Eric Siu and Neil Patel explain how to presell a digital course before building it. Use landing pages and Facebook ads to validate demand, track conversion metrics closely, and stick with one-time pricing to avoid high churn rates.
If you were to provide someone advice on how to create their first digital course/info product, what advice would you give them to create the course and bring it to market to acquire the first 100 customers?
Sure, so a lot of people create the course before they sell it. It's the worst thing out there. I don't understand why people do that. Go create a site, like a digital course type of site using Kajabi. It's cheap. It's like $100 a month or $50 a month or something like that. All right, this is if you didn't create the course. If you already have the course, I'll give you an answer for that too. But if you haven't created the course, go to Kajabi, go throw up a landing page. They do payments and everything. Then go throw in some Facebook ads, spend like a few hundred dollars and try to make sales. You'll quickly learn if you can make sales and make it profitable. If you can, then go and create the course. You can even refund those people if you want or say, hey, the course is going to be ready in a month and I'm going to give you all your money back, but let me know if you're still interested in I'll charge you in a month from now. Now you know people are going to buy it, then go and create the course. Everyone creates the course first. Just because you create it doesn't mean it'll sell. We recently created a course called SEO Unlocked, $10,000 a person.
Wow.
We spent months creating it. We probably spent around $270,000, $280,000 into the course, including the sales guys and everything. Guess what happened when we released it? People are like, Awesome course, don't want to pay for it. They're like, can we just pay you to do our marketing? I'm like, crap, all this money down the drain. And I talked to the team because I don't deal with any of this stuff. I'm like, didn't you— we have an email list of 500-something thousand people. Did you guys ask anyone on what they think before we created it? They're like, nope. I was like, sounds good. Thanks for throwing my money down the drain.
Right?
But even us, we do marketing. I blog on all this stuff. Even my guys make mistakes. Overall, they know really well. But when you grow and you have a lot of people, like we're at 150, you make mistakes. In general though, don't create anything. Try to sell it first. And if it works out, then create the course. If you already have the course, go pop it up on Udemy. I don't know if Khan Academy takes courses for money or whatever Udemy competitors there are out there.
Skillshare.
There you go, Skillshare. You make money, then go create your own site and throw ads and stuff like that on there.
Yeah, I mean, that's by far the most powerful thing any course person will tell you. I mean, if you have an email list or even if you're running Facebook ads and trying to get people to opt in, look at your conversion rate, look at the click-through rates, look how cheap they are when you're running Facebook ads, right? What I do is I typically will survey people seeing what they're interested in, which has led me to building my, you know, an SEO tool or like a course, for example. And you can do a simple pre-launch, you know, hey, we're doing this course on podcasting, for example, and then you run them through a sequence and you send them maybe 4 or 5 emails based on, you know, the number of people that have clicked each one. And what I'll also add, I mean, the final thing I'll add on top of it is, you know, I've— my background is in online education, so when I was at Treehouse, the problem is I see a lot of people trying to charge subscription, like, oh, everybody does SaaS, right? But it's difficult when you're doing SaaS. Because the churn rate when it comes to online education or subscription, those 2 combined, is really high. Lynda has a churn rate, so this is the percentage of people canceling, 15% each month. And it's not very sustainable if you're small.
What is it?
15%. 15%.
That's huge. Your people are going to churn in info. Try to charge a one-time fee versus monthly. I've always made more and everyone else has too. Ryan Deiss, Frank Kern, all the info marketers out there, Sam Ovens, Tai Lopez. You hear all these people, you see their YouTube ads. You'll make way more if you just charge a one-time fee.
Yeah, and plus, I'm not the smartest person, right? So I like to charge more so I have a margin for more error. And it gives you a lot more wiggle room when it comes to advertising. The cost per acquisition you can spend to acquire a new customer goes a lot higher, right? And you just, you gotta also monitor your numbers. I mean, Neil looked at his numbers like a hawk. He would, when he lived in Vegas, he would show me his spreadsheet. Every single day, he was manually filling out each row on his own.
Yeah, so the best advice I have to entrepreneurs, you know, a lot of people look at me as cheap and I am. I really am super frugal.
So cheap.
You can ask my girlfriend, she'll tell you, right? Like everything I negotiate on, like I believe if someone gives me a price, I can haggle it down. Even if they say no, I'm like, come on, you know?
He negotiates people until he crushes them. I have one guy that told me recently, he's like, yeah, when I first met Neil, he negotiated me. He told me my product is worthless and I just cried for the weekend.
I always try to get people down. We were here at this cross-campus thing and I don't know how much we paid for this, but the guy was trying to let us into his green room earlier and he's like, oh, someone else is in. I'm like, that's okay, just take $500 off the price and I'll call it a day. And he thought I was joking. I was really serious. I'm like, No, no, just give me $500 back. Right? Like, I want my money back. It's hard earned. But so every day I log into Google Excel sheet or I do it every few days if I'm traveling and I write out each line item expense like SendGrid, date charged, how much. And you'll see me yelling at my team. I'm like, who charged SendGrid twice in the same month? I'm like, who signed up for 2 different SendGrid accounts? I'm like, if you guys combine it, we'll save. $49 a month or $100 a month? Because if you don't make it a point that money is hard to come by, people just start blowing it. And I was there. I've had businesses that generate millions of dollars a month in income. And you look at your credit card statements and you see your team members and even yourself, you're like, oh crap, we're wasting $30,000 a month on credit card stuff that no one even uses. You don't want to be there. Go through everything line item by line item. One of the most important things you can do in business. You write it down. You'll realize what you're spending money on. You go through a QuickBooks document or like some bank account sheet and you just see line item by line item, it doesn't hit you compared to writing it out line item by line item.
