Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Olly Richards, a distinguished individual who wears multiple hats as a teacher, author, speaker, and passionate language learner.
Olly teaches languages through the power of storytelling which stemmed from a riveting near-death experience atop a mountain. Throughout his remarkable journey, Olly has left an indelible mark, having authored over 30 language books, forged collaborations with prestigious universities, and earned recognition through appearances in BBC documentaries.
Visitors to his platform are treated to a wealth of resources, including language tutorials, captivating videos documenting his language-learning endeavours, engaging podcasts, and exclusive access to his premium courses.
Beyond his educational pursuits, Olly is also the driving force behind a thriving $10 million education business where he helps content creators to build courses just like his!
Olly's Website: https://ollyrichards.co/
Olly's Language Learning Website: https://storylearning.com/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Transcript
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guest is Olly Richards, a distinguished individual who wears multiple hats as a teacher, author, speaker, and passionate language learner.
Olly teaches languages through the power of storytelling which stemmed from a riveting near-death experience atop a mountain. Throughout his remarkable journey, Olly has left an indelible mark, having authored over 30 language books, forged collaborations with prestigious universities, and earned recognition through appearances in BBC documentaries.
Visitors to his platform are treated to a wealth of resources, including language tutorials, captivating videos documenting his language-learning endeavours, engaging podcasts, and exclusive access to his premium courses.
Beyond his educational pursuits, Olly is also the driving force behind a thriving $10 million education business where he helps content creators to build courses just like his!
Olly's Website: https://ollyrichards.co/
Olly's Language Learning Website: https://storylearning.com/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Transcript
We've worked with this influencer had around five million YouTube subscribers in a niche that is one of the biggest niches of all. By all accounts, you think this is surely a dead sir. We couldn't sell. I think.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name's John Ainsworth and today's guest is Oli Richards. Now, Oli had a series of random careers, from jazz musician to English teacher, before eventually starting a blog on his passion language learning and he grew it into a $10 million online business. Today he writes a newsletter at OliRichardsco teaching other online entrepreneurs how to scale their businesses to seven plus figures, using story learning as a living case study.
Speaker 2:Now, before we dive into our interview with Oli today, Yosip is our funnel strategy lead and he's worked on dozens of funnel building and optimization projects. He's developed and tested most of the systems that we use here at Data Driven Marketing when we work with our clients, and we took all of Yosip's training that he's ever done and we transcribed it and we uploaded it to a AI coach system. It's called CoachVox and it's built by this pair, Jody and Ben Cook, and they built this amazing system so you can take chat GPT and on top of it you can layer a coach's ability all of the stuff they've covered in their training before and make like a super version of chat, GPT If you, and what we've done. We've taken all of that. We've made it available for free. So if you go to datadrivenmarketingai, you can access Yosip AI and it's gonna help you to understand how to improve and build your funnel. So go check it out. I hope it's useful. Let me know what you think.
Speaker 2:Oli, welcome to the show man. Thanks very much for joining us. It is, and have a great pleasure, good to see you, John With your course business. Let's get into that first. Who do you help and what kind of problem are you solving for them?
Speaker 1:My course business is storylearningcom and we teach foreign languages through stories and, specifically, we help people who have English as a first language or an operating language and we help them learn other languages. So, for example, someone in the UK or the US who wants to learn Spanish, we will help them do that. And using stories is our USP. It's what makes us different, it's how we you know what we call out in our marketing and everything like that.
Speaker 2:So where did that come from? How did you come up with that idea in the first place of using stories?
Speaker 1:When I first started the business back in 2013, it wasn't even a business, it was a blog. You know, I was just. I was stuck in a job I wasn't enjoying in the Middle East and I needed a creative outlet of some kind. So I decided blogging on my passion, which has always been language learning. It was just me talking about my ideas. It wasn't until 2019, I think a full six years later. It could even have been 2020, I'd lose track of the years sometimes but it wasn't until then that we actually fully rebranded to storylearningcom and we actually doubled down on that angle. And I always like to mention that because you know how you always get this advice of well, you have to niche down, you have to have a USP. It took me like a full six years to actually properly figure that out, you know, and I always found that really difficult and that really came through. You know, I'd always been told you have to have a unique angle, I have to have a unique USP, but I wasn't sure what it was, and it wasn't until after a few years of running my blog that I actually started to think. Actually, you know what I actually have this way of learning languages that I haven't really talked about that much. Let's try out a few things, see if it resonates.
Speaker 1:And so I started off by writing and self-publishing some books of short stories. They really took off, ended up getting a book deal out of it, and they got published in the shops and did super well. People loved them and I sort of said, okay, well, how can we expand on this? So I've made my first course. That did really well, and then we spent the next three or four years just building out tons of courses all around this concept.
Speaker 1:That had been kind of proven to work. It had the advantage of being something that I'd done myself, but also something that really resonated with the market, or with my audience at least. And so it was kind of a sort of slow, gradual creep in that direction until it got to the point where I kind of realized, all right, we can't be ignored, we can't be dancing around this any longer. Let's do a full on rebrand, let's put our money where our mouth is. So we did a big rebrand, a big. We did a 301 redirect on the website, which was terrifying, because you know a million million businesses a month, you know your SEO, what's gonna happen. It was full on terrifying, but we did it and ended up with a nice, clean brand business all aligned around stories.
Speaker 2:So what does it look like? What's the kind of? If somebody's interested in learning a language and they want to learn it in the story learning way, what does that mean?
Speaker 1:Yes, good question. So if you think back to when you learn languages at school, most people have a similar kind of recollection. So it's lists of words, it's learning grammar rules, it's very kind of learning by rote, old fashioned stuff, and most modern language apps actually follow a similar principle. The reason is that it's quite convenient to write software algorithms that test you on Did you get this right or did you get it wrong? Is this, this word mean carrots or does it mean Apple? So a lot of apps like Duolingo kind of based on the same principle.
Speaker 1:When you learn with story learning, you learn with stories, not rules. That's the kind of tag that I always, I always use, and the reason is that stories are the most you know, the oldest form of human communications, is how everything is conveyed, passed down through generations, through stories, and so what we do is we get you reading Stories in the language from day one. They're very simple stories, but stories nonetheless, and so we immerse you in the language through Stories and then you kind of uncover the rules of the language, the grammar and the vocabulary as you go. So it's it's kind of upside down, but it resonates with people, I think, because on an intuitive level. It makes sense to people that language is learned through stories.
Speaker 1:So, you know, I think that that's why. That's why it tends to land quite well with people.
Speaker 2:And do you reckon it's like how, how many people are learning a language? Do you think if they heard about your system would be like or they tried, it would be like oh yeah, this is brilliant. Is it just that you happen, you manage to find your, your, your audience who like that kind of thing, or is it? Or this is fundamentally a better way of doing it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So there's the marketing, and then there's the truth, right? So the truth is, you know, with my language hat on, the best, the single best way to learn a language is the way that Works for you and the you've discovered, right.
Speaker 2:It's like whatever, the best workout is the one that you actually Exactly, you know the one.
Speaker 1:The only bad workout is the one that you miss, right, it's. It's like that, and you know Many of my friends who are serial language learners. They all learn in totally different ways, everybody. You know some people like a, big into flashcards and memorization. Other people, they just go on the street and start speaking to people randomly. Other people love grammar, so.
Speaker 1:But the thing is that you're talking about Accomplished high performers in this area, right? Most people are not that. Most people who are learning a language and are, they don't know what they're doing, they find it very difficult and they need help. So, and typically we Catered to people that. So what?
Speaker 1:One of the lines that I use at story learning is story learning is what you do when you've tried everything else and You're finally ready to learn. So you might. So a typical student might be someone that's been missing around on Duolingo for six months, has realized that it's a waste of time and is now actually ready to put some work in to actually to finally learn Spanish or French or Japanese, and so that's who we cater to it. It's not the you know if Duolingo, who apparently have 500 million users of their app. If dueling Ocatus to the masses. We're kind of the next level down where it's like, right, once you've kind of got it out of your system and you're finally ready to learn. Our stuff is going to be a challenge, but it's going to work and so that's kind of how we, how we approach it.
Speaker 2:It's kind of interesting, isn't it? Because, like we know a lot of people who teach languages in different ways, right?
Speaker 2:So if you take Lydia with language mentoring, I think is her sign yeah that's right, the exact URL, but I think, if I remember right and she'll tell me off for this because we've had long conversations about it, but like, I think her method is try and figure out whatever system works for you. It's like it's almost more that than here's a method of how you actually go about doing it, because she said the same thing. Right, she knows loads of polyglots and they've all got a different way of learning languages. You know, you see Benny, and he's like I saw Benny out in Benny Lewis out in Mexico and he hadn't been traveling for ages and all of a sudden he was traveling again and he was so excited because he's like nearly the whole conference he's missing all the sessions because he's out in the market talking to Mexicans and like learning Mexican style Spanish and trying things out and what have you, and he loves that and most people would find that terrifying to go out and just go to a market and be bad at the thing and it's like, oh my god, that sounds awful.
Speaker 2:And then some people love your method of like how you do it. It's really interesting, like that kind of you found a specific angle that works for a group of people, whereas probably Duolingo is like okay, they've gone with the absolute common denominator. That works for the most people or doesn't work maybe in a bunch of cases, you know. But appeals to the most people is kind of the most normal.
Speaker 1:I see a lot of different education businesses, as I know you do as well, and there are. I tend to think of there being two main approaches to content. One is the is meta and one is instructional. So meta would be how to do something, for example. This is this is you mentioned Lydia, where she helps people find the best way for them to learn? This is very much a meta approach. So this is how to think about learning, how to discover the system that works best for you. It's extremely meta. An instructional approach, on the other hand, is do this, then do that, then do this, then do that.
Speaker 1:Now, most people in the world are not systems thinkers. Most people are. They don't particularly take an interest in that in the house wise, wherefores. They just want. They just need to know. They need a step-by-step path do this and then do that and then do this. So I started my in the early days of my business. I was also very meta. My first language course that I ever made was called Language Learning Foundations, and this was a 10-part course. Here are my tips and tricks for learning a language. This was the meta and it did fine because I had a small but engaged audience. But what I found was, as soon as I went out to start running paid ads, for example, reaching a wider audience of people who I was, who were encountering me for the first time, they would get my course on how to learn a language and they'd be like, yeah, but where are the words, where's the grammar?
Speaker 1:And I'd say no, no no, I'm sort of telling you how to learn. Give me a refund. So I very quickly realized that what product market fit looks like to the masses is very different to what audience market fit looks. Sorry product audience fit looks like. As in you know, you can cultivate a very sort of passionate small group of fans who will hang off your every word that what you do for them typically doesn't scale out to a more mass market approach. So I've very deliberately gone down the path of designing something that Joe blogs on Main Street in Central Oregon who's never learned Spanish before, can pick up and use from day one and doesn't need to start thinking in all these meta terms.
Speaker 2:That's really interesting. Christopher Sutton, who's been on the podcast before. You know Christopher, right, I don't know. I know the name, but I that's about it. He doesn't come out anymore. Christopher Sutton runs. He really should. I need to convince him.
Speaker 2:He runs a site called MusicalU. I think the site is musical-ucom and he's teaching people musicality. He's teaching people how can you become more what you think of as naturally musical. So he's teaching people how to play music by ear, how to be able to hear the music and play it without having to go through the process in between of you know, find somebody who's already transcribed it, written out all the notes, learn all the notes. It's like there's a step where you can become what people think of as a virtuoso, but he's like there are a series of steps to get there, but that's too far from where most people are. So when he's running ads, he doesn't sell that product.
Speaker 2:When he's running ads, he's selling something. That's like teaching a much more simple, entry-level mass market thing and getting people in and then explaining his message, explaining his concepts through email and video over time and then saying if you want to upgrade and you want to go get the full package, this is available. So I really see that's really interesting, that kind of way to think about. What is it that you can take out to the masses? How mass do you need it to be? Because all of us have got these relatively niche businesses compared to Duolingo or something like that right, but you can't be too niche. So I kind of find that's really interesting.
Speaker 1:It is a big danger to be too niche. You know, and I think it all comes. There's no right or wrong here. It all comes down to knowing the game that you're playing.
Speaker 1:Essentially, and I think a lot of the time, a lot of the time, people, we often fall into these businesses by accident. I mean, I certainly did I'm not sure in your case, but certainly a lot of, certainly creators. Do you know anyone who identifies as a creator, started off making content, realized there's a business behind it, ended up monetizing and finds himself with a big business on their hands but have never really thought about the fact that, hey, maybe being a personal brand has its limitations. Maybe my meta products over here that teach my topic to a very kind of high level for the experts, maybe that's not what everybody wants.
Speaker 1:And so, you know, often you kind of have to go through this process of actually reimagining your whole business in order to create something that can scale further, because the you're, you know, scaling a business requires all different elements of your business to be able to scale in the marketing, the finance, but also the product. And the product has to be something that can scale beyond your, beyond your immediate audience, and you know that's essentially what I did. Five, six years in I realized, hang on, this is this is what I have here currently is not going to, it's not going to fly with the wider market and if I want to grow, I'm going to have to rejig things and move things around. So, yeah, it's a big deal.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about the audience, because you you said you know you're very, you were very niche and you need to expand, but you had this you just say a million website visitors a month.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a lot, you know. Most people are not at that level, right, we know a I mean no, maybe a couple of people who are, who are past that with these kind of language businesses. How did you manage to build that audience up? Was it all through blogging?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, anish. So I started off blogging 2013. Blogging was a big deal. Youtube wasn't really. I mean, it was a thing, but it wasn't a thing. You know, yeah, and podcasts have started, but you know podcasts are very hard to grow, very hard to build large audiences, unless you're in a very, very you know big, big area or you're one of the. You know a lot of the big podcasts started in the mid-2000s and managed to keep their their their first positioning. Over the years.
Speaker 1:I also enjoyed writing, so I started off. I started off blogging and the thing that I did right was I kept it up. So, you know, after a couple of years, I had I was getting, you know, 30, 40, 50,000 people a month to the website. I saw there was traction. When things really started taking off on multiple levels, but including on website traffic, was when I began to hire a team and to build a team because I was the bottleneck, right.
Speaker 1:So I my job for the first two years was, every week, write a blog post, publish it, but I would spend like 10 hours writing my blog posts because I was. I had to create a mentality at that time. Right, I'm going to make the best damn piece of content I can on this topic, so I would write it and I would spend just as long making it look pretty on WordPress before publishing it. As soon as I started to shift and I started, hired a blog manager who would be responsible for actually writing it up on WordPress and publishing it, and then we started to hire writers who would actually create the content in the first place. As soon as I got myself out of the equation, then we started to release two, three blog posts a week. We then started working with SEO people who helped us kind of redesign the site structure so that it was Google friendly. We then took more of a keyword approach to building, and so we just did the fundamentals well and kept it up for years and years and years.
Speaker 2:And what's that converted to? And if there's any of these numbers you don't want to share, then just just say I'm going to move on. But what has that converted to in terms of email list size?
Speaker 1:So we as of today, I believe, our email list is around 150,000 people. We quite proactively cull the list, so every three months we tend to remove 15,000, 20,000 people. To a certain extent I'm plucking these numbers out of thin air because I don't do this myself anymore, but we quite aggressively cut. So we would have 150,000,000 people and we'd have open rates of around 40% to broadcast, so it's a relatively engaged list. Yeah, that's good 40% strong. Yeah, it's what's happened recently, though Last year, because we've been running a lot of paid traffic, that's slightly been decreasing, for obvious reasons, but then by as long as we keep up the aggressive cleaning of the list to make sure that only the most engaged people stick, then that keeps the quality up.
Speaker 1:So I came from a very old school online business background where you build a list, you really nurture the relationship with that list, you take care of it, you practice good list hygiene, which is a terrible term, but it's what you do. So I feel grateful that I got schooled in these online business fundamentals back then, because I think a lot of people now. My big criticism of the creator economy is that everyone gets through the door and they get started, but they tend to think that the source to everything they want in life is AdSense and brand deals, and so they never.
Speaker 2:Oh, it upsets me so much, ollie. Oh my God, yeah, I'm preaching to the choir.
Speaker 1:But as a result, they never learn fundamentals right. They don't understand list building, they don't understand nurturing relationship with your list. They think email is something from the 1990s. So, from having learned this thing at a good point in time, I've always had pretty good fundamentals with email, and that's also what's allowed us to build the systems that sell very effectively on the back end as well. But these things take years to learn and to hone.
Speaker 2:Do you know about how many new email subscribers you get a month from the? Is it still a million a month? The website? I honestly couldn't tell you.
Speaker 1:I don't check it that often, I'd say it's See, our website traffic has been. I see a lot of growth curves which look like hockey sticks. How has it never been like that? If you look at our growth curve, you just see one flat. What would it be? Flat? No, not flat. It's up into the ride, but it's very smooth. It doesn't. You've got random fluctuations, but we know with Over time. When you look on a 10-year view, it's one very long, gradual growth curve.
Speaker 1:What I take from that is that we've done a good job with content, because I know a lot of people who have been hammered by various Google updates and things. We've never had that problem. I could only surmise from that that it's because Google likes our content. But then also over time, what's happened is that we get a lot of traffic from other places now so we have affiliates that send traffic. We have over 25 books in the shop, so people pick up our books and come over. We've grown up in YouTube channel now and that's growing all the time. That sends people over. So our reliance on Google is less and less now. So that also smooths out the curve. But yeah, it's in the range of a million a month, give or take 20%.
Speaker 2:Do you know how many new email subscribers you get, or is that one of the numbers that you're not sure?
Speaker 1:Now, because we run so much paid traffic the numbers are getting polluted.
Speaker 1:So we would get anywhere from like three to 500 emails a day. A large amount of those would be from paid. At least half of those would be from paid, and a certain number of those wouldn't remain on the list for very long because they'd either unsubscribe or we'd clean them off. So you know, I I tend I've stopped. It's been some time now that I've stopped paying that much attention to this is a whole topic of itself.
Speaker 1:You can let me know you want to go down this road, but I tend not to look so much at the kind of the unit economics of email from an organic perspective, and I think that's much more in terms of kind of cost to acquire those emails. Then versus you know what comes out in revenue on the other end and sometimes, sometimes you'll be paying more for leads, sometimes you'll be paying less. We're just about to go into Black Friday, so costs can be through the roof. And then you know something else, something, something will happen. We'll have another pandemic, god forbid and then prices will go through the floor. So you know cost for everything goes up and down, but it's you know. I tend to look more at the kind of the big numbers on either end rather than rather than you know trying to try to get an LTV for individual emails.
Speaker 2:What's the, what's the process like for you guys around? How do you actually convert someone what's on your list into buying from you? Are you doing launches? Are you doing promotions? Is it like evergreen? Have you got stuff that's done manually? What's the? What's kind of structure for you?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's a big fat mix of lots of stuff. So fundamentally, we just take a step back. So my, my way of conceiving the business is is in terms of an ecosystem. So, whereas lots of people have a value ladder we've heard, everyone's heard this term before way the aim is essentially to kind of sell people gradually up from your cheapest thing to your favorite thing.
Speaker 1:Our way of approaching email and and selling is that we say you're learning a language. It's going to take, you're going to be doing this for a number of years. We want to be part of your journey throughout that time. There's no such thing as a secret that we can sell you now. That's going to help you learn in a month. It's going to take you time. So we want to be, we want to be on that journey with you. So in such, the main approach we take is to to offer, make, to make regular offers at different points in time, and so a lot of our LTV comes from people who will buy something on today and then, by the next level, in six months, and then maybe buy a bundle of packages later, later on in the year, and then maybe, of course, is the next year. We we have a big ecosystem of products that we can cross, sell and upsell and so on and so forth. So that is the, that's the kind of ethos, and so from that we then say that, okay, if the aim is to maximize customer value over a longer period of time, then it follows that our principle aim from our marketing is to nurture and grow those relationships.
Speaker 1:So what we try to do is to spend a lot of money on content marketing. So these blogs, this podcast, is YouTube videos, and then we will market that internally, so people on the email list will receive that content. That in turn strengthens the strengthens the relationship. And then we have a general cadence of two offers per month. So we will have a mid month offer and an end of month offer, and those offers will change. Sometimes they're kind of programmed out for a whole year. Sometimes we have new initiatives. More recently we've been sending a lot of high ticket stuff, for example. So we inject new things. Certain products and products get retired, other new ones get brought in. So it's essentially a cadence of two promos a month, buffeted in between large amounts of great content.
Speaker 1:What we like to think of is great content that we send out to people over the course of time, and so, as such, we have people that have been buying from us for six, seven, eight years literally that long and that I think that kind of contributes to that that relatively flat growth curve that I spoke about before, because so much of the you know revenue we might make this year will come from the convenience that we've acquired two, three, four years earlier and who are still still buying from us, you know. So that's conceptually, that's how I think of things. I also have a kind of penchant for stability and slow, long slow, stable growth. That's kind of what how I like to do things. So I very much lean into that. So that's the, that's the.
Speaker 1:That's how we approach it can procedurally, but then on the front end we do have a fairly robust automated sequence as well, because you know marketing principles.
Speaker 1:A large number of people who join your list are interested now, and so you do have to sell them now, because if you don't you'll miss that opportunity. You also want to offer things to people so that they have access to the help if they want it, because if not, they'll just run off to your competitor to buy. So what we do is we have essentially three months of emails, of automated sequences that get sent out, daily emails, with only the occasional couple of days off, maybe after a promotion, and then in those emails, essentially we are doing one of three things. We are either telling stories, we are sending them out to our best content and then we are promoting stuff, and we've structured that in a way that we've kind of figured out what makes sense over time and I'm happy to talk about it if you want to go into more depth. But we have that two, three, probably two and a half three month automated process at the start, which is where a good chunk of that revenue comes from Nice.
Speaker 2:And what's the? You've got this whole new. I don't know, maybe not that new, but like a separate venture going on right when you work with people who don't have courses yet but have got an audience. Can you talk to people about that, like what you've been doing with that Cause? That's been fascinating to watch.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So the business is called Creator Empires and I've run it with you and my business partner, and the reason we got into this was essentially because we had so much experience. I mean, you know what this is like, but you have a certain amount of experience doing something and then you want to start to apply that to something beyond your immediate surroundings, your immediate sphere of influence, and more and more as time went on, we found that we had people come into us at first people from the language space, who already knew about us saying you know well, how do you do this, how do you do that? And so we started to help people.
Speaker 1:Initially we were, we were excited to run events and we did little retreats and things. And eventually we started to have people come into us who would say, like, so someone with a lot a large YouTube channel, for example who couldn't care less about courses, doesn't want to make them. They're not educators, they're not the kind of person who's going to make a course. But they come to us and say you know what? I kind of think it makes sense for my business to have courses. And we'd say, yeah, it would, and you could probably add a fairly easy six, seven figures to your top line with courses, and they'd say, right, well, I'm not going to do it myself, so could you just do it for me.
Speaker 1:And we'd say yes, we can, and so we sort of set about doing that and it's been great because we kind of understand how to do these things in a.
Speaker 1:It doesn't have to be fancy at all, it's often quite simple actually the way to implement this stuff. But relatively simply, we can build programs for people so that they can monetize their existing audience with courses, and so, yeah, that's been growing now in one form or another for about three or four years. And it's most of all, I'd say and you're going to understand this because this is your bread and butter but it's just super fascinating to see the dynamics of other businesses and how they work and to see how different businesses perform, because it's a big world out there and you've got people who you think are going to be absolute knockout superstars but then it completely flops. And then the opposite, people with a very an audience that you think, oh, it's not much to this, who then have, you know, massifying power within that audience. So it's been very interesting to kind of watch and learn about other people's businesses as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a fascinating one because, from the way we get round it, it's, we only work with people who are already selling courses, and they're already selling.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it's so hard to figure it out.
Speaker 2:Well, it's a much smaller audience, though right, and it's in some ways, your model's got way more potential from a business point of view because you could take, like, this whole percentage of the business for a long time. It's a whole new thing, but it's so hard to figure out in advance. You look at an audience. You're like, oh yeah, this is a no brainer. This audience is an audience who buys courses. We've seen other people in this niche sell courses and do great with it. And then you get somebody in that. You know, you get that person who's got that big audience for a million website visitors a month, or a two million person YouTube channel, whatever, and we've worked with people and they've started making these things. And then it's not done great and he like why? And I like I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's mad. I think it all comes down to the audience, that the thing about the world of the kind of creator world is that people are drawn to people, right, and so individual people are going to attract other people of a certain ilk, of a certain kind, right, and that, in one of those characteristics, includes audiences of buyers and audiences of non buyers. There was a there was a very famous case earlier on this year with a company, a big YouTube channel called yes Theory, who are one of the biggest YouTube channels of all, the most I don't know how many tens of millions of subscribers they've got massive, absolutely massive channel. They launched a course on their first course, I believe, on storytelling, and you know, objectively, what a great opportunity to learn from these guys who have built a massive YouTube channel, master storytellers. They launched this course for I don't know how much it was at $300 or something. They faced a massive revolt from their audience. How dare you try and sell us a course? What?
Speaker 2:are you guys are?
Speaker 1:so their audience just burned them alive, and and so you know why is that? Well, if you think about who the audience is, it's people who are watching for entertainment. They're not. They don't have a problem that they're trying to solve, or they do have problems. This channel is not solving those particular problems. They're not. They're not interested.
Speaker 1:We've worked with you know the one particular influencer I can think of, who obviously I won't name, but this influencer had around 5 million YouTube subscribers in a niche that is one of the biggest niches of all, one of the big three, you know health, wealth and relationships. By all accounts, you think this is surely a dead, a dead we couldn't sell, I think, and the reason was because the particular audience that this person had was demographic, graphically, just not an audience that is used to buying things, and I can't really say more than that. But, but, but it was shocking to see. You know, you normally think well, the law of large numbers you get put something in, you get something out right, not always at all. And so, yeah, it's, it's, it's a real, it's a real bag of fun.
Speaker 2:I think so. I think product market fit is fascinating and I think that lots of people who think who we know, who think that they figured a thing out, were lucky. I agree In a large number of ways. Like so somebody starts up a YouTube channel or podcast or whatever and they put all the work in and it's successful and it builds up and then they launch the course and the people buy it and they go that was great and it's like it was and you did lots of hard work and you were. You were dedicated and you persevered and it was emotionally difficult and you pushed through it and you learned lots of new skills and you did all that. But you could have done that and it not works. You would.
Speaker 2:What you did did not guarantee success by any means, and I just definitely applies for me as well. Like there's a bunch of places where I'm just like I just I just keep thinking, oh, I'll figure this thing out in my head and I try it and I figure it out in my head and I'm wrong. And I'm wrong again and again and again, and occasionally I go what is it that when I just look at what happened to work or I copy somebody did something that worked before I go, let me try that. And I do that.
Speaker 1:I'm like, oh well, that doesn't make any sense to me why that works, but it does, I think the reality of regular business is that most of the things you do should be failing and a small number of things you get right, and then you reorientate the business around the things that you get right and that's, I think, most entrepreneurial experience of business. The whole, you know, if you take the broadly the terms creators and courses that creators sell, I think there's a lot other factors as well. Like a lot of people, a lot of people that we know started at a particular moment in time where you could build. It was a lot easier to build large audiences because there was relatively less competition. They also happened to have the right approach of, say, teaching something on YouTube. Personality led, it was before their time slightly, whereas I think what happens now is people get started and there's so much more awareness of what you can do with a YouTube channel, for example, that you there's a lot easier access to advice and to help. And so people I think I know that there's sometimes in more of a rush or they kind of have this next expectation of things to work, and so it may be. If something doesn't work right away, there's more of a temptation to jump to something else that might work a little bit better.
Speaker 1:So I agree that, like you know, luck is a big part of things. But then I guess you could also say that you know it's like in the, which was the book by Malcolm Gladwell where he writes about how Bill Gates the number of the number of the number of fortunate events that had to conspire for Bill Gates to create Microsoft, you know he had. He was at the only university in the country that had a computer department where you could access it as a student and he had the. You know he happened to be going to university in that particular year where, where personal computers were about to take off and his parents had the money to, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean there's, I mean, love accounts for so much, doesn't it? But then? But then I think what's interesting is to is to see how that develops over time, because luck can get you started.
Speaker 1:But to, I think what the you know, the mark of an entrepreneur, I think, is whether you continue to learn and you continue to build and to grow. And you know, from the most kind of humbling aspect of that for me has definitely been paid advertising. Because I see, however, however well you may do on the kind of audience building, creator side, paid advertising will, will, will, will, um, what's the term? It will, uh, it will raise you to the ground pretty, pretty quickly, and it's a real. It's a rude awakening because you're real. You just realize that you know all the stuff that you've built simply doesn't work with anyone who's, who is not, who hasn't already self-selected as a fan of your content. It simply doesn't work. So then you realize, right, okay, well, if I want to grow, if I want to expand to to a paid audience, I have to figure out, um, I have to have. Actually, now my job is to understand the wider marketplace, and serving the wider marketplace is a very different proposition to serving an audience that you've, that you somehow built.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, totally, ollie, this was awesome. I absolutely love your kind of insights and perspective and all this kind of stuff. If people want to get some more of your wisdom, where else can they go? I know you've got like a case study you could share with people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, the place to go will be to ollierichardsco, and that's my newsletter, and every week I send out new letters talking about building education businesses. A lot of the stuff that we've been talking about here is exact kind of thing. I've also written a 117 page case study of my business story learning. It's completely free. You get it free in a Google doc when you when you sign up, and that will show you how my whole business works, how the marketing works, how the structure of the team, how we sell all of this stuff. It's all there and you can download that for free. So, yeah, just head over to ollierichardsco and grab yourself a copy.
Speaker 2:Perfect, and we're going to link your YouTube channel and Twitter in the show notes as well. So if anybody wants to go grab that case study or check out Olly's YouTube or Twitter, then that'll be in the show notes. If you found this interview useful and you want to get future episodes, please subscribe. Wherever you've been listening and thank you, olly, so much for coming on. And thank you guys, course the most for listening and, bearing you know, listening in for the whole whole episode. Really appreciate your time. Thanks, guys.