Coffee with Carissa

Carissa Hill spent 10 years building and running a brick-and-mortar B2C business—growing it from a garage operation into a chain of three stores. The secret weapon? Facebook. She mastered direct customer acquisition through Facebook groups, Messenger, and organic community engagement, keeping her stores fully booked without paid advertising. As word spread about her unusual success, customers started asking her how she did it. Rather than just consulting one-off, she saw the opportunity to systemize and teach.

In February 2015, Carissa launched her Facebook marketing course at $1,500 (offered as a 3-month payment plan). She spent the year "learning what people wanted to see from me," as she put it. By the end of 2015, she'd hit about $100,000 in revenue, with roughly 67 students paying into the course. It was steady but not explosive. She was also making "between one and two K per day" from her ongoing marketing work with small businesses, so the course was building alongside her consulting practice.

Carissa's first Facebook Live experiment happened in mid-2016 in someone else's Facebook group (1,000 members). She went live with her face on camera for about 25 minutes, sharing free value and tips on Facebook marketing. At the end, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned a $19.95 ebook she'd written. A friend posted the Samcart checkout link in the chat. About 40 people watched live, and 20 bought the ebook immediately—a 50% conversion rate. She was stunned. The replay continued trickling in sales for the next 24 hours.

Carissa realized she could replicate this with her full $1,500 course. Two weeks later, in late June 2016, she went live in her own "Coffee with Carissa" Facebook group (2,000 members) using OBS to stream slides with her face in the corner—essentially a Facebook-native webinar. She gave about 45 minutes of free content, then softened into the pitch by cracking a joke and changing the subject slightly ("I always soften the pitch at the end... so it doesn't feel like a hard sell"). She placed a Samcart link on the slide and in the comments.

The results: 30 people purchased the $1,500 course live that day. Over the next 48 hours, another 40 bought from the replay, even though Carissa was away and had turned off her phone. She'd uploaded the video to YouTube and embedded it on her website as a blog post, then sent a "in case you missed it" email to her 2,000-person list. Total: 70 sales from one broadcast = $105,000 in revenue in less than a week. For context, that matched her entire 2015 annual revenue.

Carissa's 2016 trajectory is remarkable. She hit nearly $300,000 in revenue by June, with June itself bringing $180,000. Her scaling strategy is replicating the Facebook Live playbook across partner groups: find groups with engaged audiences, go live once a week for three weeks giving free value, then pitch on week four. She's already tested this model in someone else's group and it worked. She manages churn well—when payment plans fail, a quick touch from her team fixes it. She credits her success to surrounding herself with entrepreneurial mentors (specifically naming Ben Simkin of Businessnet) and staying ruthlessly focused on what actually drives sales on Facebook, not chasing shiny objects. With a baby on the way, she's at the early stages of building a scalable machine, but the unit economics are proven.