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The Art of Selling Online Courses
The Art of Selling Online Courses is all about online courses.
The goal of this podcast is to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. We are interviewing successful business owners, asking them questions on how they got to the point where they are right now, and checking how their ideas can help you improve your online course!
The Art of Selling Online Courses
$500,000+ Revenue By Giving Away A Free Course - with Julio Tarraf & Bruno Nogueira
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today's guests are Julio Tarraf & Bruno Nogueira founders of Crafting Cases. Former consultants from the prestigious firms of McKinsey and Bain, they have dedicated themselves to mentoring candidates on acing their case interviews.
Bruno and Julio have encountered a wide range of queries and concerns from candidates, from the complexities of structuring cases to the nuances of developing a keen business sense. They've felt the frustrations and challenges first hand, having navigated their own journeys into management consulting, with Bruno securing offers from both Bain and McKinsey on his second attempt, after initial rejections.
What sets them apart is their approach to coaching, focusing on teaching candidates to think, communicate, and solve problems just like a real consultant. With a track record of helping their clients achieve a higher than 50% offer rate, Bruno and Julio have refined their methods and techniques to not only prepare candidates for the interviews but to ensure they stand out.
Julio & Bruno's Website: https://www.groundcontrol.film/
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
We decided that we wanted to start a business together At the end of this free course. You kind of know what you're good at and what you're not that good at.
Speaker 2:That's definitely the most debatable decision that we made.
Speaker 3:Hello and welcome to the Art of Selling Online Courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from online course creators. My name is Jon Ainsworth and today's guests are Giulio and Bruno. Now, these guys were the co-founders of Crafting Cases. They started off as case interview coaches, so they're helping people get jobs in consulting firms. Then they started making courses and they grew Crafting Cases to more than a 50,000 email list and mid six figures in revenue. They did all of that with organic traffic and no team. Today we're going to be talking about their course business, how they started it and how they grew it to mid six figures.
Speaker 3:Now, before we dive into our interview today with today's guests, I want to tell you about Yosip AI. Now, Yosip is our funnel strategy lead. He's worked with dozens of funnel building and optimization projects. He's developed and tested most of the systems that we're using here at Data Driven Marketing to make our clients millions of dollars. And what we did is we took all of Yosip's training for our clients, all of his coaching calls, and we used it to train an AI version of Yosip called Yosip AI and made it available to you for free. You can ask any questions you want about your course or your membership business and get us help with writing copy for your emails as well. Go to datadrivenmarketingai and you can access it for free. Now back to the show. Giulio Bruno, thanks so much for coming on today, guys.
Speaker 2:Thank you for inviting us over, John. Yeah, thank you for having us.
Speaker 1:Nice, it's our pleasure.
Speaker 3:So talk us through. Who do you help with your courses and what kind of problem are you solving for them?
Speaker 2:So usually people will join MBAs. Some people will join MBAs just to get jobs in consulting firms and many people just get out of college as business majors or engineering majors and they want to get jobs in McKinsey, bain, bcg and the job market to get a job in those firms is very competitive and the job market to get a job in those firms is very competitive, and the way that they select those people, after reviewing their CVs and stuff, is through a case study interview. What that means is they'll give the consultant a business problem or the candidate a business problem and ask them to solve the business problem in front of them and they will see how they think and see if that way of thinking matches the way a consultant thinks, and then they hire those people. But since the market is so competitive, people end up preparing and practicing a lot to learn that way of thinking beforehand, so that they can make sure that they get the job. And so those are the people that come to us, especially those who really, really want that job.
Speaker 3:Got it Okay cool. So that interview where they're going through that case study, that is the case interview, or the case study interview that we mentioned before. So you were teaching people that you were working for somebody else doing that or you're doing that for yourselves, or like, how did that originally when you started on it, how did that work?
Speaker 2:or like how did that originally when you started on it? How did that? Work, so we got out of our jobs in consulting and we decided that we wanted to start a business together. And you know, we had all these ideas to start businesses but as we were working through them and choosing one of them, people kept asking us for help in getting their jobs in consulting firms.
Speaker 1:Like friends. Yeah, friends, yeah, yeah, yeah, because we were going to start a coffee business.
Speaker 3:You're like we're busy trying to start a business, guys, yeah.
Speaker 1:We're busy trying to start a business. Stop asking us for help with this problem. Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2:That's exactly what happened. And then we thought to ourselves it wasn't as organic as it could be. Because we thought to ourselves, it wasn't as organic as it could be because we thought to ourselves, like, we're gonna need a bit of money before whatever business we do starts giving out money. And so we thought, let's just, you know, do some case interview coaching on mondays, and that's gonna pay our bills.
Speaker 1:And then, uh, we're gonna, you know, create our business yeah, like it seems like a nice side job, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah and then but we we did some sort of lead gen, uh like, we made a, an online test that people could take so we could get their leads, and started doing a bit of diagnostics calls and it like free sessions, our entire schedules yeah got it. It filled our entire schedule and then we were like okay, so is this our business or is this not our business? What are we gonna do? And then we decided to dive all in. Uh, in coaching gotcha how long?
Speaker 3:did you do coaching for before you start making the courses?
Speaker 1:a couple years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, two and a half years. I'd say yeah, Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we focused because, like once we started in like our second or third month, when we saw that there was a ton of demands and we didn't even have to like do normal traffic strategies, like a lot of word of mouth from clients and stuff, we kind of foresaw that if we want to scale this business, we want to do courses.
Speaker 1:I guess we could have gone the agency side at the time, but what we knew was courses and uh, and so because of that we started doing only long-term coaching, because the regular thing in our market is to do like one session, then then one session, one session like a mock interview, right, and we structured it a little bit differently. We did like minimum 10 sessions because we wanted to work long-term with clients, because we wanted to develop methodology. So it was kind of pre-planned like that and we charged less on an hourly basis because of that. So, uh, it was kind of like we'll do it like less uh for less money per hour, but then we'll have a method that we can develop a course on top of.
Speaker 3:yeah, when you said we knew that we were gonna scale this with courses, because courses is what we knew. How did you know courses already? Basically okay, okay, so not that it wasn't that you'd been making courses in some other somebody else or anything, no just to start, you've been listening to pat flynn yeah, it's like courses is the way, guys, you're like got it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right, and that's back on 2015, so it was like audio podcasts and yeah yeah, we, we'd been sold on the whole four-hour work week and, uh, passive income dreams.
Speaker 2:And we were. We knew that, like we wouldn't want to do coaching forever yeah but we knew that it was a path to develop an online course or an online business in general.
Speaker 3:That makes total sense, yeah.
Speaker 3:I think it's really interesting, right, because I mean, obviously people listening to this have mostly got a course business already or a membership or something like that, right. But there are loads of people that we know who run agencies, yeah, and the thing is it kind of makes sense starting an agency because you know how to do a thing and people ask you for help and then you do the thing and you get money and you go right, cool, now I need to scale this, let me hire more people, build more marketing systems, build a sales team, all of this. And the problem with that is it sucks, right, and all of a sudden you've just built yourself a shitty job, right, and it doesn't have to, but a lot of the time it does a lot of the time, that's like not a great business to scale, but a course business is brilliant.
Speaker 3:So I really like what you guys did here. You were like, okay, we're gonna do consulting because that pays the bills and people want that and it's allowing us to develop systems, but to scale it we're gonna go to courses, so that's okay. Were you always like, you know, it sounds really neat now, looking back at the time, was it as clear-cut as that? Or were you thinking, oh, or maybe we'll do it like this or maybe we'll do it like that? Like how sure were you?
Speaker 2:I would say that we're very sure about the vision. Okay, the path was tricky. Okay, the path to developing the methodology, what we were actually going to use, and actually creating the videos and creating the courses. That was super tricky, like over those two and a half years we did. We started off doing five days a week of coaching and we reduced that to four.
Speaker 2:So we could do one day of creating methodology and recording videos, and then we reduced that to three, and then two and then one, and we still weren't moving forward too fast in creating what would be our business. That only worked when we did two things. First, we created a boot camp where we took in a lot of people and we went through the entire methodology with them, so that made us do the the structuring of the methods.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the method work, and then we also cut off coaching entirely. So we sort of burned the bridges, and now we had to do this because there was no money coming in at all.
Speaker 3:The path was helped you to make the methodologies was when you went from doing one-to-one to doing group because you kind of had to. Was that right? But is that what you're saying? I?
Speaker 1:think it's both right, julio yeah like because, uh, like I, I always have people asking me like, oh, how do? How do I do an online course because, like friends want to do it, because it's it's a nice business, and I always tell them okay, are you willing to do one-on-one teaching first? Because if you're not, like I don't think you should. Yeah, and people are always kind of like disappointed when they say that.
Speaker 1:But I absolutely think they should Because first, like if you don't want to do one-on-one teaching before you do a course, like maybe you shouldn't be a teacher, right, because having a course is essentially teaching at scale, right scale. So in our case, I think, when we started doing one-on-one work and the reason why we did like two years of it before moving into a scalable course is when we learned, like all the problems of our audience, like the specific problems, right, how they feel, like it really helps with marketing even today, the techniques that we like, we developed a lot of techniques and also some sort of sequencing, right. So what should we teach first, what should we teach later, what's best for last? But then doing group coaching helped us solidify that. So, okay, we have, we have all the techniques, we have all the pain points. Uh, we know how they feel. We, we kind of know the sequencing.
Speaker 1:But when you're doing one-on-one you don't force yourself to have a really systematic method because you can always adapt, right, you're working one-on-one. It doesn't make sense to make the method more rigid or more, uh, like that much more structured. But then when you work with a group, you need more planning and I think that's that's made everything that we learn by doing one-on-one fit in into something that you can record and sell, and of course we could have recorded first, but then we'd probably have to do a lot of rework, right yeah, yeah, and it's the same for us, right?
Speaker 3:so we did so. We started off with agency, then we did one-on-one coaching for people, and then I did group coaching, but with small groups, and then we made the course, yeah, and then we did group coaching with the course, so it's like people would come on you know, could come on to a call, but once or twice a week.
Speaker 3:And then we've got to the point now where we're like, okay, we need to redo the whole thing to make it even better yeah, so we've paused it, so we're like, okay, right now it's like, oh my God, to make a really good course is is not a small amount of work. The thing is, sometimes it looks like it's three months work or something like that, because you've done the previous three years of learning how to get really good at teaching something and then you're like okay.
Speaker 3:And then it's still a lot of work. Three months is still a lot, but it's a lot less than the two or three years of getting really good at something first. Yeah, nice, yeah. So talk to us about your traffic. How have you built up, uh, this organic audience you've got? Where is it what? What, uh what channels are you you driving traffic through?
Speaker 2:I think that this is one of the most interesting parts about our business. We, uh, today are, I'd say, maybe 50-60% of our traffic comes from word of mouth.
Speaker 1:Okay, and that's from a survey, so kind of trustworthy it's self-reported.
Speaker 2:And the way that happens is we sort of created a flywheel in the beginning of our, of our business journey. So we created with all the knowledge that we had in the beginning. We created a free course, that's 15 hours long. It would take people like 30 hours to go through the course, uh, but the thing is it was better than all of the paid content out there that everyone had access to.
Speaker 3:So 15-hour course for free.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's intense.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's definitely the most debatable decision that we made.
Speaker 1:I still don't know if it was a good decision.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because people tell us.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'd buy your course, but I got all I needed from the free one yeah, so some people still buy, of course, but yeah, yeah, but in the end, that created a really strong flywheel, because people will join our free course because, well, it's free and it's clearly good, and then they'll get offers or not, yeah, you know. Uh, just one percent of the people will try get offers and there's nothing we can do to change that from the consulting firms not like offers to buy your courses, yeah and we can't.
Speaker 3:I was thinking yeah, you should probably offer everybody to buy your course like I know what to do, guys, I know what you need to do.
Speaker 2:Sorry, sorry for the lingo. Uh. So the only we can change that, like some people are going to get offers but there's only so many spots for consulting jobs, uh but are you, are you helping people to get offers as well?
Speaker 3:no, this is for. When you say get offers, do you mean to get an interview? Get the job you mean to just get the job, get the job.
Speaker 2:The interview is the last step of the process before getting the job. And so those people go into consulting. And then when people ask the current consultants, how did you prepare, what should I do to get my job in McKinsey Bain BCG, they will say just use Scrapting Case's free course.
Speaker 2:Even if they use the paid ones, they're going to recommend the free course because you know they're not going to recommend someone to buy something or sometimes they will, but it's just easier to recommend and then more people use the free course, more of the current consultants have used their free course and so, as this slide goes round, we end up with a lot of the current early consultants being our former students. And the first thing that people do when they, you know, know that they want to prep for consulting, is ask what they should do to current consultants, because they'll go to their universities, they'll do, you'll do presentations and career fairs and consultants will recommend our courses to people who are not even looking for the jobs yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or even if they ask their friends which often happens their friends will say, oh, I spoke to this McKinsey consultant and he told me to use this free course and it's really good. I've been using it. So it's an easy way to get not only leads but also the most interested leads, Because there's people who prepare for six months, there's people who prepare for two days or so or who don't even prepare and, of course, since we're selling courses, we need the people who do prepare right. So, there are high-quality leads also.
Speaker 2:And then we ignited this flywheel with a lot of Google SEO work. Google did some Quora posts that were strong in the beginning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's our first channel, Quora.
Speaker 2:Answers and YouTube really took us off. And then the flywheel sort of ran itself and now word of mouth just took over.
Speaker 3:Got it and how much is your course? You just got one right, one paid course, or have you got multiple different things?
Speaker 1:Okay, we got a few. So basically, the free course breaks down the skill of solving case interviews into six core skills, which are also the six types of questions the interviewer may ask of you. So do this quantitative analysis or do this estimation you might have heard, like what's the market for bottled water in Germany, or something like that. Those types of interview questions, they're estimation questions and there are six types of them. So estimations, analysis, structuring, and what the free course gives you is a three-step, four-step, five-step approach to solve each type of question, with examples and practice drills.
Speaker 1:But then at the end of this free course you kind of know what you're good at and what you're not that good at in these skills.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:And then we sell courses that go deeper into into each skill got it, so you got six different courses. It's not six, so like uh, analysis and charge interpretation are in the same course, for example, they're sort of bundled. So there are three. Yeah, there's three main courses and then one that's cheaper. That's just doing mental math really quickly.
Speaker 2:And they're between $200 and $300.
Speaker 3:Yeah, each course is about that kind of price Got it.
Speaker 2:Cool. That's another thing that we did differently, that sort of set us off and put us in a different decision category for customers, I guess. So everyone who sold anything to help people get jobs in consulting firms, they would sell the whole package. And we made the free course in a way that broke down the skills so that we could sell only a specific skill, and what this would do is if you know you have a problem in that skill, then you know that a general course is not going to help you so?
Speaker 1:you need an in-depth course and that and we're the only ones doing that- got it okay and you get feedback from your interviewer, right, they tell you like, oh, you didn't do the estimation right, and then next day they're looking for estimation resources.
Speaker 3:Got it okay, and talk to me about the funnel side of things. What's your process for promoting the courses, so people go through the free course, then what?
Speaker 2:So we're all via email selling. We have people get the join the free course, they get into our email list and then we have like an, an entirely evergreen, very long email sequence. So they'll get like five introduction emails, uh, in a welcome sequence. Then they'll get a, uh, sales sequence for one of our courses and then the best seller, yeah yeah, the best seller.
Speaker 2:And then some engagement emails where we'll teach them some more things, and then another evergreen sales sequence, and then it sort of stops and we have weekly or biweekly engagement emails for a few months.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they also can see the paid courses on the platform. So they're using the free course. They see like the courses button, and some people find their courses that way.
Speaker 3:And then do you do like email promotions to the whole list once someone's finished with the evergreen ones?
Speaker 2:Sometimes Sometimes yeah, black Friday yeah.
Speaker 3:And when you do it, do you make more money?
Speaker 1:Yes, we do yes.
Speaker 3:Why don't you do it more often?
Speaker 1:Honestly like we're a little scared of people expecting the discounts, you know, yeah. So yeah, it's kind of I don't know.
Speaker 3:Maybe we should be doing it more often I don't know do you mind if I talk you through no, please, please so when?
Speaker 3:so, in course businesses and I've seen a lot right, which is the only thing that we do is work on funnels. For course businesses. Most people don't want to seem salesy and spammy and they don't want people to get used to the discounts and they think, right, if they, if I don't give that, if I, if I give those discounts, if I do a regular promotion with a discount, then people are just going to wait until there's the next discount and then I just won't make any more money. I'll just have the same number of sales for less, uh, for less money, because people are buying when there's a discount. And it's not true. It's not the way it works. Revenue goes up when you do email promotions considerably like a lot in course businesses. 80 of the revenue in the business is in the email list. Yeah, like, and I've seen this consistently right, like. But if you just take drive-by sales, but obviously you've got some email marketing right, you're doing Black Friday, you've got your initial email sequences when somebody signs up to the initial free course, so you've got stuff in place. Those emails, though that email list is about 80% of the revenue of the business generally. That's like on average.
Speaker 3:So I had a friend who I saw every year at a conference and every time that I saw her she ran a course business and every time I saw her I was like, oh, you start doing any more promotion yet? And she's like no, I don't want to do it because I don't want people to get used to discounts and I don't want to be, you know, too salesy by doing regular email promotions. And I didn't see her for a few years. And then I messaged her and I was just checking in how she's doing and she told me she doubled the sales. And I was like that's brilliant, that's fantastic. What did you do? She's like I started doing regular email promotions with discounts and I was like, good, exactly what you should be doing.
Speaker 1:So how regular would you do it? I mean, we do once a month.
Speaker 3:Once a month, yeah, okay so if a client has got three or more courses, we will do one promotion a month and then we'll just cycle through every three, four or five, how many courses they've got.
Speaker 3:We'll cycle through that number of months, and there's a couple of ways that you can do it, um the the simplest thing is to have the discount in there, um, but the thing is, the discount isn't the real thing. You're not just promoting we've got a discount, we've got a discount, we've got a discount. What you're doing is you're giving an excuse to really focus on. Let's talk about this course. Yeah, what was one of the ones you said about? Just the um?
Speaker 1:there's the structuring course, which is the main one.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Okay, so, and then, uh, so let's say we've got to talk about the structure. Let's really talk about structuring. Why is that important? So you'd send out a week's worth of valuable, useful emails and YouTube videos and whatever about structuring and I really get people thinking about the topic of structuring. And then you move into right this and you say to people right, this is going to be something we're going to have a discount for a week on this. I'm going to talk about this all week and you would talk about why do you need this? What's the importance of the topic? Why should people be? Why should people be thinking about getting better at this thing? Why does it matter? How's it going to help them in their interview? Why does it help them when they're actually working in the job, all of the things that they care about?
Speaker 3:You talk about it in different ways. You talk about what's the benefits of it. You talk about what's the problems if they don't do it. You talk about the logic and the facts and the data that show people who are better at this have a 67 higher chance of getting the job that they're after. All of that isn't about your course. That's about solving this problem. And then you mention, of course, don't forget, for this week you can get the course.
Speaker 3:The point of the discount is to give urgency so that people make a decision now. It's a little bit so that somebody saves. You know, like, oh, I'll buy it this week or the next week because of the money, but it's like that's it's more an excuse to really be talking about. You need to be taking action on this this week and you've got a countdown time when you're making people think I should do it now. And then you can have your case studies and your testimonials about that particular course, like here's people who went through it before and how they thought it was brilliant. Here's all the questions that everybody asks about this topic and answers to all of them, all of that stuff. And you do that for a week, concentrated, and then you stop and at the end of that week, especially on that last day, you get a ton of sales and you make way more sales than if you don't do that. Yeah, let me. And then you can just leave that for a month and you do it again with another topic the next time that that's.
Speaker 2:That's a great point, but let me ask you how you adapt this to the nuance of our market? Sure, that's what I'm really curious about. So what happens in our market is some people not many, but some people will have interviews in random times of the year, uh, and they know beforehand that they have to prepare. So they have a long, uh, a long, life in our, in our email, and for those people, I can see that making sense, just the way you said it. But for most people, they have a set timeline, a very set timeline. So they joined their MBAs in August, september, and they know they want to prepare for consulting, but they have their tests and stuff. So they start November, december, and they'll have their interviews on March.
Speaker 1:I think it's January isn't it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe January, but the point being, people will join at a set time in the year and they'll have their interviews at a set time in the year. It varies depending on where in the world they are, but their timeline is very specific. So if someone's been on my email list for eight, 12 months, it doesn't make a lot of sense. It hardly ever makes sense for them to buy.
Speaker 3:Interesting Okay.
Speaker 2:And if they've just gotten in the email list, then that's when they're most likely to have their interviews coming up and they have their own uh, urgency and convergency coming up how do you think about, basically, like our leads have a a short spam of time, that they're worth uh, something to us in terms of money, right?
Speaker 1:in terms of willingness to buy, because they have their interviews and then after that they don't, and for some people it's one month, for some people it's six months, for most people. Isn't more than it.
Speaker 3:Isn't more than that, yeah here's something really interesting that I would want to play with if I was you guys is, after someone signs up initially for you, what happens on the confirmation page after somebody signs up for your free course? What's on that page? Not much, but the email.
Speaker 1:There's an email that says how valuable it is that it should treat it as a paid course and basically explains, like, what kind of value they're going to get. Okay.
Speaker 3:There's nothing. All it says is done. Now check your email to find the link to join our free seven-day course. Okay, so, first of all, that page. At the moment it's just a little message that pops up. But that page that you could set up it redirects to another page right is one of the most valuable pages you have in your entire business and at the moment, it doesn't even exist.
Speaker 3:So this is great news, because what this means is you can make a bunch more money, and I can tell you exactly how to do it. So there's two things that you could do with that page. One you could just offer them the chance to buy the paid course straight away. Okay, and you could have a special offer. If you buy right now, here's a special offer and you have the whole sales page and a discount. What we normally do on that page is we have something called a tripwire, so we've got like a cheap offer, something that you might sell for like $27, what have you?
Speaker 3:I don't know if you have anything that kind of fits at that price point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's the mental math course. It's 70 bucks.
Speaker 3:Okay, so that's a possibility. Is you could put that mental math course on that page?
Speaker 3:and then have a discount and say, right, well, that's going to be like you know, special offer if you get it right now for 50 bucks or 49 or you know 39, whatever, and then you give it like a 30 minute timer and you get people. A bunch of people would buy straight away Between 3% and ten percent if you do a really good job on that page, yeah. Second thing, though, that I think could be really interesting, based on what you've said in terms of people's timings, is you could put a survey on that next page and you could ask people what is the date or when is your interview going to be? Or when you know what's the likely date is, how long off is that? One month, three months, six months, what have you? Or I don't know how accurately people are going to know that kind of thing, but, like, if you start to put find some way of finding that information, because then you could include that in your email marketing. You could include that as like, if it's in one month, then send this campaign.
Speaker 3:Talk about because you're, because your interviews are going to be in a month, you need to be preparing. This is what you've got to be doing, and I would suspect that would increase your conversion rate. Within that. You're saying you've got like a short time period, you know like six months, eight months, whatever. That's like the most valuable period, one month, whatever. It was going to be right for that person. Yeah, so then it allows you to really tailor your, tailor your marketing at that period. What that would be. Why? Why that might be particularly interesting is because about 70% of people will fill out a survey on a confirmation page. Give or take, it's normally about 70%.
Speaker 3:So then what you could have is after someone's filled it in, then you could have still another offer on the confirmation page after that.
Speaker 2:So you still could guess.
Speaker 3:After the survey yeah, say thanks, so much for filling that, and you could make that offer targeted based on what they put in the survey. Or you could just say here's the mental math model. Go by. You know this, what have you?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah both of those would be like you'd have to kind of play with it, because you need to look at your audience and see like what percentage um is it which offer going to make sense for what conversion rates do we think they're going to be, and then you make your best estimate on that and then that's what offer you're going to put on the confirmation page and then you can do an A-B test later on in there. But that would give you a starting point. So it gives you some sales straight away and it would give you more information to target your emails with people more accurately.
Speaker 1:I'm taking notes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I like this.
Speaker 2:I feel like I would like to create some offers for that, rather than use our current ones, that's always tempting right.
Speaker 3:So here's why. So that's a good idea, but it's not a good idea. That's always tempting right. So here's why. So that's a good idea, but it's not a good idea to do straight away. And here's why. If you I'm looking at this from a making money point of view rather than from a delivering perfect experience point of view right, if you go right, we're going to make the perfect offer for that page. Two things one, you don't know when you put that perfect offer that you create, that takes you two months to make it, or whatever, right, when you put that in place, you don't know if that was any better than what you could have had straight away, because you didn't have anything to compare it to right secondly, you've lost two months of making any money on that particular part of your funnel that you haven't got anything.
Speaker 3:So what I recommend to everybody for that Is make a list of all of the things, all of the products that you've got. So your three main you know your main course, and then the other three courses and then your mental Math model and anything else that you can think of, and go what do we think would make sense here and then put something Up for that. Ideally it's one where You've already got a sales page, because that, then, where you just copy that existing sales page and you tweak it so you say that most of the pages exactly the same, but you say here's a special offer, here's, you choose your discount, and then you put a countdown timer, deadline funnel or whatever else you might use, and to put a countdown timer and, uh, you put something at the top that says the free course is on its way. It'll be with you in like 10 minutes in your email inbox. In the meantime, check out this offer. This is the first thing to do and, apart from that, the sales page is exactly the same.
Speaker 3:So it doesn't. It's not a massive amount of work to put this whole thing in place and then you're getting somebody coming in and you've got a baseline and then you can go right, actually that's not performing that great, we're going to make this better offer or, um, we'll just leave it running. Now the real reason that really matters is because you've got dozens of things in your business that you can be doing right. So what's quite easy to happen is go oh, that's a clever idea, john, I like that. I'll come back to that after I've done x, y and z. And then it's a year later and you've never put anything in place and then you're not being you know. It's just like that's super easy to happen, right?
Speaker 1:super easy yeah yeah, whereas if you just put something up and you're like cool, I'm making money from this in the meantime, while everything else is happening yeah, I think we do a decent job in trust building, like those more human elements of conversion, but not a good enough job in putting the right software, the right software at the right time in front of the right person, you know. So I really like this because it can even help people earlier, right, like the way it's currently set up like.
Speaker 1:Sometimes the person just sees the offer 15 days later and it may be too late, you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. If someone says, right, right in that survey, here's a way you could do the logic right. So you do the survey in type form or something that's got logic built in, and someone says, uh, my interview is in like a month, don't bother giving them lots of trust building and everything. It's like you need to crack on. You need that, you need the good stuff right now, dude.
Speaker 3:So you show them an offer of like okay, this is what you need right now, and you've got to make sure obviously all of this is in service of the customer, right? You can't show them offers that only serve you and actually it's not going to be helpful to them. But you know after the survey which thing is going to be the most useful for them straight away, and it's your. So if someone's learning I don't know to play the guitar, right, yeah, there isn't a deadline's learning to play the guitar, right, yeah, there isn't a deadline on learning to play the guitar. But you guys, your audience, has got this really specific deadline that they have to hit and you know how long it takes for them to study and prepare for each of these things. So you can serve them by making the right offer at the right time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2:It makes sense. I I also feel tempted to put in, rather than you know, a small uh, a low value offer that serves some people, not necessarily everyone and is not necessarily the most important skill that will be a multimodal map. I sort of feel tempted to put in the, the, the course bundle or maybe the all-in or something like that, yeah would that be too expensive?
Speaker 3:if you think that's what would serve your audience best, then that's that could totally make sense. What is the um? What's your thinking with that? Why is it because that's the bigger thing that actually that's what everybody should be getting? Is it because it's higher price and more money? What's your thinking? Why do you reckon that's the right course?
Speaker 2:it's I guess it's. It's the thing that actually aims at solving their problem. Yeah, like if I, if I put in a small uh, like the mental math course. Mental math is something that people always feel like they could be better at, but it's for many people it's not going to be their problem, it's not going to be the one thing that they should be doing, and so, while it serves us and while it would be good for some people, it's not necessarily the best thing to put in there for the students, I think. But if we put it all in the complete pass, if they're short in time, especially, they can go in-depth right away in whatever they need. So you have a month. You don't spend a week thinking whether you should join this or that course.
Speaker 2:You just know, oh, I have this problem with that. Estimations, Actually it's structuring in estimations, actually it's structuring in unit of supply estimations.
Speaker 1:So they go right to that video and they've got that problem solved right away, because they've got the old impasse yeah, basically like every day they practice, they find out something that they didn't know how to do and that they should improve on, and then, if they have access to everything, they can solve things like in real time, you know, like yeah, yeah, yeah. They don't spend a week solving some issue, they spend like 30 minutes.
Speaker 3:Nice, great. This is exciting. Yeah, it is. You guys are going to make a bunch more money.
Speaker 1:I like it.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I love this. It sort of puts our whole roadmap of projects in perspective. Joe, let me take this moment to ask you a question in terms of tools. What would we need in terms of tools to add these surveys in there and add in the tripwire, because all we use is Thinkific and it doesn't feel like they would have the right tool for that.
Speaker 1:Oh, I think it has upsells.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this isn't upsells. This is like having a limited time offer.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 3:Okay, here's what you need, right, so you can do it in Thinkific, is it? You make a different version of the sales page right with your bundle. That's specifically for people who either have gone through this and it says they're interviews in a month, or for everybody, depending on what you decide as the offers to be for each person, and you get Deadline Funnel and you embed the timer from Deadline Funnel into the sales page and into any follow-up emails that you have, and then what deadline funnel will do is it will you choose a redirect. So, let's say, you choose the amount of time to be 30 minutes, like that's what we normally do, and it's a cheap priced offer. We have a 30 minute countdown timer and then we have a slightly different offer. So if someone doesn't buy under 30 minutes, then we follow up with a slightly different offer that lasts two days, and so that's the way we'll often do it.
Speaker 3:But let's say we just just for sake of argument, just 30 minutes, right, and deadline funnel will redirect that person after 30 minutes so they can't get to that offer anymore. Yeah, and it takes that, takes that away. And what's beautiful with deadline funnel is it makes it so that. But otherwise what they might do is go, I'll just go back to the same page. I'll just sign up for the lead magnet again. That won't work because it figures out that it's them. It's very clever, I don't know. It's not just through cookies. I don't know what they're doing exactly.
Speaker 2:What magic they've got, but they know it's you. They know who you are.
Speaker 3:You can't just go. Oh, I'm just going to go incognito, yeah, no, that won't work either. So it really makes it so. After 30 minutes, that offer goes away and that's important, so that people know oh, this, this urgency is, is genuine. If they give me another offer, I need to take it in time.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah, yeah, got it. John, can I, can I take a minute of your time and ask you about, uh, installments? What do you see in terms of installments Whether we should be doing them, because we're always discussing whether we should be doing installments or not. Maybe our courses are too cheap for that, maybe not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we don't tend to do installments.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's what I was thinking. How much do you?
Speaker 1:charge for the bundle 500, 600. Depends on the time of the year.
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah, you could do installments on it. Like, the benefit to that is obviously that you've got some people who can't afford or aren't going to pay for the full thing. Yeah, but you do lose some of those people. Not all the payments go through in the end, obviously, with those ones, you can stop them getting access anymore. Lose you do lose some of those people. Like, not all the payments go through in the end. Obviously, with those ones you can, you can stop them getting access anymore. Like, oh, you didn't finish your payments, you can't get access to this anymore. You can set up follow-up emails, that kind of thing. But about 80 of the money you'll get, something like that of whatever you you know, probably, whatever you charge, you'll probably get about 80 of it. So therefore you have to charge enough extra for the installments.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Most people charge 20% extra. That's probably where it comes from, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'd say probably at 600. Yeah, it's probably worth doing. I do like three installments of what's it? 500, yeah, 200, 190. Would that give you like a 600? So if you're sometimes charging 600, then you'd want to be charging 250. No, a little bit less than that maybe 519, some of that yeah, yeah, I don't. I'm wondering about like 5 of 150. Seems like it's lasting a little too long on that number I think 3 payments is probably about right for that kind of size.
Speaker 3:So you'd say that 5 is too long, well, if it's done over 5 months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because what I had in my mind was even going up to that's what we always talk about, maybe even 60, 12 or 60.
Speaker 3:tell me this, though how long? Because you're telling me there's like a real time limit to somebody getting access, getting used from your course yeah someone's already got the job I don't know, I just and they're not using the course anymore. Yeah, like I feel like you might have a higher drop-off in terms of payments going through if someone's like, well, I don't even need this thing anymore, why am I still paying for it? You know even though maybe it was your course that got them the job that pays them lots of money that was just my thinking about like.
Speaker 3:That seems like it's if it's past the point of them already having got it, you know it's pretty testable, though, right yeah, totally like it would take a year to test it. But yeah, yeah, but I mean?
Speaker 1:I mean like we can do it for a month and then see what's the drop see how see if you get yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:You also could see what's the uplift like you actually get more people buying yeah, because even though you'd have a bunch of people who don't make all the payments, you wouldn't have got any. You wouldn't have got any payments from some of those people. Yeah, true, one of the things that we do actually, this might be a better way of doing it is you have the upfront course, pay for it all at once, right. Then you have a down sell. So a down sell is all of the people who didn't buy the original offer. Then you offer them the payment plan and you do that via three emails over the course of three days after starting, the day after or two days later after they didn't buy, you know, after the original deadline of buying the bundle at a certain price.
Speaker 3:We've done that a lot of times and it always works. Of times and it always works, and it's it. How much it's worthwhile depends on how many people you've got going through that process and how long it's going to take you to kind of set this up and whether you can reuse those emails, because writing emails takes a certain amount of time and that's time you're not doing something else, right? Yeah, um, and also, of course, if you make, if you make too many offers to your audience, at some point. They start to be less engaged. Now, but the thing is for you guys you need to be making offers until they reach that point at the interview.
Speaker 3:Right, you need to be on it and it's I don't know like how many you've got in there because you've got the, the free course and then you've got the follow-up offers after that. But I it sounds like this is just based on some of the stuff you've said so far. That could that probably needs to be increased yeah every angle you can get to see right.
Speaker 1:Come on guys, you need this because they do right they need your damn course yeah otherwise they're less likely to get the job you know yeah, yeah, we're even starting instagram to be able to have more frequent offers, right, yeah, basically, talk to me about that. What do you mean? How is?
Speaker 3:instagram going to help to have more frequent offers, right, yeah, talk to me about that. What do you mean? How is Instagram going to help you have more frequent offers?
Speaker 1:Basically, we don't do any social media nowadays, so our only touch of contact with our audience is through email, which is kind of like one-to-one right when they answer. And we thought Instagram as a way to do one too many right. So a lot of our customers are on instagram and the thought is, if we put good content there every day, then we can use the stories to raise awareness about specific problems in the interview and then also offer the courses and then maybe ads.
Speaker 3:I don't know about that one yeah, so instagram's good for building the audience, but what you want from there for making sales is to get them then onto the email list.
Speaker 1:Making offers through social directly yeah, it's okay the idea is to send people from the email list to ig so they can have interactions with us, right, okay, so kind of using more as, not to, not as a top of funnel, but more as a middle to bottom like more middle funnel so what's the what's the benefit of it?
Speaker 3:you're trying to make the offer on IG or you're trying to warm them up?
Speaker 1:We can make offers more often, you know, because, like via email, like we have five courses, so via email, like let's say, we have a five-day sequence for a course, if you multiply that by five offers, you have 25 emails, which is like a month of selling, so you probably want to spread that out over two or three months, so it's not like sell, sell, sell. Want to spread that out over two or three months, so it's not like sell, sell, sell and uh, and a lot of our leads don't have three months right uh yeah, and the thoughts which I don't know.
Speaker 1:We got a test but the thought is, uh, with ig we can do like whole day of stories talking about structuring. And then we tell them, hey, we have a course here in case you want it, or do hard sales or discounts or whatever we got to figure out. But the idea is like, what's a five-day email sequence? Could be one day of stories or something like that.
Speaker 3:I would think, with the kind of thing you're talking about there, you probably be better off with webinars okay than ig, because so webinars are great for sales and they're also great for building a lot of trust really, really quickly. Yeah, because you can do an hour's worth of giving away free content. You've already got 15 hours of free content in your course, so it's like.
Speaker 3:But you can have, like I don't know, find a different angle or something like that. Um and then about a specific topic, and then you point people from email to the webinar and then the webinar goes into sales, because I just ig just doesn't work as well for for direct sales it's it works way better for audience building. If you're going from email to ig, it's the wrong way around.
Speaker 3:It should be instagram to email it's not the usual, yeah yeah, like I mean, who knows right, there could be something new that I haven't figured out, that you try it and you're like, oh my god, this is brilliant. But if, like, it's a tried and tested way, I wouldn't do it that way around, I would think that's probably not going to be the way that's going to drive a lot more sales for you.
Speaker 1:Got it. Yeah, I'm kind of biased against webinars because they never go to them.
Speaker 3:But that's the problem with marketers. Right, it's like marketers don't do it.
Speaker 3:They don't do any of the things that marketers want you to do, because they're not like I know you're you know, but they work they do work well, like you'd need to look at what your registration rate and whatever is, but what you typically get. A relatively low percentage of people will go and actually register for the webinar um from your email list three percent, five percent, something in that kind of ballpark. But all the steps after that tend to be pretty good and it's worth doing when you've got a more expensive course like it's definitely worth it for the bundle um, because, uh, you do get drop off at each stage, right.
Speaker 3:So let's say, if you do it, if you do a live webinar, you'll tend to get about 35% of people attending, and out of 35% of people who attend, you'll tend to get like 70 or 80% of them will finish and actually get through to the bit where they see the pitch. So you've got drop off each of those steps. Yeah, but the people who get to the end and watch the pitch, if you do a good presentation and a good pitch, then you'll tend to get a high percentage of people who buy compared to people who go to a sales page. If people go to a sales page, you're probably looking at like 20% to 25% and will go to the checkout page. From the checkout page, you're looking at 20% to 25 percent of people will buy. So totally looking at like four, maybe five percent kind of thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but with a webinar, you can have as high as 10 percent of people who actually see the pitch who then go by, and it tends to work with higher priced offers as well. So that can be. That could be really nice in terms of conversion. But yeah, they do. They do work um still, even if you don't like them oh yeah, I know it's a bias.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a personal bias because I don't either.
Speaker 3:I never go to webinars either. Yeah, so tell us guys what's, what's your goals, what's your vision. Where do you want to be with the, with the course business, in like a year or three years? Like where are you trying to get to?
Speaker 2:julia uh so we sort of see our course business like a a portfolio that we're building. We have the the lead gen part that's mostly built out and then we have a conversions part that we can still work on. We have a portfolio of courses that we can still work on and we have a sort of a roadmap to complete and that maybe we can double this business. But the way we see it, it's more something that's going to be a great business out there, that's going to help out everyone but can also allow us to go do other, take on other challenges do different challenges in mind.
Speaker 3:How'd you mean?
Speaker 2:It's just run different businesses. So, uh, I would love to have either DTC brands or maybe even software businesses. Bruno's got some, some great ideas on teaching people entrepreneurship here in Brazil. So we've got some dreams that we sort of want to pursue, and I feel like Crafting Cases is currently the platform that's going to let us do that. Nice, do you agree, bruno?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree. Like we have some stuff coming up, like we're doing a course for beginners, because we only offered a free course for beginners, which is kind of a mistake because most people are beginners. We're redoing our bestseller course because it was done like five years ago. But yeah, the way I see our business because it's a very evergreen business, right like for our work week style. So the way I see it is kind of like when an author writes a book, like he can keep working on the book and launch like v2, v3, v10 or they can just move on to another thing.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's related, maybe it's not. So the way I see it, it's kind of like that. Like we published stuff online and then as a free course, and then the paid courses, and that kind of all works as a book. So it's still gonna have value probably 10 years from now, because the topic is basically like how to solve business problems. Like you don't need like new stuff, like in terms of new trends or things like that, which is very different from your your thing, I think, john because like you always have to be on top of the new marketing thing, like even if to say it doesn't work right, like. That's what's on people's minds, right? In our case, it's an evergreen topic, so we can use the platform to do other things. Like Julio is learning to program right now, maybe we'll build.
Speaker 2:SaaS apps.
Speaker 1:I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe we'll build SaaS apps. I don't know, maybe not committing to this.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't do that. It's hard, it's hard, yeah, yeah, bad yeah.
Speaker 3:SaaS businesses is an interesting one because they're very different to like. There's pros and cons to different types of business. Right, of course, agencies or consulting you make money straight away, yeah, and they're actually quite easy to get some work in through your network and what have you? Sass businesses are like the whole other end. You have to build out for like a year or two or whatever before you're making any, like the mrr, before you make any money. Sorry, I didn't finish my sentence there and then and then the monthly recurring revenue is great, but it takes so long to build up to a level that's actually meaningful.
Speaker 3:Like I've got a friend who she's been working on. She had one SaaS business, sold that for a lot and then has been working on another one and her husband's a programmer, so he does the programming, she does the marketing, they work together on it. And like I and her husband's a programmer, so he does the programming, she does the marketing, they work together on it. And like I don't know a year or something in, they were like on less than 10 000 a month in revenue. Yeah, yeah, and she's badass, like she knows what she's doing right, yeah, it's just, that's how it's just, but it just takes a long time. You know, they had to keep building more features, had to keep building up their seo traffic, all of that kind of stuff, to kind of get out to a certain level.
Speaker 3:So yeah if you do take that on, I'll be interested to hear how it goes yeah, I'll let you know yeah we could guys, this has been absolutely brilliant. I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing your whole story and what's been working for you. Um, if people want to go check you out, where should they? I mean, should they go check out crafting cases? Should they look at your, your um, entrepreneurship for beginner stuff like where would you want to point people to?
Speaker 1:I don't have an entrepreneurship for beginner stuff yet, but oh, okay, okay but I don't have anywhere to point to but it's gonna be in portuguese anyway, so okay forget that, then okay, it doesn't exist in open a different language. Okay, I guess they can check out crafting cases, our youtube channel or if they're applying to consulting our free course. Maybe, but we don't have a. Do you have anywhere to point them to? Julio?
Speaker 2:no, not really. But if they, if they want to reach out and say hello, they can always email us yeah, yeah, cool.
Speaker 1:what's your email, son julio, at Cursicist Bruno at Cursicist.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're just like one person, julio and Bruno. These guys are on two separate cameras but really they're just signing.
Speaker 1:It's so funny man, because our students they mistake one for another all the time. They're like oh, julio said in this video that that's me they don't know who is who and they don't care yeah, yeah, I don't think they care, honestly nice all right, john, thank you for inviting us.
Speaker 2:This was yeah. Thanks, so much, guys.
Speaker 3:I really appreciate your time today and uh, um, yeah, we'll, uh, we'll talk soon all right, yeah sure.