Meet Robin, who scaled repeatedly to 8-figures. He’s now condensed his learnings into a system anyone can use.

Isaac

Your BOTS system is a game changer. Tell me how it all started.

Robin

There were four years of building my agency, trying to fix the problem of why most businesses can’t scale their eCom businesses using digital marketing. We analysed over 100 different business cases.

One day, we finally got it. We stumbled upon a wave. It was based on something business owners and entrepreneurs have known about for decades. It’s called Bottleneck Thinking.

We repurposed this Bottleneck Thinking philosophy for performance marketing. Once you saw the formula it was obvious after many years of failing we’d found the solution to massive predictable scaling.

Anyway, we were blown away by the results we were suddenly able to achieve. No one had seen this predictability in generating huge growth before.

Isaac

So what exactly is Bottleneck Thinking?

Robin

It’s simple. You analyse problems as systems. For example; you have a product which consists of three different parts. If you have only two out of three parts then you cannot produce a single product. If you lack one step, you have an incomplete system.

We took this approach and thought ‘what parts does an ad consist of’, or ‘what parts are needed to create the landing page’, or ‘what parts are needed to create a funnel or a marketing campaign’. As a result, we came up with a set of deep performance marketing analytics. We finally understood the system.

We call this the BOTS System.

Isaac

But why is this actually so groundbreaking?

Robin

Apart from the fact this is an eCom marketing system that consistently generates results, there are a few distinct features that set it apart from how the majority of entrepreneurs view their marketing.

Mainly, the innovation here is twofold:

1. Most people don’t treat their marketing funnels as complete systems and simply try to improve one area like website conversion rate or content click-through rate.
2. Never before has there been a reputable guideline for how each element of this system should perform. Like, actual metric benchmarks for every core pillar that constitutes a funnel.

Isaac

What scale can this system help small businesses achieve?

Robin

When we’re talking about scaling, we mean being able to profitably spend $1000’s a day on ads. that’s millions a year in revenue. $10 to $20 a day, that’s not scaling. Scaling is what you do after creating a super close connection to your market to build a product which is tailored to the market and channel.

Isaac

That’s a big claim! So you have this amazing formula for success. What came next?

Robin

We went to find a perfect eCom startup to fit the strategy.

We partnered up with a young startup which sold pillows. We created ads, landing pages etc. and we were able to scale this business from zero to over 10 million in revenue. 100,000 customers in Germany. Making it a huge market leading manufacturer. This confirmed we actually had something that reliably works.

Isaac

Tell me more about the details of how the BOTS system works.

Robin

There are six areas in the paid media system: product, brand, content, supply, traffic conversion, and CLTV. The better these six parts are built the more budget you can profitably spend on ads.

So we built a super in-depth KPI master checklist which you use to measure a marketing system. This identifies where the bottleneck is in the business.

If you have great copy and a visual, but you’re not hitting the right target audience, then audience targeting is your bottleneck. Or if all the elements which make up the ad are amazing, but after people click on the ad they’re totally confused by a website, then the website is your bottleneck.

Isaac

From what I understand there’s a lot more to BOTS than this master KPI checklist?

Robin

We’ve also built the Perfect Product Checklist. It measures the attributes the product needs to bring to the table to be well tailored to digital marketing channels.

Recently we’ve produced a Perfect Brand Checklist for optimising a product’s brand so they’re suitable for massive scale in the digital marketing space.

Finally, we’ve founded BOTS university; an educational resource and startup accelerator focused on teaching the world about the concepts which will empower entrepreneurs to improve their lives.

Isaac

So when did the importance of this system become obvious?

Robin

We had a company from the German Shark Tank TV show which collected $100,000’s in funding. They were super successful on Amazon. They were expecting to be a huge success with social ads. They had an amazing product! They had over 5000 5-star ratings on Amazon. They were ‘Amazon’s Choice’. Just growing like crazy.

But the business model was not suited for Performance Marketing. It worked well on Amazon which relies mainly on free organic traffic i.e no cost to generate a sale. But their customers weren’t making repeat purchases. It was impossible to make a healthy margin on the first sale once the cost of advertising was factored in. They had only had a single product and it lacked CLTV (customer lifetime value). This made performance marketing unviable.

They had an amazing product, an amazing brand, content, a well-targeted audience, and conversion rates of 17% on our landing pages. But they only had $31.50 CLTV. That’s a clear CLTV bottleneck. They were never able to scale with ads.

Instead, imagine they had 10 more products and a subscription model afterwards. The acquisition costs would stay the same but the profitability would be way higher.

Isaac

Okay, but what size CLTV do we need to scale?

Robin

By analysing hundreds of businesses, we figured out the ones that failed miserably at scaling had CLTV below $150.

If you can’t monetize the customer enough, then you can’t be profitable with these channels.

Isaac

Tell me about BOTS university

Robin

At BOTS University we teach a foundational understanding of our entire system. This will enable entrepreneurs to no longer build highly imbalanced businesses.

Once you have this foundation of digital entrepreneurship, a great product and high CLTV, every marketing channel will work for you.

I like to call it a framework for digital entrepreneurship. We haven’t seen that yet. We only see fragmented solutions which are sold by weird coaches. They say, ‘this is going to solve the problem, this magic copywriting strategy’. No, it won’t, unless you have the proper bottleneck foundation set in place.

Once you have this foundation you can just be creative and focus on whatever marketing strategies you’re passionate about.

We all also teach about being an enlightened entrepreneur, and collective entrepreneurship.

The university also provides an environment where new businesses with the common objective of creating a sustainable future, bringing high-consciousness products into the everyday life of people, can be formed and support each other.

At BOTS University I’m creating a community of entrepreneurs, founders, and creators to build purpose-driven businesses together. We can achieve more as a collective if we all have the same goal.

Isaac

Let’s switch gears a little here. You’ve spoken to me before about how ‘Enlightened Entrepreneurship’ is integral to your mission. Tell me a little bit more about being an enlightened entrepreneur.

Robin

We have a certain level of development in society. It’s all about better, bigger, faster.

To begin with, I too was caught up with chasing success and recognition. But, I started out because I love performance marketing and I’m passionate about building a business which runs on autopilot.

I’m not talking about a 3k a month passive income or a business where you have to write 10 new blog posts a day to stay relevant.

We built a sleep company as an automated performance marketing-driven business to a million a month in revenue. We had everyone working ‘on’ the business and not ‘in’ the business.

However, I noticed even as more success came, I still didn’t care about pillows. I don’t have a personal story that deeply relates to sleep. I’m actually passionate about creating my business that helps hundreds of thousands of customers through personal development. Focusing on pillows for 10 hours a day wasn’t these values.

It’s this insight that lead me to start teaching how you can work ‘on’ a business, building it for your self-fulfillment, not just to make money. This focus on fulfilment is the basis of enlightened entrepreneurship.

Fulfilment comes from loving the tasks, our team and our customers. To love these things you need to be driven by a personal mission. We teach how to find your personal mission.

Business is just the scaling tool to make your personal mission happen. If you don’t have a personal mission yet then what are you doing in business? Go figure out your personal mission, your purpose and then scale so you can help more people through your mission. That’s what we call life purpose.

If you think about purpose or mission first, you’ll understand why the biggest, most impactful brands today are religions. They’re making millions. They’ve survived for over 2000 years. That’s because vision to change something you care deeply about is the right foundation for business success.

For example, I knew a Berlin founder. When he first founded his business he immediately attracted 10 people. There was a volunteer purpose-driven energy in this business. Most of them worked for him for free because they were just passionate about helping. Everything was great! Until he raised money. His investors gave him deadlines and pressing new targets which didn’t fit this purpose-driven movement he had before. Within a few months, his employees didn’t want to continue working with it. He ended up burning out and had to leave. It still hasn’t grown and most likely never will.

I want more people to know about and fall in love with this philosophy of purpose-driven entrepreneurship, or as we call it ‘collective entrepreneurship’. I’m passionate about creating sustainable businesses that provide value, solve problems and create a valuable future for the world.

So, I’m passionate about helping business owners realise work fulfilment with performance marketing. This is a major element of what we teach at BOTS university.

If people like this and want to learn for themselves, we have over 100 hours of deep content in our BOTS University where people can study this.

https://www.bots.ventures/ (it’s currently in German, but Robin is always up for a 1–1 chat for any English speakers)

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