90 Day Year

Todd Herman had spent years building a boutique consulting and coaching business working with self-made billionaires, Fortune 50 executives, Olympic athletes, and professional sports teams. His secret weapon was a proprietary methodology called the 90 Day Year—a framework for helping high-performers achieve excellence through execution. When a private client who had experienced phenomenal success with Todd's program suggested taking it online as a course, Todd initially wasn't interested. But the client persisted, and Todd eventually decided to test the waters with a beta launch using the client's list in December 2013.

The beta was a massive success, which convinced Todd that the 90 Day Year could work with a broader audience beyond his high-touch consulting clients. If it worked for self-made billionaires and Olympic athletes, why not entrepreneurs? So Todd made a bold decision: he would create a full-fledged online business around it and launch it properly in mid-2014—but he had one problem. He had absolutely zero email list of his own.

Todd's launch playbook was inspired by proven frameworks like Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula, but with a twist that reflected his coaching philosophy. He decided to build authority through value before asking for the sale. His plan: spend money to buy an audience, build trust through content, then convert.

He set an ambitious goal of 20,000 opt-ins and allocated a specific budget to achieve it: $56,000 in paid advertising. His media mix was primarily Facebook and YouTube ads, supplemented by aggressive retargeting with pixels. Anyone who hit his landing page was pixeled and followed across the internet on mobile and desktop—"Todd Hermans all over the internet," as Nathan Latka joked. It was relentless, and it worked.

Once Todd had his 20,000-person list, he deployed a three-part content teaching funnel to build trust and position the offer. Each video focused on models and frameworks—Todd's signature teaching style—addressing the real problems business owners face and how to navigate different stages of growth. Between the teaching videos, Todd inserted one-minute motivational and positioning videos showing who he was as a coach and calling people to action.

This wasn't just content for content's sake. Todd was walking his talk, demonstrating the execution and performance principles he taught. He knew that at the upper echelons of business and sport, you can't fake it. People would see through inauthenticity, and he had to prove he was the real deal.

When it came time to sell, Todd used a classic online sales letter format with a 25-30 minute video explaining the offer: you could take what he'd taught you and run with it yourself, or you could join his 90 Day Year program and work with him directly.

The initial pricing strategy had three tiers: $2,000 one-time payment, $800 for three payments, or $200 per month for 12 months. Here's where the learning happened. The three-payment option at $800 barely converted. Todd realized the problem: $800 and $2,000 are psychologically too close. Both force the buyer to think hard about affordability. People chose the $2,000 upfront option instead.

But Todd had a contingency. In the final 24 hours of the launch, he activated the 12-payment $200/month option—and it worked spectacularly, bringing in an additional $200,000. The lesson: different price points serve different decision-making psychologies, and testing matters.

When the dust settled, Todd's 90 Day Year launch had generated $556,000 in total revenue. He'd invested $56,000 to earn $556,000—a 10x return that he compared to an ATM machine you'd want to use repeatedly. More importantly, he'd learned critical lessons about pricing psychology, buyer behavior, and the power of value-first content marketing. Todd's success was driven by action, testing, and the willingness to course-correct mid-flight—the exact philosophy he teaches his clients.