One of my coaching clients was making real money, but almost all of it came from live webinars. If he wasn’t actively running one, the business slowed to a crawl.

 “If I weren’t doing a live webinar, I would be broke,” he told me on one of our calls. 

The webinar worked, but it just meant every dollar depended on him showing up, live, again and again, with nothing underneath catching the people who weren’t ready to buy that day.

So we built a tripwire funnel to fix that dependency, but we built it in a way most advice on tripwires would tell you not to.

The idea behind a tripwire is simple: a small, low-commitment offer that turns someone into a buyer for the first time, quickly, so the relationship shifts from “subscriber” to “customer.” 

The data backs this up for a reason — someone who’s bought from you once is dramatically more likely to buy from you again than someone who’s only ever read your emails. For this client, the goal wasn’t just extra revenue. It was building a layer of the business that didn’t need him live on a webinar to make a sale — something sitting behind a lead magnet, converting new subscribers into buyers on autopilot, supplementing what the webinar already did well instead of trying to replace it.

I’ve seen this tactic generate millions for course creators. Here’s another recent example: Case study for course creators: A $27 course, $30,000 in 41 days and paid traffic that funded itself.

This client taught a creative, visual skill to an audience that ranged from complete beginners to working professionals, built mostly through long-form YouTube content over several years. 

It’s a slower-consideration audience by nature — people don’t usually pick up a new creative tool on a whim, they watch, they research, they compare, and they take their time.

A tripwire solves a problem most course creators don’t realize they have until it’s pointed out: most of your list has never bought anything from you. 

They’ve opened emails, maybe clicked a few, maybe even watched a webinar — but there’s a real difference between someone who’s paid attention and someone who’s paid you. A tripwire exists to close that specific gap, cheaply and quickly, so that the much bigger, much more important sale later on isn’t the first time someone’s trusted you with their money.

It also does something else that’s easy to undervalue: it gives you real proof of what your audience will actually pay, on a small enough scale that testing it doesn’t feel risky. That data becomes useful well beyond the tripwire itself — it informs how you price everything that comes after it.

When it comes to tripwires, the standard advice caps the price under $47. 

We didn’t start there. This client had already proven, through past ad campaigns, that people would pay $97 for the right offer — he’d sold over 3,000 copies of a $97 course during a previous run. So instead of guessing at a lower price point because that’s what tripwires are “supposed to” cost, we tested $97, positioned as a genuine discount off a $397 value.

The real question was never “what’s the standard tripwire price.” , it was: who do you actually want landing on your list as a buyer? 

If the goal is maximum opt-ins at any cost, price low. If the goal is a smaller number of people who are already proving, with their wallet, that they’re serious, a higher price point can outperform — because you’re filtering for quality, not chasing quantity.

We also weren’t trying to replace the live webinar with full automation, even though that’s the dream most creators chase. In practice, most brands still need some live, human interaction, especially at higher price points. The tripwire wasn’t built to replace live selling. It was built to reduce how dependent the business was on it.

The sales page was nothing complicated

And that was intentional. A short, focused page: the problem it solves, the offer itself, three clear bullet points on what’s included, testimonials, a call-to-action with pricing and a simple countdown, a money-back guarantee, and an FAQ. We built the minimum viable version first — a single 30-minute countdown, no follow-up email sequence yet — specifically so we could see whether the page itself converted before adding anything on top of it.

Once the page proved itself, we added the layer most tripwires are missing entirely: abandoned cart and follow-up emails for people who almost bought but didn’t finish checkout.

The result

A decent tripwire, at a low price point, typically converts around 3.5%. This one converted at 10% — at a price nearly six times higher than what most people consider a “safe” tripwire number.

The checkout page itself converted at 35%, in line with typical industry benchmarks (checkout completion generally falls between 20-60%, with a median closer to 40-50%), solid, with clear room to improve. The $27 order bump converted at roughly 75%, extraordinarily high for something most businesses treat as an afterthought. And the $247 upsell converted at 17% in its first seven weeks live.

What this is worth over a year

Roughly 18 weeks of live data puts total revenue from this funnel at just over $5,200 — averaging close to $290 a week. Annualized at that pace, this puts the funnel on track to bring in somewhere around $15,000-$16,000 a year, on autopilot, from a channel that didn’t exist before. It includes the flat weeks, the $0 week, and the weeks before the order bump and upsell were even added — which means the real number, now that both are live and converting, is likely to trend higher from here.

So, should you add a tripwire?

The short answer is… it depends.

It worked here because this client already had real proof his audience would pay $97 for good content, a warm list with people who’d stayed engaged for a long time, and an existing higher-priced offer to anchor the discount against honestly. 

Take away any one of those, and a $97 tripwire is a much bigger risk than a $17 one.

If you’re working with a brand-new list, cold traffic, or you’ve never tested what your audience will pay at any price point, starting lower and building that proof first is the more reasonable move. 

What Happens Next?

Just like a doctor doesn’t prescribe treatment before identifying the root cause, I don’t recommend new funnels, ads, emails, or offers until we understand where your business is losing momentum.

Sometimes the bottleneck is traffic.

Sometimes it’s positioning.

Sometimes it’s an offer that isn’t compelling enough.

Sometimes it’s a sales funnel that leaks buyers at every stage.

And sometimes the biggest bottleneck isn’t marketing at all—it’s unclear priorities or building things in the wrong order.

If you’d like someone in your corner to help prioritize, challenge assumptions, review your work, and keep momentum going, coaching is the next step.

Together we’ll:

• prioritize what actually moves revenue
• refine your positioning and offers
• build or optimize your funnels
• review copy and messaging
• analyze performance data
• identify new bottlenecks as your business grows

Instead of wondering what to work on next, you’ll always know the highest-leverage move, because every business eventually reaches another bottleneck.

So, the goal isn’t finding one perfect strategy, but continuously removing the biggest constraint to growth.

If that sounds good to you, start by filling in this form.