Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today we talk with Rick Davidson CEO of @Gdevtv
Rick is a seasoned entrepreneur, educator, and coach who has guided millions of budding game developers toward achieving their dreams of creating games. He holds the position of CEO at GameDev.tv, renowned for offering the most popular game development courses globally.
Rick has developed numerous online courses, dedicating thousands of hours to recording and editing. With three decades of experience in leadership and management across diverse sectors such as consumer research, video game development, and online education, he continues to be an avid learner with a deep interest in psychology and personal development.
Check out Rick's website: www.gamedev.tv
Check out Rick's YouTube: / @gdevtv
Check out Rick's Twitter: / gamedevtv
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today we talk with Rick Davidson CEO of @Gdevtv
Rick is a seasoned entrepreneur, educator, and coach who has guided millions of budding game developers toward achieving their dreams of creating games. He holds the position of CEO at GameDev.tv, renowned for offering the most popular game development courses globally.
Rick has developed numerous online courses, dedicating thousands of hours to recording and editing. With three decades of experience in leadership and management across diverse sectors such as consumer research, video game development, and online education, he continues to be an avid learner with a deep interest in psychology and personal development.
Check out Rick's website: www.gamedev.tv
Check out Rick's YouTube: / @gdevtv
Check out Rick's Twitter: / gamedevtv
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
So selling a variety of things on Teachable becomes very difficult. We've got around about 60 or 70 courses in our portfolio, so we've gone for a volume strategy low cost, high volume.
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 is Jon Ainsworth and today's guest is Rick Davidson. Rick's been making video games for a living for more than 13 years, as a designer, producer, creative director and executive producer. He's created games for console, mobile, pc and Facebook. He founded an indie game studio, inspirado Games, which has been acquired back in 2012 by Electronic Arts. So today we're going to be talking about GameDevtv, where Rick is now selling courses. We're going to be talking about how he set it up, how he built an audience, the funnels they use and their current challenges.
Speaker 2:Now, before we dig into today's interview, I want to remind you of how much your support means to us. We're here to make your podcast experience even better, and you can help us with just a quick favour. So by taking a moment to rate and review our podcast, you're going to give us priceless feedback that helps shape future episodes. Has this show helped you make money? Has it helped you grow your business? Has it helped you improve your courses? If it has, please share it in the reviews. Go to ratethispodcastcom. Slash onlinecourses. Nothing can make me happier today than to hear how this show has helped you. We've done over 100 episodes of the show today and I'm dying to know which one was your favourite, which guest you enjoyed the most. Who would you love to hear from as the next guest on the show? Make my day and let me know in a review. Go to ratethispodcastcom. Slash onlinecourses and let me know what you think, and let's make this podcast the best that it can be. Rick, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:John, thank you.
Speaker 2:So talk us through who do you help with your courses and what kind of problem are you solving for them?
Speaker 1:We help people get good at game development. There's a lot of people out there who, as hobbyists, have a passion for games. They like playing games, they like talking about games and they're really interested in making games. And it's never been easier to jump into a game engine and make a game, but it's still super complicated. So we take people through that process of here's where to start. We focus on beginners to intermediates, mostly people who are interested in just I've always wanted to make a game, I want to make a game, how do I go about doing it? So that's the primary need we're meeting.
Speaker 2:Okay, cool. So how many courses are you guys selling at the moment?
Speaker 1:We've got around about 60 or 70 courses in our portfolio.
Speaker 2:That's a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let me see. Yeah, it is a lot. So let me start straight away by showing our business model. Talking about our business model, so GameDevTV started its existence making courses for Udemy and, as we know, Udemy discounts courses down to pretty low, so $10, $15, $20. So we've gone for a volume strategy Low cost, high volume and I'm excited by that. I mean, I like that model because we help a lot of people and so to do that, we continue to make a lot of courses. We partner up with instructors. The instructors we work with are usually on a royalty deal and we just try to make a course a month that's going to add value to our community.
Speaker 2:Wow, got it Okay cool. So I saw you selling courses on your site. Do you still sell them on Udemy as well?
Speaker 1:We do. Yeah, we do both. So it's a really interesting. I don't know if any of your audiences created courses for Udemy or any other marketplace, but it's often that dance between how do we satisfy the needs of the marketplace but also grow our own presence, our own brand, our own relationship with the customer. So we've got a fantastic relationship with Udemy. They've really springboarded our brand and our company over the years, so we try to make sure that we're always fitting within what works for them, but at the same time we don't want to be beholden to the marketplace because Udemy changes their policies all the time they use the percentage revenue shared to their partners all
Speaker 2:the time Not in the positive direction. Funny how that goes, isn't it? We've decided to give you more money.
Speaker 1:It is. It is yeah, oh thanks, yeah, but it's so. For us, building our own website where we sell our courses has been an ongoing journey, and we've been doing that for three or four years now and it allows us to own the conversation and we have been spending the last I'd say 12 to 18 months building our own bespoke platform from scratch Up until now, we've been using Teachable as our platform for hosting our own courses, but there's limitations on that and we've got to the size of the business now where we need to get more sophisticated with our analytics and with our sales funnel and just the levers that we can pull. So we've gone through that. I'm not going to call it fun, but it's been a process of building our own.
Speaker 1:We're probably about a month away from launching.
Speaker 2:Okay, nice. Now I've got my own personal opinions about the limitations of Teachable from the point of view of funnels. What's some of the stuff that you found as limitations? What's been holding you back there?
Speaker 1:Yeah, the biggest limitation I'd say is Teachable is fantastic. If you've got a couple of courses, you land on your site you know mysiteteachable or if you've got your own domain for that, then you land there. Here's a couple of courses, check them out. It's great For an organization like ours. We have 60 or 70 courses and probably over the years, 10, 20, 50, 100 different bundles where we'll say let's take those three courses, bundle them together, those five courses, bundle them together.
Speaker 1:And we've started selling asset packs, which is basically 3D art that you put into your game world that game developers can purchase. So if you're making a game, you've got the coding aspect of it, you've also got the assets that go into the game. We teach people how to make those assets, but a lot of people don't want to make the assets themselves. They just want to purchase them and put them in the game. So selling a variety of things on Teachable becomes very difficult. There's not really a marketplace that we can set up ourselves. So that's been the biggest limitation.
Speaker 1:Second big limitation would be just the sales pages. It's difficult to get a custom landing page for a, I'd say, a bespoke campaign. If we want to run a workshop, for example. Then we're constrained by the sales page structure that we would need to use to sell our courses, so we're going to have to jam everything, the square pegs, into the round hole of how do we sell courses if we want to sell other things in there as well. And then the analytics when you work with an organization, they own your data. They can share certain things with you. We have a lot of information, obviously, on our sales and our number of students and lecture completions, etc. But the the nuances of shopping cart abandonment, for example, we can't get to just because of the limitations teachable.
Speaker 2:The things that piss me off with teachable are the sales page is bad, like it's really bad, but you can build the sales page somewhere else. You can say right, I'm going to set up the sales page in wordpress, click funnels, whatever, and just have a checkout in teachable.
Speaker 2:That's doable. It is doable to do the sales page and checkout separately and then link it with teachable for the actual delivery of the course. That is possible. But it becomes a bit of a pain in the butt if you stick with teachable for the checkout pages. Their checkout pages suck like from a conversion point of view, they're just rubbish.
Speaker 2:There's like really there's like six crucial elements to have on a checkout page and you can have like four of them on on teachable but you can't have them in the structure in the order that you want. So, for example, you want to have really good testimonials on the checkout page to remind people when they're right at that point of deciding whether to buy. You want to have testimonials to make people feel really comfortable and like yes, I'm making the right decision here. And they're like way down the page, they're off the page. So if you're on, even if you're on desktop, you're still probably not going to be able to see those testimonials unless you scroll down, which is ridiculous from a conversion point of view and I don't know why they do that, because they would make way more money if they had better performing checkout pages.
Speaker 2:Like as a company, they would make way more money if their checkout pages were better. Their order bumps are okay. Their upsells are terrible. Like, the process of being able to actually make the upsell is just really bad in there. Uh, you can't add in a second order bump, you can't add in a second upsell, you can't add in the downsell. It's like from a funnel point of view I'm just like, oh my god yeah, it's.
Speaker 1:It's fairly constrained. It's like what if someone already owns the thing we're trying to order, bump them to well, I don't know, they could see it again, uh, but it's if anyone's starting out, I think Teachable is fantastic, so simple.
Speaker 2:I would 100% recommend it.
Speaker 1:I would 100% recommend it as a starting thing and building your own platform. That's no fun. As we're going through that process. We probably generate about 10% of our revenue from order bumps on Teachable, so they didn't have them for a long time and then they did have them and we started playing around with them and order bumps. At least it's better than nothing the way that they've implemented it, but yeah.
Speaker 2:So the average that we're seeing across our clients is about 19% for order bumps. So I would say there's probably potential for that number even to go up higher. For you guys, Do you know what kind of conversion rate you're getting in terms of the percentage of people who buy them from any of those? You know not just the revenue, but the percentage you're actually making the sale?
Speaker 1:No, no, I don't. Well, I mean, yeah, 10% of our sales. I think it's 10% of our sales. I'm just, I'm ballparking it I haven't looked at these numbers recently, apologies, but yeah, I don't. Yeah, and this is one of those things that Teachable doesn't make it super easy for me to just go click, click and find that percentage of the number of people who are. Maybe they do, and I haven't looked at it recently. I'm looking at it right now to see if I can find some more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd be surprised. I don't think so. I don't think many platforms would do that. We do a lot of stuff like that in spreadsheets to like do all of the analysis and go okay, right, where's the, where's the sales coming in from? What's below benchmark? What could be improved? Because a lot of systems, it's like, even even if you take some complex analytic system, that's very tricky to get exactly the bit that you're after, whereas if you put it in a spreadsheet you can just do it however you want.
Speaker 1:Question for you have you, have you or any of the people you've worked with, used PostHog for analytics?
Speaker 2:No, I never heard of it. What is it?
Speaker 1:Okay, it's something that we started we looked at for our A-B testing for our new platform. You know this is all big stuff and plugging it together and they've got a fairly decent looking analytics platform as well and priced in a more reasonable way than some of the other analytics platforms we're looking at. So just curious to see if you've heard about it. But go to go to posthogcom. I'm not affiliated with them, but we're hoping to to use them and integrate them into our system. It looks really looks really good, looks for. I'm excited, john, I can't tell you how much I'm excited. You asked him about limitations of Teachable for us to get there and say what about this course image versus that course image?
Speaker 1:What about this copy versus that copy, what about this price versus that price? And to do some actual proper AB testing on our funnel. That is going to be.
Speaker 2:We're just going to be bouncing around giddy with joy AB testing, things that didn't need AB testing. Because you can, it's so exciting.
Speaker 1:Should we write the word and or should we use the? Ampersand symbol let's do two weeks of ab testing on that.
Speaker 2:It's very important so take me back with this whole thing, right. So you start. Did you start with udemy in order to start making core sales or did you have? Did you build up your own audience, um, separately to that, like, were you doing seo and where's? Where is the bulk of your audience? By the the way, is it SEO YouTube? How are you getting people in?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll tell you two paths very quickly. I won't go into the long history but for me personally, I was doing more of a YouTube to a high price point slash, consulting and coaching funnel. I was doing that for a number of years and I was helping indie game developers to to start their studios or to grow their studios and it was a high price point philosophy and I was getting a little bit fatigued with coaching.
Speaker 2:For anyone who's done coaching, there's a lot of did you do your homework.
Speaker 1:No, I didn't want to talk about it, why not? Well, all right. Well, that's why you're not doing well then. So there was a lot of that that I found frustrating and I felt like I was only helping a handful of people. So I came across my now business partner, ben Tristam. He was the original founder of GameDevTV and I came along after he'd already had some success with a couple of courses and he had a very Udemy-centric philosophy. So he got on Udemy, created a course it bombed miserably. Created another course it bombed miserably. And then, through various circumstances in his own journey, he came across a need for teaching Unity, the game engine. So he created a course on that. But he started it with Kickstarter. So he went out I'm doing a Kickstarter to do the best Unity course possible got some good attention and then created the course on Udemy and because it converted well and he's a charming fellow Udemy saw some good numbers there, so they put a lot of marketing traffic towards that specific course and so that bootstrapped and that got the whole brand going.
Speaker 1:And then I came along shortly after that and said, hey, well, you know, let's team up on a couple of things together. And then after a short amount of time I saw that the opportunity to make high volume, low cost was a lot more attractive to me. Ben already had a foothold. His brand was already, you know, already known. So I sort of threw away my personal brand and wrapped myself up in the Game Dev TV brand and from that point on it was a few years of just very Udemy-centric.
Speaker 1:And in the early days of Udemy if you had, for example, I don't know, 100,000 students that you'd taught from your courses on Udemy and you sent out a message saying we've got a new course, a good portion of that 100,000 students saw that piece of communication. So launches were very buoyant way back in the early days of Udemy. And then over time, I think, a combination of there were too many instructors spamming, so the student themselves would say I don't want to see anything else from Udemy, like too many messages, because I've bought five courses from five instructors and they're all messaging me so often, telling me stuff. That was one and I think I don't have any confirmation on this. But I would be massively surprised if Udemy didn't get there and say why are we delivering these messages to all of that person's target audience? That's super, super valuable.
Speaker 1:And when the instructor promotes their next thing to their current students, the instructor gets the lion's share of the sale. They get most of the 97% and Udemy business point of view that doesn't make sense. They want to give that new course enough chance to survive and they want to give that instructor enough, I guess, oxygen to breathe, but they're not going to deliver it to I don't know the number. Now I think we've got something like 2 million students that we've had on Udemy. There's zero chance that Udemy is delivering our messages to 2 million students. It's like that's valuable. So that's a limitation of working with Udemy, I think.
Speaker 2:And then do you do anything to get the contact details of those Udemy students into your game dev TV? John, don't get me canceled. Don't shoot, no, don't Okay.
Speaker 1:So this is if anyone from Udemy is listening. No, we would never, ever do that. How dare you suggest such a thing? But if I was to start from scratch, then I would absolutely work within the rules to do everything I could to get people from Udemy to my own site. Yep, so, yeah, anyway, work within the rules to do everything I could to get people from Udemy to my own site.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, yeah, anyway, joking aside that's part of the dance where you know if you're serious about a Udemy partnership, you need to treat it seriously and respect the fact that they've gone and found the traffic for you. You're putting something on their marketplace and if your strategy is just solely, I'll do something really quick and crap on Udemy so that I can get people over to my more important thing over here, then I think everyone smells it and sees it and it doesn't work so well. So we try to have a little bit more of a. If you purchase a course on Udemy, you can come to our site and get that same course for free. We'll just we'll copy it over so you can consume it in whichever place you want to. And we do a couple of other soft sells as well.
Speaker 1:Just generally having your brand name be your website, I think, is a smart way to say you know, this course from gamedevtv is interesting. Huh, I might just go type in gamedevtv and see what I come up with and I think that's Udemy's fine with all that. They're not trying to completely clamp down on. You know how dare you do any of that stuff, but it's and sort of it needs to be a good partnership, yeah that makes sense.
Speaker 2:So talk to me then about how you guys have built up an audience separate to Udemy. So you do, you got a YouTube channel, or how do you guys? Yeah?
Speaker 1:You know what? We? We neglected our YouTube channel for a long time. If you, if you were to go to the game dev TV YouTube channel, you'll see just trash for years and years and years. And when I say that it's um, okay, we recorded something for a course, let's just throw it on our YouTube channel. Uh, we've got an announcement to make, let's just throw it on our YouTube channel. We may as well. We've got the content there already.
Speaker 1:And then we entered the next phase where we said let's do regular podcasts or live casts, so with our audience. We're chatting with them. It's not quite streaming, but we record it and then chuck it on YouTube as well. And we'll do that more as a engagement mechanism. Keep our existing community engaged and excited. They can ask us whatever they want. They're happy that they joined us and there's a little bit of that repeat purchase philosophy wrapped up inside that. And at the same time, we may as well pop it on YouTube because we might get some acquisition out of that.
Speaker 1:Some people might see it who don't know about us.
Speaker 1:But when you've got a one hour as you know, we're doing right now a podcast, a longer form one hour chat that doesn't necessarily hit the viral markers on YouTube.
Speaker 1:So our longer chat podcast type strategy didn't really bring a lot of traffic on YouTube, and it's been more recently, I'd say in the past 12 months, where we properly sat down seriously and said what would our community like to see and what folks who don't know about us like to see? And we've created a whole new type of video, which we call the battle video, where we get three or four of our instructors to create something in one hour and we make it exciting and there's a little bit of banter going on and a little bit of, you know, polite, friendly. Well, polite maybe not the right word, but you know we make fun of each other and it's exciting. Who can game, and we have one game engine versus another game engine versus another game engine. So if anyone's sitting there saying, oh, which game engine should I learn, they get to see a little bit of the insight of that. And so the for our youtube channel at the time was, I think, about 30 000 subscribers and the first battle video got up to about 300 000 views.
Speaker 1:So that confirmed oh, this is a good format. It also confirms that you don't need to have a big following on any of the social media platforms to get a successful piece of content, which I don't think was the case a few years ago. You kind of had to build your momentum up, but nowadays you can do something spectacular and if you've got two subs and you do a really great video, you can have a million view video just because the video is spectacular, I believe. So that's sort of our YouTube evolution and we're taking it more seriously now. But it's the age-old question of should we make more content, more courses, or should we make free YouTube videos?
Speaker 1:And so I'd say, john, the strategy we've had for years and years and years has just been let's treat our current customers and community really, really well and so that they hang around and stay and talk to other people word of mouth etc about who we are and what we're up to. So we've had a good forum that we've moderated. We have a very strong q, a strategy. We have teaching assistance for every course, like an actual, real person who answers questions, make sure people don't get stuck, and then we our our forum and then Discord. So our community was just we want Discord. So okay, here we go. I think we've got up to 90,000 folks in our Discord server now, but not at any one point in time. It's you know, it's in the single digit thousands per week. But people who are members of the Discord server, um server, are up to I'd look just before 90 000 or so nice that's really strong.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I found that the thing that you're talking about with the videos, in terms of one video from someone who's got low subscribers, can just go completely crazy.
Speaker 2:I I find that fascinating and one of the things that we started working on our own youtube game recently, and one of the things we're always doing is looking and trying to find what are those videos anybody else has made. Can we make something kind of like that and find something that our audience wants or that goes viral for us? And I find it fascinating. I found this one meditation. It was a specific kind of meditation. I forget what the name of it was, but this woman had five videos. She was a yoga teacher. She lived in, like, uh, the midlands in in the uk and she had, let's say, you know, 50 subscribers, something like that, right, and most of her videos had 17 views or 123 views or whatever.
Speaker 2:And then this one had 8.6 million it was just like somehow this had just hit and I was like I don't think she knows what to do with that right because she could, potentially, off the back of that, we go, all right, cool, I'm gonna make more videos like that.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna double down on that thing. I'm gonna become an online influencer around this. I'm gonna make courses around this and make tons of money. But I suspect, from what I was seeing the fact there was nothing else on there on her channel that she was just like I guess I'll carry on being a yoga teacher and I've got a video with millions of views.
Speaker 1:You know it's so. It's also so tough. You catch lightning in a bottle and then you say, great, we'll do the same thing and the next time around it doesn't, doesn't work anywhere near as well you're like what was the magic in the first one? Oh, I've got it. I think you can drive yourself a little bit crazy trying to chase the magic.
Speaker 1:We'll do a video that, like I was saying before, gets 300,000 views, and then we'll do another one that I think is even better, that gets 10,000 views. Like, what Was it the thumbnail? Was it the title? Was it the hook? Was it the who? You know, who knows? So, yeah, I find YouTube fascinating and frustrating and I think for anyone with a YouTube-centric strategy, you fascinating and frustrating, and I think anyone with a YouTube centric strategy you just need.
Speaker 1:I think you have to be true to yourself in terms of if I think I'm adding value, whether that's education, whether it's entertainment, whether it's solving people's problems if you're adding value, you just keep doing it and keep doing it and not stress too much about what's the best way to perfect thumbnails today, because I think you can fall into the trap of okay, everyone's doing thumbnails this way, so I'll do thumbnails that way as well. Everyone's doing their titles this way, I'll do titles that way as well, and then you're just catching up to what everyone's doing. But the market is kind of over that, that's satiated with that particular strategy. So the thought leaders are now doing a different thing. So a month or two later, you realize what the thought leader is doing and you try to catch up to that as well. So I think if you have a philosophy where you just say what do I like, what do I think looks good, what's clear and what's interesting, and I'll jump in and do that, so yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2:And then, what's your model in terms of getting people? Oh, sorry, I forgot to finish up on that one. What size is your YouTube channel up to now?
Speaker 1:Oh, it's about 38,000, 40,000-ish Subscribers, yeah, subscribers, yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, cool.
Speaker 1:And our strategy is let's produce less good things as opposed to more frequent things. We've also spent a lot of. However, contrary to that point, we've also spent a lot of time playing around with short form videos and what works, and for the past I'd say three to six months we've spent way more time and effort on short form, which I don't think is a great way to build subscribers. And, to be honest, everyone talks about short form. It's so critical, it's so important, it builds your business. I'm yet to see exactly the payoff for it because my gut feeling is maybe you can. You've got some thoughts on this as well, john.
Speaker 1:My feeling is, for us anyway, long form has people, get a relationship with us. They might become a subscriber, they might check out our website and check out our courses and products because we've given them enough value. Short form is really good once you've already got a fair amount of traction. As a reminder, it's like oh hey, that's John, I recognize him, I remember him, I saw him, I watched one of his videos six months ago. But I think using short form as a brand awareness tool I'm not sure about, unless you've got a very distinct personality and face and it's one person. I think it's trickier to get people to remember you and get a relationship with them from short form.
Speaker 2:The thing that seems to be and I'm by no means a YouTube expert the thing that seems to be from what we've experimented with so far is that the short form then increases engagement with the long form and the the short form then increases engagement with the long form, and then the long form is what then leads to subscribers or people signing up to the email list. So it's like going another level higher in the funnel. So you've already got long form content you're putting out there in order to get people onto the email list, in order to get people to buy the courses, and then, above that, the short form then seems to increase engagement with the long form. But but I don't have nearly enough data to say that I'm right on that like how much it makes a difference with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I understand I think a lot of short form is well, I've got the long form there. I may as well chop it up and make some shorts out of it, because it's quick and easy.
Speaker 1:I often wonder are you better off just making another long form video instead of chopping things up? But for us, we've got a decent team size. We've got folks on the team who can chip away at these things and experiment with it, and we do have the luxury of playing around with it. But if someone's more of a solo creator, then I think picking one or two things that you really master and really put your time and effort and love into is a way better strategy than trying to shotgun across Instagram and TikTok and YouTube Shorts and LinkedIn and so on. Just make good quality long form videos and then have that be the key part of your funnel.
Speaker 2:So what is the next stage for you guys? Do you do a lot of work to try and get people from that long-form content onto your email list, like how do you connect that with actually making sales?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've been putting a lot of love into our email list for about three years now. I forget off the top of my head a couple of hundred thousand folks on our email list. So there's definitely room for us to expand and do better with our email list. Room for us to expand and do better with our email list. Let's see so without giving you 18 things at once. If you look at our funnel, our funnel has done really really well with what I call price point one. So if we've got zero to 10, zero is free and 10 is your many thousands of dollars live event or super consulting and our whole business has been based upon price point one. So our courses that are listed at $200, but because they're on Udemy and because we're a Udemy partner, udemy is like well, we'll sell them for 10 one day and 15 another day and 20 another day, so they all get pushed down to that price point one. And that's what our processes and our machine does really really well creating those courses. They're eight to 10 hours on average. They're compelling and interesting. We ask our community what do you want us to teach next? And they tell us. And so we do that.
Speaker 1:What we've not done historically is price point zero very well. Youtube videos I was saying before that our YouTube channel has been pretty neglected. So long form, short form, all sorts of getting out there and giving people free content. We've done some lead magnet type stuff to get people into email this, but we don't spend anywhere as much time on it as we could or should.
Speaker 1:So our strategy at the moment is putting more time into the zero price point and then more time into the three to five price point, so actively creating products that are different enough to a course that we can say we've got value in here. That's a two or $300 value and people aren't sitting saying, well, in a few weeks time it'll get discounted down to $10. So I'll wait for that. They can see that it's a program, it's a multi-week program, there's maybe live components to it and so on. So we're in the process of developing those. We haven't deployed those products just yet. We do have once a year we do our lifetime member sale where we sell all of our courses and all of our future courses and we sell that at around about that three to five price points. So $400, $500, which is a pretty good deal. I think we try to still keep it quite reasonable.
Speaker 1:If someone wants all of our stuff and all of our future stuff, and so for our business to grow, it's more people at the front of the funnel and then more higher price point, high value things that people look at and say, dang, I really need that and I'm more than happy to spend $300 for it, and I don't think in our near future we'll go down the path of $1,000 or more.
Speaker 1:I spend a lot of time in that I was mentioning before in my previous focus in this industry and the proposition for me of pay me $2,000 and I guarantee you you'll get $2,000 worth of value. I think to be an integrity. You have to really give someone $2,000 of value. So if you're doing something where you say I will teach you stock market trading, I will teach you how to optimize your funnel so you 2X your business, I think you can confidently say pay me $2,000, $3,000, whatever the price might be, and you'll get that money back. But we teach predominantly a hobby-based area, so people learning game development to promise them we'll teach you how to make money from making games.
Speaker 1:I think it's a more tricky conversation because it's difficult is a very. It's a more tricky conversation because it's difficult. It's a very difficult industry to be financially buoyant by making games. It requires a lot of time, a lot of effort and a whole bunch of luck. So I like sticking more in that under 1000 price point because then we can say you'll get value out of this. Even if it won't have a financial return for you, it'll give you lots of personal value or lots of skill value.
Speaker 2:You can sell more expensive stuff in the hobby space without promising somebody will make money, like I've got a friend who runs a course business around musicality, how to be more musical, and most of his courses are like $100, $200, this kind of thing you know, like learn to sing better, learn to be able to play by ear, this kind of thing. And then he's got a $10,000 program for people who want the one-on-one coaching that goes with it and I'm pretty sure he's not teaching them how to make money from it, you know.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a really good distinction that you've clarified there. A one-on-one program or a, you get access to me, the expert program. So in an organization our size we're looking at scale. So if I create any program that requires one particular individual to be present for it, then it has a cap on the scale.
Speaker 1:Unless we do group coaching or workshops et cetera. But then it's very personality-based. It's here's the expert People. Then it's very personality based. It's here's the expert People are in love with this expert. They're the greatest person I'll spend any money to. An hour with John. Oh, dream come true. Here's $10,000. That sounded dirty. It didn't mean to be, but maybe that's the musicality your friend does.
Speaker 2:Let's make some music, if you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:So I think when you, when you offer access to the expert, you can charge a lot more. I absolutely agree with that, but that's something that, uh, then we the the conversation of scale, I think, becomes more tricky. You get a little bit of in the the time for money conversation and our business is built upon the um you know, scalability of digital products where, um you, where it can scale very easily.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think that's the reason not to do so. There's a couple of reasons, I think, not to sell high-ticket things and from what I see with most of our audience in terms of what they actually want in their life, one is the scalability. Another one is they really don't want to do it. Another one is doing sales to manage that. If you're selling something that's more expensive, if you can sell it through a webinar, if it's like thousand fifteen hundred dollars and you can sell it through a webinar, that's one thing. If you need to have sales calls and now you need to have a sale, you either do it yourself or you have a sales team. It's just like oh yeah, who wants that? Who wants that in their life, you know? So that becomes a um, a detractor from the actual kind of lifestyle that we're trying to build when they start the business in the first place. So why would you? Why?
Speaker 1:would you?
Speaker 2:even go there. So that part I totally understand. We do help some of our clients to sell group coaching programs because the amount of money that you can make is so much higher with those like it's almost like however much you're making with your main course business, you can make as much again by doing a group coaching program on top. So if that matters, then that really helps.
Speaker 1:How do you handle time zone disparity? Or do you just focus on if it's live group coaching? How do you handle the fact that there's people scattered all around the world and trying to find the optimal time for them to all meet means that a lot of it's going to end up asynchronous. You know, watch the recording afterwards and that detracts from the value of it. Is there a strategy that you found there to make that appealing? Or you just say it's going to be, it's on this weekend, and if you can't make the time because you're in the wrong time zone, you know, sorry about that, maybe next time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so for us we used to run a group coaching program and what we did is we had two calls, one that was very early in the day for us and one that was very late in the day for us, and that meant that the late in the day one covered America and the early in the day one covered UK and Europe and Asia and if you're in australia, it was probably not a great time exactly, and we just like, okay, well, you can't cover everybody, right, and that allowed us to cover most of the most of the world and people kind of just fitted in around that.
Speaker 2:Um, that's cool. We didn't have anybody, I don't think, who didn't sign up because the time zone didn't work. They figured, okay, right, I like this program, I'm gonna move other stuff to kind of fit around that and some people who are in Europe would come on.
Speaker 1:Both they were like okay, cool great, and it's like all right if you want to go for it, yeah.
Speaker 2:And what was the? Cadence that you would do group coaching Weekly bi-weekly we did call every week, or two calls per week.
Speaker 1:yeah, okay, bi-weekly we did a call every every week, or two calls, two calls per week? Yeah, okay, yep, for how long? How long was this just an ongoing? You know, stick around, you pay us, pay us per month and then stick around as long as you want until you've got your value, or did you? Yeah did you have a program with an intake where you said for you know, for three months we'll really hammer this and then we'll refresh and get a new batch of people in?
Speaker 2:so we tested both ways. We did a group coaching cohort to start with, where everybody came in at the same time. We found that a lot of people they were ready when they were ready and that didn't quite fit with them and I think our audience wasn't big enough for us to be able to say, right, we're going to fill this cohort and then if people can't manage until the next one, that won't work. So then we switched to evergreen. Once we'd gone through the cohort we got people results. We're like, okay, let's switch to evergreen and start doing that. And then we originally were selling it as it's three months to get x amount in place. And then we realized for our model, what we're doing is we're helping people mostly to run an email promotion every single month, and so that means write the emails, update the sales page, make sure the checkout page is good, create the order, bump the upsell or implement them if you've got them already, and then the next month do it again. And so there was no real end point. It was like, just keep doing that again and again and again until rich. And so it just made sense for people to keep going through the whole program.
Speaker 2:We stopped the program because we felt it needed completely revamping and we didn't have the capacity at that time to redo it. So and we were focusing more on um done for you clients. So we're now completely booked up with done for you clients. We're booked up with consultancy clients. So we're like, okay, we're probably going to do it again, but we're going to like, we just raise it to the ground, redo it, take everything we've learned and rebuild it. And so we'll do one around black friday, which will be probably an eight week program, getting people ready to make a lot of money in in black friday.
Speaker 2:So we'll do that as a cohort and see how that goes and then decide again from there. So still still playing with it. Rick, still haven't got the uh, the perfect answer on this one.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, gotcha, gotcha, black friday. November is our biggest month as well. We find that that's when people are ready to to invest in online education yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's biggest month for pretty much everybody and most people do a terrible job with their black friday promotion and they still do well out of it. It's like, oh, you could have made twice as much easily, you know so yeah, do you say it like that.
Speaker 1:Oh you, idiot, you could have made twice as much. What are you doing? Yeah, I was just thinking you're following around people saying, oh, you could have made more, and they're like get away from me, like stop saying that depends.
Speaker 2:If I say it after they've just failed, just done it, that's no good. If I say it in advance and say you can make tries as much, then it can be helpful, you know. Yeah, exactly. I don't go around just pissing people off. Oh, you fucked that up, didn't you? Oh dear.
Speaker 1:You shouldn't have done it like that. How many emails did you send? Wouldn't have done it that way.
Speaker 2:So give people some kind of an idea of so we've talked about like the size of your email list and the size of your discord and what have you youtube. Can you give people some kind of idea of the size of your business? I don't know if in terms of revenue or number of students or anything like that yeah, we.
Speaker 1:It's really interesting a little formula for anyone. If, if you go to a Udemy course and look at the number of students and multiply that by four maybe 4.2 or 4.3, that's how much revenue that course has generated over its lifetime. Now there's some exceptions If someone has generated a whole bunch of traffic, had put it at free for a while and then changed the price point. But if you go and look at a Udemy course that has 10,000 students, that course has probably made about $40,000 over its lifetime. So that's just yeah, because on average we get about $4 from the sale. So that didn't answer your question at all. I just thought I'd give that as a little tidbit if anyone wants to look at Udemy. So our revenue nowadays is probably half Udemy, half our own website Between that split. And then we also have some other partnerships. So Humble Bundle is a very popular, well-known bundling site within the game space. They sell games and courses etc, and so we have a great partnership with them and that's a big chunk of our revenue as well.
Speaker 1:So we're still in the three to five million range in terms of where our business is at, and the next leap for us is to change up our philosophy, processes, approach to doing things, so that we start attacking that 10 to 20 range. And so, as you know, there's these bumps along the road. The zero to one, I think, is the hardest bit. But then there's also the you find your natural resting point where, if you're one person or two people or a team of five, then you get to the point where you can do a certain amount of promotions, a certain amount of product development, and I think people settle around a certain point. So for our business, we found that natural harmony point where you know we've got a pretty good formula or a pretty good recipe and for us to burst into that, you know, let's become a household name, so to speak. Then it's going to require a slight change to our model and to our products and to our strategy. Got it Cool?
Speaker 2:If someone has heard this and they want to check out more about you guys, where should they go? Gamedevtv for the courses, right, yep? What's the youtube channel? Is it the same?
Speaker 1:yeah, just youtube. I think it's forward slash gamedev tv. I think if you search for gamedev tv in in twitter and youtube and many and discord, anyway you'll find us GameDevTV.
Speaker 2:Wicked Yep Cool Anywhere else that you want to point people to, anywhere else people should check out.
Speaker 1:No, that's it.
Speaker 2:Sweet, amazing Yep. Well, thanks so much for coming on today, rick. I really appreciate it and our audience really appreciates hearing your journey. It's quite inspirational. There's a lot of really interesting things you've done in there. I think a lot of them are not using Udemy at all, and so that might make people think a little bit about could that fit?
Speaker 1:into my overall model. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Oh yeah, I know you're concluding the conversation, but we were lucky. We got into a marketplace and established ourselves. So one thing I didn't mention is that we have four or five courses out of our 50 or 60 that are on Udemy. That produce probably 70% of our revenue, and they're our big beginner courses and we redo them every couple of years and so one of our courses, I think, has 300,000 five-star reviews on it and when someone comes along and says, oh, I might learn this, and they see this big, massive course that has so much social proof, then they purchase that first.
Speaker 1:So popularity breeds popularity on Udemy. It's not a good sign for someone who's trying to break onto Udemy, into that marketplace unless you've already got existing traffic to push towards it. You've already got a YouTube channel, then Udemy could be great from that point of view, but um, it's. You really need to get in and study how to succeed on Udemy. Uh, particularly if you don't have traffic or you don't have a presence on there already, it's it's harder to break in than in a lot of places.
Speaker 2:Gotcha. That makes sense, cool. Well, if you found the interview useful and you want to get future episodes, subscribe wherever you listened. And thanks, as always, for listening in. And Rick thanks again for coming on, my pleasure.