The Aha Studio Early Bird: $44,216 From a Launch That Started With 2 Sales

Build in Public · Launch report

The Aha Studio early bird closed with 80 sales and $44,216 collected: 72 on Zaxaa, 7 on WarriorPlus and one paid directly. No refunds so far. After the first webinar we had 2 sales. Here are the final numbers, what I changed on the sales page, what changed inside the product, and why lifetime is now gone.

After the first webinar, we had 2 sales.

By the time the early bird closed, we had 80 sales and $44,216 collected.

With the split payments still to come, that’s about $58,000 collected or committed. And the affiliate webinars haven’t even started yet.

So here’s the whole thing: the real numbers, what I changed when sales were slow, and what I’d tell anyone launching a product like this.

The final Zaxaa numbers

That’s the screenshot straight from Zaxaa. Here’s what it says:

• Lifetime at $1,610: 17 sales, $27,370. The last one came after the close, from a long-time customer who asked for it, so we sent him the cart link directly.
• Monthly at $97: 40 sales, $3,880.
• Yearly at $970: 1 sale, $970.
• Lifetime in 3 payments of $597: 4 sales, $2,388 so far.
• Lifetime in 2 payments of $805: 9 sales, $7,051 so far. The ninth asked if he could hold the price until his next paycheck. We said yes, and honoured it when he came back to pay.
• Lifetime in 8 monthly payments of $268.33: 1 sale, $268.33 so far. It shows as “Aha Studio Workflows” because Zaxaa allows 5 prices per product and we’d used all 5. It’s the same product, set up for a customer I’ve known a long time who buys a lot of my products.

And two more outside Zaxaa:

• A lifetime sale at $1,610, paid directly through Wise.
• 7 monthly members at $97 on WarriorPlus, from people who wanted to pay by card. We kept the $97 price open there an extra day.

That’s 71 sales of the AI Workers plan from 290 unique visitors on Zaxaa, a 24.48% conversion rate. Every visitor was worth $143.65. Refunds: 0% so far.

Lifetime brought in two-thirds of the money. Counting the split payments and the Wise sale, 32 people bought lifetime, and 47 chose monthly.

Three notes on the conversion rate. All the buy buttons were on one page, so 24.48% is the conversion of the sales page as a whole. The per-option figures in the screenshot aren’t separate funnels.

Most of the sales came from my existing audience: buyers from my WarriorPlus and JVZoo launches, most of them also in my free WhatsApp group. Warm traffic converts.

And the rate has moved. At the close it was 26.85% of 257 visitors. Since then we’ve removed lifetime, raised the monthly price to $127 and started posting on social media, so people who’d never heard of Aha Studio came to look. That cold traffic is in the 24.48%.

After the first webinar, we had 2 sales

The launch webinar went out on 14 October, with 6 AI workers inside Aha Studio.

Afterwards, we had 2 sales.

So what went wrong?

The questions told me. They came into support and the WhatsApp group, and they all pointed the same way: people didn’t grasp the concept yet. The messaging seemed confused. People liked what they saw, but they couldn’t picture what Aha Studio would do for them.

That’s a clarity problem. I wrote about it the week it happened, in Build in Public #23. Here’s what I actually changed: the sales page, a second webinar, and the product itself.

What I changed on the sales page

These changes went in mid-launch, small and step by step rather than all at once:

1. A live demo at the top of the page. You type your website or your business, and an AI worker builds a Playbook you could run inside Aha. You see it working before you buy anything.
2. An outcome headline. It now says what you get, and what you no longer need: “Done-for-you marketing. No agency or software needed.” Those are the two things people usually come up against, so the page names them and invites you to the free demo.
3. The webinar replay under the hero, with a thumbnail that rotates every 2 seconds between three headlines: “No more bottlenecks”, “Stop learning software” and “Fire your agency!”.
4. Animated graphics showing what each worker does, so people get it visually.

Every one of those changes does the same job. It shows the result, instead of asking people to imagine it.

The second webinar: building it live

Around the same time, I ran a second webinar, mid-launch. This one was more about the offer, and most of it was live demos.

Every demo started from a real site that’s already getting traffic.

1. A roofing calculator site, in 10 minutes. Ian (@keywordian) had tweeted about a roofing calculator site getting about 160,000 visits a month. On the webinar, I built exactly that: a fully populated roofing calculator site with working calculators, published on Netlify, in 10 minutes.
2. A card shops directory, in 10 minutes. Ian had also posted about a card shop directory getting high traffic. I built a card shops in New York directory, fully populated with real business info and images.
3. A Backlinko-style content hub, built live.
4. Smaller demos: Trend Radar, one of the keyword research tools, and Site Sniper building a mini site with 10 articles and images, published in minutes.

People didn’t have to picture what Aha Studio does. They watched it do the job.

What changed inside Aha Studio

The sales page was half of it. The other half was the product.

• New workers, all the time. We started with 6 AI workers. Now there are over 30. Once people saw new workers being added, it clicked for them.
• Playbooks. Several workers working together in one run, for a whole strategy. Adding Playbooks boosted sales.
• The Services Page. Members tick the done-for-you services they want to sell, set their prices, and Aha does the work when an order comes in. When we released it, we saw a surge in purchases.

And every update went into the group as it happened, in a daily build log. People could watch the product grow in front of them.

Here’s the thing. I didn’t wait for any of this to be perfect. Each worker went in when it was good and tested, and I keep improving it from there.

Why I sold lifetime, and why it’s gone

Lifetime at $1,610 works out at about 16 months of a monthly member. That’s the logic behind it.

But I had two other reasons.

1. I’d paid a $10,000 hospital bill three weeks earlier, and I wanted that cash back. The lifetime sales covered it.
2. Top affiliates want to promote lifetime. Some asked for it even at $1,997.

Now the early bird is over, lifetime is gone from the sales page. It only comes back on affiliate webinars, at $2,997.

There’s one exception. One affiliate reached out before we announced lifetime was going, so I agreed $1,997 with him, and his webinar goes first. Every affiliate webinar after that is $2,997.

He’s one of my top affiliates. When he hosted a webinar for NicheBlasta, he made 23 lifetime sales at a similar price. I’m not going to let down an affiliate like that.

The other prices went up too. Monthly is now $127, and yearly is $1,270.

What’s still to come

That $44,216 isn’t the end of it:

• Split payments: about $13,900 is still to come from the people paying in instalments. That takes the early bird to about $58,000.
• Monthly members: 47 people on the monthly plan, 40 on Zaxaa and 7 on WarriorPlus.
• Affiliate webinars. I’m expanding the affiliate outreach, and the Aha Studio webinar details are going on JVswaps too. Sending affiliates there gives JVswaps exposure at the same time.
• Social media promotion and live training. This launch went almost entirely to the people who already know me, so the next step is reaching people who don’t. It’s already working: the Facebook post with these sales numbers brought in 2 big affiliates. Regular training webinars will stream live on YouTube and X, and maybe Facebook, all at the same time through StreamYard. Each one shows members how a worker works, and it’s a demo-led promotion to new audiences at the same time.

We also sold on Zaxaa rather than WarriorPlus or JVZoo, and that saved us a lot in fees. That’s a post on its own, coming soon.

My Take: This launch has been a lot of fun for me. Building tools and products fast is what I do, it’s what I’m good at, and it doesn’t feel like work. But the lesson here is clarity. After the first webinar we had 2 sales, and the product was already good. People just couldn’t see what it would do for them. So I showed them: a live demo at the top of the page, an outcome headline, the replay, animated workers, a second webinar where I built the sites live, then Playbooks, the Services Page and new workers arriving almost every day. Sales followed. If your launch is slow, read the questions people ask you. They’ll tell you exactly what isn’t clear yet.