Our Thoughts On Selling Courses In Today's World

0:00Should you sell courses in today's world? So let me start this off. Damn it, Neil. Let me start this off real quick. So let me explain why. Before you guys on YouTube, I don't want to see the retention graph like disappear. So courses used to be, they're still a really good way of making money, right? And a lot of people, especially in the internet marketing world, they would push courses and some courses would do 20, 30,$40 million a year. So, you know, Tony Robbins would do - Very few, by the way. Most courses don't even do$10 million or even$5 million a year, but yes, keep going. Yes. Okay.

0:33And Neil and I both used to do courses before. And I think our thinking is a little different now in terms of courses. I think courses still have their, there's a time and place for them, but I don't think the best way, and neither does Neil, I don't think the best way to use courses is to sell courses. No, I don't think so either. Look, when I used to sell courses, and this was a long time of a dude, I think I haven't sold a course in maybe seven-ish years. Since you started MP Digital? Eight years, maybe? Something long like that, right? I haven't had MP Digital that long, but we stopped it before we started MP Digital.

1:04And I don't know what the exact profit numbers we got to, but I know our peak in course revenue was around like$600 ,000 a month. Now, we've done launches and stuff and we've had over a million dollars in a month, but that doesn't count, right? I'm talking about it was consistency. It wasn't hard to hit 300, $400 ,000, even$500 ,000 and$600 ,000 a month in revenue. The issue we had in$600 ,000 was hard to maintain, by the way, but call it$300 ,000,$400 ,000 or$500 ,000 wasn't a big deal at all. And most of it dropped to the bottom line in which a lot of it was profit. I'm not talking about like 30 % or 40%.

1:39Well above 50 % was profit. Sometimes 60%, 70%, 80 % was profit. Now, the issue you end up having is if you're making all this money from a course, and this is what people get wrong. They think it's a great business, but you know what's a better business? Not having the course. If someone was willing to spend$100 or$1 ,000 on a course or$9 on a course, you could have made way more money selling something else. Now, what is that something else? It varies per industry and it varies on what you do. But like for me, why the heck would I sell a course for$997 when I can sell consulting services for$10 million a year?

2:15No joke. We've had clients spend over$10 million with us. Some even more. Right? So why would you have... I don't want to get into the clients. We don't need to get into that one. But why would you want people to pay you thousands of dollars for a course or hundreds of dollars or even$10 when you can make money on something bigger? The market for selling marketing services is much bigger than courses. The people who are buying the courses could have just paid us for marketing. spend. It's like Google probably looks at what we do and they're like, why would we want to sell services when we can just sell ad spots?

2:48They're right. They make way more money from the ad spots. I don't have the platform that they do, so I can't do what they do. But that's a much better business than mine. You know, you look at HubSpot. HubSpot's like, why would we want to sell services when we can sell reoccurring software and just give away a lot for free and crush your competition? They got into the game early. It would be tough for me to do what they do. Not impossible, but really tough to build a business at their size. Now I taken some of these guys's playbooks and applied it to the services based business. And it was much more effective for me to do that than it was to sell eBooks and courses.

3:21Yeah. Remember back in the day, Neil, when you used to sell like a course and then you'd give a free hour of your time or something like that? Dude. Oh my God. That was so bad. I would sell the course for$97 and then I would give everyone a 30 minute phone call. That I never understood. Yeah, the ROI there did not add up. And what's crazy is I was like, oh, this is great. It's spread. Only like 17 to 20 % of the people are taking me up on the phone call. You know, and then my co-founder, not in the course business, but my co-founder of my ad agency, Mike Camo, was like, dude, we should remove that.

3:54And this was years ago before he was my co-founder. And then it happened where I was like, huh, conversions didn't change. It ended up being the same thing. I was like, this is great. Yeah. I mean, here's the thing, right? In addition to what Neil said, it's hard to build enterprise value. Like if you're looking to sell your business at some point and down the road, the courses, you have to keep launching everything. Like the information starts to get stale. You need to keep updating it. And don't get me wrong. Like I think courses could be a great business for like an individual. But I think if you're looking to build at the end of the day, also the let's compare, let's just look at Neil's model, right?

4:26Neil has this, all this attention. Is it best monetized through courses or is it through services? Right. Right. And services, the LTV, the lifetime value of a customer is a lot higher. And again, the course problem that I see is like you have to keep launching. You have to relaunch it. Like it gets exhausting over a period of time, too. And again, it's hard to compound. Right. And so I think the best way if you want to do courses nowadays, do a course. Sure. But give it away. Do the best thing that other people are like a good version of this. Alex's book, right? Alex from Mosey with the hundred million dollar leads.

4:56He gave away like, I think, 10 courses. and his whole thing was like, look, you don't have to pay like$1 ,000 for the course, just buy like a couple of books and that's all I'm asking for. And it wasn't even like a requirement. And so the name of the game here is, if you're looking to create any type of content, what you're trying to do is you're trying to create goodwill at the end of the day. And that's what will compound over time. But trying to make a deposit and withdraw too early, that will stop the goodwill building. Dude, I'm with you. Give away the courses for free. Don't charge from, it's a crap business.

5:27Make money from something else. All right, so that is it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow.