Onwards Analytics
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THE FIFTY STEPS

You are good at the work. Being found is a different job.

There are fifty steps between being genuinely good at something and having customers who know it. Most people do four or five and stop, usually the wrong four or five, and conclude that marketing does not work for what they do.

This is all fifty. In order. With our own numbers attached, including the ones that went badly.

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ONWARDS ANALYTICS
The
Fifty
Steps

Everything between being genuinely good at something and having customers who know it.

RYAN RICHARDSON
DAN RODGERS
YOU HAVE BEEN SOLD THIS BEFORE

The guarantee covers their fee. It does not cover your thirty thousand dollars.

The pitch is thirty leads in ninety days. The fee is five thousand a month. The guarantee is that if they miss the number, you do not pay the fee.

What the guarantee never covers is the thirty thousand dollars of your own money that went through the ad account while they were missing it. That is the part that actually hurts, and it is the part they leave with you. Ninety days later you have a spreadsheet of leads that were never going to buy, and a bill you argued about.

So you are asked to trust that they are good. Which is the one thing you cannot check before you pay.

Everyone says the same words.

A bad agency says them just as confidently as a good one, and usually with better slides. Case studies, logos, testimonials, a guarantee written carefully over their own invoice. None of it costs anything to say, which is exactly why none of it tells you anything.

So the only rational response is to assume the worst and pay as little as possible. Which is why the good ones cannot charge what they are worth, and why you keep meeting the other kind.

WHAT WE DID ABOUT IT

We wrote down the entire method and put it on sale for five dollars. Every step, in order, with the real numbers, including the tests we got wrong and the money we wasted finding out. You can read the whole thing before you decide whether we are any good. That is the point of it.

WHAT IS INSIDE

All fifty. Not the first five.

Here is the full table of contents. If a step is on this list it is in the book, in enough detail to do it. Nothing is held back for an upsell, because a book that withholds the good part is just an advertisement that costs five dollars.

MARKED IN TEAL: THINGS THAT WENT WRONG, WITH THE NUMBERS.

PART I
DECIDE WHAT YOU ACTUALLY SELL
01
Name the buying moment, not the job title
02
Work out what a customer is genuinely worth, lifetime, not first sale
03
Compute revenue per book buyer. This one number decides everything after it
04
Set the day one break even floor before writing a wordA live funnel running $16.57 average order against a $20 to $40 floor. A pricing problem wearing a marketing problem's clothes.
05
Design the ladder so each rung removes a different amount of effort
06
Enforce zero overlap between rungsTwo rungs both quietly selling planning. The upper one sold to nobody until it was repositioned.
07
Decide the back end offer before writing the book
08
Write the one sentence the whole book has to make true
PART II
EXTRACT THE POINT OF VIEW
09
Find the contrarian spine, the thing you believe that your market does not
10
Crown it. One named idea beats twelve good unnamed ones
11
Collect the receipts, including the failures
12
Build the voice corpus before drafting, not after
13
Set the hard exclusions, what you will never say whoever asks
14
Build the avatar and awareness matrix, five by five
PART III
WRITE IT
15
Research and reader personas, including the reader who will not finish
16
Outline, then continuity check the outline before any prose exists
17
Lock the voice before drafting
18
Draft chapter by chapter, never all at once
19
Disrupt deliberately. Nothing self disrupts, and order is forgettable
20
Evaluate in a fresh context, never the one that wrote it
21
Revise on a capped loop. Irregular tension is structural, not editorial
22
Run the mechanical gate. Automated, no exceptions
PART IV
PRODUCE IT
23
Build a deterministic production pipeline. One command, same output
24
One canonical cover file, used everywhereSuperseded cover art still live on the site long after the book had been re-covered.
25
Contents page with real page numbers, plus folios. Harder than it sounds
26
Print interior and digital are different artefacts. Do not conflate them
27
Recalculate spine width per printerTwo printers, two different spine formulas for the identical book. Never reuse one printer's wrap on another.
28
Set up print on demand drop ship. Retail platforms will not fulfil funnel orders
PART V
BUILD THE MACHINE
29
Build the page assuming the hero is all most people will ever see66% of visitors never left the hero.
30
Format proof as scannable units, not proseStrong claims buried in one paragraph at 80% scroll depth. The proof existed and was in the wrong slot.
31
Save the card at first purchase or one click upsells are impossible later
32
Order bumps with server owned prices. Never trust the client for a price
33
One click upsells charged off session, with a fallback when the bank objects
34
Match consent to price. A large silent charge is a refund waiting to happen
35
Token gate delivery and drive it from the payment webhook, not the browser
36
Build the chains: delivery, consumption, ascension. Alert yourself on every sale
PART VI
INSTRUMENT IT. THIS IS THE PART EVERYONE SKIPS.
37
First party event tracking, about a dozen events. Own this data
38
Pixel plus server side events, and a product scoped custom conversion
39
Persist campaign parameters into the payment recordA fully built, live, well designed funnel whose every sale was un-creditable to any campaign. At any spend. On any day. Not less accurate. Impossible.
40
Filter phantom sessions at read timeAbout 30% of raw sessions were phantoms, and a page that loaded in half a second appeared to take twenty three.
PART VII
CREATIVE AND LAUNCH
41
Run two campaigns, testing and scaling. Graduate winners by post so they keep their proof
42
Judge on cost per purchase. Not clicks, not impressionsA 4% click through rate that predicted exactly zero sales.
43
Set the kill threshold dynamically from measured trailing order value
44
Approve a creative batch weekly, before spend. No batch, no spend
45
Blind verify every launchAn independent check caught corrupted characters and dropped tracking parameters in an ad upload, before a dollar moved.
PART VIII
READ IT AND DECIDE
46
Grade on settled cash. Reconcile the ad platform against the payment ledger
47
Know the three distortions, because they stackThe window silently excludes today, the value passed back is the flat front end price so every bump is invisible, and the platform simply misses conversions. A set reading 0.06 was doing 1.55 on real money.
48
Know the one mechanism that runs the other way and over credits itself
49
Kill and scale on written rules, with an age gate so nothing dies early
50
Know which problem you are solving. A floor problem or a spike problem
RECEIPTS

Eleven of these are things we got wrong.

Every number in the book came off our own funnels. We publish the losses because a vendor who only shows you wins is telling you something about their record keeping, not their record.

4%

Click through rate on a set of ads that produced zero sales. The best looking number we ever posted.

66%

Of visitors who never scrolled past the hero. We had written the good part further down.

23s

Apparent load time on a page that actually loaded in half a second. Phantom sessions, about 30% of the total.

$0

Attributable revenue on a live, well built funnel, because campaign parameters never reached the payment record.

0.06

Return the ad platform reported on a set that was actually doing 1.55 on settled cash. Three distortions, all stacking.

$16.57

Average order value against a floor of $20 to $40. We spent a while treating it as a traffic problem.

Then positive

Three repricings after that number, a reader now costs us less than a reader is worth on day one. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why we can carry your advertising instead of billing you for it.

WRITTEN FOR

People who are genuinely good at a narrow thing and are bad at being found for it. Consultants, specialist firms, advisors, operators with a real point of view and a long trust cycle. If your customers take months to decide and your best work arrives by referral, this is your problem.

NOT WRITTEN FOR

Anyone looking for a shortcut. There is not one in here. Fifty steps is the honest number and most of them are unglamorous. If you want the version where three clever tactics fix it, that book is widely available and cheaper than this one.

AND YES, WE SELL SOMETHING

Here are the fifty steps. Or we do them for you.

Some people read this and go and build it. Genuinely, good. It works, and the book is complete enough to do it from.

Most people read it, recognise how much of it there is, and would rather keep doing the thing they are actually good at. For those people we run the whole machine. You show us what you do. We do the fifty steps in between. The build costs you nothing, you pay only for leads, and you keep the book, the website and every lead we produce.

There is no minimum term and nothing to cancel. If it stops working for you, leave, and take all of it with you. We would rather keep you by feeding your business than by writing a clause.

WHY WE CAN AFFORD TO DO IT THAT WAY

Because the book pays for the advertising that sells the book. That is the whole trick, it is step 3 and step 43, and it is why we do not need your money before we start. Anyone who needs a retainer before they will touch your account is telling you their front end does not work.

We are not describing that in theory. We built it on ourselves first, on a consulting business nobody had heard of. It lost money, we repriced it three times, and it now costs us less to acquire a reader than that reader is worth on the day they arrive. The whole record is in the book, including the part where it was not working.

QUESTIONS

Why is it only five dollars?

Because its job is not to make money. Its job is to prove we can do this, to the sort of person who will not take that on trust. The book pays for the ads that sell it, and that is exactly the mechanism the book teaches. If we charged ninety dollars for it we would be demonstrating a different business.

If you publish everything, why would anyone hire you?

Knowing the fifty steps and doing the fifty steps are not the same job. Most readers will do a handful and stop, which is not a criticism, it is what happens when you already have work to deliver. The ones who go and build it themselves were never going to hire anybody.

Is anything held back for an upsell?

No. Every step on the list above is in the book in enough detail to execute. There are add ons at checkout, and they are separate pieces of work, not chapters removed from the book.

Do you keep my leads?

No. Your leads are yours, along with the book and the website. We keep the machine that produces them and the front end revenue that funds the advertising, and we say so in writing.

Can I get a refund?

Yes, on the book and any add ons, for any reason or none. Ask and we refund it, and you keep everything. At this price arguing about it would cost us more than the refund.

Who wrote it?

Ryan Richardson and Dan Rodgers, of Onwards Analytics. We wrote the parts we each actually run, and every section says which of us is talking. It reads slightly differently in places because two people wrote it, which we decided was more honest than smoothing it out.

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EIGHT PARTS · FIFTY STEPS · PDF

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