How to launch more quickly and make a safer bet.
I became a content creator because I love teaching.
I started monetizing with Adsense and affiliate links. But the true fun began with my first ebook.
The move from free how-to content to paid guides and courses is natural. Most importantly: the profit is much higher and the impact of your ideas is more transformative.
This doesn’t mean every infoproduct will succeed, though.
Uncertainty is highest with your first launches. You lack experience and you never tested the audience response.
By borrowing some tricks from the lean startup philosophy you can mitigate risk and maximize the upside. I’m using these tricks in my launches and teaching them to my clients.
Here’s how they work.
My clients want to scale their consulting business through online courses. One hundred percent of them want to create the ultimate course: an endless collection of videos covering everything their students could need.
This is guaranteed failure.
Many people don’t even get to launch day. Analysis paralysis freezes them. The absence of data from previous courses makes every option possible. At least in your mind.
So you get stuck in a maze of infinite choices about topics, pricing, length, format, copy, delivery platforms, and on and on.
If you miraculously manage to launch it, total sales won’t justify the time investment. You will have made too many assumptions about your audience’s needs (remember: it’s your first launch). Many of them will be wrong.
But in any case, the time required to create a course in a similar condition will probably balloon and eat up all the profits.
My first course was about a photography post-production software called Lightroom. It covered every feature. I made about 5000€ in the launch week. For me it was amazing.
But I didn’t track how many hours it took to record and edit the videos. I’m sure the profit per hour was not so exciting.
With the right strategy, you can minimize all those risks and the cost of failure.
I recommend my clients start from the opposite of what they envision: a short webinar. It’s the leanest way to create and sell a course.
What do I mean by “a short webinar”?
It’s a live lesson at most one-hour long, plus some time for questions.
The price is low, depending on the niche. Usually, it’s under 100$, even under 50$ in less affluent markets.
The lesson is recorded, so you can sell it later as an evergreen product.
You can shrink risk by stealing a tactic from Jeff Walker’s Launch Formula (and from many other smart content entrepreneurs, actually): sell the webinar before creating it.
It works this way:
- set an early bird price for people who want to take the risk and buy in advance,
- write a landing page,
- send it to your list (or a part of it, to test the idea),
- if not enough people buy, refund them and cancel the webinar,
- if enough people buy, go on with the webinar.
You are not tricking anyone here. You will refund every single penny if you don’t deliver. Just remember to explain why you’re doing it.
It’s similar to selling tickets for an event. The main point is that you don’t work on the webinar before the presell. You just list the problem you will be solving and all the benefits for your audience on the landing page.
When is a presell successful? This is up to you. Estimate how much effort will the webinar require and set a goal accordingly.
If not enough people buy, there’s some crucial mistake in the course idea. Survey your list and fix it.
When you record or write lessons in advance, you have all the time to polish every single word, every single scene. Or at least you believe so.
In a webinar, instead, you prepare the slides and the outline. But you can’t (you MUST NOT) read a script.
This will inevitably lead to less time spent in preparation.
Obviously, you’ll still provide quality content. But you’ll disarm your perfectionism forcing yourself to improvise.
Many audiences need small steps to build their trust and pay you high dollars. So, a low-price webinar can make the first conversion easier.
It will be also easier to upsell more expensive products down the road.
This is not written in stone. Sometimes the right product or service sells well independently of the price.
But many creators lack the confidence and skills to go high-ticket from the start. An inexpensive product removes this obstacle.
Scarcity is probably the most powerful conversion lever. If people want answers to their questions, they must be there at the right date and time.
So a live webinar could increase conversions because it embeds scarcity.
I know: in business, there’s no free lunch. (There never is in life, right?)
A short webinar is not guaranteed success.
First, you have to be decent at explaining things live. If not, train with friends, family, or beta testers from the community.
You also need some equipment. Nothing fancy:
- a 1080p webcam,
- decent lighting (any LED panel from Amazon is a good place to start),
- Zoom or another webinar platform with a recording feature (even an unlisted Youtube live stream can be enough),
- Gumroad or another sales and delivery platform.
It’s more than what you need to just write an ebook. But any video course would require almost the same equipment.
The live aspect can also be an obstacle. People unable to attend won’t buy. You can mitigate this problem by repeating the webinar several times.
Finally, some audiences prefer “complete courses”. It sounds strange but we have many subscribers who don’t buy short courses because they only want the complete picture. You obviously can’t provide it in an hour.
When too many subscribers are like that, it becomes hard to sell such a short webinar. This is another reason why you want to test through preselling.
I’m working with a nutritionist. He has two topics in mind for his courses: gut health and understanding food labels to make healthy choices.
He was already setting up a video recording studio and planning a recording marathon. But he never sold anything online. Besides that, he spends almost all day with clients.
So we trimmed down his idea. A lot.
We decided to do a webinar on “Understanding yogurt food labels”. You wouldn’t imagine, but there’s a lot to say.
He wrote an outline and the landing page. We set the early-bird price to 15€: his audience is not affluent.
We sent the first presell email a month in advance: no one bought. Not even a question via email. But several hundred people opened the email.
Probably the topic was not as hot as he thought. The price surely wasn’t the issue.
So we killed the experiment. He didn’t write other launch emails and got back to the drawing board. He saved a lot of hours of work.
