Hey, this is Mark Butler and you are listening to a podcast for
coaches special Friday episode.
Kind of in vacation mode around here.
I'm home, but the kids are out of school.
It's my quiet week for coaching.
So I have had just a couple of coaching sessions, but very few.
So there's not a lot going on around here.
And we're kind of puttering around the house.
And yesterday being Thursday, the day I normally record and publish at about
one o'clock in the afternoon, I turned to Kate and said, wait, it's Thursday.
I'm supposed to publish a podcast episode.
And then she said, we'll get on with it.
And I said, ah, it's vacation, whatever.
But I woke up this morning thinking.
For me, the publishing habit feels so fragile that being casual
about skipping a week seems risky.
I think a lot about The Princess Bride.
I'm sure that you do too.
I think all of us spend a lot of time thinking about some of the
amazing quotes that come from that brilliant movie, The Princess Bride.
And I think about the scene where Wesley and Buttercup
are walking through the swamp.
And I can't remember the swamps name.
I'm so embarrassed, but Wesley is telling Buttercup the story of their time apart
when he was with the dread pirate Roberts, when he became the dread pirate Roberts.
And one of the things he says to Buttercup is when he went from being the Dread
Pirate Roberts prisoner to becoming the Dread Pirate Roberts himself,
at the beginning of his relationship with the Dread Pirate Roberts, the
Dread Pirate Roberts would finish each day by saying, Good night, Wesley.
Well done.
I'll most likely kill you in the morning.
And I often think about that because in my own life, I am both Wesley
and I am the Dread Pirate Roberts.
This is especially true in my content publishing because each and every time
I'm not exaggerating each and every time I publish a podcast episode, a solo episode
at the end of that episode, when I've clicked publish and the episode has gone
out into the world, there's a little voice in my head that says, good night, Mark.
Well done.
I'll most likely kill you in the morning.
Meaning There's a part of my brain that thinks the episode I just published is the
last podcast episode I will ever publish.
And I think it's sort of a coin toss, whether it's true or not.
That's how fragile publishing feels to me.
So as I thought about being in vacation mode, and I thought about the fact that
I didn't intentionally skip the week, I just sort of the way that I do skipping
feels like Actually having the dread pirate Roberts kill me in the morning
as it were, look, it's a metaphor.
I know I overworked it a little bit.
Hang in there.
So I woke up this morning and I said, no, let's publish an episode.
I've had this episode in my head for a while, so it's
not completely off the cuff.
There are some principles here that I think are important to share.
And at the end of it, I'll be able to say, well done, Mark,
you published another one.
I'll most likely kill you in the morning.
Now.
This episode is about the urge to create a course.
It's an urge.
I still have, I've had it for over 15 years now.
I've created a few courses during that time, but the urge to create a course
is this thing that doesn't seem to leave any of us that are in the world
of coaching and personal development.
Why?
Well, because we have this perception that courses are semi passive income.
I've talked a lot about this.
You can go to the early episodes of a podcast for coaches.
You'll hear me talking about training models versus coaching models.
The challenges of , scalable business models.
But today I want to talk specifically about this urge to create a course
where I think it comes from.
And then.
What I think about actually acting on it because I do have a specific course
in mind right now that I would like to create and to distribute into the world.
Will I?
Probably not.
Let's be, let's be real with ourselves.
But something I hear newer coaches say often is when they get into the
world of coaching and they realize that they don't have any clients.
And they realize they don't really know how to get clients.
And I have great sympathy and empathy for that.
Then I hear them saying, so anyway, I'm creating a course.
Well, why is that happening?
Well, first of all, it's happening because when you can create a course,
, there's just a well of dopamine waiting for you in the creation of that
course, you get to write and create and you get to feel smart and you
are, I'm not, there's no sarcasm here.
Creating a course is, is fun and it's challenging and it's rewarding.
And I think there's many great dopamine dumps waiting for us in course creation.
It also allows us to avoid the discomfort.
of being with the reality that we don't have clients or that we don't know what
to do with ourselves in between clients or in between yeses from potential clients.
So I completely get that.
I also have the opinion that coaching is, is harder than people think.
It can be very hard when you're engaging with clients and you have a
whole set of principles in your head and you're trying to help them explore
their challenges and explore their behaviors and their relationships.
And you find yourself thinking, if you just knew what I know, you wouldn't be
making the choices you're making and getting the results that you're getting.
So if I could just transfer my knowledge to you, Then
that would solve your problems
it's not strictly speaking untrue if A person is skilled and knowledgeable
in an area and if they can transfer their skills and their knowledge
to me I'm I'm probably better off The asterisk here is that Time and
circumstances and personality also matter.
So it's not just having the knowledge and having the skills.
It's how those skills and that knowledge lands with me.
And what's the timing in my life?
What's my preparedness for it?
What's my ability , to act on that new knowledge and those new skills.
So it's actually quite a flawed idea.
This idea that if they just knew what I know that they would be
different, they would act differently.
They would get different results.
It's an imperfect, but it's an understandable idea.
And when you mix that good intention, the good intention of, if you just
knew what I know, you'd be better off
with the discomfort of being out in the world, actually
attempting to create relationships.
And nurture those relationships into client relationships.
Then you can understand why people go into their caves to , make
a course or , create a program.
This is where you hear a lot of coaches saying, I'm working on my program.
Okay.
Amazing.
You're working on your program.
I get the urge.
And as I said, I still have the urge.
There's a course that I have in my head right now.
I'll talk about it in a few minutes and I'll talk about what I think
its challenges are, but I want you to know, I acknowledge the urge.
Here's the single biggest challenge with courses that I probably said in the
early episodes of this show, but I cannot remember courses are cheap to produce.
Information is abundant and cheap.
Packaging abundant, cheap information as a course is an inexpensive thing to do.
Many, many, many, many millions of people have the ability, they
have the resources to take abundant information and package it as a course.
Even if you spend 10, 000 on a website and 5, 000 on videos and
5, 000 on photography and 5, 000 on copy and et cetera, et cetera.
Even if you go all in 20, on a course, In the production of it, you will
then realize that many millions or at least many hundreds of thousands
of people have the ability to spend 25 on the production of a course.
So that's not a high barrier to entry.
Of course, you don't have to spend 25 on the production of a course.
I'm speaking at the upper limit of what I think many of us would believe
to be reasonable to make the point.
The point being it's easy and cheap to make a course.
And since it's easy and cheap in production, then all of the
competition will be in distribution.
It will be in the sale of the thing.
Courses have a high appeal to the maker, to the producer, because they're
perceived to be high leverage and scalable and either passive or semi passive.
So lots of people Have the idea that making courses would be
a great way to make a living.
But since it's cheap to make them, and since many people want to make and
sell them, the supply and demand here means that we have a high supply of
courses and a high demand for customers.
We're the ones demanding customers.
And if we're demanding customers, we're bidding up the price.
We're making customers more expensive.
That's why over time in open auctions, well, they're not open,
but in auction environments like the Facebook ads environment, maybe
also the TikTok ads environment.
I don't know anything about TikTok.
I know nothing about Facebook.
I know even less about TikTok, but in an auction environment, Ish environment,
the demand for customers, the demand for attention will drive
up the price of advertising.
So it's easy to produce a course.
It's hard to sell a course because lots and lots of people want to sell courses.
So all of the cost of a course driven business is in the marketing
and not in the production.
It's a hard business.
Even when you have the best production values in the world, a
few years ago, I had a membership to that masterclass thing.
It was given to me, an annual membership was given to me, and I probably watched
one or two of the masterclasses.
And they were great.
The production value was amazing.
And knowing the very little bit I do about video production, just through
friends in the coaching industry, I know that that production for something like
masterclass would be massively, enormously expensive on the production side.
I just got done telling you it's cheap to produce these, but I'm using
them as an example where they're kind of maxing out the production cost.
They've got celebrities as they're, as they're, as they're featured experts.
I don't know how they pay them.
I don't know if it's revenue sharing.
I don't know if it's upfront fees.
I have to imagine that masterclass is venture backed.
They must be taking investment money.
Their advertising budget must be enormous.
There was a season during which you You couldn't get anywhere online
without seeing a masterclass ad.
So the margins in that business, I promise you, the margins are tough.
And one of the ways I know the margins must be tough in that business.
And that business must be a grind is that since I've been a member of their
thing, I get their emails still, I haven't unsubscribed and the emails I get
from them are mostly about two things.
Number one, what a great gift masterclasses.
And by the way, did you know there's a sale going on?
It's a Memorial day sale.
It's a holiday sale.
It's a father's day sale.
This is the best thing to give your dad on father's day.
If it's being marketed as a gift.
Primarily.
And if it's being marketed with frequent and significant discounts,
that means it's a hard business.
That means the intrinsic demand for the Netflix of personal
development, which is what I perceive it to be is comparatively low.
And that that demand has to be manufactured in the
form of telling people.
Hey, this is the perfect thing to give dad on father's day.
So now the product isn't even about the content.
The product is about, let me make your gift giving easier.
Courses, in my opinion, are most appealing to course creators and
least appealing to course buyers.
That's why there is a glut of courses in the world.
And it's not quite clear to me who is consuming and
benefiting from these courses.
Now, there is a specific personality.
, I have friends and I have clients who fit this personality.
I call them the straight A student.
That's not a pejorative . I wasn't a straight A student, but I have great
respect for people who can get themselves to do the work of getting the straight
A's, both the literal straight A's and also the metaphorical straight A's.
They will consume courses.
They will go through every module.
They will complete every worksheet.
They love courses and they benefit massively from courses, both directly
from the information that they gain and indirectly from the entertainment
value they get from that process.
But the rest of us don't really care that much about courses.
We might buy courses, but we're probably not going to complete them.
And if we buy a course at all, it's probably going to be so specific
to a problem that we face, that we will get from it what we want.
But we don't care that much about completion and we don't care that
much about the next course I've bought a couple of courses in my
life that were incredibly impactful.
I would call myself an intermediate software developer after five or six years
of practice One of the main things that unlocked me on that path to building that
skill Was a course for which I paid 300 that finally organized the principles of
programming in such a way that I could actually start to practice meaningfully.
And as I was able to practice meaningfully, now I've been able
to build things that are incredibly useful to me in my business.
That course was not worth 300 to me.
It was probably worth 30, 000 to me.
I think about courses like my friend, Jenny Lakeman.
Has a course about helping people set up their first website.
I'll admit I haven't looked at the course, but I know Jenny well, and
there's no way that Jenny would produce anything that wasn't great.
You should go to Jenny Lakeman, Google her Jenny Lakeman.
com.
Sorry, Jenny.
I don't know your website off the top of my head.
It's probably Jenny Lakeman.
com.
She sells this course.
I have no doubt of its value.
I'm not going to say it's priced because the price might change.
I have no doubt that that course would unlock people who want
to set up their first website.
These kinds of things have incredible and immediate value.
They're relatively easy to consume.
They're relatively easy to implement.
They're relatively inexpensive.
300 for the course that I bought was not inexpensive.
It wasn't 47,
but 300 was still an amount of money that I could and would spend to
solve a painful problem in my life.
The thing about most courses is that they're expensive in
time and effort to consume.
So even the course that I paid 300 for that unlocked me in my, in my desire
to be able to build my own software.
I bet I only consumed 30 percent of that course.
I got in there, I watched just enough videos and I saw just enough
examples that I could springboard off of one or two of those examples
and finally get into my own practice.
From there, I did not care about watching the rest of the videos.
I don't like to watch videos.
It's too time consuming.
It's boring.
And the retention on a video is not going to be great.
Learning is about practice.
Courses are mostly expensive to the user because there's so much video to
watch and there's so much to implement.
The one course that I created in 2016 or 2017 was a guide
to doing your own bookkeeping.
I think it was five hours of video about bookkeeping.
What was I thinking?
I, I don't know how many, I probably sold 50 of those total.
And through my video host, I had the stats on the view counts on the videos.
, you can guess what the view counts on the videos at the end of that course were.
They were zero.
No one got to those last videos.
What was I thinking?
Well, I know what I was thinking.
I was well intentioned.
I was trying to create something thorough.
I could have charged exactly the same price, but given 10 percent of the
information and said, this is the 10 percent that benefits you, that
springboards you into knowing what you need to know about your bookkeeping.
So you either do it yourself or you hire somebody.
I've got a million little technicalities that I could teach you, but I'm
not going to teach you those.
until you absolutely know that you want to be in this and doing it for yourself.
In the meantime, watch, instead of these five hours of video, watch this
30 minutes of video, and then you can decide what you want to do from there.
Courses are enormously expensive to consume.
That's why they're intrinsically not that appealing.
To the person who doesn't want to consume courses, people who just want results.
Courses are not the best way to get those results.
I hate to say it.
Consumability is a big deal.
When it comes to consumability, you're competing with podcasts
and you're competing with YouTube.
Email to a lesser extent, but you're competing with podcasts and YouTube
podcasts and YouTube are a near frictionless consumption environment.
If I have to now get off those platforms, go to a Kajabi website, find the website,
log into the website, find my place in your course and continue to consume it.
I don't think that happens very often.
Okay.
Let me tell you about my course idea.
And we'll kind of beat up on this so as you decide to act on or
not act on your urge to create a course, Maybe you'll do things in
a little bit more clear eyed way.
The course that I want to create.
Is one about online business models.
The difference between this course and others is that most courses
in this area are about how to make money with X, how to succeed with X.
I mostly don't think those work , but even if they do work, I think that
they're an incomplete solution because even if you can tell someone how to
make money with X, you haven't answered the question of whether they want to,
whether the thing that you're teaching is in any way well suited to them or
whether what you've done is just taking your own particular set of skills and
neuroses and combine them into a workflow that works for you and may also work
for people who are very much like you, but for everyone else, it will be.
An upstream swim.
I want to create a course that says I have been in this game
now for, Oh man, 20 years, 2004.
I've been doing this for 20 years.
Wow.
Okay.
That's weird.
I've been doing this for 20 years.
In those 20 years, I've seen every business model.
I've seen most of them from the inside.
So if you're a person who's trying to figure out how to
make an independent income,
maybe you're happy to have a job.
Maybe you want to have a side hustle.
Maybe you want to get out of your job, whatever.
I'm not going to tell you what to do or how to do it
because that's mostly baloney.
What I'm going to do is say, here's how the world actually works.
Here are the business models that exist in the world, particularly the online world.
Here are the principles that drive success in those models.
Here are the personalities that tend to thrive in those models.
I want to make that course.
Now, here's the thing.
I don't know whether that course is appealing It's not a result
driven course in the way that we think about courses usually.
So it's not get 10, 000 Instagram followers.
It's not make a thousand dollars a month using X.
It's not those things.
, it's two or three steps back from that where someone says, ah, I
really would like to make an extra 500 a month or 5, 000 a month.
And it's me saying, Yeah, I know how that happens, which is different
than, I know what you should do.
I know how it happens is me inviting you into 20 years, apparently, 20
years of experience of saying, here are the models that exist in the world.
Let me give you my thoughts on how those models work and who
the people are that work them.
And then you can decide what might be the best fit for you
and for your way of being.
I think that could be appealing, but I don't know.
But the truth is that's not even the right question.
The right question when it comes to a course is not, Is it appealing?
It's not, Would people buy it?
That's not an invalid question, but it's not the best question.
The better questions sound like this, Who would be entertained by it?
Courses, I would say, are at least 51 percent entertainment.
If you don't have an entertainment mindset going into the creation of a
course, I think you're kind of sunk that masterclass business has done a good job.
Of acknowledging that above all people want to be entertained.
Entertainment can look like inspiration.
It can look like knowledge acquisition, but it's got to be entertaining.
So when I think about my course, I think, well, who would be entertained
by a conversation about online business models,, by a walk through
the world of online business models, who would be entertained by it,
who would look smarter for having purchased it.
We humans were very reliable.
We're very predictable.
How does a person's status increase by buying my course?
How do they look smarter , in what situations will they be able to look
smarter and look more put together because they've purchased my course?
That's a good question.
A really good question is who would benefit from selling this?
For example, in this course, I would talk about the fact that.
Among the personality types, there's the, the driven, the hunter, the achiever.
These are the people who go out and sell tons of courses.
They mostly sell courses about selling courses.
Let's all appreciate the irony,
but they are driven in a way that I have never shown myself to be.
So if I'm going to create a course, the first question is not
what's going to be in the course.
The first question is who would be excited to sell this course because it ain't me.
I want to make the course.
I want to think about the ideas.
I want to organize it.
I'm not going to set up funnels.
I don't know what amount of money you'd have to put in my bank account to get me
to want to think about marketing funnels.
It's a large amount of money, huge amount of money, because I
have no interest and no desire.
So for me, if I'm going to create a course, I have to ask myself the
question, who wants to sell this?
Why would they want to sell it?
Especially if courses are cheap to produce, why would they
want to sell my course instead of selling their own course?
And then I've got to answer that question.
Well, they might really believe in me.
They might think that I'm uniquely able to talk about the thing I'm talking about.
Their perception would have to be that it's more expensive for them to
produce this particular course than for them to have me do it so . There's
some arbitrage there for them.
There's a leverage there for them where they say, I don't
want to make that course.
And I don't think I could make the course as well as Mark can.
So I'm going to have Mark make the course and then I'm going to sell it.
That's the thing I'm excited about anyway.
And then you look at, well, how do we split up the revenue?
Well, I just got done telling you that courses are cheap to
produce and expensive to sell.
So the revenue share would need to reflect that.
It would need to reflect that they're doing the hard part in selling it.
So they're going to get paid more per dollar than I am.
That's appropriate.
Okay.
Who is excited to sell this?
Now, many of you will hear that and say, oh yeah, I'm going to
set up an affiliate program.
That's not what I'm talking about.
You might set up an affiliate program, but if you set up an affiliate
program with some simple software that you can plug into your website,
you have not solved your problem because you still lack demand.
What is the lack of demand?
The lack of demand is no one knows about or cares about your affiliate
program and they have no reason to.
So you're still having to do some selling.
The idea is that you may have to make fewer sales because you're selling a
distributor instead of selling a user.
That would look like me working my network and going to them and saying, I could
probably name three right now that I might go to and say, how I want to make this.
Do you want to do like an 80, 20, 80 to you, 20 to me, or 90 to you, 10, 10 to
me, maybe, or a hundred to use zero to me.
Because there might be a scenario where that's the most advantageous thing for
me to do, which is to have them take all the revenue from the course and I get.
Non revenue benefits.
I've got to go make those sales.
Why is that appealing?
Because it's more of a relationship driven sale, which is the thing I
like anyway, and it's fewer sales.
So there's no funnel to be set up.
There's just me going to work my network and try to figure out how
to make it advantageous for them to distribute the thing that I've made.
That's a better question than how do I set up Facebook ads?
For me, that's a better question.
For some of you, the better question will be, how do I set up Facebook ads?
These are the fundamental pieces.
Number one, do I think that I have something to say?
Yes, I definitely do.
After 20 years in the world of online business in almost every business
model you can think of, or having access to a person who has implemented
every business model you can think of.
I think I am uniquely able to tell an entertaining story
about online business models.
That question is answered.
There is the production of the course, which for me, I would, I would
probably have to get help because I only do content production Two ways.
One is almost like hot potato where I sit down in front of this microphone
and I just talk for 30 minutes and then I got, I got to get it out of my hands.
That's how I do content production.
Or I try to do something more thoughtful and purposeful, in which case I way
overthink and then years go by as the thing expands and expands and expands.
And instead of trying to create a course about online business model,
I am attempting to rewrite the entire internet in all of its detail.
Before I will actually put the thing out into the world.
I only seem to work on these two speeds.
I would need help at finding the middle ground, the middle ground being, okay,
we're not going to rush it out into the world, but we're also not going
to overthink and overcomplicate it so that it never gets into the world.
There's a middle way.
And I would need help because I don't, I don't do the middle way.
I've never done it yet anyway.
And then there's distribution and the distribution would be me going to my
network and saying, I've got this thing.
Do you want to sell it?
Now let's talk about that.
A minute ago, I said, maybe there's a scenario where the split is
somewhere between 80, 20, 80 to the distributor, 20 to the course creator.
That's me or a hundred zero where a hundred percent of the revenue,
maybe less merchant fees and refunds.
So a hundred percent of the net revenue after merchant fees and
refunds goes to the distributor and, and 0 percent goes to me.
Well, how does that benefit me audience?
That's how it benefits me.
The more people who know, like, and trust me, the better off I am in
the long run, having a large enough and large enough could be 300.
It could be 3000.
It could be 30, 000 people who like, and trust me will drive my ability to succeed
in everything that I do in business.
So it probably makes sense for me to do one of a couple of things
to work with my network and pay them the vast majority,
maybe even all of the revenue.
Of the sale of the course, or to do this differently and to make the course free
and to advertise the free thing, not as a freebie, uh, freebies
gross, but as a, as a thing that is worth real money because it's got
relatively high production values.
It's actually useful
and it's consumable.
I make it a standalone thing.
I build it as though I intended to sell it for a hundred or a thousand dollars.
And then instead I make it free, but then I still pay to promote it either
with that same network where I say, Hey, can I pay you to promote this?
Or I do sponsorships where I, I go out in the world and I, I, I sponsor
groups of coaches or communities, or I don't know exactly, but I do
sponsorships to try to drive traffic
to this free thing that I've created.
The idea being I have to know what my goal is.
If my goal is to have the course.
Actually make me a lot of money.
I will just tell you with 20 years of experience, that is hard.
Full stop.
Making profit directly from courses, especially one course is very unusual.
If a course creator is making profit as a course creator, it's usually
because they have a suite of courses.
One is their loss leader.
They either lose money on it or they break even on it.
And then their margin all comes from subsequent course sales.
In my experience, there's not a lot of word of mouth.
In course creation, there's word of mouth around course platforms like Udemy.
There's not a lot of word of mouth around courses themselves because
they're too easy to produce.
So you do have strong course brands.
People like Amy Porterfield come to mind.
Amy Porterfield has a course brand.
I can't really think of another one.
So making money directly off the courses is tough.
You've got to decide what your goal is.
What is the course's job in your life and in your business?
Is it to make a lot of money by itself?
That's going to be hard.
Is it to build your audience?
Okay, now this is more feasible.
You have to know what your intention is going in.
I will admit that my financial goal for the course.
Would be lunch money.
I go out to lunch almost every day in these modern times that adds up.
It's expensive.
It kind of annoys me, but I'm not willing to quit.
So I thought, Oh, if a course could produce lunch money, I'd be
pretty thrilled with that course, but I'm also admitting my bias.
And you might say my limited thinking, because I'm not sure I believe a course
by itself can do a lot better than lunch money for the average person.
Now I know plenty of clients who drive a lot of top line revenue from courses.
They may bring in hundreds of thousands.
Of revenue from courses, but the profit, the amount left over after you pay
for the team, after you pay for the ads is usually a very small number.
So you've got to decide what you want the course to do.
I think most of us feel some amount of urge to create a course.
I think that siren song will always be playing in my head at this point.
I just know too much.
I've seen too much to get very excited about course distribution,
especially if the goal is to make money, which is a weird thing to say.
I realize
If its purpose is audience building, I can get more excited about it, but
if you're wired like I'm wired at all, trust me, you have no interest
in the distribution of a course.
There are people who only want to distribute low production cost
products like courses like this.
Memberships like powders, supplements, it's all the same kind of mindset.
No problem.
That's great.
But my point is you're competing with people whose whole desire is to distribute
the stuff and your desire might be to make the stuff and the people with a
great desire to make the stuff will always struggle against the people
whose desire is to distribute the stuff.
To distribute it because the stuff itself is hard to differentiate.
And since the stuff itself is hard to differentiate, the differentiation
all happens in the marketing, which is the place where people like you
and me just aren't that interested.
When you have that urge to course create.
I would encourage you actually to act on that urge at least once or twice.
It's fun.
It's challenging.
The course does become an asset that you can use with your clients.
It can be an asset that you use to inspire other content creation.
If you do have a potential distribution network, you can use the asset to pay your
network to raise, to raise your revenue.
Your visibility in the world.
I would say act on it at least once or twice, go in with your eyes wide open.
You're probably not going to pay for your family's trip to Hawaii next year
with the proceeds from your course.
You're just probably not going to, but there are other benefits to be had.
And with that,
good night, Mark.
Well done.
I'll most likely kill you in the morning and talk to you next time.