$63,150 In 48 Hours? Lessons From Our $150 ChatGPT Webinar | Espresso Hour E8

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour where the running joke is this is going to be much shorter than an hour because once again, we had an incredible week. We are hyped up on caffeine. Cole, what's going on, man?

Feeling great as ever. Although I will, I will admit my espresso machine is telling me that I have to clean it and I don't know how to clean it. And so this weekend I have to watch a YouTube video to figure out how to clean my espresso machine.

Well, there you go. You got your weekend activity. So this is going to be a two part episode. We're going to break this up into two because we got a bunch of things we want to talk about. First, we want to talk about our Chat GPT webinar that I still can't believe was only a week ago. Today we're going to walk through the numbers of how that worked. Made over $70,000 in two days of work. We'll give the full breakdown on that. And then next episode, we're going to update everyone on our ghostwriting intensive, how that went. Quick Preview, we held 50 calls this week. We got our initial cohort locked in, really excited about that. But we're going to break that out into the next episode. So if you're enjoying how we're doing this on the Espresso Hour, kind of the build in public, leave a comment, let us know, send us a dm. We love hearing how many people are interested in this kind of stuff and we want to tailor it to make it as interesting to you as well. So throw it a, like leave it a comment, send us a DM if you're listening. But where do you want to start with ChatGPT, probably.

Maybe we explain quickly how we first of all coming up with the idea and then the infrastructure. I think of how we organized and thought about all of this. I'll say that the idea I think really stemmed from and this is definitely a thread I want to write and probably even an e book that we could turn this into is we're just drinking our own Kool Aid. This idea came from you and I starting to tweet about ChatGPT and AI and when we would, we would get a lot of signal from people and constantly getting asked the question, what's, what are these tools going to do? You know, does that mean as a writer I'm out of a job? Yeah, like all of these questions that people wanted answers to and all of a sudden we were like, well, okay. If everyone's asking these questions, that means it's probably valuable for us to turn into like a webinar or some sort of paid workshop. And so we did and immediate signal that it clicked.

Yeah. So today's the 17th, we're filming this. We held the webinar on the 10th and I think we had the meeting where we decided we were going to do it on Wednesday the 1st. Right. So we had that meeting and then we spent you know, a day or two. And it's interesting because we wanted to learn how to use ChatGPT. And the best way to learn it was to dive in head first, immerse ourselves in it through the lens of like we're gonna learn this so we can teach it. And I think that's kind of a meta principle that anyone can apply is when you're looking to learn something new, think about how you're gonna end up teaching it one now. Cause I feel like I can use ChatGPT for a hundred different things because of how we went and learned it. But in terms of turnaround, we went from idea and then we started working on it what Tuesday of last week. So three days, three days of real work between research, creating the slides, creating the templates, creating the deck, launching it on the email campaign, all that. And I think high level results. Extremely happy with it. So for context, this was the first time we've ever sold anything at that 150 price point. We think it's an interesting way of as ship 30s prices continue to go up as we've continued to add things there, filling out that full. There's people who don't want that full cohort experience that still want to learn from us in certain ways. And we think that filling in that asynchronous workshop style and we can talk about why we think the workshop is more effective than like an async course that no one gets in, like gets through putting it all in one video and then having the, the templates and workbook that go alongside it I think is much more effective. But I tweeted out the numbers. So the numbers on just the initial Launch, we did 65k in, in revenue on that. So 400 something sales, three emails and what's your take?

Yeah, I think, I mean first of all blew my expectations out the water. Like before we hit go live, I was fully expecting like 12 people to show up to this webinar. Like I, I had no idea this was going to do what it did. But I think just, just to crystallize what you're pointing out. So there's a bunch of things that are. That would be helpful for people. So a, this whole buying curve idea, you know, having products at different price points. And so if you think about what we. And we've been aware of this for 18 months now, you know, we have on the quote unquote, higher end, ship 30 has gotten more and more valuable. It's gone from 3, 300 bucks to 400, 500, 600 bucks plus. And then on the really low end, we have these ebooks that are like 20 bucks, you know, and the ebooks kind of serve as this little onboarding into our world and how we think and our principles. And then that's kind of what introduces people to ship 30. And we've been aware for a year and a half, we've just been busy building other things that we don't really have anything at that more entry level, you know, $99 to $299, you know, price point anymore. And as you and I are learning, Dickie, there's entire businesses to be built at each one of these points of the buying curve. But as a business matures, and once you cross certain thresholds, you actually want products at each of these price points. And so the idea for us was a, there's a lot of people on our email list who haven't bought ship 30 yet. And it might be a price thing, it might be a trust thing. We don't know. So why don't we test a $150 product? Was 1, 2 was does this unlock a vehicle for us to be able to educate on and monetize like hot topics? So, ChatGPT, something in the writing world comes up is this is a. Actually a really efficient way for us to jump on that really quickly. Third is when you do it in that live workshop style. You said this in a great way to me, which is this isn't the first time that we make money on. This isn't the first time we sell this, right? So you hold it for 150 bucks per person live, and then afterwards you can sell the recording of it. So now you just basically got paid to create another digital product as part of your suite. And then fourth, which was interesting is we have this captain's table community and we're always like, how can we add more value to the members there? And the unlock for us was, oh, we just give all our members 100% off coupon code to attend these paid workshops. And then we put the recording in our community. So if you think about it, you're basically quadruple dipping here. Where then the paid asset also becomes a community retention tool. Because it's like, hey, we're continuing to put more and more resources in here. And I just, I want to like explain that whole thinking because I think on the surface it kind of looks like, oh, you guys did a paid webinar. But. But there was a lot of thinking that went into like why we did this. When we did it at the price point, we did it all the different ways that we're thinking of using the asset. It's a great model for other people.

There's so many different ways I could go with that because the first is we could have done this for free, I guess relative to some of the other webinars we've done. But very interestingly, like to have 450 people buy to attend. Like our Lean Writing webinar that we were debating doing is a 150 webinar had a thousand people attend and that was free. Right. So very interesting to see. There's almost like because it's paid, it's more valuable. Like the content. Yes. We put more effort into this one than we did the Lean writing because we charge for it. We want to deliver like a 10x on that at least. But that was an interesting takeaway too of like people. People showed up and put in more effort and treated it more like an investment because they paid for it. Which I thought was another interesting takeaway.

It depends on the stage of where you're at. Like if we were doing this 18 months ago, of course it would have been free because we had 5,000 people on our email list and we were like, you're just still earlier on. But as you mature and as the business matures, do we really need to do another free webinar to get another thousand emails? Well, no, we're collecting a thousand emails a month now. You know, like, it's just that that isn't the problem. Now we can move on to the next thing.

Two more things on the webinar idea. I think it's more effective to have a two hour crash course with a workbook than like an asynchronous course. Because you binge it all at once, get all the information and then you can watch that on two times speed. Right. I think that's actually more effective. And the people who showed up live got that immediate value rather than buying the course and then never going through it. Right. So even now that it's async and available for purchase. You can buy it and then immediately jump into the two hour webinar. It's like boom, instant learning. Right. Which I think is valuable for people. And the last point I think is we plan on doing for these throughout the year and you can see how that's just going to compound. Or by the end of the year we have four lower ticket parts of the buying curve. Solving specific problems in a specific way that then we could one, bundle up and do for Black Friday or have as order bumps for ship 30 or just bundle them up and give them away for our January ship 30 cohort as like a sweetener. So you could see. I. I do think. I'm glad you brought up kind of the intentionality behind it because of all the ways we're thinking about using this. It wasn't just, hey, let's do a webinar. It's like how can we start a templatizable model that we can repeat that's going to compound over time where if we do extend the time horizon and do eight of these, where are we sitting in two years with the number of products we built and it only took a week to do so. A lot of fun.

Yeah. And also, you know, so what we did 65k on this one. Ish. And so you do four of those a year. You basically just added another quarter million dollars to your top line. And you got paid to create assets that will continue to sell ongoingly. And you got paid to create assets that you can give away for free because they're digital and there's no marginal cost as sweeteners for another higher end product. And those add more and more value to your community archive, which increases retention, which increases people wanting to stay in longer. So it's like you just. When you start to see how all these pieces connect, it's like this is why the whole game of digital education is all about bundling and unbundling. Because there's no marginal cost. You know, if you run a CPG company or you're shipping physical goods, it's a totally different thing because you have costs to everything. But we have no cost. It's all 99% margin products. So you can do some really cool things with that.

What might be interesting is to think about what we want to do next. And, and that unbundling point is interesting. Right? Because ship 30 is built on kind of six pillars. Ish. And each of those could become individual webinars now where we break out the different parts of ship 30 and find the People who are, maybe they don't need help building a writing habit, they've already done that. They just want help with headlines. And we do like a two hour headline masterclass. Ship 30 used to fill this part of the buying curve. We didn't have anything higher ticket like our ghostwriting and we didn't have anything even mid ticket. So now it's like if someone just discovers us and the only way they could join is the ebook or joining, having that bridge. But not just like one thing. We want six different ways that they could build trust with us with a, you know, impulse buy kind of hyper specific solution product.

That's a great point. I feel like the two low hanging fruits, well, three, I mean the eig, the Endless idea generator is always a hit session. That would be an easy paid webinar. But also the headlines and the formatting like those three are just layups to all be individual paid webinars. And each one, and I want to point this out because we've started doing this in the captain's table and on the membership, this idea of rolling education credit. So our model in the captain's table is every month that you're part of it, that monthly cost gets rolled forward into whatever other education product that you want to buy. So if you're in the captain's table for a year, you rack up a year's worth of cost basically to invest in the next product. And if you think about doing that on the front end with $150 paid webinars, right. The model is really simple. You just extract one of your main lessons from your primary course. So ship 30, we extract say the headline session. We sell that for $150 as a live webinar. And then every person who attends at the end, we say, hey, you can roll your $150 into the next cohort of ship 30. And that as just like the way of thinking about how to bring people into your ecosystem. So powerful.

And we're already starting to see it, right? Because in the follow up we said hey. And I haven't looked at, at the exact numbers, but I'm pretty sure 90% of the people who attended the webinar that weren't part of the captain's table. So our membership that is ongoing, it was the first time they bought something from us, so it was filling that initial trust. And now when we have our upcoming cohort in April, we'll say, hey, we're not giving you $150 off, we're giving you $150 in credit to upgrade to ship 30. Right. You've bought one thing now if you want to roll that investment forward and it feels like a progression rather than a discount. And if someone buys four of those, they've gotten that full suite and then the upgrades only a couple hundred. Right. So that is how I see it's going to take some magic and convert kit and on the back end and doing all that. But like that's, that's the name of the game. Right. If you get an email that says hey, you bought two things, our next cohorts coming up. If you enjoyed those, you're going to love this. But by the way, you can roll that forward.

And this is true for any, any type of business but just particularly with info products and education products is people think about it like they're selling different products and in reality what you're, what you're really selling is you're selling like some sort of entire journey or an arc of some sort of transformation. And each of these are just steps on that. And so you don't want to think about it like you're selling four different products. You want to think about it like you're, you're selling different products at different stages and you to incentivize the person to go, well you already took the first step and we want to reward you for that. So just upgrade to the next step. Upgrade to the next step. Because the whole game is I want to extend the LTV of any given customer or student.

Yeah. And two things I think we could have done better because I think it's always worth doing a little postmortem. Like what could have gone better or what could we, what will we do better in the next time? First I think we should have a incentive to share the sign up link when you join. So create an extra bonus that we don't talk about. So right when someone buys, they get an email saying hey, welcome, hey. We put together this kind of unrelated thing. If you want that too for free, all you gotta do is tweet out the link to the webinar. That's an easy way to get virality of hey, I'm going to this webinar alliance incentives where they download that and get it. And then I think another kind of similar thing to that is create a custom discount code for everyone who buys that works for one other person and say hey, you can invite a friend and they can get 50% off. Right. So it's like hey, I'm going to this, send this to a Friend they can get in for half off. You look like a great friend. Boom. You know, you both get it. Who knows if that one would work quite as well as the first one because they might just invite their friend with the, the link. But I think that that is something we could have done better.

Yeah, that's, that's a really cool idea. I'm trying to think of like what else we could have done that would have made. I mean one thing is if you, if you think about the execution, we basically did this entire thing in less than a week, like start to finish. And I think we probably could have generated more sales if we had started talking about it and doing the emails not three days before, but like two weeks before, you know. So just extending that email campaign probably would have been good.

Yeah, just multiple touch points. Right. So two newsletters say put it on the calendar two weeks ahead. So it's the main CTA of both our newsletters just to get a little bit more attention on it because yeah, I'm very interested to see how the follow up goes. And so what we are doing now is relaunching it to everyone who was initially interested and saying, hey, it's available but we're going to keep it at 150 and eventually raise it. So for the first week that it's on sale, you could get it for the same price as the live and then we're going to continue to raise it over time as kind of demand comes in. That's our game plan.

Yeah, so that's, that's where it gets interesting of again, the. You doing it live isn't the only time you make money. It's the first time you make money. And then there's so many other ways where you can continue to distribute it. And aren't we also. I think Daniel bought an individual domain and so it's sitting on its own domain as a product too.

Yeah. Start writing with chat GPT.com so now it's like its own thing. All we need now is to. And this is actually just a reminder for us, we need to go get that little product box and skin it out. So it's like you get this thing. Right. I love that idea. I mean, Jack Butcher obviously pioneered this I think with the sleek product boxes for digital products. Right. Because it makes you feel like you're actually getting something.

It goes, I mean, yeah, it even goes back to like, if you remember buying. I mean when, when did like Internet video games start becoming a thing? But even back then, you know, like 15 years ago, if you were buying a game on Steam or something, like, they would find a way to make it look like you were getting this physical good digitally. To me, that is like one of the whole keys of selling digital products, education products. Anything is like, you need to remind the person that what they are buying is as valuable as a physical thing. It's just. It's in the digital world. And so it's almost a weird backwards thing where it's like you have to take the digital thing and make it seem more analog so that the person goes, oh, I value this. Like, I value getting an Apple box in the mail.

Yes. So we got to get to work on that. That's just a reminder to us. I think the. The most important part of this whole thing was the reaction to the presentation itself, where everyone was mind blown. Like, that is what I felt best about is the testimonial page afterwards saying, I can't believe this was only $150. Like, this was by far the most actionable of anything that I've seen. Like, this was a masterclass. I feel like I went into this almost scared of, like, Chad is going to do X, Y and Z now. I feel extremely empowered and so above sales, above everything else on the business side. Like, it was cool to see people be like, yo, this was a legitimately, extremely, extremely helpful for me because I came into this worried, unsure. Now I'm like, I have a new virtual assistant and I'm gonna go train it right now. So many people are like, I'm clearing my entire calendar for the rest of the day, for the rest of the weekend. So I can just go down that. And that's what we did too.

Yeah, that I. I'm glad you said that. Cause that was definitely the coolest and most valuable takeaway for me as well, is recognizing that this is an unfair advantage for us. Like, our ability to take something new in this world, learn it very quickly, package it, and be able to articulate it to someone else. You know, like, if you think about and anyone who's listening as if you want to build some sort of info or education business, like, that whole arc is the skill. The skill's not just like coming up with an idea. The skill is learning and coming up with an idea and then being able to articulate it and then being able to package it and then being able to market it. And, like, the more that you circle that whole loop, the better and better you get at it. And so to me, being like, watching us be able to execute that whole loop in a week. I was like, oh, we're just going to get better and better at this over and over and over again.

Yep. And that's what we'll do. But now we got to hit the other side of the curve with with ghostwriting. So we're going to stop this episode and follow up in the next one, talking about our ghostwriting intensive, what we did in this week. So last week was a ChatGPT sprint. This week, we sprinted on our new ghost riding intensive. Tons of learning going on. But other than that, if you enjoyed this, leave a, like, leave a comment, let us know, send us a DM because we want to keep doing these and we'll see you in the next episode. Talk soon.