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Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
New episodes delivered every Tuesday.
Unknown Speaker 0:00
Hey everyone. Today I'm joined by Nathan Warner. Nathan is the founder of fearless leadership LLC and a master course creator. I watched a master class from Nathan in the Tech Insider community, and wanted to reach out to him just to learn more, but after going through one of his mini courses, I knew I needed to get him on the show so we could help agencies do the same. You have probably heard about creating mini courses and some of the benefits for your business, but it's not always as simple as it sounds, right? You're not just creating a course and launching it. Nathan takes a lot of the guesswork out of the process, and he is here to share some of those key insights. In this episode, we discuss why mini courses are a powerful tool for agencies. The common mistakes people make when launching their course what to do after someone signs up and more. Today's episode is brought to you by Zen pilot. There are lots of tools out there for agencies to manage projects, but any project issues aren't usually caused by the tool. They're from your own processes. Zen pilot helps agencies implement their project management tools while streamlining operations so your team can move from chaos to clarity. You can see for yourself at Zen pilot.com/forward,
Unknown Speaker 1:13
and now let's talk courses with Nathan Warner,
Unknown Speaker 1:17
it's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward.
Unknown Speaker 1:35
Why mini courses? Everything's gotten shorter. We look at the content we consume. I don't know about you, but for me, the number of times that I've lost two hours of my night to 22nd video clips on social is more than I can count. And for some reason, when people build courses, they're still creating 1015, 2030, minute videos and creating courses that take 510, hours to complete, like there's a disconnect between our own
Unknown Speaker 2:05
consumption habits, of how we consume video and media and information, and the way that most sort of old school, archaic core structures still are. And that was my desire. Was like, let's just bring it back to what we know works, like, when, when, when you're when you're driving the car when you're in charge. Let's build the course that aligns with how you naturally desire to consume information, because a great course is a great course is like you're watching Netflix, and that bar starts to creep across the bottom and it just auto plays the next episode. And you don't have the willpower to get off the couch and stop it right? Right? It's that. And so how do you create a course that's bingeable? And it comes back to me. It's like it's all around shifting. My goal is course completion rates. I want to build courses that people finish, because if they don't actually ingest all the information and take action, they don't get results, and nothing happens for me as the course creator. And so every decision I make is based around, how do I create a course that's bingeable, that people want to keep going, that they send me an apology and say, I'm sorry. I know I wasn't supposed to go to day two, but I just couldn't help myself. And that comes with shorter courses, small and specific goals, and helping someone actually make traction immediately towards their larger, bigger picture goal, right? So I took your mini course, one of your mini courses, and I actually started it when I did not have time to actually go through a course. It was like, between meetings. But I'm like, I don't start it. I'm not I'm gonna forget about it, right? So I kicked it off so to make sure I would get any email automations to remind me. And after I started that first lesson, I'm like, Okay, well, now I need to get the other ones right. But I sat down and binge them all. I got all, like, days two through five done at once. And it was like, I had nuggets like that. I was pulling from each each one. That was like, okay, but I can immediately apply this. And so on top of it being like, quick and, you know, easily digestible because it's short and wants to drive you the next one, it's like, there one. It's like, there's a good takeaway from each one. So it's not like, I'm having to sort through 20 minutes of content to find something of value. It's like, no, here's the value up front that made it so much easier to move to the next well. And that's the I think that's a challenge in a normal course. In a normal course, the course is like 16 modules, and each has four videos. And each video is just, frankly, too long and it's too broad. It's not even about length. It's about like, for every single video I create, it's a one point, like, what is the one you heard someone, you hear a public speaker come up and say, if you remember one thing I say today, remember this right? What if every single video inside of your mini course was a one point speech to your
Unknown Speaker 4:47
point? Like, then it's like, if I have a question or if I need to go back and look at something, I don't need to go hunting and scrubbing through a 20 minute video. I don't need to go through a giant course. I'm like, I've got five, six, maybe seven videos at most, 10 in this course. You.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
And here's the video I'm going to and I already know I don't have to dance through it. It's right there, right? I just took a course with a
Unknown Speaker 5:10
I mean, it's a very well known, well respected entrepreneur. I won't use names, but, and the content was valuable for what I was getting. But each video was 20 minutes, yeah, and, and and there was so much packed in there that I, like, I really couldn't even segment out some of the ideas. And so I think even just being able to break apart that, like, one of those videos could have been a course in itself, yeah, and, like, and delivered to give value. So, yeah, it's definitely something there to just shrinking this down, yeah, well, and the question is this, well, I think something, I think a couple things we need to understand. I think first napkin, math, 80% of people are extrinsically motivated. 20% of people are intrinsically motivated. So right out of the gate, whatever I'm creating, I'm concerned about four out of five people inside of my course.
Unknown Speaker 5:57
Like, that's a problem, and so it's part of it is about content design, like we're talking about, how do we create the right containers? How do we create those size, the length, the, you know, memorable piece,
Unknown Speaker 6:10
and beyond that. How do we make the experience memorable? How do we actually take them into a place in which they go?
Unknown Speaker 6:19
Well, I'll give you an example. So we live, you know, 90 minutes from Disney. We go to Disney World all the time. I've got five kids under 10. It's an undertaking, but it's fun.
Unknown Speaker 6:30
It's a lot of things. It is very expensive. And yet, there are moments inside of Disney World where reality is suspended. You know, I remember a day it was like 95 degrees out, I just bought $184
Unknown Speaker 6:42
lunch, and
Unknown Speaker 6:46
a experience happened which suddenly suspended my reality. I was no longer in Disney World. I was no longer in a subtropical climate. I no longer had sweat collecting in places I didn't know existed. I no longer cared about the $184 lunch. And the question for my business has always been, how do I do that? How do I put someone inside an experience where they are just fully immersed? They're ignoring their phone, they're ignoring these outside impulses and all things calling for their attention. And part of that is bite sized content. Part of that is storytelling. Part of that is
Unknown Speaker 7:17
taking action, right? Like we don't have an information problem. We're not We're not here sitting in 2024 like, Oh, if I just had more information, then my problems would be solved. No, the reality is like, I need to take action. And so creating the videos, yes, creating the content, yes. And part of the great course design is taking immediate action, which is moving that information into long term memory and actually helping someone get, you know, gain speed and clarity towards their goal. They don't really care about your course. It's nothing to do with the course that we're human beings. We're selfish. We want to move towards our own ambitions, our own goals, our own desires. And your course is just a tool to help me get there, right? Yeah, I think one of the big reasons that I look at courses isn't to just acquire information, because I could just go to Google right even now, I could go use AI and figure some of this stuff out on my own, but I'm going to someone for their ability to curate this content and get me those nuggets in a way that like I can't get on my own. And so now my speed to be able to take action should be much faster. And so if you can also package that in a way that's, you know, enabling me to achieve that goal, I'm like, Yeah, we're in business.
Unknown Speaker 8:29
So, yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. And just thinking, you know, I think part of the challenge is we've muddied the word course. Like all of our courses, you know, we've sort of wandered away from the shared definition of what it actually means. Now we've watered it down to an email course. What an email course is just a campaign. We're having someone opt into an email campaign by giving it a cooler name, right? This is still a wall of text that hits your email box once every 24 hours.
Unknown Speaker 8:57
However, what we can learn from that is that the word course carries value,
Unknown Speaker 9:03
right? Of course is inherently more, has a higher perceived value than an ebook than you know, another medium, and that's why people willingly raise their hand and give away their email address to opt into your five day email campaign, because you've chosen to call it a course. And I think that's one of the things that you know? Back to the question of why mini course? Well, all things we share, we talked through before, but also the reality that the word course carries inherent value. It's a higher perceived value for someone. And the word mini makes it less intimidating. It makes it feel like less of a commitment. It makes it feel less daunting. It feels like something that I could do quicker, like I'm not committing to this comprehensive you know, I remember, I remember signing up for someone sent me a course. I review courses all the time. People send me courses, I give them a report card. It's one of my services. Someone sent me a course, and it had 97 modules in it,
Unknown Speaker 9:55
and they said, Don't worry, I keep adding I'll keep adding more. And I was thinking, I.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
You're solving the wrong problem, like you're making it worse now better. And that's that's normal, and those are part of the things that contribute to these
Unknown Speaker 10:12
awful completion rates. Where you're seeing course completion rates of, you know, 357, percent, even I talked to someone that was doing four grand a day in course sales, so a little over a little over a million a year on a single course, and their completion rate was 10%
Unknown Speaker 10:27
and their ad spend and to get there. The conversation we had was, well, what if, instead of just spending infinite more money on ads to convert to then complete 10% what if we took the people that we already made the ad spend on, and we made them an offer for a second course, and instead of $400 maybe the second course was $1,400 and
Unknown Speaker 10:48
like that's where we really get our money back. As we take the people that get through that course, we focus on boosting the completion rate. They know us, like us, trust us, and they want to continue investing in themselves through our systems,
Unknown Speaker 11:00
that's when we really make money with courses, yeah. And that ultimately comes down to getting them to see the value of what they're doing in that course. And I think, to your credit, putting this in more like, bite sized chunks to be able to show that value very easily. Like, yeah, it's gonna be a win. I want to go back really quick to just the the idea of putting value on the word course. Had a conversation with a friend recently where we were talking about how when you have something incredibly valuable, but you make it free, it immediately invites skepticism for people. And so I think this is what just popped in my head. So it's an idea not fully flushed out, but the idea, if we are putting value on the idea of a course, right? Maybe because universities could charge a lot of money to send people through courses, stuff like that. But as soon as you say, like, free course, it's immediately inviting skepticism. But when you can add the term, like, mini course, now it's like, it almost lowers that bar, just enough for someone to be like, Oh, well, then it is okay. Like, it's still going to get the value of the course, but, like, they've reduced the size of it to give it to me, yeah? So now it's just, how do I make sure I get the value and make sure they understand the value that they're still going to get? Yeah? And I, you know, I always recommend my clients give away many courses for free, but it's a lot of creative psychological language, right? We're going to use price anchoring, right? We're going to say, hey, this course is, you know, worth 197 bucks. And no one, no one bats an eye if I tell you the course is worth 197 bucks, you go, well, the top five creators on LinkedIn all sell courses for 197 bucks. That number checks out. And so what happens then is, you internalize that price, right? So don't use the right language on that sell page or on that sign up page. People go, yeah. And then what happens is,
Unknown Speaker 12:43
I begin to break the first golden rule of online courses. The golden rule of marketplace courses, is this, you sign up today, you have access for life that's on every sign up page you'll ever see.
Unknown Speaker 12:55
I don't do that. I say you sign up now to take this five day course. If you finish it in five days or less, you keep access for life. If you don't, I take it away. And so now you know, 48 hours, 72 hours, I've started to get through that course sign up period. What happens is now we start, when I start to send you very nice, threatening emails that your course access is about to be removed,
Unknown Speaker 13:21
I trigger the endowment effect. The endowment effect says that because you believe this course, be worth $200 I'm about to take something worth $200 away from you, and you don't want that, so you're gonna fight to protect it,
Unknown Speaker 13:33
right? So, yes, there's something around the idea of having something free,
Unknown Speaker 13:39
and there's a very intentional strategy around how we give away things in a way that people in an uncommon way, to give away things so that people still find it worth to be money. Because for me, I would rather I'll probably never sell the course for $200 I would rather have the leads than I would have $197
Unknown Speaker 13:58
yeah. No, that makes sense
Unknown Speaker 14:02
in the it's actually funny, because that fit in perfectly with with how I engage with the with the course, like I did it one day when I didn't have time, and I knew, like we had already talked, right? I knew the model. I'd seen a master class from you, which actually, if anyone wants to join the tech community, Nathan did a great master class on on how to do this entirely. So go ahead, I'll put a link somewhere in the show notes.
Unknown Speaker 14:28
But yeah, watching that, and I still, like, felt it like, Oh, I gotta finish this, otherwise I'm gonna lose it. And it's like, I knew it was there, right? It's like a
Unknown Speaker 14:36
I'm hyper aware that this is what the play is. Yet I'm still feeling the like, I don't know, compulsion
Unknown Speaker 14:44
to go for it. It's Parkinson's Law, right? We know that work expands to fit the time container you give it. And so under every other course in the world, when you sign up having access for life,
Unknown Speaker 14:55
it's never a priority, right? So like I used to, I used to go to the library and check out books.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
I used to go to the library at half mile from the house and check out books, and I knew I had 14 days to finish the book and get it back. And so consistently, I'd come back to the library on day 1213, sometimes 14, with my book freshly finished, and drop it in the box. One day, went down to the library, and there was this big, giant sign, and it said, No more late fines ever. And I was like, wow, this is so cool. I'm gonna be the most brilliant person on earth. But
Unknown Speaker 15:28
then a strange thing happened. How many books do you think I finished after they put in the new policy? Chris, probably not as many, none. I took out tons of books, right? I started tons of books, but I never finished any of them, because there was no time container that forced me to deliver it. So that would tell me that I fall in the 80% of people who are extrinsically motivated, right? I don't have the internal drive to overcome that thing,
Unknown Speaker 15:53
and
Unknown Speaker 15:55
I'm not alone, like I'm not the outlier, I'm not the weirdo, like I'm the majority stake, and so
Unknown Speaker 16:02
you have to create urgency.
Unknown Speaker 16:05
And that's, you know, it's what's called the show the half life of enthusiasm.
Unknown Speaker 16:10
Half Life of enthusiasm suggests, for every day you have something and don't take action, you're you're half you're 50% less likely to do it. So you download that ebook, it hits your inbox in that moment, if you don't take action, if you wait 24 hours, you're now 50% chance you're gonna open it the next day, 25% chance next day. 12 and a half, right? There's a half life of enthusiasm under a traditional model when you sign up to receive something and you don't immediately take action. And that's why that communication sequence with the course is so important that it is sending emails and text messages to remind people that the doors are closing. This is, this actually is a limited time offer. It's not a gimmick.
Unknown Speaker 16:48
Yeah, I like that term, the half life of enthusiasm that we want to reuse. So I get if, let's say I'm an agency owner, and I'm looking at designing my own mini course, what is the 8020 there? Like, what should I be focused on the most?
Unknown Speaker 17:06
I think the first question is, what's working right? Like, you already have a pile of content. You already have a treasure trove of content. Let's not overthink this. Let's take something that we already know connects with our audience, something we already know moves the needle and helps us convert and let's double down on it. So if that thing is a blog, if that thing is a newsletter, if that thing is a shorter form piece of content, what does it look like to take that piece of content that we already know sits at the top of our resources of what works, and triple down on it, turn it into a two day, three day four day, mini course, and really get the full pull out of this thing that we've already created. I think that's the first thing. I think a lot of people overthink the what course should I create?
Unknown Speaker 17:50
Well, let's start with what we know works already. You know, for me, I spent two years on Discovery calls, talking to people about, you know, building courses, and I started to tell more stories. I started to create more more frameworks, and I would say something. I would just stare at people's faces to see how they responded, see what they when they paused and wrote something down. And over two years of doing that, I took all of those notes and turned them into a course based on, hey, this is the stuff that people told me really helped them. This is the stuff that really stood out to them. This is the thing they'd never heard before.
Unknown Speaker 18:21
Yeah, and so that was my way of validating, but for an agency for sure. I mean, if you already have that newsletter, that blog, that top performing item, tease it out, make it more significant, double down on that I was, I talked to fitness coaches who say, hey,
Unknown Speaker 18:36
every time I write about, you know, being able to eat out without losing weight or being able to travel without losing weight or hydration, right? They pick their micro topic that fits inside of the fitness and wellness umbrella. Every time I write about this, you know, people explode. It's like, or they write a lot of times actually, they say the number one things that really hits is when they talk about not drinking. They talk about sort of this, you know, new dry movement. Okay, let's build a course on it, right? Like, I talk to people and finance coaches, and they're saying, Well, every time I talk about
Unknown Speaker 19:08
budgeting for vacation or how to manage the finances of having your first baby or buying your first home, it's like, every time I write that blog, share that story, do that thing, you know, it takes off. It's like, okay, well, it sounds like we've got a great idea for a lead magnet for you, right? Here's something that you something that you can drip out over a few days, and it takes people from sort of the shallow end information into actually
Unknown Speaker 19:31
taking action and getting results. Because
Unknown Speaker 19:36
no mysteries here. The reason that I do mini course is the goal of a mini course is to solve a small and specific problem you're aware of.
Unknown Speaker 19:45
Because I know, having done this for 17 years, I know what the large problem is that you're unaware of or unwilling to admit. And so we're going to solve a small problem for you, which is going to do two things. One, it's going to demonstrate expertise and credibility. You're going to understand that.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
I know what I'm talking about. And two, you're going to unravel a larger problem you have, which I just so happen to sell the answer for,
Unknown Speaker 20:10
right? So I know the first step in creating a course is creating content. So over five days, I teach people how to create course content, and then at the end, they realize they still have no idea how to build an online course or where to begin, and that so happens to be my primary service, right? Yeah, it leads them in. That's one of the things that I've found. So there's a lot of lead magnets out there, from from agencies, and most of them will provide some sort of value, but it's not always directed at a specific problem, and doesn't necessarily give like a solution to the problem. It's just like, here's information, right? And then at the end, there is no logical next step for, you know, hey, here's what you should be doing now. And so what I like doing is just looking at it from a like, this is the problem that we solve as an agency. They might not be or, you know, prospects might not be super problem aware, but they probably know the symptoms that they're facing right like they know that they perceive the symptoms to be problems Exactly. And so why don't we just call out those symptoms, find the one that's most painful for them right now that we can quickly resolve for them, and then show them that, hey, this is the solution. Here's how you do it. But just solving this doesn't actually solve the problem, right? There's this bigger issue that you got to get over. And then, yeah, leading them in. And so we're then we're on the same page here. And then you, once you have that recipe dialed in as an agency of how what your internal process is for making mini courses, right? So
Unknown Speaker 21:40
years ago, I cracked the coat on food. I finally figured out how to make something that was healthy and tasted good. But I've always I grew up in this theory that had to be one or the other. I developed this golden ratio for meatballs. Sounds crazy, but it's like one pound of meat, of ground meat could be beef, pork, lamb, veal, bison, whatever. One egg, something to bind it, something to season it. So it's it sounds like a recipe, but really, the reality is, it's a ratio.
Unknown Speaker 22:08
And so with that ratio, I can make 14 kinds of meatballs.
Unknown Speaker 22:13
And so once I teach people that ratio, they then can make Asian meatballs. They can make ground, ground chicken, Buffalo meatballs. They can make barbecue bison meatballs like, right? You can make anything you want, and it's the same as a mini course, right? Once I teach them on the golden ratio, sort of this process of how you create it, you then can use that to stamp out 12 of them, right? If, over time, this becomes your campaign of once a month or once a quarter, you rule out a new mini course that solves a new mini problem
Unknown Speaker 22:41
that all lead back to more or less the same route or the same larger problem, or connect to your larger service, right? Then it becomes, this is the primary way that we do business, right?
Unknown Speaker 22:53
Great model. And now I'm wanting to talk to you after this about what the ratio for meatballs is.
Unknown Speaker 23:00
So once you let's say we got a mini course, we're out there. What are what do you recommend for the actual marketing strategy to get that course now in front of people? Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 23:11
everything.
Unknown Speaker 23:13
Well, you know,
Unknown Speaker 23:15
when you have, when you use the word course, we know we're giving away something of value, and it becomes much easier to give something away when it has real value. Like, we can talk about the value of ebooks, but people see the smoke screen, right? Like they know that. They know what this is. They know what they're trading, you know, emails for ebooks. They get it when it comes to a course, it really is more valuable. And so for me, it's everywhere, right? When I, you know, meet new people. Hey, send it over. Hey, I have this thing in my banner, in my email on my website, you know, to create short form social content and to, like, kind of tease this idea, and at the end say, Hey, want to learn more about this. You know, here's a mini course we just put together, right?
Unknown Speaker 23:56
So there's a lot of kind of small lead ins you could do, from blogs, from podcasts, from, you know, newsletters from other pieces that kind of hit the tip of that iceberg, and then invite them to go deeper into three days, five days, you know, on that specific topic. And obviously, you mean, you can run ads on it. You can, there's, it fits everything.
Unknown Speaker 24:17
Yeah, I think that's one of the the struggling pieces for just lead gen in general for agencies is being able to get something of value in front of as many people as possible in a way that actually entices them. It's like every we're doing marketing for for our clients, right? Doing marketing for ourselves becomes such a problem for some reason. Well, like anything else, once you have it and once it's in the market, you mean you have data on it, you can begin to share case studies and begin to show it works, right, right, yeah, just giving out the evidence.
Unknown Speaker 24:49
So
Unknown Speaker 24:51
we talked the 8020, what would you say is the very first step
Unknown Speaker 24:56
to just making this happen, to actually sitting down and building.
Unknown Speaker 25:00
Out the course now,
Unknown Speaker 25:03
yeah, I think it's being super specific on what problem you're solving
Unknown Speaker 25:08
right specificity sells whether someone's paying with their time or paying with their money. They're not buying information. They're buying that solution of that specific thing they know about.
Unknown Speaker 25:20
And so it's looking at every single thing that could go into this and throwing out as much as possible. One of the things I share in my course is this principle of do less with less. It's really simple but really profound, because most courses try to do more with more, or try to do more with less.
Unknown Speaker 25:36
And once you understand that this isn't an isolated project. The goal isn't just to create one mini course. The goal is to create a series of parallel mini courses that solve different problems, or a series of ascending mini courses that help you
Unknown Speaker 25:51
unravel the next thing to move towards, you start to look at it inside of an ecosystem,
Unknown Speaker 25:57
right? So I think that first step really is to identify that container of what can we reasonably solve, what is a problem I can solve for somebody in an hour or less,
Unknown Speaker 26:07
which helps them improve their, you know, speed, clarity and confidence towards their goal,
Unknown Speaker 26:14
without actually solving it.
Unknown Speaker 26:18
Right? That was actually one of my bigger takeaways from the course, because naturally, right, I want to give as much value as I can with a, you know, with as little as I can, but you end up adding more, and it just becomes this behemoth of a of a project that you end up never finishing. And do. I started a, actually, it was going to be a live course. I finished it on decision making, and it went from, hey, I have this model for looking at decisions, to this massive notion database with everything you can, like, plug and play, all this stuff and like, it took weeks for me, of, like, deliberate effort to get this done. And then I got to, like, finish it. And it's not a huge audience for that wants that specific course. And so I can give it away for free.
Unknown Speaker 27:07
Really, I'm repurposing it for, like, content and stuff like that. But it was like one of these instances where had I just focused on a very small piece, I
Unknown Speaker 27:15
could have got more from it actually, well, and let's be honest, too, once you have that you can re niche it, right? So once you have a mini course, you mean, you can decide to niche down and go after, you know, an industry or a subset of an industry, and then you can put in an extra 10% of work to duplicate that and swap the stories and swap the swap the the visuals, and go after a totally different industry, something like problem solving. Like, is someone gonna buy a problem solving course? Maybe will someone buy a problem solving course? For, I don't know first time managers, right? Or first time managers inside of, you know, I don't know some specific subset of industries. Like you can niche that down, and you can share your stories, and then you just recap, recut the stories, and then spin it off to another industry, to another persona,
Unknown Speaker 28:06
right?
Unknown Speaker 28:07
Yeah. I mean, the ability to kind of repurpose these is pretty, uh, extensive. Do you have, do you have any data on, like, the, I guess, the length of videos, or how many days you should pack in here? I know there's probably a ton of variables that change all that. We've done a fair amount of testing.
Unknown Speaker 28:27
I don't, I don't do anything over seven in the beginning, we did some 10 days, and we did some large scale 10 days. And I think the 10 days sometimes work for authors. So sometimes for authors who've got a book that you know is more likely closer to 10 chapters. It was very logical for us to approach many courses of let's do one of the common themes of authors is there's a frustration that people buy the books and don't take action, right? They say, hey, you know this, this thing, I did this thing, I found this thing, I created changed my life. And so I wrote a book to share it with the world, and then people buy it and say nice things, but never do anything with it. And so the course was a very logical expansion of like, how do I actually challenge people to do these things and take action on them? And so, like, I did a big project for Dr Ivan Meisner, who founded BNI for the world's largest networking organization. They have like, 380,000
Unknown Speaker 29:13
members, or something, something of that magnitude. And Ivan, Ivan had written close to 30 books, and there was one we did on a book he wrote called who's in your room. Really simple, really powerful concept. The concept is this,
Unknown Speaker 29:27
your life is a room. It can be as big or small as you want, and you can visualize it however you desire. But the reality is that the front door of your room is the only door. There's one door into your room, and that's a one way door. Once we let people into our life, into our mental space, they never leave. And this is anatomically true, right? Once people have entered our headspace, they never leave. We may not think about them for 20 years, but we see something, smell something, sense something, and suddenly that memory comes back from what feels like a previous lifetime. And so Ivan, in this book, teaches this concept of you.
Unknown Speaker 30:00
Your life is a room with a one way door. How do we install a doorman? How do we install a bouncer? How do we install somebody at the front on the front porch outside of that front door, who knows our values, who knows our priorities and what's important to us? How do we teach them on that so they can just like, hey, let's slow this down. Let's make sure we don't let any people in my room that are the kind of people that already here that I wish weren't. Let's make sure we don't get any more of those inside. Then Ivan walks through the concierge. How do we take how do we then install somebody inside of the room, inside of our mind, who takes the people who are here and make sure the people that bring the greatest value to us, the greatest energy to us, are near to us and close to us and in regular communication. And how do we take those people that
Unknown Speaker 30:43
drain us, those energy vampires, and how do we put them in what Ivan would call the lock box? How do we put them in the farthest, most distant area of our room, in a place that we don't have to interact with them or think
Unknown Speaker 30:55
about them? So this book became, you know, it had 10 chapters we created as a 10 day mini course, and we watched people take action, and then we, you know, celebrated them for completing the course, and then gave them an opportunity to continue invest in themselves and invest in us a little bit as they continued their journey of mastering those principles and then teaching and coaching and moving forward. So there are instances in which that long form, say 10 day course, works. Outside of that, I have found a sweet spot on five days. I think five days is enough where people really can make some progress. They really can feel like they solved a problem in a reasonable way in five days, without feeling like I'm only getting those 20% of people who are intrinsically motivated right, and then within the actual course, I guess, for each day, how much content or you recommended gets, yeah, my Target's 15 minutes or less. I mean, my target, the whole course, is less than an hour. And my goal on a daily basis is, I would say seven to 15 minutes, depending on kind of exactly what it is. But every day I have to be remembered that every day I still need to earn someone's attention, right? It's not given this person is committed. So every day I have to resell them and re hook them and bring them back into my world.
Unknown Speaker 32:12
And so every day is, you know, we think about on YouTube, we think about the power of the thumbnail on LinkedIn and social. We talk about the hook, those things still play out inside the course. Every single day, I have to re earn someone's attention and re earn their commitment to continuing this journey. And so every day, you know, for me, there's a curiosity title,
Unknown Speaker 32:34
right? I'm a writer. I had a client and
Unknown Speaker 32:38
Mitch Whiting, Mitch is a high level coach. And Mitch was creating one of the days in his course, and we were working on it. And we were scrolling through a script written the rough draft of the script. We were on Zoom together, and he was going through it, and I said, Stop, did I just see the word? Did I just see the question, are you afraid of death or something like that. And he said, Yeah, I go, take that. Go put it at the top of the script. We're going to start there, and then we'll work backwards,
Unknown Speaker 33:07
so we know that
Unknown Speaker 33:09
the human mind fires emotion first and logic second.
Unknown Speaker 33:13
And so how do I hook someone emotionally right? How do I connect with someone's feelings first? In my thumbnail, in my opening line, in my video, title for each day, in my title for the day.
Unknown Speaker 33:27
To get them to I have to know,
Unknown Speaker 33:31
right? I wrote a I wrote a LinkedIn story yesterday. It started
Unknown Speaker 33:36
with I grabbed the red folder from the secret drawer and ran out the door.
Unknown Speaker 33:42
Someone's like, what? What's What the heck's in the red folder, right? And I go on to tell a story about, you know, going through a hurricane last week and whatever. But
Unknown Speaker 33:52
you have to create curiosity. And sometimes, you know, sometimes we can shock people with statistics, and sometimes we can use inspiring quotes. But we have to keep in mind on a daily basis, I have to re earn someone's attention for the first time every single day. And I do that by, yes, creating it short content that's focused, but it has to start with something exciting, interesting, mysterious, curiosity, whatever,
Unknown Speaker 34:19
right? I think that's something a lot of people kind of look at like, they know, right? Everybody knows you got to be curious and all that. But I think when we talk about gaining attention, a lot of people just look at the competition and say, I need to be like, more curiosity inducing than the people I'm competing with, so they share that attention. But in reality, you're competing for attention in every part of someone's life, right? Like they're they got, they got to make dinner, they got to get the kids to school, they got to do all these other things. So if you can be creating content that's not only valuable to them and like the business sense or their personal life, whatever you're targeting, but also make it so it's entertaining, engaging, and actually like making them feel like they want to take part in that, right? Like you're creating.
Unknown Speaker 35:00
That experience, which actually leads to the next question I want to get in. But if you can create that experience, it's now you're much more likely to actually get them coming back and actually that course, you know, completion right now, goes up. But one of the things I noticed with your course, and we talked about it before, was just the it was an actual experience, right? It wasn't just, hey, finish this and it click into the next video. Like, you're using a platform with like, animations, and they're, you know, these pattern interrupts that, like, get you excited. There's a gamification system in there. How are you seeing those things and kind of assist with getting those completion rates?
Unknown Speaker 35:37
Well,
Unknown Speaker 35:39
human beings seek instant gratification. Yes, right? We're hardwired. Push the button. Something happens. Push the button. Something happens. Push the button. I tell you not to push the button. What happens? You push the button. Right? Like we're wired for instant gratification. And yet, courses, the modern course, has become a give up machine.
Unknown Speaker 36:00
So here's this long form videos. Here's the stack of too many long form videos that solve broad, generic problems. And if you're lucky, and you become one of the five to 7% of people who finish, maybe you get an automated PDF certificate of completion, and that is your single piece of gratification.
Unknown Speaker 36:19
Okay, if that status quo, that's where the bar is.
Unknown Speaker 36:23
I like to, I don't know if you follow Jesse Cole. He owns a savannah bananas baseball team down in Georgia. Yeah, it's a it's a circus, you know, really. But Jesse's fascinating study. But Jesse uses this principle. He says, you know, we do the opposite of normal, right? If we agree that normal is broken, if Jesse says that baseball games are too long, too boring, and, you know, followership has gone way down, Jesse does, what's the opposite of normal?
Unknown Speaker 36:49
And for me, it's been the same question, well, if normal courses get normal results, I can't, in good conscience, you know, let me let me backtrack.
Unknown Speaker 36:59
I got into building online courses because I failed online courses. That was my start. I failed. I was in grad school. I failed six online courses in a row, and they threw me out.
Unknown Speaker 37:11
And so through some weird combination of, who knows what, that became, the motivation to drive a career in trying to solve this problem. Is saying, wait a minute. First, I'm not alone. I'm statistically normal. How do I build courses that I would complete?
Unknown Speaker 37:29
And if we look at the gamification piece, right, if you like, if you I don't know. I'm a Turbo Tax user. Better, worse, whatever. Turbo Tax has started the gamify you log into Turbo Tax once a year, and it says, hey, the average person completes their tax return in this amount of time, and it shows a race track, right?
Unknown Speaker 37:48
The one thing you should rush your taxes.
Unknown Speaker 37:52
But if you, if you look all around you, you know, if you, if I was using a fathom, one of the Zoom AI recorder tools, right? Fathoms. Entire user experience is gamified, right? They're giving you points and trying to motivate you to continue to take more actions. And like, oh, you should, you know? And if you you know, log into your if you like cookies and you log into the crumble app, right? They give you points every time that you add your email address that you follow them on tick tock. You follow them on Facebook, you follow them, right? Like the world around us again, back to our initial conversation. The world around us has become addicted to short form content. The world around us has been gamified. And yet, when we create courses, somehow we just park these things at the curb, and we think that people are buying
Unknown Speaker 38:37
these.
Unknown Speaker 38:39
We think that we think that people are buying encyclopedias, right, that they just, they're just giving us money for information, and we can run a business this way. That's
Unknown Speaker 38:49
how people are doing. And then that's why we're seeing completion rates they are. So if we say, what is the opposite normal, the opposite of normal is to create courses that are short courses, that are sexy, courses that are addicting, courses that are binge worthy, and part of that is content design, and the rest of that really is, how do we create this user experience that's gamified, that has pattern interrupts, that violates what people think is possible or conceivable inside of a course?
Unknown Speaker 39:16
Awesome. All right? Well, Nathan, this was a, I mean, it's an eye opening topic, because it really does kind of redefine how we we can look at courses in order to actually increase consumption and use it now as a an asset within our companies.
Unknown Speaker 39:34
I've got two more for you. Let's go the first one being, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read?
Unknown Speaker 39:42
I Well, given my last plug, I would adventure one of Jesse Cole spokes. He's got two of them. I
Unknown Speaker 39:51
kept them blanking on the names off the top of my head. But he has, he has two. I
Unknown Speaker 39:56
think one is how to find your yellow tux, which he's famous for wearing a yellow.
Unknown Speaker 40:00
Tuxedo as the owner of the banners through all the games. And the second one came out, I think last
Unknown Speaker 40:06
year, I'm big into founder stories. I love to read founder stories of these old Mavericks of business, like Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines, or true Kathy at Chick fil A, or the story of Texas Roadhouse. Or, like, some of these really early, really just like strong Maverick cowboy entrepreneurs who were a little loose cannon, because they they create this amount of excitement, this amount of this vision of possibility,
Unknown Speaker 40:35
and that's what gets me going. Yeah, it's awesome. Last question, Where can people learn more about you? I am a one man show on LinkedIn. It's been the right audience for me, so I've doubled down there. You'll find me on LinkedIn. I am Nathan Warner. The my tag is the online course guy. And you can also find my mini course there the Rule Breakers playbook, which will walk you through in five days or less, how to create great online course content that connects and captivates and actually converts awesome. And we will get a link to that in the show notes as well, because I recommend anyone who's curious on how to do a mini course like just go through this course. You will learn and see how what is possible. And it's a it's it is pretty eye opening,
Unknown Speaker 41:19
but awesome. Nathan, thank you for joining great conversation. Thanks, Chris,
Unknown Speaker 41:28
that's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on substack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai