How a First-Time Marathon Got 189 Paid Signups With No Team or CRM

The Challenge

A small group of corporate employees wanted to launch a Mother's Day marathon with no starting list, no event experience, a 39-day deadline, and absolutely no capacity to manually call or qualify leads.

Our Approach

We used the signup fee itself as the ultimate filter. We set up Click-to-WhatsApp Ads linked to an n8n automated flow that qualified interest and routed only paid, fully committed registrations to the organizers.

Results

• 189 paid signups achieved in 39 days from cold traffic
• ~58% of WhatsApp chats qualified through initial interest checks
• ~23% conversion rate from interest-qualified to paid registration
• 2.09x return on ad spend (ROAS) generating self-funding surplus