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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
209 The Secret to Finding Your True Audience
🔥 Work With Me - https://datadrivenmarketing.co/done-for-you
Today I'm talking with Nate Terepka, who runs Piano with Nate on YouTube. He's got 118,000 subscribers and he's getting nearly half a million views a month teaching adults how to play piano using a chord-based approach.
This conversation was brilliant because Nate figured out something that so many course creators miss - he discovered his real audience wasn't who he thought it was at all. When he started the channel during COVID, he was making tutorials for Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift, thinking teenagers would be his main audience. But when he launched his first course and actually looked at who was buying, he had this massive realization. 90% of his sales were coming from just 10% of his content - the Beatles and David Bowie tutorials. His real buyers were retired adults, not teens.
I love how he discovered this. He just got so excited about making his first few sales that he went into his email system and looked up each person to see which video they'd found him through. That simple curiosity completely changed his business. We talked about the tripwire funnel he's building now, what he learned from doing a business audit with Josip, and why his course buyers have an 85% email open rate, which is just mental.
If you're in the music space or you're teaching anything and you're not totally sure who your actual buyers are, this episode will show you exactly how to figure it out with data you probably already have.
🎹 Check out Nate's work:
🔗 https://pianowithnate.com
🔗 https://youtube.com/@pianowithnate
🔗 https://instagram.com/pianowithnate
90% of my core sales were coming from the 10% of song tutorials. I saw those people come through and I was like, who are these people? I was just really, just really excited and interested. I looked each of them up, confident that you're taking the right action is so important for motivation. I didn't have the motivation to actually build out an online course, which was a lot of work. I didn't have that until I had an audience and I had like a real felt sense of people want this. And if I make it, people are here and they will buy it. Once I had that excitement, it was still a lot of work, but I was excited doing the work. I've had a lot of motivation. He was looking at that and it was just like, this email that you send to people who buy your course like a month later has like an 85% open rate. And I was like, yeah? And he's like, these people love you. Like they would they want to hear from you and they are interested in more from you.
SPEAKER_03:Hello, and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We are here to get winning facts. My name is John Antwerp. Today's guest is Nathan Rap. Now, Nate is a music educator and the founder of Piano with Nate, which is a YouTube channel and an online course dedicated to teaching adults how to play piano accompaniment using a chord based approach. Now, before launching Piano with Nate and relocating out to Fortnite in Oregon in 2020, Nate spent a decade teaching private piano and guitar list to kids in Brooklyn and New York. And during the time he also founded Echo City Music Lab, which is a brick-and-mortar music school that was short-lived due to COVID. Now Nate believes that learning piano should be joyful and personal. His teaching helps adults to reconnect with music by playing songs they love without the pressure or perfectionism that came with childhood lessons. Nate, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's really good to be here. So tell us a little bit more about what's the approach that you're taking when you're teaching piano. How is it different to what anybody else is doing?
SPEAKER_00:So uh speaking about the YouTube channel now, Piano with Nate, because I I taught in a lot of different ways, including a lot of more traditional ways when I was teaching uh kids. But uh I teach with a chord-based approach. Do you play any music? I play bass, so there's no chords. Okay, but you're uh if you're playing rock music on bass, you're probably following a chord-based approach. Following the chords, yeah, yeah, yeah. So mostly playing playing the roots of the chords, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So um I teach piano the way that a lot of um casual players will learn acoustic guitar or something where you learn to play a G chord or a D chord, and then maybe you learn a Bob Dylan song, and it's just a couple of chords and you learn a strumming pattern. Um, so you can pick up songs and play and sing along. So you're generally accompanying your your voice. Uh a lot of people are familiar with that on guitar, but piano tends to have a more um sort of traditional lens that a lot of people view it through in terms of what they were exposed to in childhood lessons. Um and on my YouTube channel, I teach a chord-based approach where you learn you learn the chords and then you can play um Beatles songs, or a lot of my audience is um older adults, uh retired folks who are picking up piano again as a hobby. And so my method makes that kind of um casual playing uh accompaniment to to sing your favorite pop and rock songs really easy, and I I sidestep traditional notation entirely.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, okay, interesting. I had a really interesting experience. I've got a a friend who plays piano. He also plays ukulele and is learning. Do you know what the U bass is? No. So it's a acoustic bass and it has got massive thick strings without that much tension to them. And it looks like rubbery. Yeah. Okay, yeah. And it looks kind of like a ukulele and kind of like a bass.
SPEAKER_00:I have played one of those in a guitar store once.
SPEAKER_03:They're awesome. It was yeah, it was a very confusing experience. I tried playing a muse song on it, and I was like, these strings take so long to get back to where they started that I can't actually play fast enough to play to play this. Yeah. I'm sure I could get the hang of it, but like anyway, I was playing with this guy, right? And so he's used to playing songs on the piano. And he would play the the in some, he he kind of had learnt to play the bass element with his left hand and then the melody with his right hand. Oh, cool, yeah. And so then I was playing bass with him, and I was like, well, we're we we realize that I'm basically he and I are both basically playing the same part. So he's then having to he's trying to learn, okay, what what's the other part that I can play with my left hand? And I'm like, this just blew my mind, the idea of like playing two different bits with the different hands and what have you.
SPEAKER_00:So that is a big the hand coordinating two hands doing separate things is uh definitely a challenge for people on piano.
SPEAKER_03:This is too much, it's too much for my brain, Robbie. You just need to you crack on and do your thing, and I'm just gonna play the bass, right? Okay. But tell me about that. One of the things you mentioned there was that you a lot of your audience is people who are retired. And there's a lot of people in the course business where that is true. And it's something we don't talk about all that often, actually. A lot of people teaching music, that's really common. Like I had a friend who was teaching guitar and he was teaching blues guitar, I think. Yeah, blues on electric guitar. And he said, when you looked at his testimonial videos, it was like it was all the same guy. They all had grey ponytails with receding hairline and a grey goatee. And it's like they're just they're all that kind of a fit. And I got a friend who's teaching banjo, and most of his audience is is retired people as well. So it's like clearly that is an audience where like they want to learn music and learn languages and kind of start all these kind of hobbies. Did you how long did it take you to find out that was the case?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it took me a year or two. Um so I when I started the YouTube channel, it was a whim uh during COVID, like lockdown. Uh I was I had started that music school, yeah, and I was still thinking of that as my main business that I was going to uh either make it through the pandemic or turn it into more of a virtual thing. Um and that was mostly teen teenagers and preteens. I was doing a lot of Billy Eilish songs and Taylor Swift songs with them. Uh and when I started the YouTube channel, I just thought, well, maybe if I put some piano tutorials on YouTube, it'll something will happen. I didn't really have a plan. I just had this little seedling of an idea that it could become something cool. Um and so I started my first probably years worth of tutorials were of contemporary songs that were popular with like teenagers. Um and at one point I did a David Bowie song. I did Space Odd Oddity. And uh I did a Beatles song. I think I did maybe Penny Lane. Um those songs I had done with some kids too, they had some popularity with with teenagers. So I was still kind of thinking along those lines. Um but those videos took off a little bit more than the others, uh, which I found interesting because I thought, you know, the biggest pop songs in the world are gonna get the most views. They also had the most competition for them. But uh, and I just started seeing comments uh the that were just of a different tone and were um clearly coming from from older folks that were excited about the learning these these songs. Um, you know, fast forward, it wasn't until like two years in I had already started to lean into that a little bit, but I I made my first course and started selling the course. Um I everybody on my email list, I know what song they found me on YouTube through because if they download the cheat sheet for that song, they're tagged in my system. So what I noticed as soon as I started selling courses was um that you know, 90% of my course sales were coming from the 10% of song tutorials that were like the Beatles or David Bowie, as opposed to all these other up songs. And it made it made sense to me, um, of course, and then I think I just started to lean into that more, and then it was just a uh self-ful fulfilling thing that those were the types of people that were finding me, those were the types of people that were commenting and requesting songs. Um, and at this point I just that's that's my audience primarily.
SPEAKER_03:What made you think to check where those course sales had come from? Was that something that was surfaced automatically and you just spotted it? Or did you think, right, let me go back and analyze this and figure out who are these people who are buying the course?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's I'm trying to remember. Uh you know, the when I first published my course, uh, this was 2022, it was such a novel thing to me to to have worked on this course and then to be making course sales. Like the first you know, notification that comes through from Stripe, it was such an adrenaline rush. Uh and I didn't sell a ton. I did a really heavily discounted launch, and I probably sold over the course of that launch, uh, like two days, I probably sold 10 of them. After that, it was a trickle of like maybe once or twice a month for a while. But so there wasn't a whole lot of people who bought, but I was I saw those people come through and I was like, who are these people? I was just really um just really excited and interested. And so I think I just I looked each of them up on active campaign just to be like, what how did how'd these people find me? Um and I I think I just naturally noticed that, oh, they're all people that have done my one Beatles tutorial and not my you know five Billy Eilish tutorials.
SPEAKER_03:If you're listening to this and you run a music course business and you don't know how old your audience is, I would seriously consider doing a survey or looking at some of the data or messaging with some of them or talking to people who bought the course, or if you haven't sold a course, if you're not started creating courses yet and you just got an uh you got an audience on YouTube though, find some way of figuring this out because this is a recurring theme that I've been noticing a lot, and I think it's it's worth trying to figure out and kind of lean into. Um, I love that you figure that out because that it wasn't wasn't guaranteed at that point that you would figure that out. Like it's not like a not like everybody would think, oh, let me go and do an analysis of like who it is. But you happen to see it by just, oh my fucking god, I made some course sales. This is cool. Who is these, who are these people? And then yeah, yeah, yeah. Love that. Okay. So now that you've been uh running the YouTube channel for for about five years, how where are you at in terms of size of that? How many uh subscribers you got, how many views do you get a month?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I am at like 118,000 now. I hit that 100,000 milestone back in July. Um and I get Congratulations. Thank you. I get a little less than 500,000 views uh month.
SPEAKER_03:That's nice, though, isn't it? That's a lot more than because there's the relationship between number of subscribers and number of views is very much not what was the right what's the right uh coupled. Yeah, yeah. Like it's it doesn't it doesn't if one goes up, doesn't mean the other one goes up. If you look between different channels, some people will have a million subscribers or two million subscribers and be getting like 200,000 views a month. And others will have, like you, you know, like hundred and something thousand subscribers and then nearly half a million views a month. And it's not even due to like the number of videos that people are making, just like sometimes people haven't done as much work on it in a long time. Sometimes those subscribers have built up over years and not all of them actually pay attention anymore to the to the channel.
SPEAKER_00:Right. I think that uh subscriber count is sort of a vanity metric these days. Um and at some point YouTube started showing people what the algorithm knew they wanted rather than what they thought they wanted based on what they subscribed to. Yeah. Um so yeah, you can have hardly any subscribers and have a video that's performing really well, and YouTube will just push it out to everyone. Or you can have, you know, 10 million subscribers and make a dud and YouTube won't show it to people.
SPEAKER_03:What's your kind of frequency now? Are you how often are you doing a new video?
SPEAKER_00:Uh I've been doing a song tutorial every other week for the last couple of months. My um which was about my frequency when I started, and then about a two years in, I hired a VA, virtual assistant video editor. Um, and actually for a minute I was doing two a week. Uh, and then my pace for the last year or two has been one a week. And th these are song tutorials. So sometimes I'll do like a general lesson, sometimes I'll do a bigger project, you know, seven mistakes self-taught beginners make or something like that. But I have sort of a formula for okay, I'm gonna learn a song this week, I'm gonna make a you know chart for it, and I'm gonna teach it, and you know, there's sort of like a template for the way the video works with the playthrough at the end, my editor knows how to kind of crank them out. Um my pace has been one of those a week. Uh I have slowed down slightly because I think two reasons. One is um as the channel's grown, I've taken each video more seriously. Um just I feel like there is a bigger audience, because there is, and uh you know, I do a performance at the end, I play and sing through the song, and I think I scrutinize myself more. Um not not in a bad way, but I just I care a little bit more about getting it right. Um and so they t they it it kind of crept up on me, but I realized these are these take me longer now. Right. I can't I can't I when I look back on 2023 or whatever when I was doing two a week, I was like, I don't think I could do that now. Just based based on the care I put into each one. So there's that, and then also I've been I've had these big projects with um trying to develop courses and work on other things in my business. Um and the amount of time one tutorial a week was taking, I just felt like I was kind of on a treadmill keeping up with that and having that be really high quality, and I was having trouble getting ahead on the bigger picture business growth things. Yeah, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_03:Um Have you ever tried doing like bundles of past song tutorials as a new video? Like here's 10 spooky Halloween ones or or whatever, you know, like but take all the ones you've done from previous years to and and put them together. I'm not a YouTube expert. I was just talking to somebody in the music space who had done this recently, who is teaching an instrument, and someone suggested it to him and he tried it, and it seemed to work pretty well. And I was like, Well, that's fucking clever, because you've already recorded all of those, and then you get to make a new video out of it.
SPEAKER_00:So as opposed to putting them in a playlist or something like taking the raw videos and editing them together in a new video.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so cut the intros out, cut the outros out, put them all, you know, just do one big intro or one intro for the whole lot and then put five together or something.
SPEAKER_00:I have not done that. That's interesting. Um I'd be curious to see uh the example that you're talking about. I wonder if um I wonder how long each of those videos originally was. Like I think if I was doing shorter like quick, so each one is long. Each one is like a half hour or between twenty and thirty minutes. Um I wonder if that would be that would be a long video, yeah. I did do one video that I conceived of kind of in a way that that makes it like with what you're talking about, that was like five songs that use the same four chords. It was positioned at like kind of total beginners. It was just really easy. Um taught the four chords at the beginning, and then there was just like five sections for each song that that utilized those chords. Um that video has done quite well. That's one of my best performing videos.
SPEAKER_03:That's interesting. That's proper beginner level aimed, then, isn't it? Okay, like you can get, if you learn these four, you can get all of this, much more leverage. So you can now learn a bunch of songs. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. How what kind of level do you find your audience is at? Are you attracting a lot of people that are complete beginners? Or is it people who've already been playing a little while and they're kind of but they don't like the style and they want to try your style, or is it as homemade?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's it's mostly people that have played a bit. So my I'd say the level that I arrange my songs at, and I usually give options within a video for sort of you can make it a little bit simpler if you need, but it's sort of like late beginner, early intermediate. It's hard to define this stuff. But um it's typically someone who um already, you know, maybe they took piano lessons as a kid and then haven't played in many years, um, but now they they've started learning songs again and they're kind of using a chord-based approach. It's people whose fingers already sort of know their ways around the keys. Um on a base, you know, they've they've played a bit and they know how to find chords and so they are looking up they're finding me through these song tutorials they're looking up.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. They're already song name plus chords or something like this.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Yeah. Um and there's a lot of variation within that, and it you know, it does make it hard to design courses because um you know, sometimes I think it would be easier if I was just targeting total beginners, and there's the promise of the course was just learn piano. You know, you've never played piano before. We're gonna start at the beginning. Here's the here's the method. Um so I've had to sort of position my courses to help these people uh be like, okay, so you already know chords, we're gonna but you're kind of stuck playing simple rhythms and we're gonna teach you how to get these different tricks and ways to embellish them into your muscle memory. Um and that that has felt like sort of the most helpful thing, the a helpful next step for the kinds of people that are doing these piano tutorial videos. But um, it has been a bit challenging where, you know, some people enter the course and they're like, Oh, I already know a lot of this stuff. And some people are like, this is too fast for me. So it's that's still a bit of a puzzle that I'm trying to sort out in terms of um, you know, I have like a beginner's crash course that does start from the beginning, um, and then trying to get the tone, tone right for because I do I want to have you know foundational technique and stuff at the beginning of my main course just because it is a uh a hole that a lot of people have, even if they think they're more advanced. It's it's actually something really foundational, holding them back. So it's like, how do I present that material to them because it might benefit them without them being like, oh, like I'm a I've been playing for a long time. This is for total beginners. That's that's one of my biggest challenges is trying to pin down the the level of these people.
SPEAKER_03:Interesting. Uh going back to kind of the the combination between or the the point between the YouTube audience and then starting to actually make sales, you mentioned something that I think is really important, that you do a cheat sheet for each of these videos. And I think in the music space, this is one of the is it's like this is the system. This is the way to do it in order to get a good number of people onto your onto your email list. If you're teaching a song, you then have the cheat sheet that goes with it. Can you describe what yours looks like for one of these songs that you're teaching?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it'll be uh it'll have lyrics to the song and it'll have the the chords. Um and so it makes it much easier for people to follow along.
SPEAKER_03:And do you know what kind of percentage of people who view a video will then opt into that?
SPEAKER_00:I don't know the number. Um I would guess that uh a large percentage of the people who really use the video to learn a song will get it because it makes it much easier. And I I really, you know, uh encourage them to use it when I don't know about percentage of of views. I I don't really have a sense of how many people just watch part of my videos or you know, uh yeah, like what percentage of of the view count represents someone who really took the time and used the video to learn a song rather than just kind of clicking around on YouTube.
SPEAKER_03:But yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand what you mean. Yeah. What w what I found in terms of where we have tracked this in the music space, it's been between about two and four percent of people uh of of views of the video, which then will convert to downloads. Now, somebody might have viewed the video multiple times, somebody will only have seen the first 10 seconds, whatever. But that's kind of the general percentage, which is high, which is really solid. If you look at general opt-in rates from YouTube to an email list in other spaces where you don't have such a perfect fit between what's in the video and why you should download this this uh guide, it can tend to be more like kind of 1% if they're doing a decent job, maybe 2%. And the music space, you can get like 2% to kind of 4%, which is great. You know, you get a very high opt-in rate, high bigger email list.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that would be really easy to find out. Um I d I have never thought to look at that metric. But yeah.
SPEAKER_03:What's the um you recently started working with Josep, who, as listeners of the podcast, will know, is uh who's our uh head of funnel strategy, he's been on the podcast lots of times before. Um, absolute funnel wizard. What's some of the stuff that you've been planning out with him that you're gonna make changes to in your business?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so first order of business is a tripwire offer, which I am working on right now. Um hoping to just make that happen in the next couple weeks. Because that was the biggest thing that it just never occurred to me. And and once we kind of laid it out, it's like, well, I'm leaving a lot of money on the table. Um, or or once I do this, it'll probably generate just you know, fair amount of extra money. So it's so then it's just like, okay, but like let's let's let's make it happen.
SPEAKER_03:Anyone listening who doesn't know what a trip bar is, could you could you talk them through what that's that is that you're working on?
SPEAKER_00:So that would be an offer after someone that gets presented immediately after someone opts in for a free thing. Yeah. Um so I have these, you know, 200 something uh different individual forms that go with different videos of mine that are cheat sheets for the videos, and you um, and that's how I've been collecting email addresses, you click on uh the link for the chords and lyrics chart or for the um cheat sheet for the music theory video, and then you enter your email address and it sends you uh a link to your email. Uh and the way I've had it is just once you submit, it goes, it just goes to a page that says, you know, thank you, blah, blah, blah. You know, it may take a minute or two to arrive. And then I follow up with uh an email sequence once, you know, over the following weeks. But so now we're going to have that page redirect to an offer immediately, which you know, now that we are planning it, it's like, man, I why didn't I think of that? There's there's like that there's thousands of people every month that are interacting with me in this way. Um, and so we're gonna do a like a$27 PDF vault, because I think a pain point for the people who learn a lot of stuff with me and watch a lot of my videos is individually requesting these resources through these sheets. So it'll be, you know, you pay once$27, you just get access to this Dropbox folder with all these PDFs in it. Perfect.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, one of our best performing uh client tripwires was almost exactly the same as that. It was in the spirituality space. If you downloaded five free guided meditations, which was their free lead magnet, then the next page you were offered their meditation vault where you would get every meditation guided meditation they'd ever recorded, which to start out was 27 of them for$27. But now it's like, you know, 43 for 20. But it's like, okay, it doesn't have to be the same number of things as the same number of dollars. And it converted so well because the fit was so perfect between the thing that they have requested for free and the thing that you're offering that's paid. You know that people who download this free thing are interested in that type of thing, and now you're offering them just lots more of them for a very small amount of money. So it was a that perfect fit meant it it um is part of the reason it converted really well. So that's a good chance that'll work really well for you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and then also that allows us to have a bump offer on the checkout for that PDF vault that'll be uh for my main piano course uh with a with a discount. Um and it'll probably be the same discount that I typically offer automatically through like a deadline funnels type thing, um, you know, a couple weeks later in the email sequence, if they've just subscribed to my email through getting this chart. But um yeah, I think presenting that offer to them at the moment that they're the most excited about learning piano when they've just taken this action to download the the resources for a song that they're sitting down to learn. Um yeah, I'm excited to implement it and see how it goes.
SPEAKER_03:Nice. So if you're listening to this and you're like, man, I want to work on one of these tripwire funnels, how does this all work? I've recorded a few podcast episodes about this with Yosip. So episode 102, Exploring Tripwire Funnels. And then episode uh 132, how to optimize your tripwire funnel, which is that one's from April 2024. And those two are going to take you through everything you need to know, or certainly to get started with understanding how this tripwire funnel works, exactly where it's going to go, what page is going to look like, how to tweak it, etc. etc. Um, if you want to get a tripwire funnel in place, I would thoroughly recommend it. And to give you an idea of the kind of conversion rates that you tend to see on these tripwire funnels, it's really high. So it's about three to maybe 10% of people who opt in for the free thing will then buy the tripwire. And obviously the price is low, we're talking about$27. So the amount of money per customer is not massive, but that's increased quite a lot by having, like you're saying, you're going to set up, an order bump and an upsell and having that kind of stuff in place. And it's also means that you're going to get more money long-term. Because if someone buys something from you and they have a good experience, they're way more likely to buy from you in future. We found that buyers are about 20 times more likely to buy again than non-buyers are to buy something in the first place in any given promotion, which is like, you know, there's a massive, massive difference between the two.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and Joseph had the idea to um when you buy the PDF vault, you know, my inclination probably would have just been like they get an email with the link to the vault. But he suggested no, it should actually be a product that is part of your members area that you log in. And you log in, and I'm right now working on a uh like a logo for it, and you it it appears as if it's uh a a course. And then you click on it, you get the link, and I'll I'll probably make a video talking about how to get the most of it or something. But that brings them into my world. They'll, you know, if they just get the PDF alt, they will have a a membership, uh login, and you know, if if they're in the member area, there's a little promotion of here's these other courses you could add from you know from piano with Nate. And so yeah, I I'm excited.
SPEAKER_03:Nice. All right, cool. So that's first, that's top on your list. What else have you got in your plan to to work on now?
SPEAKER_00:So the other immediate order of business is just executing on Black Friday. The starting to work with Yozip uh was well timed. Um and so I've been working on another product, a smaller product that is a piano pattern toolbox that is uh collection of 40-something common uh piano accompaniment rhythm styles that go with different genres or different time signatures or tempos, and it's all organized, and each one has a little uh short lesson video with a chart and also links to what song tutorials on YouTube I've done that use that rhythm. Um, so I've been developing that and I'm sort of crunching to finish that in time for Black Friday, and then Yosip is helping me with the email uh promotion strategy and um doing a Cyber Monday and bundling it in different ways with my um other courses and and also just offering it standalone to people who are already members of my main course. So uh my Black Friday plan is a lot more elaborate this year than it has been in past years, and that is in large part because of Yosip's guidance. So right now we're just sort of Sort of grinding on those two things, the getting the tripwire out as soon as possible, and then trying to have a great Black Friday. Uh then longer term, we've got some some sort of bigger projects. I've been for a long time, I've been designing a reshoot and like my main course, piano core breakthroughs. I made it in 2022. I've learned a lot since then. My production has gotten much better. I've gotten so much feedback. In general, people really love it, but I hear certain types of negative feedback um that like line up with one another enough that I'm like, okay, there are these kind of issues with the with the the program or things that I can make better.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um and so that's been this there's uh uh overhaul that I want to make happen. And it still remains to be seen, like if I'm going to break it into multiple products or how exactly I'm gonna position it. And um I think Yoship's starting to help me think outside the my own box with it a little bit. Um and I think Yeah, I think once we get past Black Friday, thinking about uh my overall strategy with with my suite of course products is gonna be um on the table. And I think we'll probably play around with a uh membership option. Because right now I I sell my courses as just one one-time purchase, lifetime access. Yeah. Um, but as I as I have more products, I think maybe some sort of a membership would make sense. Um the other thing we are talking about, um, and I got excited about this. I think listening to one of your podcasts, you were talking, it might have been about a uh a musician you were you're speaking of who did some sort of high-ticket coaching thing. That it was essentially private lessons. Um but uh I, you know, I burnt out on private lessons. That's what I, you know, I was I did that for many years, and then even after um after I had started the YouTube channel, I was still teaching virtually all the kids that were in my music school, and I was doing like 30 or 40 Zoom lessons a week, and I just burnt out, got to a point where it felt like I was losing money teaching lessons because my YouTube my YouTube channel was starting to do really well, and I felt like if I didn't have to teach five kids today and like prep their lessons, I could just have this whole day to work on my YouTube business, and that would be probably make me more money. Um and so yeah, but I do miss the one-on-one interaction. Um and I think given my audience and reputation now through YouTube, I could charge quite a bit more than I ever did and position it differently. Um and I think there's there's people that would really, you know, I get I get a lot of emails from people that are like, could you do this song? Could I like commission you to do a custom tutorial for this song? And it's like I can't I can't help all these people. Um But I you know, I think there are some people out there that really have have learned a lot of songs with me and uh would be happy to, you know, pay enough to make it worth my time to to have that to do that one-on-one super personalized uh lesson experience. And um I do miss it a little bit.
SPEAKER_03:So yeah, my experience in terms of the the pricing that we have seen people be able to charge in the music space with more bespoke, like the one-to-one lessons, plus plus when you also include like access to all of your your courses that you've you know, access to everything that we've got, plus the one-on-one stuff, has been about ten thousand dollars a year. Now, some people are managing to do that without it being the course creator, the founder, who's actually doing the coaching. They're then hiring coaches and what have you as well. That's not what you're talking about. But that is a thing that is possible if you've got here's the system, and here is a person who is an expert in my system and is also going to be teaching you. Like Scott's based lessons. Let me find um the episode with Scott. It's from January 4th this year, uh last year, sorry, uh building a five million dollar music education business. Scott talked about that in that episode.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. When you say$10,000 a year, is that for weekly lessons? I think it was. I think it was, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so probably close to$200 a lesson or so.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that kind of ballpark, right?$250-ish. Um and I've seen that a number of times, that kind of pricing. So I've seen it with uh uh teaching musicality with musical you. Again, that's not the founder who is doing the coaching there. Uh seen it with uh Jack from um Banjo Banjo Skills.
SPEAKER_00:I think that's who I think that's who um you were speaking about on the podcast I listened to.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah. I I uh he's uh he's a friend who I kind of um I chat with quite a bit about kind of what he's up to, and so I kind of uh help him help him a little bit with some of what he's working on. He he's did this recently, six months for$5,000. Um and actually did an episode with him before he started doing that coaching was April 17th, 2025. The funnel that makes this banjo player$5,000 a month. If anyone wants to go check that out, but I've talked about it yeah a few times on the podcast recently. Um yeah, and he basically took that pricing from I told him this is what other people are charging. He's like, all right, yeah, if they're doing 10 grand for a year, I'll do five grand for six months and see and it worked great, you know. It made him a uh a lot of extra um revenue. Obviously, there is then it's it's not a scalable thing. You've got to then do that yourself. So you've got to limit your time to like what you're actually happy with with doing, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. I'm a little little hesitant to jump back in the into the fray of those one-on-one lessons, um but just in terms of my time and energy. But uh yeah, I'm really definitely down to explore it because I I do miss the one-on-one connection. And I learn a lot in private lessons with people, which I've completely stopped doing the last year or so. No ways to well, I I was just gonna say I learn, you know, in the actual flow state of a lesson and you're having interaction with just a person and vibing and explaining things in the moment, uh, I'll often find that I just I end up explaining some some musical idea or articulating it in some way that I I never have before. And I'm like, ooh, that's really good. I'm I can now use this if for my you know video content. Yeah. So I think there's definitely some real value in continuing that that one-on-one connection. Um yeah, it really just comes down to um can I charge a price that that feels good for me in terms of the amount of my energy it takes away from building the business in other ways.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And there are other ways of packaging it. Like you could say, well, I'm gonna do group coaching sessions, or I'm gonna do one-on-one, but it's only for this short period of time. It's gonna be a six-week intensive, or I'm gonna do a weekend intensive or a like a one-day thing that people can come and attend. There's a bunch of ways you can package it that it has to fit, it has to work for you and it has to work for the customer. Yeah. But that it's not just a one-on-one lessons is, you know, uh just kind of do whatever, do that individually with each person. It could be like, here's the syllabus. We're gonna work through this course together, and uh you're gonna go through and you take the lessons, and then we're gonna work on this stuff together, or we're gonna work on it in a group, or whatever, you know. Yeah. As long as people wanna are willing to pay for it and you're happy to do it, then it's like uh there's that's it, right? You know. What's the um what's the experience been like? Could you talk everybody through like you did the an audit, first of all, right, before you started working with uh Yosip on the coaching? Yeah. Could you talk everybody through that? Because I know like for a lot of people um who are listening, uh an audit would actually make a lot of sense. Um, but I don't know if I've done an amazing job on this podcast of like explaining what it is and how it works and what have you. I wondered if you could explain, you know, why did you sign up for that and then what was actually included?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, I guess I'll start by saying I maybe four or five months ago, I hit this point with my business where I just felt I felt really overwhelmed. And I was just thinking, I feel like I'm at this moment where I've sort of plateaued. It's it's growing, but there's this like metamorphosis that needs to happen in my business. And I can see different pieces to that, you know, maybe a membership. I know I need to redo these courses, make them better, so I'm more confident, you know, spreading the word about them, and um maybe other smaller products, maybe the, you know, I need to redo the copy on my landing page, maybe um my funnel's not converting like it could, like all these things. And I was just like feeling overwhelmed about the order of operations. And I actually put like a uh note like in my calendar of just just like I have a to to to-do list of like, you know, someday or things that aren't pressing this week, but things that I want to work towards. And I said the business audit. Uh and I was just and I remember I have a mastermind group uh that we meet every other week to talk about business. But sometimes I feel like I'm I was so in the weeds with the details of my business that I couldn't catch these people up to understand my business well enough. Uh like just meeting every other week that they would I just felt like the details I was thinking about was just too much for for um casual conversation. And so I was thinking that would be it would be so great if I had someone who is really experienced that could just really, really get to know my business the way I do and to and just tell me what to do. Uh so I I I had been sort of ruminating on that, and I I was getting close, I think, to taking action. I'm in the SPI community, um, and I was thinking I'm gonna make a post. Like, are there people that do like audits of businesses or like some sort of coach that would be uh but then I just happened to hear about data-driven marketing um and decided to check it out. And in yeah, long story short, it has been exactly what I was looking for. Like the so the audit was we did, you know, two different hour-long phone calls, I believe, uh with some uh, you know, just sharing lots of metrics, talking through my whole funnel and everything with Yosip and uh and giving him access to, you know, my anal my course analytics, my active campaign with all the funnel stuff. Um, and then he gave me a homework assignment to survey my audience, which was a really cool um experience. I got like 3,000 responses.
SPEAKER_02:Whoa.
SPEAKER_00:And I uh and to incentivize people doing the survey was actually I sort of tested and validated the PDF vault idea. If you do the survey, you'll get access to this PDF vault. And people were really excited about that. Right. But then I also, once they finished the survey, I said, by the way, here's also a promo code for like half off my main piano course. And I just by doing the survey, I got a bunch of awesome insights about my audience, but I also sold a bunch of courses and it paid for the audit. Uh more than paid for the audit. So that was pretty cool. Um but yeah, I it it helped Yosip kind of present a game plan to me. Um and I think one of the biggest, it was a really simple insight uh that was pretty powerful for me was he looked at the the follow-up sequence I had for people who bought my main course, piano chord breakthroughs, which is like my sort of flagship technique course. And I have this other course, keys to chord progressions, that is more just m uh theory, like bigger picture keys and scales and how that how chord progressions are um constructed. And I I like to bundle it with piano chord breakthroughs. I I like it when people get both, and I offer a bump, bump offer. Um, if you're buying like a course individually, I encourage people to get both. But I have uh an automation that maybe three weeks after someone buys piano chord breakthroughs, if they didn't also bundle it with keys to chord progressions, there's a an email that says, Hey, like how are you enjoying piano chord breakthroughs? I I have this other course that's can be you know synergistic with it. Uh if you're interested, here's uh a promo code to get a discount on it. Like as a piano chord breakthrough student, you can get a discount on this. Um so he was looking at that and he he was just like, This email that you send to people who bought your course like a month later has like an 85% open rate. And I was like, Yeah. And he was like, These people love you. Um like they they want to hear from you and they are interested in more from you. Yeah. And I I think the the realization was what's holding my my business back right now is I don't have enough to offer to these people. Yeah. You know, I just have this this these two courses, mainly just this one course that's just a one-time purchase. But I the the people that really like learning from me are uh some of them are hungry for more and I d and I'm not giving it to them. And so thinking about, yeah, the high ticket coaching to different different products, maybe some kind of membership. It's still sort of a a testing and f and and brainstorming of you know what what these things could be, but it was really eye-opening and motivating to be like, I there's a lot of room here for me to develop more ways to you know support these people in learning piano and the and there they want it. Yeah. So that was I think one of the biggest insights from the audit.
SPEAKER_02:Nice.
SPEAKER_00:Um, but yeah, I think confidence that you're taking the right action is so important for motivation. Um because I didn't have the motivation to actually build out an online course, which was a lot of work. I didn't have that until I had an audience and I had like a real felt sense of people want this. And if I make it, the people are here and they will buy it and you know, learn. And I because when I was just starting YouTube, I had a mentor and he was like, You should make a you should make a piano course. Like, you know, people are having a lot of success with courses. And I was just dipping my toes into YouTube. I hadn't really built an audience yet. And I just thought, like, that sounds like so much work. And I just the thought of it overwhelmed me. I don't think I was even thinking, what if nobody buys? But I think you know, that was sort of the driving fear in me just saying, that sounds like such a a lot of work. And then a a year and a half later, I had, you know, I maybe at that point I had five or ten thousand subscribers, probably maybe even less, but I I was seeing this audience forming. And it it just totally flipped to where I just felt like I have to make this course. And once I had that excitement that like these people are here, um it was it was still a lot of work, but I was excited doing the work. I was had a lot of motivation. Yeah. So I think that's why I I uh generally recommend people just build your audience first by providing a bunch of value and you know, making content. And then the the the what products you should make, as well as the motivation to make them, I think will uh uh emerge naturally.
SPEAKER_03:Nice. That's awesome, man. Well, thank you again so much for coming on. I love your story. This is fantastic. It's another COVID success story, which we do hear a decent number of them on this uh on this podcast. Um, if anyone wants to go check out your channel, uh learn more about you, where should they go?
SPEAKER_00:Uh you can well, there's pianowithnate.com if you want to check out the YouTube channel. Uh well, you can just search Piano with Nate on YouTube and it's pretty easy to find. Perfect. Amazing.
SPEAKER_03:As always, everybody, thank you so much for listening. I mentioned a few podcast episodes during this. I've got one more I'm gonna plug for you, which is Nate mentioned about Black Friday being on his list. And we did an episode specifically about Black Friday, September 25th, 2025. It says, Watch this before planning Black Friday 2025. Now, in that episode, SIP takes you through everything you need to all the stuff you need to plan out for Black Friday. I'm just realizing I'm recording this like shit. What if this episode goes out after Black Fridays? That might actually happen. If it doesn't, if this comes out in time and you hear this, I have got a free guide about how to plan out your Black Friday, where I've detailed everything from in the episode and everything and a number of other things to try and make it simpler. If you want that, drop me an email, John at datadrivenmarketing.co. If this comes out after Black Friday this year, then you can get it for next year.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there's always next year.
SPEAKER_03:Nate, thanks again for coming on. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you guys next time. Thanks for having me.