Bootstrapping Using Facebook Ads to $5M: Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a rolling program?

Britt Baker: People can join anytime. We took on a handful of people in March from another Facebook post. Then we really decided to take more people in April which is when we started advertising.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of advertising did you do?

Britt Baker: We advertised on Facebook and Instagram.

Sramana Mitra: Give our audience a primer on how you advertised on Facebook and Instagram.

Britt Baker: We got lucky. We came up with this idea for an ad which was a picture of a woman in a bathtub. It had a single line on it, “Taking care of your finances feels like self-care.” It struck a chord with people. Just for context, this was the start of COVID. People are locked down. People are paying attention to their finances.

We created one ad with one line and it just worked. We sent people to a webinar where we talked about how to treat your finances like self-care. We taught them about values-based budgeting. Then we invited people to join The Million Dollar Year at the end of the webinar.

Sramana Mitra: What was the targeting?

Britt Baker: The business is women-focused. Beyond that, we didn’t do much drilling down at the beginning. We may have targeted the age – 25 to 60.

Laurie-Anne King: We tested a lot of interest-based targeting. It was really interesting to realize that our customers were not the ones who like the pages of financial journals. Our customers weren’t learning about this area. If anything, they have an avoidance pattern of money. We found that our customers were women who were interested in personal development and growth.

We’re talking to a very broad group of women. The original version of Dow Janes started in Brit’s living room. These are women in their 30s. That is what we had in mind as the customer. Then once we started advertising broadly, we realized that we were attracting a really wide age range. The market was showing us who our customers were over time.

Sramana Mitra: Was it all North America?

Britt Baker: The majority is the US. The things that we teach are universal. We do have members from Canada, Australia, and UK.

Sramana Mitra: How did this all develop? How did the numbers pick up? What were the strategic moves that you made that gave you further leverage?

Laurie-Anne King: I’ll say we only had one strategic move. That was to stay very focused. We had one customer acquisition channel. That was Facebook ads. We had one conversion funnel. That was our webinar. We just stayed focused on that and getting as good as we could in acquiring customers that way and improving our conversion rates. We saw success relatively quickly. We started acquiring customers profitably in April. Then we started to scale our advertising spend. In that type of customer acquisition channel, the more money you spend, the more customers you acquire.

Sramana Mitra: It’s very good unit economics.

Laurie-Anne King: When we first started, we were acquiring customers for $500. We’d spend $500 and collect $1,500. We’ve bootstrapped this. The only money we had put in was that first thousand dollars. We were just reinvesting the profits we had made. We finished the first year in business with about 800 customers.

Sramana Mitra: So you were a bit short of a million dollars the first year.

Britt Baker: We have a payment plan and there are refunds. We ended up doing $600,000 in our first year.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the second year of growth was significant.

Britt Baker: It was.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Facebook Ads to $5M: Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker
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