SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Charlie Houpert: How To Make $12,500 While on Vacation
30 Oct 2015
Chapter 1: What is the main concept behind Charisma on Command?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. A lot of people loved yesterday's episode. It was with Armando Biondi, who broke down how he's built literally on top of Facebook and gotten a customer ARPU of a thousand bucks, customer lifetime value of a thousand dollars, and a $1.8 million run rate. Good morning, good morning, good morning, top tribe. You are going to love my guest today.
His name is Charlie Hoopert. He is a good friend of earlier guest, Ben Altman. He loves playing guitar, but most importantly, the dude is founder of, actually co-founder of Charisma on Command. Charlie, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, I'm psyched, man. Your energy is out of control. It's drugs, it's drugs.
I swear, I'm just kidding.
Dude, I'm stoked and here's why. You and Ben are like a great team. I follow Ben, so I see all these crazy pictures of you guys, these gorgeous women and great looking dudes in Brazil over the world. I'm like, these guys know how to just attract the top 1%. How do you do it?
So, yeah. So, I mean, the business, the idea is that it started for me being very, very shy. I was voted most likely to break out of the show.
I don't believe you. I feel like I feel like I feel like that's one of those things that people like you, you make up because it makes the story better.
Yeah. When I was little, I was that. No. So I was I was. really, really, really shy. And I think that's, you know, when you're not good at something and it's a pain point, you are so much more motivated to make it happen. So it started with books and then kind of, you know, studying abroad, getting to travel, learning a different language is where I started stepping outside of myself a lot more.
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Chapter 2: How did Charlie Houpert overcome his shyness?
Sure. So it started with, you know, the book was created in much the same way where I read this book called Running Lean. And in tandem with the Lean Startup, it comes from this idea that I had at the time, I was writing stuff that I thought was interesting to me, which is great and it's fun. But readers were maybe engaged, maybe not.
And instead of going to the emails that I was receiving and seeing what are the questions I'm getting, which by the way were, how do I make a great first impression every time? I feel like if I'm 20 minutes into a conversation, I'm excellent. People will like me. But I struggle with those first 20 minutes. How do I be more confident in that position?
I was just writing about other stuff because that was what interested me at the time. So going back to that ā I came up with a survey for a bunch of people, and we basically said, if you could, on a scale of 1 to 10, take any area in your charismatic life to a 10, what would it be? And we collected responses, and there were six that stood out.
Hold on, hold on. I want to get into detail here. What tool did you use to do the survey?
So at the time, we had an email list of probably 3,000 or 4,000 people, and we used SurveyMonkey. Okay, you used SurveyMonkey? It started with just actually a Gmail email saying, okay, what kind of topics do you want? And that gave me the list of things to put into SurveyMonkey so that people could radio click.
So when you told people, tell me where you want to scale of 1 to 10, increase your charismatic life, did you have four or five pre-written responses, or was it just a blank field?
So we started with just the types of questions I was getting is whatā gave us the stuff to input first. So we probably had 10 or 12 that they could do, and then an other category. And of those, six surged to the top.
Okay, and I don't wanna get into list building. I imagine you guys probably got your three to 4,000 just from the book launch and things like that. Is that accurate?
Yeah, and having a website for a while that had a crappy email capture. It was nothing impressive.
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Chapter 3: What innovative tactics did Charlie use to pre-sell his course?
What's very well? Above what percent? So looking at the website, I think it's like 3% to cold traffic. It's between 2% and 3% to cold traffic. It's an $850 product, which is insane. These are not people that are on our email list. This is people that are clicking the sales page and buying it.
You're talking about charismaoncommand.com.
Yeah. So if you go there and you click products and there's a little dropdown, you click charisma university, you can crib our ad copy.
So wait, the charisma on command.com forward slash C hyphen university. This is the page that's converting 3%. Yeah.
And don't quote me on those numbers. I'll have to dive in. I'm so not good at analytics, but I believe it's between two and 3% of people who hit that page wind up buying.
And you said cold traffic. How are people finding this page? I know they're cold, but are you spending like ad dollars to drive cold traffic or JV partners or what's
So the truth is right now we are focused very much on building up our funnel. We want to have the autoresponder launching this program because most people that weren't there for the launch don't even know that it exists unless they've poked around on the website pretty thoroughly. So we are not really driving any traffic to the site. It's Reddit and SEO and other people share our stuff.
But down the line, we definitely want to do ads.
I love this. I have to ask you though. I go to charisma on command.com and I see you in a plaid shirt and Ben in a black shirt. And I go, you know, if I wanted someone to teach me charisma, I would much prefer to see a picture of these two dudes in power ranger suits in a bar.
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Chapter 4: How did Charlie gather feedback for his course creation?
So I use it to do gratitude exercises with friends. I use it to keep in touch with people. And we just have, you know, what was the greatest thing that happened to you yesterday? The kind of questions that make you think about the things that are good in your life and to improve.
I love that. Okay, yes or no, Charlie, you guys are building an empire. I want to know if you're doing it in a balanced, healthy way. Yes or no, do you get eight hours of sleep every night?
no i get nine or ten i love it i sleep a lot man i'm bad that's no that i hate i hate that you think that's bad i think there's like i really don't yeah i know it's i think it's awesome i think it's great okay and how old are you right now out of curiosity 27 okay take us back seven years this is number five if you wish your 20 year old self knew one thing what would it be
Yeah. So, I mean, aside from like, you know, pick Duke in the 2007 final four, great stuff. I would say it's bad, but like, well, it's not bad. I would say either drop out of school or start building your business while you have the protective cover of school and are not expected to be making any money.
And I have universities begging to sponsor this show. That's never going to happen anymore. Charlie, thank you very much.
If people want to follow your guys' journey online, where can they follow you? CharismaOnCommand.com. If you want, sign up for the email list. For me, email is best. Charlie at CharismaOnCommand.com.
Well, guys, there you have it. From Ed Sheeran, guitar, crazy Brazilian nights, a book launch, a pre-launch for a course, and $12,500 in pre-sales. Charlie, thank you for taking us to the top. Thanks, Nathan. All right, guys, coming up tomorrow as fall moves in here in the U.S., you're going to hear from Greg Rowlett.
He used a $1,400 magazine ad to drive $8,700 per month in new revenue, and he does it every single month.
The dude's a machine. Okay, Top Tribe, sponsors are wanting to pay me a lot of money to get on the show and I'm telling them all no because I don't want to waste your time. So help me out and go subscribe to the show on iTunes and then leave a rating and review.
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