Thread by @harryswalesbiz

I sold $50k worth of whitening pens in the first month with the ugliest funnel ever using only tiktok and snap ads. Then it all came crashing down. Here’s why 👇🏼

A little background: one of my old business partners, Jay, built the sales funnel and I ran the ads.

I know some of you have said tiktok ads are like the Wild West.

Well, imagine what they were like over a year ago when they were only open to a couple agencies.

We realized with whacky targeting and a pretty crappy advertising system overall, our best bet was to sell a cheap product that had high utility, and that had a huge TAM.

After landing on teeth whitening, we found a supplier and bought several samples.

Eventually we ended up switching suppliers and going with a fully white labeled product with our own labels and packaging but in the beginning it was pretty basic dropshipping after we confirmed that the whitening formula actually worked and didn't melt our teeth.

The website wasn’t a traditional Shopify site.

We used gempages to build a sales funnel, with a ton of images, reviews, and some simple direct response copy.

And it clicked.

We scaled it and did over $50k per month profitably for like 6 months.

We didn't make a crazy amount of money, and our store metrics weren't actually great (low AOV and CVR), but because tiktok ads traffic was SOOOO cheap we did alright and this was a very low maintenance project after grinding through the first few months.

Then we got to the point where we had to decide whether we want to keep going at this pace, or rebrand and try to turn it into something big.

We decided to go big, rebrand and rebuild the site.

Jay built a beautiful Shopify site, with an “AI chat support” feature (typeform integration that answered 99% of support questions or requests automatically).

It was sick.

But it didn’t convert.

We changed the copy, tested new images, even messed with pricing.

But it never clicked.

We switched back to the old funnel and it worked again, but at this point I was growing my agency and Jay was pursuing other opportunities so we ended up shutting it down.

A lot of people would say the funnel that worked looked spammy or cheap looking.

I’d say it wasn’t pretty, but it gave a simple explanation and visualization of what the product does and why people should buy it.

Pretty graphics don’t sell things.

Good offers, copy, and UPS’ sell.

Simple sells.

So next time you're about to pay a web designer a ton of money to make the prettiest site ever, maybe you should reconsider.

Design is important, but there are much more important things in online business.

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