How Codie Sanchez is driving insane growth w/ video

Codie Sanchez teaches normal people how to buy and grow small businesses… and she’s killing it. I estimate she’s doing ~ $10M / year, essentially running a media company that drives serious product sales.

She started posting regularly on YouTube in March of 2022 and on TikTok & Reels not long before that. It’s been a little over a year and she’s gone from zero to:

• YouTube: 600,000 subscribers & 90,000,000 views

• TikTok: 1,000,000 followers & 100,000,000 views

• IG Reels: 642,000 followers & 133,000,000 views

This is good. Really good. More importantly, it drives serious sales.

IN LESS THAN 5 MIN I’LL SHOW:

1. How video has affected Codie’s business

2. What she’s doing right + my Videos-That-Convert framework

3. Missed Opportunity: how I would take her content to the next level to drive even more revenue

GOOD VIDEOS = 📈 & 💰

It took Codie two years of consistent growth to reach 125,000 newsletter subscribers. She doubled her rate of growth once she started making video content. She gained another 150,000 newsletter subscribers in just one year and currently has a little under 300,000 readers. (h/t to my friend Chenell of Growth In Reverse who did an excellent write-up on Codie’s business)

These newsletter subscribers are who she turns into paying customers. Codie’s main offering is Unconventional Acquisitions, where she teaches anyone how to buy businesses. Their flagship product is their Mastermind, which goes for $8,800.

When they turned on their video strategy, newsletter growth & product sales started to really take off.

At the time of writing this, their Facebook group (only for Mastermind members) has 623 people in it. That’s $5,500,000 worth of people. Get this, 257 people were added to that group in just the last month! While this pace is likely not a constant, that’s a $2,250,000 PER MONTH pace = $27,000,000 / year.

I built an 8-figure / year business with 14M+ subscribers & 5B views. It’s clear she can surpass us in revenue within a year with just a fraction of our audience.

WHAT SHE’S DOING RIGHT

If you want to drive serious sales with video, you only have to obsess over 2 things:

• How engaging is your content (packaging + viewer retention)

• How well you establish credibility & organically show your product’s value (Videos-That-Convert framework)

Your score on these two bullets will predict how much revenue you drive. There are a few other things that will affect this, but these two will drive 90% of your success.

Let’s look @ Codie’s content.

Is it engaging?

Without a doubt. Codie does a better job than most “edutainment” creators out there. These 1 & 2 videos are my absolute favorite of hers.

Her cold opens are impeccable. Watch the first 1 minute of these videos and tell me you don’t agree. The first minute is easily the most important part of a video’s retention and Codie nails it.

Even with the first video being essentially just an interview, Codie and her team do a phenomenal job with pacing, interesting visuals + ways to mix things up so you don’t get bored. Honestly, all I can do is 👏👏

She’s talking to a starving crowd and packages her videos with that in mind. Millions of people want more ways to make a living in life than their soul-crushing 9-5 can offer, and she leans into that hard.

Check out her packaging (thumbnail & title):

Bright poppy colors, good color correction / saturation, big bold numbers, expressive faces. Long-form YT videos are the hardest to get right and she’s doing excellent. Her short-form content follows the same punchy, engaging editing style.

It does seem like she might have different people working on her content because there is some inconsistency. This video, for example, doesn’t have a great thumbnail, is a bit unengaging & not edited the best it could be. It’s so different than many of her others that I struggle to believe the same team members were behind it. Codie - hit me up, I can show you how to make this video much better.

Overall - Codie gets a great score from me on engaging-ness:

How does it score on the Videos-That-Convert framework?

This is the three-bullet framework to ensure you convert as many of your viewers into whatever product / service you’re offering:

To dominate with conversion through video, you have to incorporate your product into the content itself. This has to be done in a way that adds to the content and shows off why the product is good.

In future newsletters, I’ll dive into this much more and showcase examples that absolutely crush it here. After years of making entertainment for billions of viewers, I believe this should be why you ultimately make videos. Drive sales (not just views & ad revenue).

Codie could be doing a lot better here. She totally positions herself as the go-to person to show you how to buy / build small businesses with her videos. So… credibility: ✅. But the linkage between her videos and her newsletter or Unconventional Acquisitions is pretty weak. She would amplify her growth if she made that connection stronger.

What entrepreneurs who start making content get wrong is thinking they’ll alienate their audience by mentioning their product. WRONG, so very wrong. It’s all in the approach. My goal is to get you to perfect that.

Overall, Codie gets an average score on the Videos-That-Convert framework:

HOW I WOULD TAKE HER TO THE NEXT LEVEL

This is where I get the most excited.

I’ve peaked at 12% conversion on millions of views and collaborated with many of the top creators who crush it selling product through their videos. Based on my experience, Codie could be doing even better.

Because Codie does a great job delivering a highly-engaging viewing experience, she should focus more of her attention on developing videos that drive insane conversion for her.

What I would do:

• Launch a video series where Codie takes everyday people and leads them to replace their full-time salaries by buying a small business. In this series, she would guide them using the frameworks that her courses & Mastermind teach and highlight bits of that to the audience.

While Codie’s current content establishes her as an edutainer in the space, this series would actually leave hundreds of thousands of people dying for Codie’s help in buying a business. Enter… her Mastermind and courses 🙂 

This would score through the roof on the Videos-That-Convert framework. I would bet at least a 3-4x increase in conversions from her videos to either newsletter subscribers or UA customers. She would be seen even more as the badass expert many of us (but not most people) already know she is.

Some simple math:

• Typical conversion on YouTube views is somewhere between 0.25% and 1%. Meaning with 10,000 views on a decent video where you promote a product (correctly), you might convert 50 of those viewers into a customer. With the high price of Codie’s product, I’d drop this estimate by 90% to 0.005%.

• If she launched this new series of 3 videos and followed the Videos-That-Convert framework, I’m confident she could drive $3,300,000 - $4,400,000 in revenue (250 - 500 customers)… from 3 videos. AND, her credibility skyrockets.

  • Math: each video averages 500,000 views (1.5M views total & number of unique viewers is usually around 50%) = 750,000 viewers

• Given the newsletter is free, I’d bet she’d see a 5-10% conversion on all viewers to newsletter subscribers too, which would be a massive boost for her.