MBA2403 Courses vs. Communities. Which is Better for You? + Free Ride Friday

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show. No fluff, just the good stuff with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. And today is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays, we give away a free ride to the$100 MBA program, showing you how to become a better entrepreneur, 100 % guaranteed over at 100mba.net. To win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review, and you'll enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen on Friday to see if you won. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's episode, you'll learn all about courses versus communities.

0:46Which one's better? For you and your business. Online courses are one of the easiest things to sell and to maintain because you create it once and you sell it over and over again. You kind of preload or you front load all the work and then you offer it to your audience. Communities, on the other hand, are a little bit like hybrid courses and coaching. They have access to content, but they have access to accountability, tips, guidance. And this type of business model, Communities, is perfect for reoccurring memberships. That means you sell and they buy month after month, year after year. And it's not a one-time purchase like an online course.

1:22So which one is better? Which one to choose? Well, it all depends on your goals. I'm going to outline it in today's lesson. I'm going to show you which is best for your situation and for what you want to do, actually, in the day-to-day of your business. My goal is by the end of this episode, you'll know to choose between a course or a community, and you'll be content in the process of delivering this to your audience. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Listen, I am a big, big lover of courses. I love teaching and learning. I think it's one of the best things that you could sell online.

1:57It's not going anywhere. It's one of the oldest professions in the world is teaching in the transfer of knowledge and skills. But also, I'm a big fan of reoccurring memberships. This is why software as a service, SaaS companies, are so, so valuable. I know this because I'm the founder of Webinar Ninja, a software company. And it's so good to feel like you are earning money month over month from the same customer, meaning you only have to capture the customer once and make sure they're happy while they're a member. And so, as you can see, there are some pros and cons here, but let's talk about your lifestyle.

2:30Let's talk about how you want to spend your time as you run your business. Let's talk about what kind of business you want to run so that you can know which one to choose. If you want the ultimate lifestyle business, the business that allows you to have complete flexibility and your time is not in demand constantly. If you want to step away from your computer for a month, two months and still have a business that runs and sells and makes money, then courses are more up your alley. Communities need more maintenance. Obviously, you're going to have to build a team and you can get somebody to do all this stuff for you while you're taking that holiday.

3:04There's more required with a community. Why? Because of the way things are sold. With courses, you sell the course once you deliver the course automatically through an online course platform or your website. And you've fulfilled your end of the bargain with the customer. With a community, you have to sell your community month over month or year over year because you got to give them a reason to keep on paying and not cancel. So you got to continue to up the ante, increase the value, add more content, add more features. This might entail a video call or might entail some templates or some worksheets or might entail a forum, a community forum where they can ask questions.

3:44So there's more hands-on maintenance, whether with you or your team or you managing with a community. But by nature, because of the reoccurring sales, there's more value in a community. Meaning if you wanted to sell this business, it's going to be much more valuable in the future. So if you're in kind of build mode and you want to have a business that you can sell in the future easily and with a high valuation, a reoccurring sale type of business, reoccurring memberships like a community is huge. So maybe you're in the season of your life where you don't mind rolling up your sleeves and working hard.

4:17Yeah, you want to take a break here and there and take some vacations and long weekends, all good. But you're in build mode in your career. Community is the way to go. I would also say communities are great for you to build a brand, build culture and be able to sell to current customers easily. When you have a community, they get to know you, get to love you, get to be a part of your tribe. So when you have another type of product or service or course, or even if you're selling it as an affiliate, it's easy for you to do this. There's less of a community vibe with courses. Yes, you might have email, but it's very one way and very transactional.

4:55So let's talk a little bit about the cons of both. Online courses right now are very competitive. So your course has to be really compelling and really have a compelling outcome so that it's easy for you to sell. Now, I've known a lot of great course creators like Brian Dean, who sold his company, actually, to SEM Rush. And he was a strictly course business, and he did fantastic. His courses were quite expensive. They were between$3 ,000 and$4 ,000 each. He focused on SEO and YouTube, and it was well worth it. Great content. But the point here is that he had to launch and sell this course two or three times a year.

5:28There was a lot of effort when he had to do it, but when he did it, he brought in the sales and then he can relax in between. But he is the thought leader in this area. He is the SEO person online or one of the top. So he stands out. If you're not an authority, it's going to be harder for you to stand out and sell your course and actually make a good living because you're going to have a decent price for your course. Versus a community, you know, community is a lower price product where they pay, you know, X amount of dollars a month. It could be$40,$50,$60,$100 a month. And they're getting everything, almost too much for them to consume in one month.

6:03So they stick around for four, five, six months a year, hopefully years. So it's easier to sell because the barrier of entry is lower and people will give you a chance, even if you're not a tastemaker in your marketplace. Now, what about communities? What are the cons here? Well, it takes a lot of maintenance because you're dealing with people. In communities, you have chats, you have forums, you have people expressing their opinions. You have people that maybe are not so nice and are rude and maybe not showing a lot of love. And you've got to man that. You've got to police that. You've got to make sure that people know what the rules are in your community.

6:34You may even need to block people and refund them. There's more room for headaches in communities. But it's not an impossible task. Many people have done it before. You could do it too. So how do you choose? In my opinion, if you're starting out and you're looking to grow and make a name for yourself, and maybe you don't have a huge library of content, I would choose a community because a community allows you to build and add more content month over month. Maybe you add a new course every single month or a few new videos, adding value and people are gonna be willing to give you a chance because of lower barrier entry price.

7:08This allows you to learn as you go, allows you to learn from your audience and find out what they need so you can build for them. You're building a community along the way where they're speaking to you, you're getting to know them, they're getting to know you, you're building a brand. it's a great way for you to start getting some traction and also just to get some money through the door, right? With an online course, it's an investment of time and effort with the hopes that it will sell and people will buy. Even a minimal viable version of a course is going to take some upfront time and effort to build and to put together and to sell.

7:38So it's a little bit more risky and it's going to cost you a bit upfront. So you're starting out. I really recommend going community route. And then maybe you can sell an online course to your community members that's separate from the community and allows them to kind of dip their toe and learn something new from you that you've built on the side. Now, if you're an established business, if you have revenue coming in, if you have other types of products you're selling, maybe it's a book, maybe it's coaching, and you kind of have a name for yourself in your community, an online course is a great way for you to package your knowledge in a digestible way for people that really don't like to read, or maybe it's not their thing.

8:14They love video. Maybe they love you, and maybe they love to learn from you and your teaching style. It's a great way for you to kind of bolster your brand and bolster your product offerings. A lot of people in the coaching industry sell a course after they've been coaching for a while, knowing their clients, and that course actually becomes sort of like the gateway to their coaching because their coaching is more expensive. So courses are great for established businesses that have revenue coming in. They're not like a starving artist trying to make their first few bucks so they can maybe transition to full-time entrepreneurship, or maybe they're trying to just make ends meet.

8:50That is better suited for somebody starting a community. If you have an established brand, you have established business, you have some revenue, you have some stability, a course allows you to focus and create something special and offer at a premium price where it'll be worth your while. Now, having said that, that's my opinion. This is my kind of take on it. But I've seen people be successful doing both courses and communities and doing it a little bit differently. Some people do mini courses. I'm talking about a course that is less than an hour long, 10 modules, 10 minutes a piece, low priced and just volume.

9:27They're just getting a lot of people going through that course. One of the people that comes to mind is Arvid Kahl. He's got a course on how to grow your Twitter following. Now, his is not as short as an hour in total, but it's a shorter course and it's actually quite good and it's low, low priced, under$100, and it allows you to really learn a lot in a short period of time. But mind you, Arvid is an established entrepreneur. He's sold the business before. He's an author. He's got several products in his suite. He's got a podcast. He's got a YouTube channel. He's got a thriving newsletter. not his first rodeo.

10:00When it comes to the communities, I've seen communities really do well and become this huge brand. One that comes to mind is Entrepreneurs on Fire, EO Fire. They have a course called Podcasters Paradise. It's also a community. It's kind of a course community hybrid, teaching people how to start their first podcast or grow their podcast, monetize it. John Lee Dumas and Kay Erickson do a great job with this community. And it's grown so much that they do meetups in person. They have events, they have masterminds. So they've been able to build in-person products outside of this community business.

10:34So whatever you choose, my advice is to choose something that you actually look forward to working on. Both of these are going to be a lot of work, courses and communities. Which one gets you excited? Which one feels like something that you'd want to do day in and day out? Do you like to talk to people, like to chat to people, solve people's problems in a forum, in a community, through calls or video training, live video training, community is great then. If that's not your thing, you'd like to kind of go deep and build a course that's really in-depth and you like video work and you want to create something that's high production, courses are the way to go.

11:07Thanks so much for listening to The$100 MBA Show. Today's episode's not over, though. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is Stephen M. Key. This is Stephen Key, one of our guest teachers who delivered a guest teacher lesson over at, back in February of this year, NBA 2243, how to bring an idea to market without starting a business. It was lovely for him to leave a review and he won. It's a random draw. Stephen Key says, it was an honor, five stars. It was such an honor and pleasure to participate in this podcast. Thank you for letting me share my story with your audience.

11:40Thanks, Stephen Key, for that amazing review. Your mission is to email me over at omar at 100mba.net so we can hook you up with the free ride to the$100 MBA program over at 100mba.net. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random drawback called Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday, just like right now to see if you won. It's that easy. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Whether you choose to create courses or communities, understand that this is a commitment. It's a long-term commitment because when you create a course, you still have to refine it, sell it, market it for years to come.

12:18Same thing with the community. It's going to need your tender love and care, right? It's going to need your attention. So make sure you're ready to commit to it for the long haul. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

12:48Thank you.