Case study · One business, one window, dated

Could the sixty steps work on us? The Onwards Labs challenge.

We had the problem, so we gave one of our own businesses the whole method — no shortcuts, no borrowed template, every asset built from nothing. All of it is live at onwardslabs.io/book, and you are welcome to pull any of it apart.

Read this as a point in time, not a company. One business, one funnel, one window — here because you can check every part of it, rather than take our word for the parts you cannot.

The whole account, nothing left out

Seven strangers, then ninety-nine. Same account, same pixel.

Between January and September, seven of our own products ran through the account — 46 campaigns, 24,221 clicks, 108 buyers, every dollar ours. Six did not work. One did. The comparison that holds is the first two rows: both are books, sold out of the same account on the same pixel.

4 CAMPAIGNS · 1,411 CLICKS

Onwards Labs — our $5 book, run through all sixty steps

BUYERS · 7.02%

16 CAMPAIGNS · 3,007 CLICKS

Our earlier books and offers, before the sixty steps existed

BUYERS · 0.23%

26 CAMPAIGNS · 19,803 CLICKS

Our five other products — context, not a like-for-like

BUYERS · 0.01%

Thirty times the rate. Sixteen campaigns sold seven copies between them; the four with all sixty steps behind them sold ninety-nine. The three rows add up to the whole account, so nothing has been left out to make the gap look bigger.

And three of those rows are not ours to call failures. One product may never have reported to this pixel; one converts inside a free chat; several campaigns were never optimised for a purchase at all. Judging a test against an intent it never had is step 58, and we will not break our own rule for a chart.

The work itself

What sixty steps looks like when somebody does all sixty.

Most of these are the unglamorous ones. Nobody sells a course on making sure a campaign parameter survives into a payment record — which is precisely why almost nobody has one.

The Onwards Labs book sales page — **The sales page.** Step 34 onward — written assuming the hero is all most people see, then rebuilt twice after the numbers disagreed with us.

An Onwards Labs one-click upsell page — **The post-purchase chain.** Steps 37–39 — card saved at first purchase, one-click upsells, consent matched to price. Eleven pages sit behind the checkout.

The Onwards Labs comparison pages — **The second front door.** Step 42 — twelve comparison pages and five long articles. Paid was never the only way in.

The Onwards Labs site — **The business behind it.** The funnel is not a marketing artefact bolted onto a company — it is the front of one.

229

ads written and graded for this one product

pages built — sales, checkout, delivery, intake

server endpoints — checkout, webhooks, tracking

190

scripts in the pipeline that runs it

183

commits across three complete rebuilds

failure modes documented along the way

What it actually cost

The media was A$11,770 — the cheapest part by an order of magnitude.

You cannot buy this by spending money on advertising — that is what we tried first. What it actually cost was years, two people who do this for a living, and three complete rebuilds, each wrong in a way only running it could reveal. The media is the only line anybody could simply buy.

A$48.72

to acquire a book buyer, measured Jan–Aug

A$31

back per buyer, same day, from the book and add-ons

~64%

of media returned before we bill a client anything

797,335

impressions bought and read back

WHAT IT PROVES

A stranger who has never heard of you can become a named person who knows how you think, from cold, for under fifty dollars — precisely what a referral hands you for free, and precisely what you cannot order more of. And that the steps are the mechanism: same account, same pixel, thirty times the rate.

WHAT IT DOES NOT

Ninety-nine people at five dollars is not ninety-nine engagements, and your business will not behave like ours. So we do not bring you an answer — we bring the way to find one: your own arithmetic, run in writing, before either of us commits. That is the Teardown.

A small machine you have counted honestly beats a big one you have not.

Every claim here was cheap for us to check, and is cheap for you to doubt. The next machine gets built on your business.

Send your numbers — free → Book a call How the engagement works