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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
Meet the Man Making Millions Teaching Spanish (Timothy Moser interview)
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🔗 Check out LearnCraft Spanish Podcast: https://www.learncraftspanish.com/podcast
This interview might change how you run your entire business.
Timothy Moser reveals how he tripled customer retention (2.5 to 7.5 months) by making one counterintuitive change - focusing on becoming truly the best in his market, not just saying it. While his competitors promised "quick, easy, fun" Spanish learning, he rebranded to emphasize "rigorous hard work" and saw his monthly revenue climb to $120K.
Discover his exact process for building a product so good you can sell it with complete confidence, the surprising way he filters for committed students (by making things HARDER), and why he gives away his course for free while charging premium prices for coaching.
That's what made the difference for me. We have found a small but serious niche of people who are willing to spend money. We were doing fine. I just didn't want to do fine. I wanted to do exceptionally well.
Speaker 2:Timothy's business generates $1.4 million in annual revenue, while serving 400 coaching clients at any given time. His LearnCraft Spanish coaching service stands out as the only Spanish program that guarantees fluency in a second language, with his students demonstrating their abilities by giving spontaneous interviews in Spanish after just 12 months of training.
Speaker 1:One of the reasons that I wasn't selling more was just because I didn't, at the core of everything, really believe that this was the best thing for everyone. Are you asking if I just had an exceptionally crappy product?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, let's put it like that. Did you just have a shitty product, timothy? Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We are 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 Timothy Moser. Today, we're going to talk about how you can make a seven-figure business teaching Spanish, why we're not as good as we think we are, the pros and cons of selling coaching versus courses, how Timothy tripled his retention rate, why he gives his course away for free, and the funnel that he uses to make people so desperate to buy that they'll work hours a day for the chance. Timothy, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me Now. You've said if you're not convinced that you're truly the best in the world of what you get for your clients, your only focus should be on becoming the best in the world. Can you talk us through that?
Speaker 1:Why do you think that this came largely through some personal experience of mine. We had this coaching program. That is the core of our business and on average, our students were sticking around for two and a half months. I was working really hard at trying to convert more students. There were a few who were really successful, becoming fluent in Spanish, leaving testimonials, but what I eventually had to figure out was the reason. One of the reasons that I wasn't selling more was just because I didn't, at the core of everything, really believe that this was the best thing for everyone. If I could catch a hint let's say I was on a sales call with a coaching client If I could catch a hint of doubt that this was absolutely going to work for them, I didn't always have an argument. I might actually say, yeah, maybe something else would work better for you. When I made that shift and brought my whole team on board with the idea that we needed to be the best in the world at getting serious learners fluent in Spanish, that made all the difference.
Speaker 2:And we've turned around our average retention from two and a half months as well have a tendency towards spending all of their time on the product and not spending time on the marketing, but it sounds like your approach on this why this mattered to you was because it was stopping you from succeeding at the marketing, or partly because it was stopping you succeeding in marketing, and another part was because it was stopping you succeeding in marketing, and another part was because it was reducing your, your retention, and when you improve the retention, you improve the product, improve the retention, which then improves the profitability is that right?
Speaker 1:yes, and I do think a lot of course creators spend too much time on their course and not enough time on marketing. I was hanging out with a lot more marketers than course creators Myself. Plenty of marketers. What is it? Is it Seth Godin? That's like marketers ruin everything. Yeah, I don't think that's straight up true, but I think Seth Godin doesn't think that's straight up true either.
Speaker 2:Seth Godin says a lot of stuff to get attention.
Speaker 1:Of course, Of course, but I think the pendulum had swung a little too far into the man you know, and it's tempting to. It's like if I could just sell a few more units, I would be able to afford to make my product better, but by at some point just pairing everything back and saying I need to focus on the product, I need to focus on getting results for our students and figuring out why they're not all successful.
Speaker 2:That's what made the difference for me. Okay, do you think that applies to everybody, to all listeners, that they should be focused on becoming the best, or do you think that was, in your case, true, and it kind of depends on a number of factors.
Speaker 1:Are you asking if I just had an exceptionally crappy product?
Speaker 2:Sure yeah, let's put it like that. I like that one. Did you just have a shitty product, timothy?
Speaker 1:it was actually more that we were making claims based on our best students, and I think that that's what any good marketer will do anyone who like, really believes in their product.
Speaker 1:They'll look at the exceptional stories that some of their clients have gotten and be like look at what you can achieve if you buy our product and are successful with it. Well, that's two different things. There's buying the product and then there's the few people who actually end up achieving that amazing success, and so what we ended up having to do was make sure that these claims that we were making in our marketing like we guarantee fluency. We are showing exceptional results. We have interviews with students speaking spontaneous, fluent Spanish online, and we have for the last nine years Back in the day, that was about 3% of students got to that point. Now it's much higher. That's where we determined if we're going to position ourselves in this. Like really language learning is such a competitive marketplace, and we have stood ahead by positioning ourselves as premium and as serious, and so, basically, by leaning into that and becoming more serious, that's what made all the difference.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's one of those things where there's a number of factors involved. So we're kind of in a similar situation where we're figuring out. At the moment, do we spend more time in trying to make the product even better, or is it more of the focus should be in the marketing? So we've had 15 students recently going through our program and 13 of them have doubled their revenue, which is great, fantastic. And then two of them it has made no difference and the reason is because they didn't do the thing that we told them to do. And we told them again and again and again. Just, and they didn't do it. And we're like okay, is there any like? We gave them resources. They had the same resources everybody else had. We gave them the same feedback we looked at and they didn't do the stuff.
Speaker 2:I'm like, at what point do you go? Okay, 13 out of 15 is good enough, or is it like no, we should really focus on getting to 14 out of 15. And it's like you know, like what else could we do? How can we help them? Or do we say no to more people? And I think that's a good level? That's like, okay, cool, we're fine there. We're actually everything's going great, but I worry about it. Sometimes I'm like it eats at me. I'm like come on, guys no-transcript.
Speaker 2:If you're looking to boost your course revenue, you need to check out our seven-day roadmap to increase your revenue. It's the same system that we've used to help countless clients achieve predictable revenue without making sales calls or running paid ads or competing on price. You're going to learn how to increase your course revenue by 30%, how to identify and fix the missing parts of your current funnels and how to optimize your funnels for maximum performance. So, if you're ready to take your revenue to the next level, go to datadrivenmarketingco slash roadmap and download it. Yeah, yeah. So you've positioned yourself as a premium product.
Speaker 2:You're making very bold claims and then you, you needed to be like, and you, but, and yet you weren't always able to match up to those.
Speaker 2:Some people achieve them, but not as high percentage as you wanted, especially when you've got a guarantee in place I imagine so and you have a recurring payment from people, which is we'll come back to that a little bit later. So, by making these changes and trying to become the best that you could be, then that has increased the amount you make per client three times it, and it has. Is that true? Is that? Is it actually? Yeah, absolutely okay. Yeah, and you're able to follow you are to back up those claims you're making, and it means that you're able to be more confident when making sales to people, because you can say, yes, you are, it's not going to be something else. But if we this is the thing because of this and this and this and this that we've, we've put in place, how do you, how do you know that you are making it better? Like, what are you measuring it? How do you figure that out?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're measuring constantly. So, like if you I know that your company, you brand yourselves as being data-driven marketing. We have very much leaned into we're data-driven evidence, and so we get data on every single lesson, collecting both how satisfied are you with this and how difficult was this relative to the other lessons around it? Because, like you're saying, like one of the reasons that clients are not successful is because they can't stick with the program, and so our job is actually to make it easier for them to. Well, okay, you didn't say can't, you said won't, but for us it's like a lot of people just don't have the time to spend an hour or two on Spanish every day, so it's kind of our job to make it as simple as possible, give them a daily checklist for what to do.
Speaker 1:We're measuring constantly. Is this the right amount of stuff to give them today? Is lesson 54 a whole lot harder than 53. So we need to move that material around and that way we can make the promise that they are going to have just enough every day to challenge them and keep them moving forward. That's one way we measure. There are many other ways we measure. We constantly track in which cohort of students are students sticking around longer versus dropping out earlier, and what were the factors that played into that? We could dive into any aspect of measurement. I'm very passionate about metrics.
Speaker 2:So how much have you actually then changed any of the individual lessons because of those measurements? Is that like a hypothetical idea, or is that something you're doing regularly?
Speaker 1:So we have two main programs. One is a one month challenge that has only 20 lessons, so it's five days a week. It's like a very affordable program. It's basically our tripwire that we use to kind of filter students into whether or not they're good coaching students. If they can get through that challenge they're in great shape to become coaching students.
Speaker 1:We have iterated on that four times since starting these measurements and it's now in a place where we're 100 confident like um.
Speaker 1:It's pretty even as far as the materials, now there's always enhancements to be made about how much quizzing material to give them, how many different opportunities to practice with each other or with our software or whatever it is. But we've iterated that enough that it is the right steps in the right order for our students to measure, to like be at a place where they know the top 100 words in Spanish and they those who make it to the end are great candidates for our coaching programs. The rest of it, the next one this is the tough part it's about 200 lessons, so more than 200 lessons. So for us to we're still. You know the average student takes about a year to get through that. So we don't quite have enough data on all the lessons to finally roll out all those changes. But we actually have made changes to many of the lessons based on the data we've collected and we the easy. This is kind of a hack that we put in place no-transcript buying the coaching.
Speaker 2:Why are you selling coaching? Why have you taken that approach?
Speaker 1:I made the decision early on. I started this whole thing. I mean, it partly comes from just the fact that I started as a hobby back in 2014, and I was releasing everything I did online for free, and so I kind of made the commitment to my audience at that time, forever ago, that our courses would be free, online for free for people to use. So you can, you know, use our entire podcast to learn Spanish from zero to a thousand words in 250 episodes for free, anywhere that podcasts are found. The reason that has worked so well for us I think that that kind of random decision that I made early on has worked so well is that maybe students who love our program are hesitant to ask their friends to pay for an expensive coaching program, but they have no hesitation about saying you can use the entire course for free. Just go to your podcast app and search for Learn Spanish and use it.
Speaker 2:Okay. So what I'm hearing is the reason you're selling coaching is because you decided in 2014 to give the course away for free, so you couldn't sell courses.
Speaker 1:Is that right? Sort of? Yeah, I mean, I kind of suspected in 2014 that it would become a coaching course and I hired I just went on Upwork and at the time it was called Elance hired a few contractors who had impressive credentials and linguistics to help me create the materials and I just like I was like okay, help me create these materials, I'm paying you to do this and giving it away for free. So a way that I could actually make money out of this is by having you also work face to face with some of my students, charge them for that and it all comes out at least comes out in a wash at the time, while it was still a hobby. From there it has scaled just very organically and systematically. It's like every two years, every two or three years, we double, and so it's almost like the connection from that to where we are now, with over 30 coaches, was organic and kind of seamless.
Speaker 2:So can you talk everybody through, like how much does it cost if someone does want to do the coaching with you? How much do you sell the initial Tripwire product for? How much do you sell the the initial tripwire product for how much do you sell the coaching for?
Speaker 1:the tripwire is 39, so they can get into this teachable course. Um, it's a 20-day video course and it basically brainwashes. The whole purpose of that thing is to brainwash students. In our methods it's brainwashing them into. Here's why you should study every day, not in big leaps, and you know lurches. You should actually like do a good amount of expression right Leaps and lurches.
Speaker 1:When you're in language, you can make up whatever terms you want, but people in language do tend to set really ambitious goals and then burn out. And so what we're doing with this course is we're trying to convince them. No, no, no. It's not about taking a course and then taking a break.
Speaker 1:We're using this challenge to brainwash you to do an hour or two of work a day, and we intentionally make the challenge a little bit harder than our coaching program actually. So if they can get through that, then we know that they're good candidates for coaching. So if they pay $39, they can add coaching basically at cost. We charge $200 for they can have a coach during that time and work with them face to face. At that point, if they make it through that program, spend the time every day, then they're sold on the whole thing and then there is a follow-up program, a coaching program. I do a little webinar in the middle of the one-month challenge and I'm still doing it live every month because of how well it converts people. We get people into the coaching program with lessons that we've custom tailored to pick up exactly where the challenge left off and transition them into our bigger coaching program.
Speaker 2:And then how do you sell that to them? So they've finished the wait. A minute, Actually. No, take a step back. You said if they finish the challenge then they're a good candidate for the coaching. Is it a requirement that somebody has to finish the challenge to qualify to go into the coaching? Good, question.
Speaker 1:We actually have two main coaching programs. One is self-paced, where they just work on their own. It's about 400 a month and they meet with a coach once a week. They do have unlimited like asynchronous help throughout the week, access to all of our software. There's like a lot of benefits they get, but for only one meeting a week, paying $400 is just completely different from what other like what basic tutoring services charge for their stuff.
Speaker 1:We still do convert a lot of people into that, and that one is what's evergreen, so people can just book a sales call with me, get into that program at any time. At the end of the one month challenge, though, that's when they have the opportunity to do a significantly cheaper coaching program and be locked into that price, and that's because it's a cohort program where they will be able to get like the one-on-one every week plus a group coaching call every week. We can only do that because they're working with a bunch of other students who finished the one month challenge, so that means it's a better deal for them. They get the two calls a week instead of one, and it's a better deal for us because we can reliably sign on a bunch of students every time we have a challenge.
Speaker 2:Got it Okay. So what's the price of that if they do it?
Speaker 1:That's currently $3.19 a month. Okay.
Speaker 2:So it's $39 for the tripwire. It's 400 a month for evergreen coaching. They can sign up for any one time but if they finish the challenge and then go into the cohort then it's 319 and they're locked in at that price and that gets them the one-on-one call and the group coaching call. Got it okay? So we're kind of overall discussing like this model that you've been using of doing coaching. Now a lot of people listening are selling courses without any coaching. So we've talked about like some of the way that you kind of lucked into this. What do you think is like the benefits of doing it this way in terms of having coaching, versus selling just low ticket courses or high ticket courses even, but without coaching involved?
Speaker 1:To be perfectly honest, I think the main benefit is if you're trying to do something really innovative, which is what our mission is like. We have the mission of creating a very innovative program that is evidence-based, that we can demonstrate gets people to their goals better than anything else out there, that we can demonstrate gets people to their goals better than anything else out there. If that's your goal, you can't be the only one making the course. You need a team of people doing it for you. And if you're just selling an info product, it's kind of hard to retain a really big team because unless you're getting reliable revenue every month to pay those salaries, it can get really nerve wracking paying those salaries when you don't know where that revenue is going to come from.
Speaker 1:If your revenue I don't you might be able to talk me out of this mindset but like the idea that you are just getting your revenue each month from launches, from course launches or whatever, and then you're just kind of on the treadmill of having to do all of those promotions and if you don't have enough things to promote, then you're just stuck trying to do that. For me personally, I just kind of like having an evergreen coaching product that we know is getting better and better. And then my team that is servicing those students. They're being paid already from the coaching revenue and they're using a significant amount of that time their salaried time or their hourly time to help me with enhancements to the program. They're enhancing, fixing errors, they're doing research on how to make it better, and so I have a total of 10 people who are helping make the program better with every iteration, and I have the security that I can afford that.
Speaker 2:In terms of you said, maybe I can like talk you out of it. I mean, I think it's a pretty reliable model. If you've got a course business and you've got an audience, the benefit is you've got better margins when you're selling just info products and you don't have coaching, and so that's easier. If you don't have such a good month, well it's all right, because you aren't spending all that much in the first place and it's not like no course businesses have a team or anything like this, right, but it's it's definitely like the margins are better there. So and I'm I'm actually like I'm not trying to talk you out of it, I'm actually with you I think most course creators should also have a coaching side to their business. Even if you are selling low-ticket courses that people can just buy exactly as they are, you should also have a group coaching or a cohort or one-to-one coaching or some mixture of that, depending on your audience, your product, the outcome.
Speaker 2:You're trying to get people Because two things one, there's a percentage of people where they are not going to get the result with just the course because they're not going to go through and do it, and so you can serve those people better. And secondly, you can make a lot more money, because if you're selling courses already and a percentage of those people would also pay for coaching, it's normally ballpark, like 10% of people will pay 10 times as much money. It's not exactly that it depends audience to audience etc. But ballpark, which means that basically you can double the size of the business by adding in coaching as well. And so I think that's you know. I think overall it's fantastic, but that is the downside. You do now have a whole team of coaches and it's like more people to manage and more things to kind of keep under control, and that's the downside to it.
Speaker 2:But you said something interesting there. You were mentioning that you've got a significant portion of their time is actually on improving the product. So that's pretty cool. Could you elaborate a little bit on that? How does that work? How does that process work? You know, presumably they can't just go and change whatever they want to change. Does it have a system where it comes through you? Do you manage it all and send it out to what they do like? How does that work?
Speaker 1:yeah, good question, and I think that that, like, first of all, this is an assessment that you have to make. If you are currently just creating courses and selling them to an email list and that's working for you and you just want that as your lifestyle business, that's that's fine. And you're just selling that to your list, that's fine. I think that the the assessment of whether to hire a team comes down to how much do you want to work and collaborate with people. Collaborate with people. And if you're going to go ahead and hire like coaches to help make your product better and to do these things like double your revenue and stuff like that, well you may as well hire the best people possible who really know and are on the same, like an aligned mission with you on what you're trying to accomplish. And if that's what you're doing, then in any extra time they have, they could be helping you enhance the product. And so we have set up systems.
Speaker 1:I think we it was about halfway through this whole journey that I've been on, so it was about five or six years ago that we started running on Traction by Gina Wickman, so like we actually have department meetings, that they meet every single week. At first. I was in all those department meetings. One of them is like the team of coaches, talking about how we service our students, and what we do is we bring ideas and issues to solve to every one of those meetings. And then we have another one that meets on curriculum.
Speaker 1:How do we fix our curriculum, what are some enhancements to do, what are the next lessons and programs and things that we could offer to our team and those?
Speaker 1:So, basically, anyone can bring an idea to the curriculum team. Anyone can bring an idea to the coaching team and then, once it is discussed and approved by whoever's leading that currently I have a director of coaching who leads the coaching team and I currently lead the curriculum team Once it's approved, we then have, like, at this point, we have projects in Asana that just we can easily just click a button and we know that all the tasks are going to be out there for people to create the changes to the podcast episodes or whatever it may be. So it is very systematized. You want to maintain that quality standard and that control over your product standard and that control over your product, but I think you should also empower anyone who has the expertise to like bring ideas to your curriculum, to your whatever it is that you're doing, and the advantage of that also is that they then have the buy-in that they helped create this thing, and so they're more likely to be loyal and stick around as coaches too, okay I get that.
Speaker 2:so everybody meets up, they review what issues there are and what changes people might want to make. Somebody decides on OK, this is the thing that we're going to go ahead with. So maybe you in the curriculum one and whoever you said in the other meeting, and then that then gets implemented and the change gets made. And then are you presumably with all of the tracking that you're doing, you're measuring did it make the difference that we were trying to make? Did it actually make it better?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and in an ideal world we would do. For some of these changes we would do like an A-B experimental test. We don't have quite enough coaching students right now in any given cohort to do that. Most of our cohorts are around 30 students. So trying to run an experiment on you know, it's just not enough data I think.
Speaker 1:But yeah, we do track over time. Is it getting better and trying to track which types of changes are making it better. How often does it make it better, can you tell? I think it generally does. Like the simplest ones are correcting typos, fixing, adding a little bit of extra quizzing material, so like maybe students want a little more practice with subjunctives. So that gets brought to a meeting. The student is in episode 35 and doesn't have enough examples with subjunctives. We just simply add more to our database so that they can practice with more things in the software. It's pretty straightforwardly good in that case. What gets a little hairier is there's a temptation, I think, to keep adding features or keep adding assignments to lessons, and that was a big problem for a long time because again we overwhelm the students and they drop out. We've tried to keep that survey going on which lessons are the most difficult to rein in those issues.
Speaker 2:So is it ever about taking something out rather than adding something in?
Speaker 1:no-transcript.
Speaker 2:Got it Okay, all right. So you've mentioned that you have been tracking everything, you've been making a lot of improvements, and that's allowed you to increase your retention from two and a half months to seven and a half months. So that's massive, right. You've absolutely smashed it on that one. What's some of the changes that you made that allowed you to make that kind of an improvement?
Speaker 1:One of the biggest ones in the very beginning of trying to fix that specific problem was we did a full rebrand to change our marketing and we changed our messaging from we were called Accelerated Spanish, which is impossible to pronounce, messaging from we were called Accelerated Spanish, which is impossible to pronounce anyway. But we were called Accelerated Spanish and we were kind of positioning ourselves like most language learning companies do, as like this is an easy, fast way to become fluent. We completely rebranded and we call ourselves LearnCraft Spanish and we focus on the rigorous hard work of learning Spanish. So I think that right out of the gate, first of all, the rebrand did bring us in more leads because we launched a new podcast course and everything. But that helped just filter for the right people, people who actually did want to put in the work every day and were willing to. You know, not be scared Like if you promise something easy and fast for students and then they come in and they realize they actually have to get some work done. Of course they're going to churn, but that by itself brought us that.
Speaker 1:And starting to redo the curriculum doubled us from two and a half to five and then from there we've been systematically improving it month over month, using a lot of the things I've already described to get it up to the seven and a half months. A lot of the things I've already described to get it up to the seven and a half months. But one trick that I really found useful was I already mentioned the one month challenge. Of course that, like you know, gets them into the habit of doing a little bit of Spanish every day. But we still found that many of the people who then converted into coaching students would churn after a month or two, which we were like. Why is that? We found that the format shift from the one month challenge to the regular curriculum that we use with everyone was just a little bit jarring. So we actually reworked the first three weeks of the lessons to look exactly like the one month challenge, so it's just as seamless as possible so they really feel like they're getting the same stuff.
Speaker 1:Then the other thing we did while we did that project this was kind of I don't know. This was really fun, but I was just like I'm going to get really nerdy and put lessons in this for just hammering home the idea of your habits and sticking through it are what are going to get you fluent. It's not about it's not just about grammar, it's not just about learning words. I took a bunch of lessons from james clear's atomic habits and I worked them into the lessons to be like here's what you're going to do to try to get through this thing, and I even have printable habit trackers so they can put it on their wall and check off every day that they've done their assignments. That's the kind of thing where, if you really care about your students success, you might do like that. If you care about your bottom line and want to keep people for seven and a half months instead of five months, this kind of thing is an aligned goal between you and the students.
Speaker 2:I think that behavior change is the missing part of nearly all courses, training anything. So I've been working with a physiotherapist recently and I went to her because I had a slight niggle in my adductor Nothing too bad, but a slight niggle, and I've torn it before. So I was like I'll go see a physio and she gave me some stretches to do and I was like I do those stretches already. This isn't going to help. But she had a little app and it's from the company that she works for and the app has a little number that pops up on your phone, on the home screen on the app, showing how many exercises are left to do. And I'd be like I don't like having a notification showing that something's left to do, so I do all of the exercises and then it would go away.
Speaker 2:And what I found was I was not doing nearly as much stretching as I thought I was doing. I was like, oh, I've got way more flexible, much quicker than I thought was possible on this, because I just obviously been lying to myself about how much, how often, I've been doing it and it's like, oh, so the real clever thing here was not actually like do the stretches and the exercises, whatever it was like. How can, how can I get myself to do it? And part of it's because I was paying her the next week and so I needed to show that I don't know. But part was I was actually tracking it. So I love that about that kind of change.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you change the branding from this is quick and easy to this is difficult and hard, and that improved your retention, great. Did it have any downsides for the marketing? Because I imagine it would do. People like to hear about something quick and easy. Not so many people want to hear about something difficult and hard. So did you find you had less people signing up initially for the chat? Were you doing the challenge back then when you had that? Was there any downsides when you made that change?
Speaker 1:The nice thing is that since it was already called a challenge, I mean challenge doesn't mean. What does challenge mean? It means something that's difficult. So that was pretty smooth. We had about the same number of people coming through the challenge.
Speaker 1:One of the difficult things to track is that we did all of our opt-ins kind of shifted over to the new branding.
Speaker 1:All of our opt-ins kind of shifted over to the new branding and with the new podcast, which grew to a similar size as the old podcast in terms of number of downloads and stuff like that, but since it was newer it got a lot more email opt-ins in those first few months.
Speaker 1:So it's really hard for us to track to A-B test, like if I could tell you like I can say one thing like we definitely got a lot more email opt-ins from the new podcast than we got from the old podcast back in its heyday. So we have a ton more. And part of that, I think, is just being a little more savvy on how to get people from the podcast into our email list. In every single lesson we basically say there's free flashcards that go with this, you can opt in for free, and then when they opt in for free. They have the opportunity to join our next one month challenge. So it's a little hard to track what kind of change it made, but I do suspect that one big difference is most language learning materials out there do sell themselves as quick and easy or fun, and by shifting away from that I think that we have found a small but serious niche of people who are willing to spend money, and so that actually has worked out to our benefit, even in the opt-ins Okay.
Speaker 2:I want to take a slightly different shift now and talk through your funnel from top to bottom. So we've touched on it throughout these different areas. So the top of the funnel for you is your podcast. Let's start with that. How many downloads a month do you get on the podcast? You said you got two now an old one and a new one.
Speaker 1:Yes, the old one we're deprecating. The old one gets I'm just running the numbers right now the old one gets about 15,000 a month. The new one in the last month has gotten 120,000. And bear in mind that this is a daily podcast, so it comes out five days a week, so each given episode is only a few thousand downloads, but that's thousands and thousands of opportunities for people to opt in.
Speaker 2:Nice, all right, cool. So that's the top of funnel, and then what's the next step? The email list. It sounds like. Get them onto the email list.
Speaker 1:Yeah, within the email list, so we get a new. New is that number. I knew you were going to ask me this stuff, so I pulled it all up about 350 a week. So let's look at that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, about 1300 a month, okay, cool so 1300 a month getting onto the email list. And then your challenge is your main conversion tool how many people join your challenge each? You do that every month.
Speaker 1:You said live we have gone back and forth. We used to do it every month and we would get one 100 to 300 a month. We decided when we started this cohort program, instead of just trying to, you know, we were doing the one month challenge and selling them into coaching directly, which was not going. But when we, like, started selling them into this seamless cohort program, we were like, ooh, this is going really well. Let's actually pair the challenge back to every other month because that way we know that we have enough people each time to get them into a challenge. All of that to say, like we're going back and forth between that, whether we have enough to get enough in a challenge each month. But the latest challenge numbers are let's see here yeah, we tend to have, on big months we have about 400. And on low months we have about 200.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, cool. And then, how many of those people? What's the next step after the challenge? I think you said get on a phone call is that right?
Speaker 1:they get on a webinar actually. So there's a video halfway through the challenge that warns them or that it's like, hey, if you want to keep this going, there's another program that'll keep going. It's a coaching program and then that week I have a webinar with them. Between the video, the webinar, the fact that they only see it if they get to that point in the challenge, basically we convert about seven and a half percent from the challenge into the cohort program and so, based on that number, we can see how many people we need in a challenge in order to have the critical mass of students to run a cohort, because it's only worth it after a certain number. But yeah, about seven and a half percent. Our best converting was about nine percent.
Speaker 2:Do they have to go on to the webinar in order to get into the coaching?
Speaker 1:They don't, and there's a replay of the webinar. I just do it because I think it increases the engagement enough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no, totally agree, yeah, but so you've got the webinar, and then you've got the replay of the webinar, and then, and then what? There's a series of emails promoting the offer directly, or how's that work? We?
Speaker 1:tell them they can only get into it if they pass the final exam of the one month challenge. And so we have, at the at the end of like every lesson for a whole week, we're like make sure to pass this weekend's exam, make sure to pass the exam. Like giving them all the resources they need to try to get to that level so they get like really hyped about it. And again we're filtering for people who are willing to try something really difficult.
Speaker 2:So seven and a half percent of people who start the challenge get into the cohort. Is that correct? Okay, cool. How many people finish the challenge?
Speaker 1:Finish the challenge, get into the cohort. Is that correct? Okay, cool, how many people finish the challenge? Finish the challenge.
Speaker 2:I don't have the numbers on that. Okay, I should, and so you're currently at what's your, what's your overall revenue in the business.
Speaker 1:We're at 120,000 a month right now.
Speaker 2:Okay, what does that convert to? How many students? Is that we have about 400 coaching students, 400 coaching students All right, nice, and they're all paying that 319? Or have there been different price points? You've tried out?
Speaker 1:There are a few different price points. Some are paying 300 from when we first started this cohort thing. Anyone who's still around is paying 300 a month. Basically, whatever people pay for the cohort, we then sell them into coaching for a special price so they can keep that for however long they want to, and many of them stay for years, so that works out for us. There's another of coaching where they can get two calls a week for about $500 a month, but we only sell that to students who are really willing to work harder in between those coaching calls, because we really find that we want. We don't want our coaches to babysit our students. We want them to be doing more work in between. So we have, I think, about 20 students on that tier. For the most part, uh, coaching is between 200 and 400 or 299 and 400 a month with one coaching call.
Speaker 2:It's funny you mentioned there about babysitting. I was chatting with my trainer the other day and so he's based in Portugal. I used to work with him in person when I was living out there and I carried on working with him online and so I pay him every month and he gives me a training program and I do it and I give him an update every week on what got done, ask him for feedback, this kind kind of thing, and he said it's quite different work with me because most of his clients are in person and he feels like he's kind of babysitting them. And I was like I I've realized that part of what helps me to succeed at doing stuff is having a coach who I know I'm going to see once a week or report to once a week or something like this, where not doing the work is going to be more embarrassing than the pain of doing. The pain of being embarrassed will be higher than the pain of doing the work.
Speaker 2:And I'm like, when I realized this, I was like I thought I was a grown up, I thought I could just be motivated and do the thing and I'm like, yeah, but it's all right, you know, it's like just pay the coach, it's fine. This is like, this is their job, this is a thing, this exists. You know, I think tony robbins said he's got coach for like every part of his life and he's pretty successful. So I'm like, all right, fine, that's just what I do. So I realized I now have, like I don't know, five different coaches. If I've got a bass teacher, the phys physio, fitness coach, therapist, to kind of make sure that I do all the things I'm supposed to do to keep my mindset good, and then I've probably got something else as well, I don't know. Oh yeah, youtube coach as well. I'm like, oh my God, ok, I better do all these things.
Speaker 1:You meet with them once a week, right.
Speaker 2:And then you have the homework. In between, I think we have a few students who think that they can just pay for more sessions with coaches and then they'll get more done, and that's typically not the case. In the show notes, the description or the pinned comment below, we have helped dozens of people more than double their revenue in 90 days and helped seven people to reach seven figures through this process. So book a call using the link in the show notes, the description, the pinned comment, or go to datadrivenmarketingco slash call and we'll have a chat. Yeah, yes, the doing the homework is the crucial part that you actually have to do. Yeah, yeah, okay, I'm going to try and summarize some of what we've gone through so far. So, because of your, an approach that you have taken that you think is is underutilized certainly, so. Maybe some other people should be doing it. Take it with a. You know, make your own decision here is really focusing on being the best in the world of what you're doing, and there's benefits of that in terms of you help out the students. They succeed better. You feel proud about that. It also helps your marketing. It also means that it's like you're attracting a niche of people who maybe others aren't attracting because you're focusing on like you're going to have to do the work. This is how it's actually going to be, but by doing that, you've managed to grow the business, improve retention, be able to make bolder marketing claims, improve your sales calls all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 2:Here you are, therefore, and that fits with the fact that you're giving away the course for free, and because you're giving away the course for free and selling the coaching, it has meant that you are getting a lot more word of mouth, because people are very happy to share the course that's for free, where they might not point people directly to you.
Speaker 2:Also, because you've got all these coaches, you're using the coaches to improve the product, which is like a whole nother level of how to grow the business by having other people involved in improving the product as well. You've got all this tracking that you do and that allows you to see what step in the process needs improving, and then you're using traction processes from gino wickman to then figure out how you're going to make changes, make those updates, and doing that and rebranding allowed you to increase your retention from two and a half months up to seven and a half months. That's allowed. You said about every two or three years. You've doubled the business and you're now I think you think you said 20,000 a month. Ballpark, the funnel is podcast at the top, into email list, into challenge every other month with a webinar as one of the conversion tools and sales calls I think you said sales calls as well as part of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, evergreen sales calls. People can find a way to do that and I'll take them when I can.
Speaker 2:So if the people who go through the cohort, are you doing all of those sales calls with them? Are you doing sales calls with each person who wants to go on to sorry, everyone who goes to the challenge, who's interested in joining the cohort? Are you personally doing a sales call with each person?
Speaker 1:We do a webinar for them, okay, but once they get to the end of the six months, they do get a one-on-one call with me and I sell half of them into coaching after that.
Speaker 2:Okay, got it, and so there's not sales calls with anybody else apart from you. But it's just that most people are getting in through the webinar rather than through calls. Okay, cool, I thought that sounded like a lot of calls that you might be doing, but that makes much more sense now. Okay, and so you've got the webinar, followed up by emails. You're also within the lessons. You're promoting that they have to qualify to be allowed to join that cohort and therefore they need to do all of the work, and that means that people are actually finishing and all of the work and then getting the chance to qualify to go on into your coaching program. Man, that's quite sophisticated business you've built there, timothy. That's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1:It's been a long, long journey, but it's.
Speaker 2:Is there anything else that you particularly want to share with the audience that you think is like a useful lesson that you've picked up?
Speaker 1:I think the one common thread of this whole thing is I just read a lot. I read so many business books. I read a lot of business articles and a lot of psychology and learning stuff as well. So one of my favorite I mean I got into this thing because I love learning. I started this as a hobby. I love learning, talking about learning, sharing what I've learned about learning, and what's been really fun is taking what I know about pedagogy and evidence on how we learn and what is effective, what is just folklore, and I've actually been turning that into a training program for our own coaches so that they can understand the principles and teach. They can teach Spanish in ways that are in line with that and they can help enhance the programs in line with that. So I think my biggest takeaway is just, if you love learning, hopefully that means that you keep getting better, and that's better for your team and for your students as well.
Speaker 2:And this was awesome. I really really appreciate your time coming on and sharing everything you've learned. Thanks so much, timothy, really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, thanks, as always, for listening, and we will see you next time, stop.