funnel in Five Days’.  The problem is, “I want sales.” The solution is the sales funnel, but it creates anew problem, which is how to fill up the sales funnel I just built. Well, then you need Facebook ads!

You have to be thinking, “What is the problem they have and the solution I can offer, and what is that real problem that I can bring them to the conclusion of that my product solves?”

JC: This is so important because I see a lot of people  arbitrarily picking a launch or creating a freemium on something that’s kind of random, but they’re not making that connection in the way that you did. When people do that, how does that affect the buying behavior and ultimately affect your bottom line?

ZS: The biggest thing to realize is that if you can show people that the problem that they have (the second P and the PSP) and if you can illustrate that your product solves that with good messaging, it’s going to increase your sales. Is it easier to convince someone that they don’t need to lose weight or is it easier to convince someone that they should lose weight, and by the way, the solution is focusing on your mindset, your underlying beliefs, and your exercise habits. You can meet that person who’s like, “I need to lose five pounds!” and say, “You don’t need to lose five pounds. You need to change the way you’re thinking and change the way you’re eating and change this and change that.” But they’re like, “Well I don’t want to do that. I just want to lose five pounds.” If you don’t meet them where they are, they will not believe that your program gets the results. If you can really illustrate to them that your product solves a problem they didn’t realize they had, that’s going to change things.

Another  good example is money mindset. Denise Duffield Thomas has a fantastic book and there’s an exercise in the book where you basically write down your beliefs about money. The book is called Get Rich Lucky Bitch and it’s about how to get rich because her audience is saying, “I want to make more money.” Once you get inside, the solution is to walk through what you actually believe about money, then the new problem is how to shift these beliefs, and that’s what the rest of the book is about. It’s about changing those beliefs even though the title of the book is Get Rich, the actual book is about changing your beliefs.

You have to walk people through that process so that they trust what you, as the expert, know they need, and they, as the consumer, want.

JC: I love the way that you just framed this because I talk about this rather frequently with clients of mine. They come in as a health and wellness coach or business coach and they decide to pivot and they’re like, “Well, I don’t really want to teach people health and wellness anymore. I want to help them with mindset in relation to health and wellness, but I want to say that I’m a mindset coach.” As we unravel it, ultimately they’re teaching the same content.

Mindset is so intangible. I love when you’re helping people figure these things out because I’m always like, “Is it tangible? Is it measurable? Is it quantifiable?” Give me the details and show me what the end result going to be like. I do not like things that are wishy washy and I so appreciate that you do that. That’s one thing that you really help people with when they’re figuring out how to name their challenge because it’s another big thing where people get stuck. People are like, “It’s the feel-better-you, sexy-life- you, in 21 days!” Like noooo. What does that mean?!

ZS: When you’re naming it, it needs to be so specific and so tangible that people know what to expect at the end of five days.

JC: Absolutely. Other than that, are there any other big mistakes that you see people making with naming their challenge?

ZS: I think in certain spaces, calling it a challenge works really well, in the health and wellness space especially. But in the B2B space or marketing, it really helps to call it what they will create in five days. We have one client that we’re working with who is running a challenge and it was called the ‘Get 20 Leads in Five Days Challenge’ and that’s not really specific. What if we called it the ‘Get 20 Leads on Facebook Without Using Facebook Ads in Just Five Days’, then it’s no longer this challenge. We’re in the process of testing, but we’re hoping that that increases the sign up conversions because it’s no longer this ‘challenge’, it’s this specific thing. So not being specific enough is a huge mistake that we see people make.

JC: I know for a lot of the health and wellness girls that I coach, especially if they’ve worked in certain network marketing companies, they have a very adverse reaction to the word ‘challenge’. Would you call it something else, like a series or a workshop?

ZS: Anything works, a series, training, training series, live experience, five day experience. It doesn’t really matter what you call it as long as it’s tied to it.

JC: Yeah. This is so good. In terms of filling challenges, I know you’re so big into Facebook ads and doing paid marketing. But for a lot of people, they haven’t really gotten into that yet. If they’re just starting out, maybe they’re running their first challenge, they don’t have a lot of email stuff set up, they are literally just throwing up a Facebook group and they’re going to go live for five days and that’s their challenge, what would be some simple things that they should be looking at in order to get that offer in front of more people?

ZS: One of the biggest things that you can do, and this is kind of a ninja hack, is write a really great blog post that the ‘content upgrade’, which is something they have to opt in for, is to sign up for the challenge and promote it two weeks before the challenge starts. This is a little overwhelming I know, but we write these 4-5000 word blog post that are really epic. You might be thinking, “Well if I give everything away in 4000 words, who’s going to sign up for the challenge?” The answer EVERYONE because they’re going to want to experience it in real time. Then, you take that and promote it organically because it’s so much easier to get shares on free content.

We recommend  that you write a long form blog post and you promote the heck out of it with Facebook live and Instagram. This is where it gets really ninja: reach out to people in your network and ask them to share your blog post. Tell them, “It’s tied to my challenge and I’m trying to promote my challenge, but I’d love it if you could just promote my free blog post, even just as a Facebook post.” Also say, “Here’s all the content you need to promote it, here is an image here, here’s the copy, here’s everything you need to promote it. Would you be willing to share this?” Ask friends, ask colleagues, ask people around you and get that blog post out. If you’ve then got a little bit of money to put behind Facebook ads, you can retarget everybody that read that blog post or watched your Facebook lives into your challenge.

You can also just do general organic promotion of your challenge. So often people are like, “I don’t have a big audience.” But if you can get 25 to 50 people signed up organically, which, 99 percent of you watching this can if you’ve been in business for more than one or two months and you’ve built connections online, you’ve got enough people to start filling up a challenge, in my opinion.

Don’t neglect the power of  general organic advertising. Post it on Instagram. Post on Facebook. Find new ways to post it. Do a boomerang one day. Do a long form post about your story and why you’re running the challenge and promote the damn thing every single day. Tag the people that are already in and ask them, “Are you excited?” Invite people to share with a friend. Think outside the box. Lean into your organic network and don’t be afraid to try new things before you start running advertisements. We have people who rock their challenges organically before they ever spend a dime on Facebook and it works either way.

JC: And when you’re doing the organic stuff and you see that working, that’s when you really know your messaging is on freaking point, especially if you’re in front of the right audience. I do want to go back to retargeting because I know there’s a lot of people who, when I have conversations with them about Facebook ads, they’re like, “This might as well be Chinese because I don’t know what that means.” They don’t realize what’s possible with Facebook and it just seems like this big crazy scary thing. It’s actually pretty straightforward when you kind of get in there, but what are retargeting ads?

ZS: So basically, Facebook has something called a pixel, which you can put on any web page that you have and it tracks activity. So when someone reads your blog post but doesn’t opt in, you can tell Facebook, “I want to put ads in front of that person so they see my content.” Another really simple way to think about this is when you click on something online that you shouldn’t buy, but you want it, and it follows you around the Internet, that’s retargeting. You can do it with a small budget and it’s a really targeted audience so it tends to convert.

JC: Love that, and when people are like, “What’s a pixel?” Facebook gives you some code and you copy and paste it. It’s not anything crazy. So I’m curious too, when people are doing challenges, do you recommend that they are done via livestream or can people do them prerecorded? I’ve been seeing a little bit of both happening.

ZS: I personally recommend Live because the expectation of production is lower. If you’re doing pre-recorded videos, people tend to have this expectation that they should be of a certain level. But when you do a live video, people are not expecting it to be this perfectly polished experience. They’re expecting you to be down to earth, to be approachable, and to be connecting with them. You can answer questions live and people just love that.

We run automated webinars because they work, but when you automate, your conversion rate drops, so if you’re going to automate your challenge, you may see a drop in conversion rates. Why wouldn’t you do it live when you know that live tends to get higher engagement, higher reach on the algorithm, and Facebook favors live video? There’s so many signs that point to why it is better. That being said, we have students who have done pre-recorded videos that have been successful. You absolutely can do pre-recorded and you’re still going to get results.  

JC: I agree with that. Even if you are going to do pre-record, maybe mix and match. Maybe you’ve got the pre-recorded video and then jump on a live inside the group so people can see that you’re a real person. When you’re doing challenges, what do you see when you’re relaunching the same challenge over and over again? Do you usually recommend that people tweak them or do different content?

ZS: You definitely want to tweak what didn’t work. Any time we do a launch, we do a full de-brief where we review the stats, the numbers, and the conversions. We want to review everything and see what happened and how far people made it along. What was our engagement? How many views did we get on these videos? We run all of those numbers and see what worked well and what didn’t work well from both a numbers and a quality standpoint. We had a Day 4 where all of these comments were like, “I’m confused and lost.” So, we changed all of the content of Day 4. We didn’t change the exercise, but we changed the way we presented it, and the next time we ran the challenge it was really effective.

Now, in terms of how often you repeat the exact same challenge with these little tweaks? As frequently as you can get new people in. If you’re always building your audience, there’s always new people to build that challenge.You have the long term followers that are going to plug back in your challenge multiple times, but you also have the ability to reach people. If you can get a hundred new people into your challenge every single time, then you can do the exact same challenge because those people haven’t seen it before. Whether you have a massive audience or you don’t have a massive audience, there’s no reason not to repeat and duplicate a challenge.

JC: To add to that, it’s going to make it a lot simpler for you guys in that you’re not going to have to recreate everything from scratch. Zach, you’re a ninja when it comes to knowing your numbers and having everything dialed in. I think there is so much power when you can look at a launch and say, “Wow look at the views. This went up, that went up. Why did this go down? We made more money this round, but our conversion rate was lower. What happened there?” There’s very nuance things that, even though you may be more profitable, something could be going wrong in the lodge.

The thing I really want to talk about is when someone opens a launch, there’s a lot of emotional ups and downs that can that happen. When you’re doing a launch like a live challenge and you have to be present on live video every single day, that could be really challenging for people. So, I would love for you to share some of the trends of the ups and downs, just so that people go in knowing that it’s not just going to be a constant stream of buyers.

ZS: The biggest thing we tend to see is that when cart opens, you want to get an influx of sales, but that doesn’t always happen because the crux of our system is using a live video. Depending on the size of your challenge, you may not have a ton of people show up for your pitch. You don’t get this massive influx in sales right when you say the doors are open, even though that’s what we would expect. You do start to get a steady stream of sales once you start sending out sales emails, which is something we teach. Write out your six sales emails and have them scheduled out in advance.

We tend to see that when cart opens, it’s slow at first, but then it starts to pick up. Once the cart is open for a period of time, we tend to see a decrease in the amount of sales. So you start kind of high, you go low, and when the carts closing, that’s where the big influx comes in. We call it the J-Curve because if you map it out, it looks like a J. I can’t tell you how many people in the Facebook group are like, “Nothing’s happening!” Then on the last day, they’re like, “I got a bunch of sales!” It happens so frequently, but I think the other thing that you mention is that it is really hard to be present when that’s happening.

It’s so much easier said than done, but remove yourself from the attachment of the result. Realize that completing the challenge is the success, not the sales. You either get the result you want or you learn. If you come from that growth and abundant mindset, it’s much easier to stay present.

The most successful people we see in our program are the people who say, “I didn’t get any sales, but this was still a massive success. I grew my email list. I learned how to run my challenge. I learned a lot about myself.” Those people, ironically, tend to get those last minute sales. We just had somebody run their third five figure challenge and before they ever started the challenge they were like, “This is already a massive success.” Just by declaring that, they had yet another success in the process! So, it is normal to have a little bit of launch free fall, but when you plan that the challenge is the success, then it’s less stressful.

JC: That’s such an awesome reframe and really allows you to be in control of the results and defining what success actually is. I’ve seen so many people relaunching the same products and going from 20,000 the first launch, to 200,000, to 300,000. Every single time they relaunch the same product, it grows or if they have it on Evergreen, that income and impact is compounding over time.

There’s another little mindset tweak for you guys today. If you think it’s not working, focus on things that you can control. Focus on putting the content out there and recognize that if you’re claiming it’s a failure because of X Y Z and you’re building a story around it and scrapping the entire thing, you’re missing out on that potential and opportunity to refine your process and have an even bigger launch next time. You just have to ask yourself if you’re playing the long game. I mean, you’ve obviously been in business since you were freaking 13, so you can definitely speak to the long game. What does that really look like from somebody who has been building businesses and serving people and creating content? What is your mindset around business and the long game?

ZS: You’re always always working on it and we all have stories. The biggest thing for me that has helped me break through some of my mindset blocks and the barriers is to do the things. Sometimes we’re like, “Well, I don’t know if I can achieve that.” So that’s where we stop and we get really busy in the activities that don’t make a difference. There’s somebody who says that if you set this goal that’s x times bigger than what you actually want to achieve, when you come up short you over achieve that same goal that you set. Come up short on a big goal rather than setting an achievable goal that you know you’re going to hit.

JC: This is so good and I think talking about the mindset piece of this is where people don’t really focus their attention when it comes to doing a launch. They’re like, “Just give me a strategy! Tell me what to put in my emails! Give me your swipe copy!” Listen, I could jam on that for days.

I also think talking about the free fall and how nothing is wrong with you, you’re not bombing, and this is completely normal, if not to be expected. People who are doing multimillion dollar launches are seeing very similar trends. Is there anything else in relation to challenge that you want to leave people with?

ZS: It would be this: your challenges scale with time. We recommended that if you’re going to get started, you have a two-to-three hundred dollar budget for Facebook ads. I say that in my program and I say that on my sales page. You need to be willing to invest a little bit. If you were going to start a business twenty years ago, you would need a storefront or a training space. Even if you were in the education space 20 plus years ago, there was overhead. Now there is almost no or minimal overhead.

You need to be willing to invest in your challenge, your software, and your systems. That can be scary, but you need to come from a place of this is what it takes to get results. Very rarely do I see someone who’s massively successful that didn’t invest a little bit. Even the people who had built up massive followings with blogs and pivoted to the education space, well, they’re paying for a blog platform. They’re investing their time on Pinterest. They are paying to upgrade their servers to have the capacity.. They’re buying plug-ins for their blog. They’re consulting with people.

You need to be willing to invest a little bit to make the system work. I always say there’s two forms of investment: time and money. The more you have of one, the less you need of the other, and you just have to figure out where you are in the process. Know that if you can invest a little bit of revenue, it’s going to save you so much time.

JC: Yes! I see way too many people only using organic marketing strategies and struggling to get their offer in front of the right people. Clients of mine niche themselves down, which is super powerful, but the people on their Facebook newsfeed are not the people who are struggling with that very specific thing. So put a little money into Facebook ads and start getting your offer in front of the right people because those are the people who are going to buy. That’s how you’re going to be more profitable.

You know, people have failed so many times, and by fail, I mean given Facebook money and didn’t know how to set things up and then lost money. When you actually know how to set them up effectively, you get an ROI. You put in a hundred dollars and get five hundred dollars back. In what world would you not continuously do that?! It’s so important for people to understand the concept of traffic; that you need more eyeballs.

Well, thank you so much for this. This was amazing. Where can people go to hang out with you and learn more about you and your challenge processes?

ZS: Yeah! If you want to learn more, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com and on the main page there is an on-demand webinar, no shame in my game! But if you’re looking for some quick content and you’re like, “Yes, a challenge is for me!” You can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/challengebook and we have a miniature workbook that walks you through everything you need to build, execute, and fill your challenge. It will walk you through the process of coming up with a name for your challenge, coming up with the five days of content, and figuring out the best way for you to market and fill that challenge.

JC: Amazing. I will link all of that up for you guys as well. Zach, thank you for being here! I just friggin’ adore you and everything that you’re doing, so I really appreciate you for taking the time to share that with everyone today.

ZS: Thanks so much for having me! It’s been a blast.