Online course building for smart fellers - part 1
Published: Mon, 04/03/17
"Ben! Ben! I want to use your email methods,
but I don't have a product to sell!"
Until today I've remained silent on this.
But, y'all are like the chick in the New Testament Jesus talked about, where she had an injustice done to her, kept nagging an unrighteous judge (who didn't care about what anyone thought) about it who kept ignoring her, but, because her nagging was so persistent he finally gave in and did as she asked. Y'all constantly asking me how to create products are kinda like the nagging woman, and I'm kinda like the judge. And, at the last Ocean's 4 mastermind I got to talking to someone I have the utmost respect for about this:
Danny Iny.
(The guy who had more impact on my list and audience building than anyone else.)
I recently had a very long talk with him about creating online courses.
(His course-building method is quite "unorthodox" -- but is the best I've ever seen.)
Anyway, it was a long call.
So, I broke it up into 4 parts.
Here is part one on how to get paid *while* creating your online course.
(Before you even finish it.)
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BEN SETTLE: All right, so Danny, tell us about who you are, your background, and your experience, specifically, with building courses.
DANNY INY: Sure, so thank you for having me, et cetera, et cetera. I've been an entrepreneur, I like to say, for longer than my adult life. I quit school when I was 15 to start my first business, and I've been an entrepreneur since then. I went back to school a bunch of years ago, got an MBA, and I'm kind of on the fence as to whether that was worth it or not, but I have an elementary school diploma, I have an MBA, that is it, nothing in between. I got started as an entrepreneur, and experimented with a bunch of different businesses, as many people do. My last big startup, in 2007, 2008, I was building a technology company. We were building software that teaches kids how to read, so I've been in education most of my career. That figures into course building, but I was a young and inexperienced CEO, and what, in hindsight is, can I swear on this interview?
BEN SETTLE: You can swear all you want. I don't want you to hold back in any way, shape, or form. Please be, whatever you've got to do.
DANNY INY: I had been and inexperienced CEO in what, in hindsight, is the most fucking complicated industry on the face of the Earth. I had a lot of learning to do on the job, and just as I was getting on top of it, we rolled around September, 2008. The markets crashed and everything just fell apart, so I walked away from that with, yeah, I wasn't comfortable with many of my investors, many of whom were friends and family, losing everything they put in, so I took a lot of that on myself. I ended up walking away from that with about a quarter of a million dollars in personal debt, which is a bummer, but you move on from there.
I started rebuilding, and getting a job was not a practical option, both because all I had was an elementary school diploma, and because any job that I could likely get, if I would then apply all of my salary to paying off my debt, I would be debt-free in like 70 years. It was not an option, so I rebuilt a consulting practice, where I helped people with their marketing and their strategy around the things, and copy-writing. In fact, I was doing a lot of copy-writing at the time, leveraging a lot of the things I had learned from doing it wrong. I built a pretty successful practice. It was a six-figure practice in a couple of years.
My sweet spot was people who were business owners, entrepreneurs who were in kind of the 0 to 10 employee range, and closer to 0 than 10, so people just getting started. There were enough of them that were doing well enough so they could afford my services. I built a pretty good practice, but there were also a lot who were not doing well at all. They needed a ton of help and they couldn't afford to pay for anything. I found that I was giving away a lot of my time for free. That's fine, because a lot of people helped me out for free when I was getting started, and you pay it forward, but it wasn't scalable. I was like, "There's got to be a better way of doing this," so I thought, "What if I build a course, teaching everything that I know that people need to know?"
I slaved away building this massive, giant course. Literally, I spent more than 2,000 hours building this thing. When I was finally done, I took it to the market. Actually, I wasn't done. I was like a third of the way building it, but I couldn't wait, so I was like, I'll sell it while I continue to build it. I took it to the market, and people think the worst thing that can happen is that nobody buys, but actually, the worst thing that can happen is one person buys, then you're on the hook to deliver this ginormous course that you promised. I was deep enough into it. I was like, "All right, I'm just going to plow through." Literally, 2,000 hours, working full sail for this one guy. The program never did very well. I think over it's lifetime, I sold less than 50 spots. I think my dollars per hour working on that course was like 11 cents an hour. It was terrible, and I was pretty burned by the experience. I was like, "Courses? Maybe this
is not such a great idea."
Parallel with that, as I was trying to get my business off the ground, get the word out of what I was doing, I did a lot of stuff to build my audience. I stumbled onto various strategies that worked pretty well for me. My audience grew, and people started asking me how I was doing what I was doing. I was getting emails, unsolicited, from strangers from 3 to 5 times a week, "How are you doing this?" I resisted for a long time. I'm not teaching anything because I just got screwed with the last course I tried to teach, but people kept asking. I was like, "All right, I've got to do something here. There's clearly an opportunity. There's a demand."
The thing is, I was afraid. I was afraid that I was going to get burned, so I basically prepared the minimum amount of work that I was comfortable preparing, which at the time, I had outlines for my slides, and I had, basically, the slides and the outlines of what I was going to cover. These days, honestly, I would even do less. I reached out to my audience. It wasn't a very large audience at the time, just a few thousand people, and I said, "Hey look, I'm thinking of building this course. If you're interested, you can sign up and be one of my pilot students. You're going to pay up front, and you're going to be one of the first people to get in, I'm going to deliver it live, and you're going to give me your feedback on how I can improve it."
This wasn't some stroke of marketing genius. This was just me hedging my bets. I thought people would say no, or they wouldn't be interested, so I wouldn't lose too much time, but it worked like gangbusters. We sold out in like 24 hours, and I have, something your listeners may not know about me is A, I'm Canadian, so our holidays are not all the same holidays, and I've been an entrepreneur forever. I'm very oblivious as the when there are holidays. I don't remember what the holiday was, but I launched this on a holiday weekend, so the cart opens on, I think it was a Friday, when a lot of people are off on vacation, and we sold out on Saturday, so I shut it down, and I got a ton of really pissed off email from people who were like, "What the hell? I wasn't even in front of my computer, and now I can't get in," so I end up having to reopen it, and it was super-awkward, but we sold out way past what we thought we would sell. We did
really, really well.
I delivered the program. People got great results, and that year, this was 2012, I sold, it was an inexpensive program, $137, I sold about a thousand spots in that program, so not bad for someone, you know, this was my first year in online business. About half way through that year, I'm delivering this training, and my students are going out there and getting success, and it was about one specific tactic. It was about guest posting. They would come back to me and say, "Now that I know how to guest post, I know how to write a great article, a great post. I know how to get on a big major blog." I was getting a lot of different variations on the question, but essentially, they were saying now they know this, "Does that mean I know everything I need to know to build my online business?" I was like, "No, of course not. Why the hell would you think that?" There's a ton more.
By this point, my business was growing. I was doing several hundred thousand dollars a year, at that time, so I was like, I had stuff to teach, but again, this would be a bigger course, much more involved. I was like, "Oh, I don't know." Once bitten, twice shy, and so I did a webinar. I invited my community to attend, and I just walked them through my whole framework of like, these are the steps I followed to build my business, these are the steps I think you need to follow, and I said, "You know what? I'm going to take on a small group of people, and I'm going to work with them intensively on this process for the rest of the year. It's by application only. You've got to put down a deposit to apply. I'll interview you. If it's a good fit, then we'll keep going. If not, I'll give you your money back," but essentially, it was a $500 deposit, and if I accepted them, it was another $6,000, sorry, including the deposit, it was $6,000.
I did this, again, because I was like, "I want to hedge my bets. If nobody goes for it, at least I'll know." I delivered a webinar, that's my whole investment. To my great surprise, I had 9 people apply. I interviewed them all. Two of them, I said, "Look, I don't think it's a fit." I was left with 7. That was $42,000 that I made in a weekend. This was the first time I'd ever made that kind of money. I was like, "Holy crap." When I told some friends, "I just made $42,000 in a weekend," their question was, "You mean legally?"
BEN SETTLE: Yeah.
DANNY INY: It's like, "Yeah." Like, "Oh, my God." I delivered this thing and it worked so well that a few months later, I did it again. I brought on another bunch of people, and it was despite there was no program. I was just delivering the content, helping people, fleshing out the content as I went, and then refining my thinking. It wasn't until January of the following year that I launched this program, so I made, I think, about $80,000 before the program officially launched. When I launched the program, we did another $300,000. Over the next two and a half years, we did about a million and a half dollars selling this program, which was called the Audience Business Master Class.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah, which I'm very familiar with, very good product.
DANNY INY: Thank you.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah. I always wondered about the story behind that, actually.
DANNY INY: That's where it came from. People ask me for it. A while later, because it's not just about the information. Because I have a background, I know you have some other questions, I feel like I might be bleeding into them a bit, but-
BEN SETTLE: No, that's fine. It's not going to hurt anything. It's all good.
DANNY INY: Because I have a background in education, running education companies, because, and I think this is a challenge in our world of online business, a lot of people out there are teaching about courses, and delivering courses who don't understand education. They don't know how to teach. They don't know how to help people learn, and that's why a lot of programs out there- I heard a stat, I won't say who the marketer is, but a very well-known marketer said that he felt his big fancy program, one of these $2,000 packages, and he has a live event, and all the people who buy this big fancy program are invited to the event, and the event is much, much later, so once people finally show up at the event, 5% of people have gone through his program. In other words, 95% of people have spent $2,000 and done nothing with it, which is atrocious. It's insane. I don't understand how people are okay with that.
BEN SETTLE: I don't think people are okay with it when they figure it out. You know?
DANNY INY: That's a fair point, yes. My background is in education. It's not that I was good at selling courses. The courses are delivered. They help people get results, and I started having questions from people around, "Can you teach us how you build your courses?" The best ideas of stuff to do comes from your markets. Sometimes, it's explicit, like they ask you in so many words. Sometimes, it's implicit. You have to read between the lines. You have to go do the research. You have to teach people how to do that. The market was telling me they wanted something.
I realized that, I looked back on, at this point, there were three courses I had built. The first one was a ginormous failure. The next two were huge successes. I realized that there were a few things that I was doing differently. First of all, there was a whole, build it after you sell it, as opposed to building it and then trying to sell it. It's a huge mistake that most people make building their courses. I'd seen people talk about that a little bit, pre-selling. That's not really what I was doing, though. The reason I had resisted these ideas around pre-selling was that it felt like it was about squeezing some money out of people early, and then delivering a substandard product. I wouldn't support that at all.
What this piloting process was doing was actually the opposite, because here's what happens when you spend all this time building a giant course. You're building it based on what you think people need to know, and where you think they'll get stuck, except you're wrong. You're wrong about where they're gong to get stuck. You're wrong about where they're going to have questions. You're wrong, sometimes, about what they need to know, and you're not going to know it until people start going through it, so it's not about not building something great. It's about moving the work to, after people have given you money, and validated that they really want it, so that you can build it in real time, while you're getting feedback from people as to what they need, to create a much higher quality product.
I thought that through, and I was like, "Okay, I think I get this process." I was like, "All right, I'm going to teach this." Of course, we followed that process. I didn't say, "All right, I'm going to build a giant course about how you should pilot stuff," so we did the piloting, and the piloting was very successful. We made well over $100,000 before there was ever any kind of course, just on the piloting, and then we launched the Course-builder's Lab, and we keep refining it, reiterating, and that's kind of what we do. That's our process that we teach. We've enrolled to date a couple thousand students. We've got a ginormous wall of success stories, which is always fun to look at, people who built courses in all kinds of successful spaces in industries, starting with an audience, starting without an audience, being good with technology, not being good with technology, the works. Yeah, that's kind of the story, me and my story and how I
came to be involved in course-building.
BEN SETTLE: I'm curious about this, so the way you're doing that, where you're kind of building it, not all at once, but as you're kind of, I don't want to say making it up as you go along, but you're building it in a very specific, counter-intuitive way than most people do. Is that a function of your training in the educational field, because you're teaching people about learning?
END PART 1.
I'm hosting a comprehensive training on how to build courses like Danny does later this week (Thursday April 6th at high noon PST, 3:00 pm EST, etc) with Danny's team on this.
It's free to attend.
And, in typical Danny Iny fashion, you'll know exactly how to do your own course in 60 days or less.
Before you even ask:
Yes, my little droogling, there will be a pitch at the end.
(For support, coaching, etc)
So if you think pitches are the devil, simply hang up early and go to your safe place.
Otherwise, here's my buck nekid affiliate link:
http://www.EmailPlayers.com/course
Ben Settle