What really happens when you spend thousands on ads, bring hundreds of people into a free challenge, and the results aren’t quite what you hoped for?
A few weeks ago I hosted the $1K Honey Flow Challenge, a four day live event designed to give a cold audience a real, hands on experience of the Honey Flow Method before I ever asked them to join the Blissful Biz Hive. It was the biggest event I’ve run in a while, and I want to walk you through exactly how it went. Not the highlight reel version. The real numbers, what worked better than I expected, what I’d change immediately, and the bigger business lessons this experiment brought up for me.
Why I Ran a Challenge Instead of Another Free Training
Since relaunching the Blissful Biz Hive in May, I’ve been running simple one hour free trainings to bring new people in, some promoted to my whole audience, some purely to cold traffic through ads. They work well and they’re easy for me to prepare at this point.
But I wanted to test something bigger. A more immersive event that would give people a real, hands on experience of the Honey Flow Method before I ever asked them to join. So I built four days of live training walking people through the same method my members work through inside the Hive: the Honey Flow model, creating a small digital offer, building your audience and email list, setting up your content engine, and finally how all of those pieces work together over the next twelve months.
Instead of running it as a normal webinar series, I hosted the whole thing inside a separate free Skool community I set up just for the event. The idea was to give people four days together instead of one hour, let them actually experience what it feels like to build something with me and with each other, and at the end, invite the people who wanted to keep going to join the Blissful Biz Hive.
The Real Numbers
Here’s what actually happened. 660 people registered for the challenge. I spent around three thousand dollars on ads to bring them in. And by the end, 20 of those people became new members inside the Blissful Biz Hive.
That’s roughly a 3% registration to member conversion rate, and once you factor in the ad spend, it cost me around $150 to acquire each new member.
My first reaction when I looked at that was that it was expensive, and that the challenge hadn’t given me three or four times the result of a simple free training despite being a lot more work. Running a four day live challenge, setting everything up, writing the posts and the emails, all of it, is a real undertaking. So my initial conclusion was that the simple free trainings had won.
What Actually Worked
When I looked more closely, that first reaction didn’t hold up.
Twenty new members is still the highest number I’ve ever brought into the Hive from a single event, and these were almost entirely new people. I didn’t run a big sales push to my full email list alongside the challenge, the sales emails only went to people who signed up for the challenge itself. So bringing 20 people who mostly didn’t know me before the challenge into a paid membership is a genuinely good result, even if a 3% conversion rate isn’t the number I’d celebrate on its own.
Almost every single one of those 20 people chose the $47 membership tier over the $7 tier, even though the cheaper option was right there. After spending four days with me, the people who decided to continue mostly wanted the full membership with the trainings, the weekly calls, and the bonuses. That’s one of the real advantages of a challenge, people get to see how you teach, hear you answer questions, and understand your approach in a way a one hour training simply can’t replicate.
The Skool community worked well too, once people actually got inside it. I sent the live Zoom links by email to everyone who registered, so joining Skool was never required to attend live. Live attendance stayed fairly low, somewhere between 20 and 40 people each day, which is normal for a cold audience brought in through ads but still on the lower end against 660 registrations. The people who did show up were engaged, asked great questions, and I started recognizing people and getting to know their businesses.
The replays only lived inside the free Skool group, so anyone who wanted to catch what they missed or be part of the ongoing conversation had to join there. 140 people did, out of 660. That’s fewer than I hoped for, but the people who joined were exactly the kind of engaged you want. And when I looked at how that specific group converted afterward, the rate was over 10%, far above the 3% overall.
The Practical Mistake I’d Fix
That gap between 660 registrations and 140 Skool members points to the biggest practical mistake in how I ran this.
The path someone had to travel to actually experience the challenge looked like this: see an ad, click through to a landing page, register with an email address, then go to their inbox, click another link, and take a second, separate step to join the free Skool community. Only then were they actually inside the room where the challenge was happening.
Looking back, that’s too many steps. Next time, I’d simplify it by having the ad link straight to the Skool community page and making joining that free group the registration itself, rather than a separate step after someone has already given their email address.
The Bigger Lesson: Why a $47 Membership Is a Tricky Number
There’s a second lesson underneath this one that I talk about often, and this challenge made it very concrete. If your business only has a low ticket offer, it’s hard to build something sustainable around it.
I spent around $150 in ads for every new member, and most of those people joined a $47 a month membership. That means I don’t recover the acquisition cost in the first month, or even the second. If members stay for four, five, or six months, the numbers start looking very different, which is exactly why retention and lifetime value matter so much with a membership. Some people cancel after one month, some stay for years, but $150 to acquire a $47 a month member isn’t a result I’m thrilled with on its own.
It’s easy to get excited about a membership and think that a few hundred members automatically means a great recurring revenue business. It can be, but you have to get those members from somewhere, and unless you’re growing entirely organically, which is slow, acquiring them costs money. This is exactly why I don’t think your whole business should rest on a $27 mini course or a $47 membership. You need a higher priced offer in the mix too, something like a signature program, coaching, or a private package. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the $47 tier itself. I like having an affordable entry point where someone can start working with me without investing thousands of dollars. It just means the membership has a specific role to play, not the whole job.
What I’m Testing Next
Instead of primarily selling the Hive as a monthly membership going forward, I want to test selling a yearly plan around live events, at a steep discount, available only for a limited time. Spending $150 to acquire a member looks very different when more of that revenue comes in upfront rather than trickling in over several months of retention risk.
I think this works best specifically around a live event, where people have spent real time with me and already trust what’s inside on a deeper level. It would be a much bigger ask for someone landing on the Hive’s about page for the first time with no context. I don’t have enough data yet to know exactly what this will do to the numbers, since the Hive has only been running in its current form for a few months, but that’s exactly the kind of thing worth testing rather than assuming.
Should You Run a Challenge?
If you’re wondering whether a challenge makes sense for your own business, I don’t think there’s a flat yes or no answer, but there are two situations where I think it earns its cost.
The first is if you want to build real trust with your audience and actually get to know them better. Three, four, or five days together creates a different kind of relationship than 60 minutes alone, and if what you’re selling needs more time before someone is ready to invest, or if you’re selling something at a higher price point, the economics of a challenge make a lot more sense. If I’d spent $3,000 on ads and sold ten $1,000 programs instead of twenty $47 memberships, this would be a very different conversation about profitability.
The second is more specific, and it’s come up a lot in the private work I’m doing right now helping yoga teachers launch their own Skool communities. If your plan is to build a Skool community, I’d recommend starting with a free challenge rather than launching a paid group cold with no members in it, or opening a free community with no end date that just stays free indefinitely. Invite your audience to join your Skool group for free, host the challenge inside it, and make joining that group the registration itself. You start with people already inside your community before you ever ask for payment, and it’s a lot easier to get people to join a community that already has some members and energy in it than one that’s completely empty. Once the challenge ends, you turn the community into a paid one, at whatever price makes sense for you.
Where This Leaves Me
This wasn’t the huge success I secretly hoped it would be, and it wasn’t a failure either. Twenty new members from an almost entirely cold audience is a genuinely good result, and I loved spending four days with people and getting to know them. If I ran another challenge, and I probably will at some point next year, I’d fix the registration process, keep the pop up Skool community because it was genuinely fun to teach in, and test a yearly plan at a higher price point instead of only offering the monthly option.
If you’re thinking about running your own challenge, I put together a full training inside the Blissful Biz Hive that walks through exactly how I structured mine, from the four day arc to the emails and the invitation at the end, in a lot more detail than I could fit here.
If any of this resonated with you as you’re thinking about your own next launch, I’d love to hear where you land. And if you want to keep building consistent income with me, the Blissful Biz Hive is open. Inside you’ll build your Honey Flow, a simple, step by step system that helps you create an offer people love to buy, grow your audience, and make consistent sales month after month.
