I spent $40,000 marketing my own creative work and made zero sales.

The receipt

My marketing worked. My shop was shut.

Here is what I paid for, in full, with my own money, to build an audience for a music and animation project. Most of it went to contractors running paid ads, email marketing and paid outreach. The one campaign that pulled properly was the one I built and ran myself.

An 8% click-through rate is a good number. Most advertisers would be pleased with it, and that one was mine: my creative, my targeting, my management. So I know the reach was not the problem. Thousands of people wanted to look at what I had made. What no click-through rate can tell you is whether a single one of them wanted to buy anything, and there was nothing properly for sale at the other end.

I built the garden. No butterflies came. It took me the better part of a year before I could say that number out loud without flinching.

Attention is not income. I had five million impressions, eleven thousand subscribers and no business. The mistake was not the contractors, and it was not the channels, because at their best they worked. It was that nobody, including me, checked whether one real person would pay for the thing before I paid to show it to a hundred thousand strangers.

I am also going to be honest about the limit of my own evidence, because it matters if you are deciding whether to trust me. I can prove the reach worked and I can prove nothing sold. What I never did was try to sell it by hand to ten people who already liked my work. So I cannot cleanly separate a wrong audience from a wrong offer. I can only tell you the money is gone, and that the test I skipped costs about $300.

The difference

Recording is not reading.

How it works

Three steps, no surprises.

About

I am one person, and I have made your expensive mistake already.

USC Leventhal School of Accounting.

I graduated from USC's Leventhal School of Accounting and trained at a Big 4 firm in tax, where I learned how financial reporting and analysis work at scale. Today I handle the monthly accounting close for the United States arm of an international e-commerce brand. That is the technical half.

The other half is that I built a creative business of my own. An original anime music project, with hired musicians, hired artists, a Shopify store, a visual novel, and revenue arriving from YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music on three different schedules. I funded it myself over several years and with significant resources.

I hired contractors to run the marketing, partly because I did not want to be the face of it. That is the part that took me a long time to admit. I made the creative and handed the ads, the email and the outreach to other people. The single best-performing campaign in the whole $40,000 was one of the few I kept and ran myself, which tells you something about what I was actually paying for. Five million impressions later I had an audience and no business, and the numbers I was proudest of were the ones that meant the least.

I say all of this calmly now, which is a thing worth explaining. It was not calm for a long time. Being able to state the number without defending it is the result of a lot of reflection, and it is the reason I am useful to you: your books are going to contain something you are embarrassed about, and I am not going to react to it. I have already said mine out loud, in public, with the figure attached.

So I am not selling you the idea that I am cleverer than your last accountant. Most accountants are perfectly competent. I am selling you the specific thing I learned by losing my own money: the difference between attention and demand, and how to tell which one your numbers are showing you.

Pricing

Priced so the first step is easy to say yes to.

Everything starts with a free call. The One Buyer Test is credited against anything you buy afterwards.

Currently onboarding founding clients, so availability is limited and the prices above are the ones I will honour for the first year.

Let's talk

Book a free 15 minute call.

No spreadsheets, no logins, no judgment. A conversation about where your money stands and whether working together makes sense. If it does not, I will say so.

Available Monday to Saturday, 3:00 PM to 11:00 PM Pacific.

Or, if you would rather just hear me talk for 49 minutes first, the podcast is here.