CASES
AND BREAKDOWNS
A case study is an account of how it worked out for somebody. The problem is that people usually read them wrong: they try to repeat the actions instead of understanding the mechanics.
This page is about taking somebody else’s experience apart so that it’s useful, rather than just inspiring for an hour.
Copy the principle, not the funnel. A funnel burns out; a principle doesn’t.
What case studies usually leave out
Almost every public case study is incomplete, and not always out of bad intent — people simply talk about what worked.
- The failed attempts aren’t shown. Before the successful funnel there were ten unsuccessful ones, and money was spent on them.
- The starting resources aren’t stated. Was there already an audience, was there experience, was there a budget, did anyone help.
- There’s no date. A funnel from a year ago may be dead today — platforms change the rules constantly.
- Revenue is shown, not profit. «Made 500 thousand» sounds impressive until it turns out 480 of it went on buying traffic.
How to take a case study apart properly
- Find the traffic source. Where did the people come from? If that’s missing, there’s no case study — there’s a story.
- Find what was paid for. Which action by a person produced the money.
- Do the economics yourself. Don’t trust the final number, rebuild the chain: costs, clicks, leads, approval rate, revenue.
- Ask what came before. What resources the author already had at the start.
- Check the date and whether it’s still alive. Does that source still work, has the platform shut down.
- Extract the principle. What exactly worked at the level of mechanics — and whether it can be applied to a different source.
A breakdown on real numbers
Let’s take one of our own months on financial offers, to show what normal, non-showcase statistics look like.
Over the month we sent 404 leads. Accepted and paid — 90. That’s a little over twenty percent approval.
How to read that. First: three quarters of the work went unpaid, and that isn’t a failure, it’s the norm for the financial vertical. Second: if the math had been built on the rate without accounting for approval, the economics would have added up on paper only, and in reality it would have come out several times negative.
Hence a practical conclusion that carries over to any offer: you have to count on the rate multiplied by the approval, and build the real share of rejections in from the start. More on those metrics — affiliate programs.
A second breakdown: the hypothesis that didn’t work
The failures are sometimes more useful than the successes, because nobody writes about them.
The hypothesis went like this: name a Telegram bot exactly the way people phrase their query, and get people out of the search inside the messenger for free. The logic looked airtight.
The result: over two and a half months, two users. Meanwhile a bot in another, entertainment niche run by the same people was producing eighty people a day out of the same source.
What follows from this: a channel by itself is never «working» or «not working». What works is the combination of channel, niche and competition. The same move in two subject areas gives results that differ by a factor of hundreds — and you can’t predict that in advance, you can only test it cheaply.
How to use somebody else’s experience
- Take the mechanics, not the instructions. An understanding of why it worked carries over; a step-by-step instruction doesn’t.
- Test cheaply. Before investing, reproduce a small piece of it at minimal volume.
- Keep your own records from day one. Your own case study three months from now will be more useful than anyone else’s.
- Don’t compare your first month to somebody else’s end result. Separately on that in income myths.
A case study with no losing attempts is an advertisement, not a case study.