Paid Challenge Funnel: The hottest offer type on the market right now?

Today, I’ll share with you one of the biggest “secrets” that helped us build a $1.4m online business from scratch…

It’s the offer type that was responsible for over 50% of our revenue (and profit)…

And best of all, it’s something you can steal, model, and apply to your own business…

Whether you’re selling to an existing e-mail list of raving fans…

Or growing your business through Facebook Advertising…

Or if you’re working as a freelancer with other online businesses.

This is a skill you WANT to have in your arsenal because an opportunity like this only comes around once every few years.

You see, between 2020 and 2021, we were able to generate our first $779k in revenue by only selling online courses, which was great…

But in January 2022, we discovered a brand new offer type that changed everything for us…

Because within a SINGLE launch, we were able to generate over $100k in revenue (and $80k+ of that was pure profit).

At that point, that was 4x more than any other launch we did (to the very same e-mail list /market).

We’ve since used this single offer type to generate an additional $500k+ in revenue within a single year…

Both through e-mail marketing and Facebook Advertising…

In the Slovenian AND English-speaking markets.

I’m shocked by how few businesses are taking this opportunity up, as it’s right there up for grabs…

And to explain why it works so well, let’s revisit the Growth Hierarchy Framework I shared with you recently.

I told you that finding a great (virgin) market is the #1 thing you can do to scale a business FAST…

But let’s face it, most entrepreneurs don’t have businesses in Virgin Markets.

If your market already has a handful of (or plenty of) competitors…

Then the second most important part of the Growth Hierarchy Framework is the offer.

When you bring a brand-new, exciting offer to an established market, your business can grow faster than you ever thought it could.

Just like I was shocked when our launch of this offer outperformed our past launches by over 400%…

You too might be surprised by how much of an impact this can make on your business.

Now, the problem is that nowadays, it’s hard to come up with a brand new offer that disrupts the industry…

Because online courses, live courses, workshops, masterminds, high-ticket programs, coaching programs, checklists, and templates have been sold over and over again for decades…

So they’re not really new.

But, in the vast majority of the markets I’ve seen, this offer type is far from common.

The offer type I’m talking about is Paid Challenge Funnels.

NOTE: You shouldn’t mistake this funnel with FREE Challenge Funnels that have also been around for decades…

As these were primarily used for lead generation, and while there were some GREAT Challenge Funnels back in the day, like The Green Smoothie Challenge…

There are plenty of funnels like this out there in the world, but don’t perform nearly as well as Paid Challenge Funnels anymore.

The gist of the challenge is that you send an e-mail to your audience every day for 7-28 days – that’s the content of the challenge.

The first ever challenge funnel we launched was The 28-Day No-Yelling Challenge for parents…

But since then, we’ve successfully launched many additional funnels, like The 21 Double Your Child’s Grades Challenge, The 28-Day Stress-Free Parenting Challenge, and The 7-Day Get Your Kids to Listen Challenge.

We’ve experimented with a variety of different challenge formats and price points, and have found that the majority of them work well.

The guidelines we’re following right now are:

• These are typically low-priced products that sell for up to $28 (but don’t let the low price point fool you, our $100k launch was sent to an e-mail list of 46,000 e-mail subscribers)
• The shorter the challenge, the lower the price point (a 7-day challenge might be priced at $5-$9, while a 21 to 28-day challenge might be priced at $28)
• Long AND short challenges can work equally well on ads, but long challenges with higher price points tend to work better for e-mail marketing
• The challenges that work best are ones that solve a big, burning problem of our audience (i.e. parents HATE yelling at their kids) or promise a very desirable outcome (i.e. double your child’s grades)
• Because these ARE low-ticket offers, you’ll want to have at least a handful of product extensions on the backend that can 2-3x your AOV (average order value) and launch revenue
• Every challenge should be extremely valuable and designed to get your audience quick, tangible, and lasting results (more on that in a sec)

There are a couple of reasons why these challenges are great, beyond what I already shared with you.

First, we’ve found that they have much higher follow-through rates than online courses…

This means more happy customers, raving fans, good reviews, testimonials, and word of mouth…

That’s because unlike online courses that people forget about (and collect dust on their digital shelves)…

Your customers will get quick and valuable daily e-mails that are, if written correctly, extremely easy to implement…

And many of our customers told us that they really appreciate the daily e-mail reminders so they can get a little bit closer to their desired outcome every single day.

Now, with challenges, I’ve found that one key thing is getting your customers “hooked” early on in the process… 

Get them a handful of quick wins… 

Which makes it much more likely that they’ll complete the challenge and get the best possible results with it.

So it helps tremendously to follow the Result Amplifiers Framework that I discuss at the end of this blog post.

The second reason why I love Paid Challenge Funnels is that we developed a formula for Product Extensions that works every time…

Simply give your customers the following options during the checkout process:

• Extend the challenge with an advanced challenge
• Get access to a checklist based on the challenge 
• Purchase an audiobook version of the challenge

Has consistently increased our AOV by 30-50%.

That’s because these types of product extensions follow the Value Equation very closely by decreasing the time and effort required to achieve the desired outcome.

There’s a lot more I could share about Paid Challenge Funnels, but for now, just do two things:

1. See if you can find a PAID challenge in your niche (simply google something like “28-day guitar challenge”)…
2. And if you can’t find anything (or the competition isn’t really strong / doing any solid marketing)… Go try this funnel out.
3. And EVEN IF you can find 1-2 similar funnels, you should still give it a shot (because you’re not competing with hundreds of online courses, and after all, these challenges are great for creating thousands of raving fans that buy from you over and over again because they’re so valuable)

Now, just like with every funnel type out there, I expect this opportunity to go away within a couple of years (or months), when more people find out about how well it works…

And just like with every business opportunity, the early adopters that come into the market FIRST will take the majority of the market share.

So don’t put this off to do it “someday”. It will never be a better time to do it than now (and I very rarely say that).

Try it out, and as you do, please do let me know how it goes by leaving a comment below.

Hustle hard,

-Primoz