Is Education A Good Revenue Stream?

0:00Alright, so we're going to talk about if education is a good revenue stream. Neil, do you want to set the tone for this one? Sure. So a lot of marketers and entrepreneurs are making money by doing things like selling ebooks or selling courses or doing webinars and then selling them on some, you know, educational based package, whether it's a certification event. And then to go one level deeper, some people make money through education by speaking at conferences. I used to be one of those people. Heck, I used to also be one of those people that charge for ebooks. and the real question comes to is those kind of revenue streams good and you know curious to hear thoughts eric on my end i think you already know the answer i hate those kind of revenue streams i think they're very short-sighted they don't have most of the potential out there there's nothing wrong with them i think charging to speak at conferences again is short-sighted and there's much much better revenue streams and i can go into some of them but eric curious to hear your thoughts first.

1:00I don't know if you know this, Neil, if you saw the stock report from Chegg. So I mean, the financial reports, the quarterly earnings more so, but they just dropped 40%. So Chegg dropped 40%. Pearson, which is a large education company as well, their stock tanked as well. And so the reason you see this happening is because where education is going, AI is commoditizing a lot of these education firms, right? Because AI, these large language models, you can just basically learn from these AIs now. And I think education is going to be completely reshaped. And so who knows what's going to happen to these legacy education companies.

1:33But what I would say is, I believe that if you're going to do this, for example, this podcast is considered education to me. If you do a course or if you do an ebook, I think the best thing you can do is just give it away. And the goal here is that you give it away to grow your reach. And the more stuff you give away, the more it's long-term focused, and it's going to come back to you in spades, longer term, short term, sure, you can try to collect money from it. You can try to sell a course. You can try to sell a mastermind. And I certainly have a mastermind. I'm one of them I charge for. But for the most part, with the education stuff that we do, whether it's a blog or whether it's this podcast or even courses I've done in the past, most of the stuff I just give away now.

2:12Because if you give away a course that's well done, 15, 20 hours or whatever, and you're just giving it away, that's going to stand out a lot more than a regular ebook. Your offer is a lot sexier than something that took a lot less effort, right? So in general, I think it's better to use it as instead of going for revenue, aim for reach. Yeah. So Eric has a spot on aim for reach, but to add to that, there's typically a better model than education. See, education gives people the knowledge. Knowledge is great, but as Eric mentioned, it's commoditized. The thing that people really want to pay for is the end result.

2:47So if you look at fitness, instead of selling education on how to get more fit, If you look at the supplement companies, they make way more money than the educational-based companies. If you look at like the Pelotons, the Climbers, the Tonals, some of them do well, some of them not so much. Why? Because people will pay for the equipment to help you get the results and there's more perceived value versus some text that you can just sell over and over again or a video that you can sell over and over again. On the flip side, if you look at my company, I used to charge for eBooks. Well, people just want more traffic.

3:25They don't want to read a book on how to get more traffic, gave away the book for free instead of charging for it, sold services. And we created one of the 21st fastest growing companies, according to Inc. in the United States. And the model was just better because when we were selling the eBooks and we even tried selling high-end coaching or educational coaching, what people would tell us is, hey, hey, can we just pay you more money to do it for us? And that's what allowed me to really realize that, whoa, education isn't really where it's at. There's money in other markets that are selling other products and services because it's a much bigger, quote unquote, TAM.

4:01Another example of this is I used to charge for speaking. Sometimes I still do, but majority of times I'm looking for the right events. I don't really care for the money. And I'm speaking here in Brazil. So I'm in Brazil right now. Eric's in Turkey, his mastermind. I'm here in Brazil for Web Summit. I have meetings with Whirlpool, Nestle, Michelin, and the list goes on and on of really large corporations. I have a meeting with their largest insurance company here in Brazil. And we have a team in Brazil. We have a whole Brazil and we even have a whole Latin America division. But for me, I don't care for the money for speaking.

4:35Closing one of these deals would make me way more money in profit over time than just charging 20, 30, 50, 100 grand, whatever it maybe to speak. Don't really charge$100 ,000. I also don't really charge$20 ,000,$30 ,000. But let's say my average is$50 ,000. The money doesn't make sense. It's better to go try to close a multimillion dollar contract than it is to charge$50 ,000 plus travel. Yeah. So two more things to add from my side. So if you think about a Mr. Beast or a Logan Paul, so Logan Paul has the prime drink. Mr. Beast has Feastables. He has Beast Burger. They led with the audience first.

5:12We've talked about this before. You lead with the audience and then you figure out your monetization engines. And so for me, it's how do I continue to grow my brand around marketing, but use my monetization vehicle, the agency is a monetization vehicle. And you can say, oh, the mastermind is another monetization vehicle, right? So my point of saying all this is you build the audience first and you can lead with education there if you want, if it makes sense for you. And then you figure out a better monetization engine And what we've found from the past is doing these one-offs, doing these launches, they don't work as well.

5:49And what I would say too is when you sell education, the problem is this with a lot of coaches and people in education, they often make fun of service businesses, right? And what I've learned is that the grass is always greener where you water it and that the service businesses are actually way more scalable in the long term if that's what you want to do. And I think that's a fun game to play. And so that's why I do it. And that's why I believe Neil does it as well. So that's the first thing. And the second thing I'll say before we go is even if you look at the largest education, like the largest institutes, right, the largest colleges, Yale, Harvard, what do they have?

6:24They have endowments, right? And so they take all the money that they have and now they found a better monetization vehicle and they're just plowing it into their endowments, right? And they're getting a nice return on those. Do you want to say something, Neil? Dude, so check this out, all right? Okay, so the Harvard endowment right now is$53 billion. dollars. All right. So if someone has$53 billion, let's say the average return is, you want to call it 7%, Eric? That's$3.71 million. If you just invest in the S &P, you should average more than 7%. I think the average was 9%. But even if you take 9%, that's$4.77 billion.

7:03You can bet they make more money in profit from that than they do from charging for people to attend college. Sorry, guys, my phone's ringing. So anyway, this is technical difficulties. But that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, read, subscribe. And we will see you later.