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It doesn't matter how good your marketing is if you've build a suboptimal container for money.
Think of a container as the vessel that holds the energetic exchange between you and your customer. A book is a container, but so is a subscription, a course, a coaching offer, a mastermind, a live event, or just about any product or service you can imagine.
The container determines the upper limit of how much money can flow to you, no matter how brilliant your marketing.
For instance, the most any single person will pay for a paperback book is probably around $30.
However, you could sell the same person a special edition for $80, or a book box for $200, or the first edition of a rare book for even more. Each of those is a different container for money, even though they might have the same words inside.
A book is only one type of money container, and one with a relatively low price ceiling. If you put that same information in a course, you could sell it for $1,000, or even $10,000 if you build a coaching program around it, or $100,000 if you find the right company to license and implement it.
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Ideally, the container for money matches the size of your intended audience. Say you have a book priced at $20, and you have 100 people on your mailing list. If every single one of them bought your book (a conversion rate that doesn’t exist in the real world, but let’s be generous), you’d make $2,000.
Or what about a subscription model with the same 100 people at $5 a month. A realistic conversion rate (let’s say 10%, which is actually optimistic) gives you 10 subscribers.
That’s $50 a month, or $600 a year.
If we stretch the math to an unattainable 20% conversion rate, you’re looking at $1,200 annually. Even if you had a 100% conversion rate, that's still only $6,000 a year.
Do you see how the container for your money limits how much money can fit inside it based on your intended audience size?
If your goal is to grow your audience exponentially, then we might be having a different conversation...
...but let's be fair, you'll do just about anything to avoid marketing, right? So, the odds that you're going to do enough of it to turn that 100 people into 100,000 without it feeling like you're pulling teeth is minimal.
If you don't feel that way, then you have a puncher's chance at making the math math, even on a $20 product.
That’s not to say you can’t make a decent living from 100 subscribers. I sat down with a construction company CEO earlier this year who managed eight contracts worth $500 million combined. They don't need 10,000 people on their list to make a fortune. In fact, they could probably go their whole career never getting one more client.
This is why it's always a good idea to work down the value ladder, if you can, from most expensive product (like $200/hr. consulting) to least expensive product (like a $9.99 ebook), and not the other way around.
I often tell people to try going fractional at their current job instead of outright quitting, making your old boss your first client. Sometimes, you can even renegotiate your whole position to give you exactly what you need without quitting at all.
Most creators, especially authors, do the opposite. They start with a $20 product, and then complain they can't make any money...
...but of course you can't, because the math doesn't math.
If the same eight people bought all the products we mentioned above, a couple would be thriving businesses while the others would barely be hobbies.
The main difference lies not in the quality of the work, but in the container they built to collect money.
On top of that, the container also determines the difficulty level. Even though my books and tarot deck sell for roughly the same price, it's 100x easier to sell somebody a tarot deck than it has ever been to sell my books.
The business should be built around the container, if possible, and matched to the strengths of the owner.
I have watched people build 100,000-person email lists to sell a $10 product successfully, and others with 1,000 people on their list make millions from a few of the right clients.
Their success depended on designing containers that fit the natural rhythms of their business.
If you’re not making the money you want, there are a few solutions:
