For small candle brands with a small budget and unpredictable sales

You make candles people love. Almost nobody sees them.

Tonight you will write down two numbers you do not have right now: what your doorway offer costs, and the most you can afford to pay for a customer. Everything else in your funnel is downstream of those two lines. I started at $25 a day and only scaled after the numbers said to. Every step comes with the real figures from one documented campaign, losses included.

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Instant PDF · both bonuses included · read it tonight
The campaign this book documents
125customers acquired
$8.10per customer
11.19%click-through
$25a day to start, scaled only after it worked

My campaign, not a promise of yours. The system and the math are what transfer.

What you leave with
2numbers decided tonight
1funnel map with your figures in it
1launch call you can defend
$25a day to test it
Cold to Sold book cover
Real numbers·nothing hidden·125 customers·$8.10 each·$25 a day·one real campaign· Real numbers·nothing hidden·125 customers·$8.10 each·$25 a day·one real campaign·

Ads are the only thing that puts your candles in front of a stranger on purpose.

Everything else is waiting to be found.

Most makers never touch them, because the whole thing looks like a slot machine you feed with money you don’t have to spare. The rest of us touched them once, watched a few hundred dollars disappear with nothing to show for it, and decided ads don’t work for handmade.

I was the second one. I burned about $1,000 on Facebook ads for my first candle brand, Knight Light, and made zero sales. I quit for two years.

Here is what I actually got wrong. I was judging every campaign by whether the first order made money. It never does. I had no idea what I could afford to pay for a customer, so every dollar I spent was a guess, and a guess with no number behind it always feels like a loss.

It isn’t your candles. It’s that nobody ever handed you the math.

And no, you don’t need a real marketing budget.

I know that’s the wall, because it was mine. Every ads course I found assumed I had thousands to test with and a team to test it. I had a day job and a garage full of wax.

I started this campaign at $25 a day. Not because that’s a magic number, but because it was what I could put at risk without it mattering. It went to $61 later, and only because the numbers told me to, not because I was hoping harder.

Here is the part that actually makes a small budget work. When you know your break-even cost per customer before you spend, a small budget stops being a gamble and becomes a test. You are not hoping it works. You are finding out, cheaply, whether it does, and you already decided what you’ll do either way.

That is the whole difference between $25 a day that teaches you something and $25 a day that quietly disappears.

One real brand. Two very different chapters.

Same hands, same garage, same wax. After those two years I came back, learned how funnels actually work, and rebuilt as Zovia. The only thing that changed was the system underneath.

Knight Light candle
Before: Knight Light. $1,000 spent, $0 back.
Zovia candle
After: Zovia, built on the system in this book.

Every other ad book sells a fantasy.
This one opens the actual books.

On $25 a day, I acquired 125 customers for about $8 each, then almost shut the whole thing off, because a wrong number on my own dashboard made it look like I was bleeding $460. I wasn’t. One inflated cost was hiding the truth. The book walks you through that exact trap so a bad number never scares you out of a system that’s working.

Élan Mini Trip Wire, Copy  ·  ● Active
Customers acquired125
Cost per customer$8.10
Total ad spend$1,012.82
Click-through rate11.19%
Daily budget$61 (started at $25)

Straight off Meta Ads Manager. Nothing rounded up. These are my numbers from one documented campaign, including the parts that went wrong. They are not a promise of yours, and nobody can honestly make you one. What transfers is the system behind them and the math to read your own results without fooling yourself.

Before you finish the first sitting

You are not reading this for a week before anything happens.

Most books like this ask you to get through the whole thing first. This one puts the two decisions that matter at the front, because everything else in the funnel is downstream of them.

Two things you will have written down tonight

  1. Your doorway offer. The cheap first yes that a stranger can say without thinking hard about it. Priced, named, and decided.
  2. Your break-even cost per customer. Your own number, in your own margins. This is the number that tells you whether to keep spending or stop, and almost nobody selling candles has calculated it.

Neither of those is theory. They are two lines on a page, in your handwriting, that did not exist this morning.

What you’ll walk away able to do

Buy customers, not sales

Decide what you can afford to pay for a first-time buyer, and stop judging a campaign by whether order one made money.

Start at $25 a day

Set a starting budget, a scaling rule, and a response to a zero day, all before you launch, so panic never gets a vote.

The doorway offer

Build the cheap first “yes” that opens the door, then price the real product it is designed to sell.

The one-click upsell

Add margin to an order you already paid to acquire, with no second ad spend and no second checkout.

The COGS trap

Read your own dashboard correctly, so one wrong cost never scares you out of a campaign that is quietly working.

Static vs. video

See where the algorithm actually chose to put my budget, and decide what to shoot first instead of guessing.

Email & retention

Set up the follow-up that earns the second and third order, which is where a paid funnel stops losing money.

The real receipts

Compare your campaign against a fully documented one, wins and losses, instead of against a screenshot with the bad parts cropped out.

BUILD YOUR FUNNEL the whole machine on one page, now map your own your cold audience 1. YOUR AD: video earns the click 2. THE DOORWAY: $___ 3. THE ANCHOR: $___ (the real product) 4. + UPSELL: $___ 5. THE BACKEND email · repeat · membership front end loses a little on purpose judge by LTV > CAC Every piece, in order. Fill in your own numbers, then go build it.
The whole machine on one page. One of the build-it-yourself blueprints inside.

And yes, the real funnel is in here too.

Not a mock-up. The actual landing page that turns those clicks into customers, broken down piece by piece so you can build your own.

The real Zovia funnel landing page
What exists afterward

When you close it, these exist.

Not a feeling that you learned something. Actual things, written down, that were not there before you opened it.

That last one matters more than it looks. Most makers never decide to stop. They just quietly drift away from ads and never learn what happened.

Included, no extra cost

The book explains it. These two get it done.

Understanding a funnel and launching one are different problems. Most people stall in the gap between them, so both of these come with the book.

The Meta Ads Pre-Launch Checklist

“I understand the strategy. I still don’t know if I’m actually ready to spend money.”

A final pass over your offer, creative, landing page, campaign setup and tracking before you turn anything on. Work through it and you get a yes or a no on launch readiness, with the missing pieces named. No more staring at the publish button wondering what you forgot.

They Can’t Smell Through the Screen

“I get the ad math. I still don’t know how to make someone want a scent they can’t smell.”

A creative strategy guide for making shoppers feel a scent they cannot smell, in your visuals and your words. The part almost nobody teaches, and you can have the funnel structurally perfect and still lose the sale here, because listing top notes and base notes makes nobody want anything.

One real $1,000 campaign.
Every number. Nothing hidden.
“I’m not a guru. I’m a maker who pours every candle by hand and finally figured out the ad math, then wrote down every number, including the embarrassing ones.”

Who this is for

It’s for you if your sales feel random and feast-or-famine, you have a product people already buy in person, you are working with a small budget and need to know early and cheaply whether ads are worth continuing, and you want a system you can measure instead of another lucky post. You are willing to look at the honest numbers, including a loss.

It’s not for you if you want a get-rich-quick button, or you want someone to promise you a result. There is no button in here and I am not going to promise you sales. What I can hand you is the system, the math, and every real number from my own campaign.

Get the whole system for $10.

Learning this the hard way cost me about $1,000 and two years. You get the finished version of it for less than the wax in a single candle.

$1,000 & two years
$10

Get the book · $10 →

Instant download · read it tonight · both bonuses included

Finish the first sitting or it’s free.

Work through the opening chapters. If you don’t finish with a funnel map and your own break-even cost per customer written down, email me and I’ll refund the $10. Keep the book and both bonuses. I’d rather you trust me than keep ten dollars.

Who’s writing this

I’m Dominique, founder of Zovia Fragrances. I hand-pour every candle myself and run the whole business behind them: the ad account, the shipping labels, the spreadsheet that tells me the truth. Cold to Sold is everything I wish someone had handed me before I lit that first thousand dollars on fire.

Questions

What format is it?

An instant-download PDF. 14 chapters, illustrated, readable in an evening and built to keep open next to you while you work. The Pre-Launch Checklist and the creative guide come with it.

How much do I need to spend to try this?

I started at $25 a day. That’s the number the book is built around, and it’s what I’d tell you to start at. The honest part is that $25 a day is still real money when you’re a small brand, so the first thing you do in this book is work out your break-even cost per customer. That number is what tells you whether to keep going or stop, usually within the first week or two. You’re spending to find out, not spending to hope.

Are the numbers really real?

Yes. Every figure comes from my own live Shopify and Meta data for one documented campaign, including the losses and the mistakes. That’s the whole point.

I’ve never run an ad in my life. Too advanced?

It’s written for exactly you. It starts at $25 a day and assumes you’re starting from zero.

Do I need a product ready first?

You need something you can sell and ship. You don’t need a doorway offer yet, because building one is the first thing you do in the book.

Will this work for my brand?

Honest answer: I don’t know, and neither does anyone selling you an ads course. Your product, your photos, your price and your market all decide that. What this gives you is a system built the right way round and the math to tell, early and cheaply, whether it’s working for you.

What if it’s not for me?

Email me and I’ll refund the $10. I’d rather you trust me than keep ten dollars.

Trade random sales for a system.

The honest ad-funnel system for makers who are done guessing.

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$10 · instant PDF · every number, nothing hidden
Still thinking about it?

No hard feelings. Two things you can take with you right now, both free, neither one a pitch.

Free download · no email needed

Take the funnel map.

The same blueprint from further up this page, blank, plus room to write your doorway price, your anchor, your upsell and your break-even cost per customer. Even without the book, the lines you can’t fill in will tell you where your funnel has a hole.

Download the funnel map →
Free tool · burntested.com

And if the ads aren’t your problem yet.

I built BurnTested for the other half of this job: the bench. It’s free, and there’s no upgrade waiting at the end of it.

  • Log a burn test tonight and have it comparable to the last one, instead of scattered across three notebooks
  • Look up a fragrance oil’s IFRA numbers without digging through PDFs
  • Run your wax and fragrance math in the Maker’s Calculator
  • Stop rebuilding the same packing list at midnight before every market
Open BurnTested, free →
$10 Cold to Sold
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