I stopped posting on Instagram 18 months ago, when I fired the marketing team that was costing me ten grand a month and draining the life out of me.
I hadn’t opened the app since. Until my son asked me to check out his soccer team.
Within seconds I was being sucked down the Instagram rabbit hole. The marketers have got really good at hooking our attention.
Here are four ads I saw within a few minutes:
1. You need software, not coaching
Stop charging a lot for your time. Charge a little every month for an app that does the coaching, and get paid by far more people.
2. You need AI to do your marketing
I’ll teach you how to give AI one photo of yourself, so it can make thirty fake videos of you that look real.
3. You need an appointment setter
I’ll put someone in your business whose only job is booking sales calls for you. If they don’t work out, you don’t pay.
4. You need an attention machine
Pay me $97 and I’ll show you how to make videos and ads that convince people to want your coaching before they ever speak to you.
These guys were good. I wanted to send money to all of them!
I know the game they’re playing. And it’s still very hard to resist.
Here’s what I noticed once I slowed my nervous system down.
They contradict each other: Sell software instead of coaching. Hire a human to book calls. Get AI to replace your face. Make content that sells so you don’t have to.
That’s not a clear solution. It’s a bunch of marketers shouting.
And you know why they have to clamour so loud for your attention? It’s because advertising is what you need when no one is talking about you, and no one is referring you.
Every one of those marketers are paying thousands of dollars to Meta to reach out to strangers. And they’ll pay more tomorrow.
In 20 years of coaching, all of my clients came by word-of-mouth and referral. And the two years where I tried to play the algorithm game only ever brought a handful of clients, while sucking the life out of me.
It’s worth noticing how hard the marketers have to work to make buying easy. They’re charging $97 for something they say is worth $497. They’re using countdown timers. You can get a 100% refund. And you never speak to a human before you enter your credit card.
Plus the ads never stop. If clients stayed and told their friends, the machine could rest. But it can’t rest. The ads run all the time because the funnel empties all the time.
The trap I can fall into is to assume that when I see this constant marketing that it must work. Actually, it’s proof that nothing quieter is working for them.
The challenge of the Prosperous Coach approach is that a coach who fills their practice through referrals is invisible. There is no feed of quiet businesses working. So I end up comparing my private reality to somebody else’s public advertising.
The marketers make you feel behind. And then charge you $97 to catch up.
But I’ve been tracking the word-of-mouth game for the past three years:
The last three cohorts of the 100K Club generated a total of $14.5 million in proposals and $3.96 million in revenue.
And the 2026 cohort that just wrapped has been the most successful yet. Those coaches generated $5,705,055 in proposals and $1,625,763 in revenue.
Word of mouth is the only marketing that gets cheaper and more powerful, the longer you do it.
But that’s hard to sell in an Instagram post. Which is why I’ve been writing about this for almost twenty years.
Love. Rich