How To Launch A Course For $1M 💰 Without Experience True Story

All right, so today we are going to talk about how we did a $1 million course launch when we had no experience pre-launch. So this was in the context of a company that had never done courses before. And to be fair, I had a background in online education and had a background understanding how, you know, different types of online education business models work. So this was a program from someone that is no longer with us, and a lot of people The company actually leveraged a lot of relationships to bring people such as Tony Robbins to help promote the program. And we also had a team as well. We had a team of developers. We actually set up a war room the day we launched, and we all sat in one room and looked at the numbers, looked at how things were going. But I would say this, you don't need to have all those resources to do a $1 million course launch. What you do need to have is, I'll tell you some of the couple things that we did that worked out well. For example, we ran Facebook ads. And, you know, the Facebook ads worked out really well for us. I would say in the past when I worked in online education, we used YouTube ads because a lot of people are on YouTube to learn and they're searching for things. The intent is there. And so leveraging, you know, underpriced attention is always a good idea. And what we did as well was we, when we ran the Facebook ads, we just targeted, you know, a lot of these influencers that were promoting the product, right? So Tony Robbins would be an example. And what we also did was we collected a lot of emails and we did a— we used the launch style sequence, right? So what a launch style sequence basically means is when you launch a course, it's only open for the next 7 days, the next 14 days or so, right? So you leave it open, hey guys, you're building up, you're drumming up all this fanfare, and then, you know, at the close of 7 days or 14 days, you know, the program is closed and it's gonna be closed for the foreseeable future. So at that time, you know, in the last 3 days, that's when you're gonna get a huge influx of sales, right? The ultimate goal is you're trying to use these ad platforms or really any attention trying to drive a lot of emails for cheap, and then once you drive the emails for cheap, what you can do is you can say, hey, you know what, here's our course and buy it, right? And by the way, it's expiring in 24 hours, it's expiring in 8 hours, it's expiring right now, right? And then maybe we've extended it and then maybe when the sale comes out, like maybe a Christmas thing or maybe Maybe a Black Friday thing comes out, you can run another promotion there. But if you work out the numbers, let's say I'm collecting an email for $1, okay? So usually what happens is, if you're trying to sell a course, the conversion rate would be anywhere from 0.5% to 2%. So typically what I've learned is from people that are very successful with courses is that 0.5% is really good if you're selling a $2,000 course. Now, if you're selling a $1,000 course, maybe 1% is good. Now, less than that, you might be able to get 2%, maybe as high as 5%, right? So just to do some math for you, you know, if we're able to collect an email for $1 or so and the conversion rate is, is 1%, so your cost of acquiring a customer is going to be $100. So, you know, that means what you sell, maybe the course you have is $100, and then that cancels out your ad costs. But if you actually have stuff in the backend where you have additional kind of, let's say, Let's say I'm selling a course on how to level up, how to play the game of life, right? Or how to build the right habits. Maybe that's sold for $100 or so. Now, on the backend, the next step might be, okay, now you have the right habits, here's how you actually learn marketing, right? And maybe that's another, I don't know, $200 or something like that. And then I'm gonna show you how to build a business, maybe that's $1,000 or so. So, it starts to ladder up from there. Now, you assume that a certain percentage of these people are going to buy for the $200 and the $1,000, right? So now you're actually making money on every single email that you collect or every sale that you get, you know, you're making money on it, right? So the idea here is you gotta look at your numbers. So every single day we looked at our numbers and we looked at conversion rates. Are the conversion rates holding? Is this acceptable? Should we be scaling? Should we be pulling back? Do we need to go be making more creatives, right? So you Let's say you're running this on your own, you might have an email list. Start with your email list first, and then, you know, then you want to survey people and see, hey, why didn't you buy in the first place, right? So you'd send a non-buyer survey, and then you kind of learn on your own. Now, if you do have a team, then you have a lot more leverage, you can move a lot faster. But what I would say is the most important thing for us is that, you know, we had the power of influencers. I know that's hard to duplicate, but ads, that's easy to duplicate, right? You can duplicate what we're doing there. And then we also had, we focused on collecting emails, and we focused on a launch sequence where it was, you know, after 7 days or whatever, we would close the cart. I don't really like the launch model because it's, there's a lot of, there's a frenzy leading up to it, and then right after you're done, you have to think about the next launch, right? And the next launch after that, the next launch. I like, you know, the idea of having an evergreen webinar. So we did use a webinar for this as well. And there's a lot of webinar softwares that you can use. Livestorm is a great one. So basically what we did was we drove traffic from an ad to a webinar and then once these people were on the list, then we'll say, hey, you know, we're opening the cart over here and then there'll basically be a countdown sequence. And then you can use a lot of different tools for your courses. You can use Thinkific, there's Teachable, there's a lot of great stuff out there. But the idea here is that, you know, doing a $1 million launch like this, which led to a lot of other launches right after, but it's, if you work out the numbers, it's not that bad, right? So again, let's just say you're collecting emails for $10 a pop and then your conversion rate's 1%, that means for every sale you're gonna be paying $1,000 for it, okay? So you gotta be thinking about, okay, that means if I only charge $1,000 for the course, then, you know, I'm gonna be breaking even, right? So I better have stuff in the backend and the funnel better be worked out. So there's a lot of people that do this. I don't think there's anything wrong with doing courses, I think what's wrong is the people that are trying to teach things that don't have experience and they're just trying to make money off these people, right? I think if you genuinely have something to teach, that's great. And, you know, thankfully this worked out for us. You know, look, you can do the launch style, live launches. You can do evergreen launches where you kind of just keep it, keep it, just keep it going. You can do, you know, the model that companies like, you know, Treehouse have where you pay a software subscription fee, you pay each month. And you can also do something like Lambda School where they'll charge you a a percentage of your income. They won't charge you anything upfront, but they'll charge you a percentage of your income once you get a job. If you don't get a job in 5 years, they won't charge you anything. So, you have a lot of different ways to do this online education model. I'm just giving you one example that's more tied to this launch course style, which more internet marketers are used to. But there's a lot of different ways to do this, and it depends on what type of business you're trying to build. But if you want to build a great lifestyle business for yourself, do the launch model, do the evergreen model. If you wanna build a bigger business, maybe think about subscription, maybe think about cohort-based courses where you charge a premium, or maybe do an income share agreement type of thing. So that is it for today. Go to levelingup.com to learn more about the book that I have coming out called Leveling Up. And that's it for today, we'll see you tomorrow.