Three Sales Before the Second Upsell: The Launch Funnel Behind Skribbly and SERP Gap AI

LaunchWatch · Launch funnels

Our launch funnels convert well, and that is by design. Every one is built to put three sales in the bag from the same customer before they ever see the second upsell. Here is the rule, and two real funnels that show it working: SERP Gap AI and my daughter Stephanie’s Skribbly launch.

The rule: three sales before upsell two

The design has three parts, and each one does a specific job:

1. A low-cost front end. Easy to say yes to, so the buyer is in.
2. A no-brainer, low-cost order bump. Usually $9.95, ticked on the same checkout. It also counts as an extra funnel sale.
3. An appealing, must-have first upsell, priced at the same as the front end or less. It should feel like the obvious next piece of what they just bought. Like the bump, it is a sales volume booster.

Get those three right and a buyer often has three sales in the bag before they see upsell two. Everything after that adds to it.

There is a second reason it matters on WarriorPlus and JVZoo. The sales count the marketplace shows is a count of products sold across the funnel, not of people. Skribbly’s final stats say 386 sales from 183 people who bought on the front-end page. Affiliates read that number, contests count it, and it is what makes a launch look busy.

Funnel one: SERP Gap AI

These are the numbers from two launches, one with a funnel and one without:

Step	Price	Sales	Of the 126 buyers
Front end	$12.95	126	all of them
Order bump	$9.95	84	67%
Upsell 1	$27	74	59%
Upsell 2	$12.95	56	44%

126 buyers produced 284 sales before anyone reached upsell two. The bump and the first upsell together sold more units than the front end did.

One thing to notice: SERP Gap bent the price part of the rule on purpose. Its first upsell was $27, about twice the front end. It was a strong upsell and I know my audience, so I knew they would pay that, and 59% of buyers did. Then upsell two brought the rule back into play: $12.95, the same as the front end, and 44% of buyers took it.

So the rule is a default, not a cage. Price the first upsell at or below the front end unless you know your buyers well enough to ask for more. If you go higher, follow it with an easy yes.

Funnel two: Skribbly

Skribbly is the launch in the Deal of the Day case study. It followed the rule to the letter. Stephanie’s final stats at the close of the launch, in the order of her funnel map:

Step	Price	Sales
Front end	$17	118
Order bump: Publish Kit	$9.95	50
Upsell 1: Theme and Font Pack	$12.95	48
Upsell 2: Reels	$17	37
Upsell 3: X vs Y	$24.95	18
Upsell 4: Listicles	$24.95	15
Upsell 5: Retention Scripter	$17	15
Upsell 6: Captionly	$47	20
Bundle (alternative front end, goes straight to Captionly)	$97	65

• Three easy yeses first. A $17 front end, the $9.95 Publish Kit bump, then the Theme and Font Pack at $12.95, less than the front end. That pack is a no-brainer at the price: 10 or 12 fonts plus more backgrounds, drawing hands (male and female, different skin tones) and background colours. At least 10 or 12 new looks for your videos. Same principle as the bump: a sales volume booster injection. A third of the people who saw it bought it.
• Upsell two matched the front end. Reels at $17. If you have just bought the standard video size, you will probably want the reels version too, at the same price. 30% said yes.
• Then the prices stepped up to $24.95 and $24.95, came back down to $17 for Retention Scripter, a strong product, and finished on Captionly at $47, the full version of another of Stephanie’s video tools.
• Bundle buyers saw one upsell. Anyone who took the $97 bundle went straight to one upsell, Captionly. More than a third of front-end buyers, 65 of 183, chose the bundle.
• 183 people bought on the front-end page and the funnel sold 386 products. That is just over two sales per buyer, with the $97 bundle counted as a single sale, and each buyer was worth about $66 against a $17 front end.

The order bump trap

Both funnels hit the same trap. WarriorPlus shows an order bump’s conversion rate against everyone who visited the page, not everyone who bought. SERP Gap’s bump showed 10% and was really 67%. Skribbly’s showed 2% and was really about one buyer in four.

The tell is that the front-end row and the bump row show exactly the same number of visitors. Divide bump sales by front-end buyers to get the real rate, before you decide your bump is weak and rebuild it.

If you only add one thing, add the bump

On my faster launches I sometimes run a single sales page with no upsells at all. Even then, the bump is the one piece I will not drop. In the two-launches comparison, the single-page launch earned about three quarters of what the full funnel did per buyer, and the one thing it was missing was the bump.

How to build yours

• Front end: low cost, the core tool.
• Order bump: $9.95, on the same checkout, an offer that is hard to say no to, for under $10, that adds to the front end.
• Upsell 1: the must-have next piece, at or below the front-end price. If a buyer would feel the gap without it, it is the right upsell.
• Upsell 2 and beyond: bigger or more specialised. By now the buyer often has three sales in the bag.
• Check the real bump rate against buyers, not visitors.

My Take: Not every launch gets the full funnel. Sometimes it is a time decision. If I am short on time and the offer is strong as a front end, I just launch the full version at one price. Sometimes it is a price decision. If I want to charge more for a product, I do not want to devalue it with a $17 or $27 front end. And if I sell it once at $197, I would have to do funnel pricing gymnastics to make the price points fit the WarriorPlus pricing model. So those one-price full versions usually go on Zaxaa instead. I pay $77 a month for it and never pay platform fees after that, and the savings on platform fees can be significant. It also takes both PayPal and Stripe.