From Idea to Dollars in 11 Days
A little push is all it takes.
I taught a class on Thursday, May 21st, 2020. I’ve taught plenty of classes over the years, but this one was different. It was special. It was mine. People I did not know signed up, paid, showed up, and received value for their time and money. Well, they said they did, anyway :)
The topic was “Customer Onboarding.” For folks looking to build tech products, this is a big deal that, in my experience, many people lack the foundation to execute correctly. I decided to teach this class from a first-principles perspective rather than a specific implementation. In retrospect, that was the right choice. Two of the attendees had follow-up actions and potential paid work, so I must have struck a nerve and established some credibility.
I used Zoom for the video call, Podia to manage the storefront and payments, and Google Slides to actually build the course content. Building the content itself was probably 25% of the total effort needed to prep for the course. Building the course sales page, coming up with marketing language, and building some design assets took the majority of my time. I think this is the benefit of teaching something you know super well…the actual “content” creation time is pretty small. Now that I have the basic design and stuff templated out, I’m guessing I can turnaround a live class on a new topic in half a day.
Big shout out to Rachel for giving me the focus and making sure I followed through. I had a blast teaching and felt a rush of adrenaline when the class was over. We recorded a 20-minute ‘podcast episode’ after the class ended to discuss how it went and what we do next. I’d share it…but we were eating ice cream (and drinking wine) while we recorded, so we’re a bit hard to understand.
One thing I want to point out: The week of the class, I was feeling really bummed by the lack of interest and registrations. It’s a bit silly in retrospect, considering my limited following and lack of lead time, but the feeling was still real. Fortunately, we had sat down and mapped out three scenarios:
Failure - Andrew doesn’t do it. Zero people show up.
Small Success - 1-8 people pay and show up. They give feedback. They get value.
Big Success - More than 8 people pay and show up. They give feedback, they get value.
We reviewed these scenarios multiple times during the week leading up to the class. Once I had actual (paying) students registered, I could no longer label this effort as a failure. This was liberating and allowed me to keep pushing. Pro-Tip: Little wins matter, so find ways of building them into your plan!
Next up, I’m planning a month of live classes. Starting June 9th, I’ll be teaching 2 sessions of 2 different topics per week. The last class is June 27th at 1:30 pm. Quick math will tell us that means I’m teaching 6 different topics, but 12 different live sessions. I’m going to experiment with this approach to see if I can use the topics to build onto each other, help drive momentum for attendees, and to see if I can generate enough cash flow to cover the operating costs I have.
If you’re interested in more insights into what I’m doing, please follow me on Twitter! For announcements on the next classes I’m teaching, you can join the mailing list HERE. Next week, I’ll have a 50% off code you can use on any (or all!) of the classes I’m teaching in June. See ya next Thursday!
In the last note I wrote, I said I would provide some updates on my journey along the way. Here are some bullets you might find interesting:
It took me about 3 hours to create the content for the course I taught. Well, 3 hours plus several years of experience.
Four students showed up. One was my wife, so she didn’t pay. Altogether, the evening generated about $50 in revenue.
My operating costs for a month of the “teaching business” comes out to just under $100. Doing the math, I did not break even in May. My goal for June is to break even for the month AND make up the gap for May. Anything extra is gravy!
I have 164 followers on Twitter. I got zero students from Twitter.
I have over 1000 connections on LinkedIn. I got zero students from LinkedIn, but I didn’t advertise until the day before the class.
One student came from the Bubble forum (forum.bubble.io)
One student came from Indie Hackers (www.indiehackers.com)
One student was a former teammate of mine, so he came from my personal network.