Vishen Lakhiani announces Mindvalley is cutting 90% of its programs to focus on 30 high-quality courses, with new collaborations and technology aimed at 80-90% completion rates. The shift will hurt revenue short-term but recover within six months, with a 200-person team across 40 countries building the new vision.
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Over the years, mindvalley has published thousands of programs in personal growth. You can log into mindvalley Academy and see literally these thousands of programs that we've put together over the last 10 years of our existence as a company. But we're going to be making a really big shift. You see these thousands of programs? Well, we're going to be removing and discontinuing 90% of them. Now, you may be wondering why. Why would we kill 90% of our legacy? Why would we remove 90% of the programs in Mindvalley Academy? Well, it's got to do with an obsession, an obsession with quality. So while we have put up thousands of programs over the last decade, we notice that there are about 15 programs that get the best praise, that create the best transformation with our customers. And we asked ourselves what would happen if we stopped focusing on a thousand programs and just focused on these 15 existing programs, plus a 15 new programs to create in the next year. In short, what if mindvalley just provided 30 different courses in personal growth? And so began our obsession. We realized that our community did not need 10 different meditation programs. You wanted one, but you wanted that one program to be outstanding, to be world class, to be the best that you could invest in for yourself. So we killed our store. There is no longer a store on Mindvalley Academy. And these 1,000 programs that we previously had, while more than 90% of them will now be discontinued, if you bought them in the past, you can still access them on mindvalley Home, but no one else will ever be able to buy them again in the future. We even discontinued 90% of our contracts with authors because we want to focus like a laser on simply the best courses and the best authors and take what we are creating to a whole new level of artistry. And so we made this promise to ourselves, a promise for you, that every program we create is going to be the best of its kind on the planet. And something remarkable happened when we made this promise. The world's greatest authors started coming to us to collaborate with us to bring their visions to life. And so coming to you in 2017 will be some of the greatest teachers on the planet teaching on mindvalley Academy. From Robin Sharma to Donna Eden, to Neal Donald Walsh of Conversations with God, to Don Miguel Ruiz, who wrote some of the greatest spiritual works of our generation, to the legacy of Alan Watts and Jose Silva, all of these legendary teachers are now collaborating with Mindvalley to bring new visions of learning and advancing human potential to the world. But it's not Just the best teachers. We've started assembling a team of artists, creative directors, designers, learning curriculum experts as well as filmmakers, so that every course we create going forward is of exceptional quality. But most of all, technology. See, in this personal growth space in education, we know that the majority of courses that students enroll in never get completed. You can look at these large education websites and they have maybe a 10% completion rate. Mindvalley's completion rate has been significantly higher, but now we're looking to skyrocket that to 80 to 90%. Using new tools of education, new types of software, peer to peer learning methods, whole new inventions in learning that we've been investing in quietly with technology teams around the world over the last 18 months. And all of this is coming to our academy soon. Now we're not just stopping with the digital world. Our vision goes so much beyond just what you see on your computer. So we are innovating in new types of events, festivals. We are even going to be doing an experiment to create a new type of university to compete with the world's four year institutions. So it's going to be an exciting 2017. This obsession has been, I think, one of the most fun obsessions I've had in my life because it's given me new meaning to the work I do. It's made me feel energized getting out of bed every morning and creating things again. And it's brought in a whole new energy to our company. But let me admit, when we started doing this, it wasn't easy. The first thing that happens when we killed our store and 90% of our products is that our revenues plummeted. And for a while we were even wondering if we were nuts and if we were going to survive as a company. But within less than half a year, things started changing. As customers started noticing new levels of quality, new types of teachers, new technologies emerging, our number of enrolled students started going higher and higher and higher and we've been hitting records ever since. This has given us more capital to fuel these investments. And we're doing this for one reason. Mindvalley, along with you guys, along with our team members around the world, are looking to create the world's greatest personal growth revolution in human history in the next great. Now, we know this isn't going to be easy, but we're going to be doing our best to get there. So you can expect this over the next three years. Expect the world's greatest teachers to come to you on Mindvalley Academy. Expect programs and courses that are designed at whole new levels of education and artistry. Expect artisan quality design, documentary quality film filmmaking, the best of its kind in the world to bring this education to you. Look forward to learning technologies that go way beyond traditional media and create 500% better completion rates in students and significantly better results. And expect a new type of event model that we're developing that turns cities into campuses that we're looking to bring to the world to compete with aging four year university institutions. So it's going to be an exciting 2017 and we can't wait to get these projects out to the world. Out to you. We've already assembled a team of some 200 really inspired, motivated, brilliant people, from artists to designers to technologists from 40 different countries, working every day on this vision. It's a vision to reform education for humanity, to help humanity get to its next level, to move mankind to become a more advanced species. And we cannot wait for you to be part of this vision. So stay tuned for a whole new mindvalley launching soon. Already in the coming weeks and months, you will begin to see massive shifts and changes one by one emerging on mindvalley Academy as we build up this new vision for the world. Thank you for being part of our community.
