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€7,500 of ads bought 43 leads, 12 demos and 6 clients in four months — roughly €60K of revenue at a 50% close rate — run by one founder and two part-time employees who each orchestrate five to ten AI agents.
~9x ROI on ad spend · 50% demo-to-client close rate · ~€600 per sales call, ~€1,200 per client acquired
"The question is not anymore how many people you have. The question is how is your process and what is your outcome? And there's no question about employees anymore." He pays €600 for a sales call and closes every second one — which is why an expensive lead is the right lead.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Jan introduces himself plainly: "I'm Jan. I'm from Hamburg, Germany. I'm the founder of Rocket Plan. Rocket Plan is a growth agency specialized in the target group of B2B SaaS. So we are helping companies from the tech industry to generate a pipeline. This is our goal, and we are really specialized in in this one topic." His background is long and it matters: "since 2005 I started my career in the marketing industry. Since 2012 in the SaaS industry, so very tech-focused and performance-focused." The problem he describes is not a lack of skill. It is the absence of a system: "we never had a system. So we were always like very activity-focused. We had several approaches like a cold outbound, cold outreach in several ways, lead gen on meta, on LinkedIn, and so on. But I think what I missed always was a system. So this was my main problem to have an end-to-end process which I can rely on and without guessing and hoping. So I think the main problem was guessing and hoping always for business outcomes." Then he opens his spreadsheet on camera: "I've opened my spreadsheet here so I can give you the really really numbers. We started our own campaign, our own funnel in this January 2026. We spent since January end of January 7,500 euros. This is the ad spend so far. Amount of leads we generated 43 leads. 12 of them converted into a sales call... And we converted six of them into a client. So this is a sales closing rate of 50% and we generated in total almost 60k of revenue." That is a complete, auditable funnel read off the founder's own records — the rarest thing in this index. It is also a testimonial in his coach's marketing video, which is the caveat that goes with it.
Rocket Plan started where most agencies start, on the founder's own network, which the interview treats as a given and Jan does not dispute. Before the funnel existed, acquisition was a list of activities rather than a channel: cold outbound, cold outreach "in several ways," lead gen on Meta and on LinkedIn.
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“So, this is a a sales closing rate of 50% and we generated in total almost 60k of revenue.”
1:18 · hear it in the video“…convert every second sales call into paying client, you just pay 1,200 euros or dollars for a new client.”
7:24 · hear it in the videoData credibility: Founder-reported, on camera, from his own spreadsheet — which makes the funnel data unusually good for this index — but published as a testimonial by the coach whose system he bought, which is the offsetting problem. The video is a client interview conducted by the vendor, opens and closes on praise for the cooperation, and ends with the interviewer directing viewers to Jan's business. The full funnel is stated and internally consistent: €7,500 ad spend from the end of January 2026, 43 leads, 12 demo bookings, 6 clients, a 50% close rate. The revenue figure is not consistent: Jan says "almost 60k of revenue," and later in the same conversation the interviewer says "you generated almost 70k in revenue in just 4 months" and Jan agrees without correcting the number. We have recorded both. All amounts are in euros — the ad spend is explicitly stated as euros and the revenue figures are quoted in the same conversation without a currency named, so we have kept them in euros rather than converting; the video provides no exchange rate and none has been invented. The founder and city are stated directly (Jan, Hamburg, Germany), as is his background (marketing since 2005, SaaS since 2012). The business name is rendered inconsistently by the automatic captions — he says "Rocket Plan" when introducing it, and the captions later produce "Rocket Bam" and a domain that sounds like "rocketband.com"; we have used Rocket Plan as the founder's own first rendering. The implied deal size comes from the interviewer's arithmetic ("if you're making 10k plus with a client"), not from Jan. No costs, salaries, profit figures or client names are disclosed, and the claim that two part-time employees plus agents replace ten to fifteen people is an assertion, not a measurement.
The first paid engagement is a retained pipeline build for a B2B SaaS company, and the opening move is not a proposal but a growth planning session: walk through the prospect's KPIs and forecast whether the funnel would be profitable for them before anything is sold.
The turning point is measurement rather than a channel. Once every step had a known conversion rate, ad spend stopped being an expense and became a dial: "now we are able to really forecast our pipeline and to make smart decision at the beginning.
The flat stretch here lasted years, not months.
The full chain, with the derived unit economics that make it interesting. Ad spend: €7,500 from late January 2026 across roughly four months. Leads: 43. That is about €174 per lead. Sales calls (marketing-qualified): 12. That is about €625 per booked call, and a 28% lead-to-call rate. Clients: 6. A 50% close rate from call to client, and about €1,250 per client acquired. Revenue: "almost 60k" — later restated by the interviewer as "almost 70k in just 4 months." Roughly 8-9x return on ad spend. The interviewer's framing of the cost-per-call number is the most useful part of the exchange, because it inverts the instinct every advertiser has: "optimizing for cheap leads is the wrong path because your leads are not cheap, right? And that's not the goal. Your cheap convert into sales calls. I mean you pay 600 euro for a sales call, right? Which everyone would think, 'Oh my god, that's very high.' But in reality, if you convert every second sales call into paying client, you just pay 1,200 euros or dollars for a new client. And if you're making 10k plus with a client, so that's the economics everyone needs to get right." Our read: a €625 booked call sounds catastrophic and is excellent, because the only number that matters is cost per client against client lifetime value. €1,250 to acquire a client worth ten thousand or more is an outstanding ratio, and it is reached by deliberately buying expensive, well-qualified leads rather than cheap ones. Most small agencies destroy themselves optimising the wrong metric in this exact funnel.
Retained growth work for B2B SaaS companies — building and running the pipeline-generation funnel for clients using the same system he runs on himself. The implied deal size comes from the interviewer's arithmetic — "if you're making 10k plus with a client" — which puts the engagements in the five-figure range each. Six clients producing roughly €60K over four months is consistent with that. The pitch mechanism is the part worth stealing, and it is structural rather than clever: "we use the psychology, the asset creation, so the whole approach for our clients as well and this leads to a really good pitch so I can pitch my clients like so you're sitting here with me and you're CEO of a tech company and this is what we do for you for your pipeline as well." The interviewer's summary: "It's very authentic and you have an easy demo call." He runs his own funnel with the identical system he sells. So the demo is not a deck — it is the fact that the prospect is sitting in the meeting because the system worked on them. Our read: this is the strongest positioning available to any agency and almost nobody executes it, because running your own funnel properly is harder than selling one. It also produces the forecasting ability he says he never had before: "now we are able to really forecast our pipeline and to make smart decision at the beginning. So how much ad spend we want to media budget we want to allocate and how it's going to develop the pipeline." A funnel with known conversion rates at each step turns marketing from a cost into a dial.
Paid advertising into a structured funnel, and his ordering of the work is explicit. Strategy first, and it is the opposite of what most agencies do: "we start with a marketing strategy. So we have to be really clear about the ICP, about the target persona. This is also a big misunderstanding that you want to go broad and you want to target as many verticals as possible. I think the opposite is the right way. So you really have to be specific in the beginning and so you have to have a good marketing strategy in place, ICP and offer definition and offer positioning and the value proposition." Then production: "then you go to the asset creation and after that to the optimization of your campaign and to make via iteration cycles the KPIs better and better." The named components of the system, as listed by the interviewer and confirmed by Jan, are a KPI funnel planner, micro-testing, psychologically optimised video ads, and AI targeting. What is notable in the numbers is how few leads this funnel needed. Forty-three leads over four months is roughly ten a month — a tiny volume by any performance-marketing standard. It worked because the close rate was 50% and the deals were five figures. Our read: this is the correct funnel shape for high-ticket B2B and it is worth stating as a rule. Narrow the ICP until the lead volume looks embarrassingly low, then accept a high cost per lead, then win on close rate. The alternative — broad targeting, cheap leads, low close rate — produces more activity, more work, and less money. His original complaint was "guessing and hoping," and the fix was not better ads. It was knowing the conversion rate at every step.
Two part-time employees and a fleet of agents. The structure he describes is the most concrete account of an AI-leveraged service business in this index. On headcount: "How many employees or people do you have in your team?" — "Two. Only two." And: "It's part-time only." On what those two people actually do: "with the help of your system and my and the adding of my own agents, we are now able to streamline the whole process like I would have I don't know 10 employees or 15 employees." The interviewer describes his own version of the same structure: "our employees are responsible for managing like five to 10 agents," to which Jan agrees: "they're like orchestrating more orchestrating than doing activities all the day." His stated ambition: "one of my approaches or the main approaches I want to build a AI led marketing agency and I'm I think I'm in the middle of it building this kind of agency." Costs are ad spend (€7,500 over four months), two part-time salaries, and tooling. The interviewer names the consequence: "that's why you have pretty good profit margins." Both men are ex-agency operators and their account of why headcount was the old moat is worth recording. Jan: "in the past it was like how many people do you have? So the brands was always like how many people do you have? Is it possible to serve us well because we need people for that. And now the questions are totally different." The interviewer, on running larger agencies: "I lost my hair during this time... I was constantly just like trying to please people and the results were just dropping because our costs constantly increased." Our read: the substantive claim here is that the unit of capacity has changed from a person to a person-plus-agents, and that this is what makes a two-person agency able to serve six five-figure clients. That is plausible and, at this scale, unproven — six clients is not a stress test.
Copy the metric hierarchy. Optimise cost per client against client value, never cost per lead. A €625 booked call at a 50% close rate on five-figure deals is a good funnel; the same money spent on cheap leads is not. Copy the narrow-ICP-first sequence. Strategy, ICP, offer definition, positioning, value proposition — then assets, then optimisation. Never assets first. Copy running your own funnel with the system you sell. It is the demo, the credibility and the case study in one, and it makes the sales call easy in a way no deck does. Copy the low-volume, high-close shape for anything high-ticket. Ten leads a month is fine if you close half the calls. Copy the forecast discipline. Once every conversion rate is known, ad spend becomes a dial rather than a gamble, and that is the actual product he bought. Change the sample size in your expectations. Our read: six clients and twelve calls is a small enough sample that a 50% close rate could plausibly be 30% or 70% on the next twenty. Do not build a financial plan on conversion rates derived from twelve data points; treat them as a starting hypothesis and re-measure at fifty. Change the capital assumption. This model requires ad spend before revenue. €7,500 over four months is modest but it is real money spent ahead of the first client, and someone with no runway should not start here. Add delivery capacity planning. Six five-figure clients served by two part-time people plus agents is the claim; what happens at twelve is not addressed and is the obvious place this breaks.
This is a testimonial. The video is published by the coach whose system Jan bought, it opens and closes on praise for the cooperation, and it ends with the coach directing viewers to Jan. The numbers are read from Jan's own spreadsheet on camera, which is genuinely better than most claims in this index, but the setting is marketing for the person conducting the interview. The revenue figure is stated twice and inconsistently: Jan says "almost 60k" and the interviewer later says "almost 70k in just 4 months" without correction. A 17% discrepancy on the headline number, unresolved. Sample size is small enough to be fragile: twelve calls and six clients. Conversion rates derived from that will move. Paid acquisition requires capital ahead of revenue and is exposed to rising costs, platform policy and auction competition. A funnel that returns 9x today returns less when competitors bid the same audience. Client concentration is severe. Six clients means one departure is a sixth of the business. The agency market for B2B SaaS growth is crowded with well-funded competitors and in-house teams, and the differentiation claimed here is process rather than anything proprietary. Delivery risk at scale is unaddressed. Two part-time people orchestrating agents is elegant at six clients; nothing in the video demonstrates it at twenty, and service quality failures in agency work show up as churn two quarters later. And the honest structural risk: the system that produced these numbers was bought from a coach who resells it. If it works, others in the same market are running the identical funnel against the same audience, which compresses its advantage over time.
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