Don't Price Your Course Like THIS!

I believe that the middle tier of courses and digital products is like slowly, maybe quickly being destroyed. What people expect out of the lower tier, more of that impulse buy, something that's less than $200, less than $150, maybe even less than $100. Those courses have gotten so much better than they used to be a couple of years ago. And I credit/blame our friend Justin Welsh. For this, I can't tell you the number of like clients or potential clients that I've talked to over the phone, over Zoom, over DMs, like, hey, can you build me— can you help me build a Justin Welsh style offer? And there are a lot of things that I could say about that, including like the sheer volume that it takes to make that profitable. But Justin's courses, Content OS, LinkedIn OS, are so packed with value for $100, $150. That people expect, especially in our, in our creator economy bubble, people expect for courses in that range to be really good. And so the delta, the difference between like what you're selling at $150 versus what you'd be selling at $500, it really needs to like scale up appropriately. So that's why I think the $500 course, it's the toughest thing to sell right now as a creator, you're much better suited if you have like say over 50,000 or 100,000 subscribers, subscribers to selling something that is like still really good, obviously, but it's closer to $100, $150. And then go like, it's like a barbell strategy. It's like a barbell effect. You want to sell something that's $100 or $1,000, $2,000, $3,000. Trying to sell something for $500, this mid-tier, the economics of it really work when you nail the offer. But I think first you have to figure out your cohort/high-value offer and your low-value volume offer that you can sell like right upon subscription. So that's my big picture hot take on like the $500, $700 range of products. Uh, it's, it can still be really good, but it's the hardest to like convince people to buy right now.

Yeah. And one thing that I'm kind of realizing as you say this is that $500, $700 number, that's really intoxicating. Let's, I'll say it again. You get 100 people to buy your $500 course and your life changes. Same thing with $700. Like relatively speaking, that also could happen at $200, right? If, if $150, $200 course, if you can find, and we're, we've gone down because it is harder to find 200 people, but if you can find 200 people to buy your $200 course, like that's incredibly lucrative for you.

Yeah. That's still $40,000. And the numbers, the numbers keep playing out.

Yeah. You went hard on like the Justin Welsh like side of it. Right. And I do think we will get to it on overdelivering these impulse kind of shorter courses that still have a ton of value. This I think is the real sweet spot for especially like self-guided courses. A hidden strategy for these impulse, like under $200 courses is that you can bundle them together and reach that mid, mid-level course price, right? So we just launched the course design blueprint. We could do newsletter launch blueprint. We could do a course on videos and communities and websites, and we could all the things that we do at Hey Creator, we could each have separate $147, $197 courses and then package them all together and make it look like an insane overdeliver in price, right? For $697, $897, you know, like, yeah, $1,500 worth of value, right? In half the price.

I love your point about like overdelivering as a strategy because this is again like something that we're seeing is that these like courses or products for creators 5 years ago that were under $100, those are like people were selling ebooks for $50. And now like some of these courses, you can get just an insane amount of value for $100, $150. And what you're doing is you're giving people, and you can talk about this a lot, lot better than I have, because it's your point, like it's great for shareability and testimonials, because people are like, holy cow, I came in, I was just expecting to learn a little bit about this. But I did so much, I did so many other things. And now they're like, our friend Amanda Gitz is doing this with her Life's a Game Masterclass. Like, there are just so many testimonials from people who are coming in and are so happy about the value that they receive for something that's less than $200.

Yeah, I was jamming with our friend Greg Eisenberg about this last year, about how like you go to a coffee shop and they bring— you pay for it, they bring it out to you. Most places they just set it on the counter, right? And after a while they check on you, they give you like a nice little cheap piece of chocolate that you didn't pay for or ask for, right? And you come back the next day, they remember your name. All these different, like, ways to overdeliver on service work, which you can do. We can go back to that for a second. Like, if you offer a service, these little things you can do, like, give people— for keep using the video example— give them 5 videos when they only paid for 3. Or, um, just like the kindness and, like, attention you show to your clients and that. In the course side of it, you could do a course and you mentioned Justin Welsh, you could do what should be $500 worth of value. It's a massive, awesome, helpful course and price it at $197 or $97. And Jack Butcher, his, his—

Jack's a great example of this.

Build Once Sell Twice. I'm not sure what it ever got to in terms of like maximum price, but right now it's $8.

That's right.

That is a, that is a Honda, not only just for how long it is, but what's in it. $8 is 80 times less probably than what it's worth and probably infinitely more for what it's done for other people and their businesses, right? So we're not saying make your $1,000 course $8.

No, I'm not saying that.

But think of the ways that you, if you ever price something in a tier on this ladder, like one rung lower than you probably should or would, what that does in exchange is Yes, you might need more people to buy it. The goodwill you've built, the gratitude that you've built from your audience and your followers, the shareability increases tremendously. It's like, oh my God, for Jack Butcher's case, if I paid $8 and got something that could help me build a $100,000 business, you know, like that's just incredible.

Yeah. And you're going to tell people, you're going to tell people about it, be like, hey, you can't, you wouldn't believe, I would, I would challenge everyone listening to this, watching this, to think about like, what would I have to price something to make people be like, you won't believe what I paid for this thing that helped me so much. If you have these like low, low priced, under $200, under $100, very low price, say like tiny offers that are under $50, though, like what we were just talking about with Jack, those only make long-term sense financially if you have a high volume of subscribers and potential customers to make, to make that economically satisfying for you. It's great when you have over 100,000 subscribers, over 200,000 subscribers, multiple thousands of tens of hundreds of thousands of followers that you can convert. You have a high volume of subscribers, leads that can turn into, like, if you're converting 5 to 7% of that, We talked about this with the 7 Steps to 7 Figures in our newsletter episode. That's a really good business. But what most people miss, and even when they came to me, they came to us and they're like, hey, I want to have a Justin-style offer. Okay, well, you've got 1,000 email subscribers. Even if they had 10,000 email subscribers, if you're converting, let's just do, let's do math. I'm using my phone as a camera, but let's do math. If I convert 8% of my 10,000 subscriber audience, that's, you know, 800 subscribers, that's 800 customers by $97. That's $77,600, which is still really great. I'm not saying that's not, but here's the next thing that again, people miss. I probably need another 10,000 subscribers next year to do that again. You can't keep pitching the same thing to the same subscribers over and over again, a percentage over time will buy, absolutely. But like, not as many people think about, they just kind of like, and I made this mistake, I was like, oh, I made it to 10,000 email subscribers, my, you know, my work here is done. Not, not quite that much, but I didn't focus as much on growing my list, then I have to replenish the list to to then like sell them this product again. I need new subscribers, new leads coming in. A lot of people miss that when it comes to these lower-priced products. They're just like, oh, well, people are gonna like, it's such a great deal, people are gonna buy. Yeah, you'll convert a higher, a higher rate than you would that $500 course, but you need to keep, you need to keep like bringing in new subscribers top of funnel so that you can keep making these sales and make it financially viable.