Done for you — The Sixty Steps

WHAT WE DO FOR PEOPLE WHO WOULD RATHER NOT

A stream of people who already know how you think, arriving on a schedule, at a price you agreed before we started.

That is what a referral does, and it is the only thing that has ever reliably worked for people who sell what you sell. We build the whole machine and you pay for the people it delivers. Forty-one of the sixty are a machine’s job, twelve need your judgement rather than your time, and the remaining seven are ours to do by hand. The year it takes to find out which is which is a year of the work you are actually good at — so we do it, on your business, and carry the risk of it while we do.

THE WHOLE DEAL, IN ONE LINE

Nothing to build it. You pay per named buyer, at a price locked before we start. If our cost to acquire them rises, that is ours to absorb, not yours.

No setup fee, no retainer, no percentage of ad spend, and no minimum spend of your money running in the background. We do not bill for effort, because effort is our problem. You prepay a refundable balance and we draw it down only as leads actually land. That risk transfer is the product — everything else is how it gets delivered.

EVERYTHING THAT IS OURS TO LOSE

Count what you are risking. We will wait.

WHAT YOU PUT AT RISK

A refundable balance, drawn down only as named buyers land.

That is the list.

WHAT WE PUT AT RISK

The build — book, funnel, site, instrumentation — at our cost, with no fee attached to it whether it works or not.
The media, on our ad accounts, our money.
The price per name, fixed before we start, so every dollar acquisition rises after that is ours.
The months between the start and the first name, unbilled.
The book, the site and every name we ever produce for you — yours to walk away with, month to month, no term, no exit fee.

We have written that out in full because it is the offer. Read it back and notice what is missing: there is no month in which you are paying us and nothing has arrived. That month is the one every retainer is built out of, and it is the reason this is priced the way it is.

If we are wrong about your arithmetic, we find out on our money, in our ad account, before you have paid for a single name. That is not generosity. It is the only structure that lets us mean the price we quoted.

WHAT WE DO

Write your book, build the funnel, and run the media on our own ad accounts. All sixty steps, on your business — you do the twelve that need you.

WHAT A LEAD IS

A named person who paid for your book and is on your list. Not an impression, not a click, and emphatically not a reply to would you like to see a case study.

WHO VERIFIES IT

Everything up to the handoff happens in our systems, so a lead is countable in a payment ledger. Nothing to adjudicate, and no definition for you to lose an argument about.

WHAT YOU KEEP

The book, the site and every lead — including if you leave. Month to month, no minimum term, no exit fee.

WHAT SETS THE PRICE

How many people could ever buy from you. A wide market and a single vertical are different machines, not one machine at two prices, so there is no rate card.

WHAT YOU DO

The twelve steps no software will do — the judgement only somebody who knows your field can bring. We bring the machine, you bring that. Neither half works alone.

IT STARTS WITH YOUR ARITHMETIC, NOT A CALL

We work out whether it can pay before either of us commits.

A written verdict inside five business days: yes at a named volume and price, or no with the numbers that make it a no. An honest no is the deliverable, not a failed sale. It is real work, so it is not free — and if it is a yes, what you paid comes off the engagement in full. We offer it to people who have read the book, because we would rather you understood the method before we ran your numbers.

5 days

TO A WRITTEN VERDICT

THE THREE THINGS PEOPLE ASK NEXT

“How would I even know if you were doing it properly?”

You already have the whole method for five dollars. If you hire us and we get it wrong, you know exactly what we were supposed to do, step by step, with the failure mode written next to each one. That is the opposite of every agency relationship you have been in, and it is why we published it.

“What happens if we stop, or if you do?”

You keep the manuscript files, the cover, the site, the domain, the list and the ad creative, in the formats they were built in, handed over inside ten business days of you asking. Not a login to something of ours. We hold the ad accounts and the machine that runs them; you hold everything with your name on it, and it is in the agreement before you commit to anything.

“And if I go ahead — was the verdict money wasted?”

No. It comes off the engagement in full, which means the diagnosis was free and you got a written second opinion on your own arithmetic for nothing. If it is a no, you keep the arithmetic and we keep nothing.

There is one way in, and it starts at five dollars.

We do not run this from a call — you will have noticed we said nothing to schedule twice already, and we meant it. Everybody who ends up working with us reads the book first, because we would rather you understood what you were handing over before you handed it over, and because a good share of readers discover at step 3 that they should not hand it over at all.

When you have read it, we will offer to run your numbers properly: five business days, a written yes at a named volume and price, or a no with the arithmetic that makes it a no. It is real work so it is not free, and if it is a yes what you paid comes off the engagement in full. We only offer it to people who have read the book, which is most of the reason the book costs five dollars and not nothing.

Read the method — $5 USD

A question the page did not answer? ryan@onwardsanalytics.com.au

WHY WE CAN AFFORD TO CARRY THAT RISK

Because the machine is running underneath this page, and we have counted every dollar of it.

Because that is what the challenge above returned, and we counted every dollar of it. Labs was not the only thing we put through the account either — between January and September seven of our own products ran through it, across 46 campaigns and 2,128 ads, every dollar ours. Six did not work. One did.

4 CAMPAIGNS · 1,411 CLICKS

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

BUYERS · 7.0%

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%

The comparison that holds is the first two rows.

Both rows are books, sold out of the same account on the same pixel. Sixteen campaigns sold seven copies between them; the four with all sixty steps behind them sold ninety-nine. Thirty times the rate. The three rows add up to the whole account — 46 campaigns, 24,221 clicks, 108 buyers — so nothing has been left out to make the gap look bigger.

So a book is not the mechanism. Publishing one and hoping is how you get the middle row.

And three of those other rows are not ours to call failures.

One product runs its own funnel and may never have reported to this pixel. One converts inside a free chat rather than at a checkout. Several campaigns were traffic or lead buys never optimised for a purchase at all.

Reading those as sales failures would be judging a test against an intent it never had — step 58, and we are not going to break our own rule to make a chart look better.

AND WHAT THAT ACTUALLY COST

The media was eleven thousand dollars. That was the cheapest part of it by an order of magnitude.

A$11,770

TOTAL MEDIA, EIGHT MONTHS

The only line anybody could copy

You cannot buy this by spending money on advertising — that is what we tried first, and it is most of the list further up. What it actually cost was years, two people who do this for a living rather than as a side project, and three complete rebuilds of the machine underneath, each one because the build before it was wrong in a way only running it could reveal.

2,128

ads written, scored, launched and graded

797,335

impressions bought and read back

190

scripts in the pipeline that runs it

246

commits across three rebuilds of the funnel

AND THE FRONT END PAYS FOR ITSELF

Measured on our own funnel, 1 January to 31 August: A$48.72 to acquire a book buyer, A$31 back per buyer from the book and its two add-ons — that is the four campaigns above, the same ones that produced the ninety-nine. Roughly two-thirds of the media returns before we bill a client anything, which is steps 3 and 50 and the reason the offer can exist at all.

~64%

OF MEDIA RETURNED
BEFORE WE BILL

One thing that number is not: the price. What we spend to acquire a name is our arithmetic, not yours. Yours is what a client is worth to you over their whole life with you, multiplied by how often a book buyer becomes one — and for the people this works for, those two numbers are not close. A firm that has published its own costs is not the same as a firm that prices off them.

That is what lets us quote a fixed price per lead and mean it.

We already know what acquisition cost does when it moves, because we have paid to find out repeatedly. You do not repeat the years. You get the machine on day one and you pay for what it delivers.

The question we would ask, sitting in your chair.

You have proved you can sell a five-dollar book to people like me. You have not proved that a person who buys my book becomes a client of mine.

That is correct, and it is the right question. We can show you the front half in full — that a book at the end of sixty steps sells thirty times better than our earlier ones did without them, out of the same account, on the same pixel. We cannot yet show you the back half on somebody else’s business, because we have been the somebody else. The first cohort is the first cohort, and pretending otherwise would be the exact behaviour this page spends eight thousand words objecting to.

What we can do is refuse to guess. Step 3 of the book computes what a book buyer is worth to you, from your own figures, before anybody has spent a dollar. The verdict runs it properly and returns a yes at a named volume and price, or a no with the arithmetic attached. If the number does not carry, you will hear it from us in five days — and we would rather lose the engagement there than find out together in the ninth month, on your list, with your name on the book.

SAID PLAINLY, BEFORE YOU ASK

The names further up are twenty years of analytics work, and they are the reason we can read a number properly. They are not evidence that we can fill your pipeline, and we are not going to pretend otherwise — nobody should buy this because BHP appears on a page. What is evidence is the funnel you are standing in, with every figure from it published, including the sixteen places it went wrong. A small machine you have counted honestly beats a big one you have not, and every claim here was cheap for us to check and is cheap for you to doubt.

WHETHER THIS IS YOU — AND MOSTLY IT IS NOT

The arithmetic decides this, and it is not deal size.

Fit is one number: what a customer is worth to you over their lifetime, multiplied by how often a book buyer becomes one. Lifetime value, never the size of a single deal. A firm selling million-dollar engagements that closes one a year from a huge pool is a worse fit than a smaller service that closes often and repeats.

This is you if

✓You sell work that takes a conversation to explain, and that conversation is the bottleneck

✓Your best clients came from referrals, and you cannot schedule a referral

✓First contact to signature is measured in months or years

✓Customers are worth a lot over time, and enough of them repeat

✓You are the expertise, and it cannot be delegated to a junior or a template

This is not you if

✕What you sell can be understood in a headline and bought the same day

✕One enormous deal a year from a huge pool — the arithmetic will not carry a lead price

✕You want it taken away entirely. Twelve of the sixty need your judgement

✕You would rather not know the numbers. Everything here grades against settled cash

✕You need leads this month. The machine takes time to build before it delivers any

THE ONLY SUM THAT DECIDES IT

Take what a client is worth to you over their whole life with you. Multiply it by the share of book buyers who become one. That is what a name is worth to you — and it is the number we quote against, never the size of a single deal and never our own costs.

If a client is worth thirty thousand to you over three years and one book buyer in two hundred becomes one, a name is worth a hundred and fifty dollars to you. If it is one in a thousand, it is thirty. Those are different machines carrying different prices, which is why there is no rate card and why we will not guess in front of you.

Run it yourself before you speak to us. It is steps 2 and 3 of the book, and the model is the forty-seven-dollar add-on if you would rather not build it.

Most businesses do not clear that sum, and we would rather tell you inside five days than take your money and find out together in five months.

THE CASE STUDY — WE SET OURSELVES THE PROBLEM FIRST

The Onwards Labs challenge: could the sixty steps work on us?

We had the problem, so we took one of our own businesses and gave it the whole method — no shortcuts, no borrowed template, every asset built from nothing. “We built a funnel” is exactly the kind of claim that costs nothing to make, so here is what it actually meant. All of it is live at onwardslabs.io, and you are welcome to go and pull any of it apart.

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

An Onwards Labs one-click upsell page — **The post-purchase chain.** Steps 37 to 39 — card saved at first purchase, one-click upsells off session, 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, because paid was never the only way in and should not be the only one you build.

The Onwards Labs site — **And the business behind it.** The funnel is not a marketing artefact bolted onto a company. It is the front of one, which is the only configuration where the arithmetic works.

EVERY ASSET IT TOOK, COUNTED

This is what sixty steps looks like when somebody actually 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.

1book, held to a scored floor before it was allowed to ship

40pages built — sales, checkout, delivery, thank-you, intake

9post-purchase pages: order bumps, one-click upsells, downsells

18server endpoints — checkout, webhook, token-gated delivery, tracking

7products behind the paywall, each a real file rather than a placeholder

15comparison pages and long articles, as the second front door

229ads written and graded for this one product, out of 2,128 account-wide

190scripts in the shared pipeline that generates, scores and grades them

183commits on this one funnel, across three complete rebuilds of it

57failure modes documented along the way — one per step

Three rebuilds, not one. The first two were wrong in ways only running them could reveal, and the third still carried bugs the first two had taught us to look for. That is the honest shape of this work, and it is the reason the engagement is priced the way it is.

People who already know how you think, arriving on a schedule.