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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
214 1-2 Hours a Day to a Six-Figure Side Business
🔥 Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈 https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap
What if you could build a six-figure course business while keeping your full-time job... and only working on it 1-2 hours a day?
That's exactly what Michael Kilkelly has done with Arch Smarter, his course business helping architects and engineers work smarter, not harder.
But here's what makes Michael's story different. He actually did it backwards. He spent 10 years working for himself as a consultant, built up his course business, and then took a full-time job. Most people are trying to do the opposite.
In this episode, Michael shares why having a day job actually makes his courses better, how he cut his course setup time from two weeks down to 10 minutes, and his "less is more" philosophy for 2026. We also get into how he survived massive layoffs early in his career by teaching himself a skill that made him irreplaceable.
If you've ever wondered whether you can build a real course business without quitting your job, this one's for you.
🧑💻 Check out Michael's website: https://archsmarter.com
I did the reverse order. I started my company. I started working for myself. And then I got, you know, a job after that as opposed to the other the other way around. I did it backwards. Realized like I'm I'm kind of lazy. Like if there's a smarter way I can do it, I want to do it that way because I don't want to be working 70, 80 hours a week anymore. It varies, I would say probably an hour or two a day. That was a good, a really good turning point in my career. My target is 100,000 USD for the year as far as growth revenue goes. That's just working solo in addition to job. I have about 120 or so students in the academy right now. I teach what I'm working on in the day job. Not just teaching theory like this is stuff that I'm implementing, this is stuff that I'm doing I'm adopting for 2026. My motto is to be less working small, but do more with what I have.
SPEAKER_00:Hello and welcome to the Art Selling Online Courses. We are here to share winning strategies. My name is John Antoine, and today's guest is Michael Kilk. Now Michael's the founder of Art Smarter, an automation course business dedicated to helping architects and designers to work smarter, not harder. We currently work as a senior BIM developer at a national engineering company, which is developing digital tools and workflows to help design teams work more efficiently. He was Steve Bachelor's from Norwich University, not the one in England I've found out, and uh MS in design and computation from MIT. Previously, he was an associate at Gary Partners in Botanville. He worked on several high-profile design projects, including New York by Gary and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which is awesome. Now, today we're going to talk about why to make your course shorter while having a full-time job might actually be a good idea while you're running a course business and everything he's been doing to grow his course business. So, Michael, welcome to the show. Thanks, John. Happy to be here. So talk to me about um who you're helping with your courses and what kind of problem. I tried to I kind of summarized it a little bit there, but I don't really understand. So could you kind of talk us through?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. So I work with students who are professional either architects, engineers, or they may work for a construction company. It's collectively what we call the AEC industry. So it's architecture, engineering, and construction. And more specifically, these are professionals who are using software called Revit. Revit is what's known as BIM BI Building Information Modeling. And it's a tool that gets, it's software that gets used quite a bit here in the US, also other places throughout the world. And it lets you create a three-dimensional model of your building or your structure. And then it has a lot of information that's attached to it. And then so we use this 3D model to generate all of our drawings, our floor plans, our detail views, our elevations. And so essentially that's how we produce kind of our designs, essentially, um, for new projects. So my kind of like AutoCAD. So it's like it's like an advanced version of AutoCAD. Yeah. So I've been in the industry for 30 years, uh, and I started out using AutoCAD. That's how we would draw. Like we would draw, let's say, a floor plan of a building. And then if I wanted to show sort of the front elevation, I would then have to draw the front elevation of it. So the floor plan, if I made a change in the floor plan, I'd then have to edit and make the same change in the elevation. With with um BIM, what I can do and with Revit, I am just modeling 3D, like the building. And so I can look at the floor plan. And if I move a wall, that wall is automatically updated in my my elevation and all my other views. So I'm really just I'm building a 3D model as opposed to drawing disconnected two-dimensional drawings. Got it. Okay.
SPEAKER_00:I think I probably only knew about autocare because my my ex used to be a interior designer. Oh, so yeah. And so she was using that, I think, for like mapping, you know, drawing stuff out. Exactly. Yeah. But this is okay. That kind of makes sense. This is like the next version of the of that process, yeah. And so what is it that you're teaching people then in your courses? How to use that software? Or so is it because you something about programming. Right.
SPEAKER_01:So it's even kind of beyond that. Like there's a lot of tedious stuff that you have to do when you're do using Revit. There, you know, there's just things that aren't all that fun, repetitive tasks that you have to do. And the software is good, but it doesn't do everything. And particularly with large complex projects, like you could have, let's say, 500 sheets of drawings, and then you have to make a change on each individual sheet. And it that type of thing can take a lot of time. So what I do is I teach, I teach uh Revit users how to create their own plugins for Revit. And these are, you know, people like me, they're architects, they haven't been trained in programming. So I step them through the basics of programming so that they can create their own tools. And ideally, they're going to save tons of time for themselves and their company by doing it. Um, a lot of companies have specific standards that they use or they they want to do things a certain way. And the out-of-the-box tools don't really accommodate that. So this is a way to create custom tools uh, again, that can save you just a whole lot of time doing the stuff that's not b that's not fun. Like you, you know, if you're an architect or an engineer, you want to do design or you want to do engineering. You don't want to have to change this little text, you know, a thousand times.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. How niche is this? Because I I would think like the architect and designer space, that's actually quite a big in a for business, it's quite a big space. But like how many people are using Revit and then how many of them would want to do something like this?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I don't have I don't have actual numbers on the audience side, but like it's a niche within a niche. So there there are uh people that I know out there who are doing more sort of general Revit training, like this is how you build a wall, this is how you build a stair. And so I'm taking even a subset of that. So like typically within an office, regular architecture office, for example, you know, you might have 50 people who are using Revit, and then you might have one person who is interested in programming and creating their own tools. So it's a very, very narrow niche. Uh and yeah, and there's I really only a handful of us, I think, who are teaching this type of thing.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so there are other people, there's enough demand that there's other people doing what you're doing.
SPEAKER_01:And and there's different flavors. Like um, I teach uh using the programming language C sharp. And there's another guy who's teaching how you can use the Python different programming language. Uh, and then there's another tool called Dynamo inside of Revit, which is visual programming. So similar idea, different implementation. Um, so yeah, it's it's not we're not overflowing. Like there's not a whole lot of competition here.
SPEAKER_00:How long have you been doing this yourself, like actually programming stuff in Revit?
SPEAKER_01:Uh I started actually I started when I was working as an architect. Um, and I was on a project, and I like I had just my my first son had just been born, and he was um like I was spending about 70, 80 hours a week at work just because I had a lot of really tedious tasks. And actually at this, at this job, I was using AutoCAD. And so I I taught myself to program because I was tired of working so much, and I had, you know, um sort of a deadline that was just crushing, and I got home really late and I said, I gotta do something different. So I I taught myself how to program, just how to necessity. And um, and that was like really a turning point in my career because then I started doing more, like finding shortcuts, and I realized like I'm I'm kind of lazy. Like, if there's a smarter way I can do it, I want to do it that way because I don't want to be working, you know, 70, 80 hours a week anymore. Um, so I taught myself programming. I built out a lot of tools. And when this was around 2008, 2009, there was the the recession here in the US. And like my company I was working in, we went from 200 employees, we laid off about half the company. And at that point, like I had built up this skill set. So I was spared, like I was super productive because I could make tools and make other people productive. So that that was a good, a really good turning point in my career. Around 2012, I actually uh we I was living in in Los Angeles. We moved back to the east coast of the US where I'm from, and I had a good relationship with that company. So I actually stayed on uh as a consultant. So they hired me as a consultant. So I was working kind of remotely for them and just building tools and custom tools. And then they they transitioned into Revit. Uh, and so I started building tools um and plugins uh for Revit at that point. And so I was, you know, around that time too, I started developing courses. Like I had been interested in doing online training. I had taught uh as an adjunct professor at some colleges when I lived in the Boston area, uh, which I really enjoyed. And I did want to do teaching and online. Teaching seemed to be a great way to do it. So I started developing a bunch of different courses uh for Revit. And I think at one point I had like 18 or so different courses for different varieties of different topics. Um, and then let's see, around the pandemic, I had been working as a consultant at that point, working for myself for 10 years. I had was doing a lot of consulting work, and then I had courses kind of going on the side um as well. And I had a client who had asked me, Hey, why don't you come work for us full-time? You know, we like what you're doing. We have a lot of work. Will you come work for us? And um, again, end of the pandemic, I'm like, I need to do something different. It'd be great to work with people. Uh, so I ended up taking a full-time job with that company. Um, and then I have recently transitioned to a new role with a different company. Um, again, but I kept the course side of the business going simultaneously. Um and so that's been a good, kind of a good balance uh in a lot of ways. Um, what I find is that I can actually I teach what I'm working on in the day job, and it really gives me a lot of um, I think it does two things. It gives me a lot of ideas in terms of what people and problems people would be facing. And then also uh it gives me some validation. So I'm not, I'm not just teaching theory, like this is stuff that I'm implementing, this is stuff that I'm seeing. Uh and I think it's it's for me and in in my particular niche, it works out really well. Um, I felt like when I was just as a consultant, I was kind of on the outside. I had think this would work, like I had ideas of things, but I couldn't back it in actual practical experience. So it was good. Uh I always felt a little bit there's a maybe a touch of imposter syndrome because I would, you know, here's how I think I would do it, but I didn't know because I wasn't really working um 100% in that role. And so now I think being a practitioner and a teacher um plays really well together. So I'm enjoying that aspect. So do you work full-time in that role then? I do work full-time. So I work full time, I work remote, which is good. Um, and that's a benefit as well. So I have some flexibility in my time. And I will sometimes uh do some course related activities like during the working hours. So if I do an office hours in my course, you know, I might schedule that for three o'clock and I just block time out for that. So it's it's good. I I what I really liked about working for myself is I had sort of the the flexible schedule. I could do what I wanted when I wanted. And I find that working remotely gives me a good chunk of that. Not full flexibility, but it's a trade-off. Like I get some flexibility, um, but I also get a steady paycheck coming in. So that part is is is nice.
SPEAKER_00:So then how long per week do you spend working on the the course business?
SPEAKER_01:It varies. I would say, you know, usually probably uh uh an hour or two a w a day, I'll carve out time. Let's say an hour a day. And then if I'm working on a course or updating a course, then I'm gonna spend some time over the weekend. But I can pick and choose, you know, bits of time during the day. So it's not always like at eight o'clock, you know, after dinner I start working on the course. Uh and that varies too. Like if I'm in a launch, if I'm doing a launch, that's obviously gonna be a little more hands-on. Um so it's it it flows. I I've been able to work it into like my lifestyle pretty seamlessly. Um, and again, I think some of the efforts that I do also tie back into what I'm doing in the job. So they're nicely blended. So I might be doing sort of work that I can then work in the day job that then I can talk about at least the concepts that I'm applying in the course. So there's it's very well so far, anyways, has been very well blended together.
SPEAKER_00:Nice, nice. And give people some kind of idea of the the scale of your business, like revenue if you're happy sharing it, or number of students, or whatever you're happy to share.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So there's um right now I have I'll I'll start with like the offer. I have one kind of primary offer, which is my RevitAdon Academy, and then I run cohorts of that, uh, which I call boot camps. So I'll run um, I try to run about three boot camps or so a year. And I have uh usually I'll get about 20 students per boot camp. And then I have a like a follow-on membership uh in the academy. So once a student goes through the boot camp, they can they can stick around you know for a while. And because I have, in addition to the sort of introductory course, they have over the years, I've built out a number of courses inside the academy for intermediate and advanced students. And then I do um I do sort of weekly office hours and and things. So there's you know, enough there. It's not a it's not really a true membership because the point of entry is in through the boot camp. But I'd say I think last I have about 120 or so students in the academy right now. And then um, you know, I run the business myself. Uh that's something I'm I'm working on getting some additional help. And as far as revenue goes, this year I'm on track. I'm not there yet, but my target is 100,000 uh USD for the year as far as gross revenue goes. Um, and again, that's just working, working solo uh in addition to the the full-time job.
SPEAKER_00:Nice. Well, that's great, isn't it? I mean, like as a as a side gig, that is a side gig amount of money, right? You know? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And it um again, it works well. Like I feel like it's good, it's it's good for my career. Like I see them holistically, it's not one or the other. Like the, you know, my teaching and and my my business feeds into my career and they and vice versa. So it works very well together. It it took me, like I did the reverse order. I I started working, like I started my company, I started working for myself, and then I got you know a job after that as opposed to the other the other way around. I did it backwards. But I I'm I'm really comfortable where it's at right now. And so for at least I could see maybe at some point I would want to go back, just work independently, but but I'm happy, you know, where I'm at. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That's great. I mean, there's no rules, right? You do whatever it is, yeah. Yep. Yeah, no, that's very true. So talk to me about, and and sorry if you said this because I'm just trying to keep track of everything in my head. When you do a launch, how many people do you get going into that that cohort that you're running?
SPEAKER_01:Usually I'll get around anywhere from 15. I'd say 15 to 30. 30 is the most I've gotten in a cohort. Uh the last cohort, the the one I'm running right now, uh had 15 students. And I've been raising the price over time. So I think when I when I got 30 students, I was at about a thousand dollars as the price point. Right now, the course is like$1,700. Okay. And I got 15 students. So it's probably, you know, revenue-wise, it's about it's pretty consistent, about the same. Uh, but the the number of students shifts.
SPEAKER_00:And what kind of percentage of them then go on to your ongoing follow-up? Yeah. Was that the academy?
SPEAKER_01:Um Yeah, it's the academy. And I've been trying different different models for it. So like the the RevAd and Academy is the is the overall container. And then inside of that, excuse me, I have the the bootcamp course, which is the introductory course, and then there's there's follow-up courses. And so when a student comes in, they get a year of access to the academy as a whole, and then we'll do like a guided experience through the boot camp. So we I do a special Q ⁇ A session for these students. Uh there's just more intense like support for them as they're going through the the the boot camp course. Uh I would say of the 15, usually I'll get about five or so that will kind of stick around after the fact. That's about that's and I can do I that's one of the things on my to-do list, like being better about kind of marketing that internally within within the academy itself. Gotta yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Do you talk to them about it? Like when they're kind of coming towards the end, do you t talk about like I do, but not enough.
SPEAKER_01:Like that's something I think there's I I again I teach automation and I I mentioned like I want to do as l not as little work, but I want to be smart about the work I'm doing. And so um I haven't built out automations on that end. Like, hey, you're coming to the end of your term. Like I think there are there are ways I could build out a a better sort of funnel for that really that subset.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. That's interesting. And then how many people do you have on your on your email list? Right now I'm at about 8,200. And is that the when you are promoting the cohort, is that the main source of of people who are gonna join that?
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So then how have you grown that email list? Is that through YouTube and your podcast? Or like what's the source for that?
SPEAKER_01:I've been doing uh a bunch of different things. So I have a number of lead magnets that that are bringing in subscribers. Email's my primary like marketing channel. Um, I have a YouTube channel. I I it has been growing very slowly, partly because I'm I'm not consistent in posting. Um, I have a podcast and I'm not consistent with recording episodes. The one thing I am actually very consistent about is my email newsletter. So I send that out. I actually sent it out this week's episode out right before we we started talking. So I'm I've been really good about keeping that going. And I I've been good about it because I really enjoy it. Like that's I look forward to that every week. So, you know, part of my like one man band thing is to figure out what's easy and like lean into that a bit more. I do for for next year, I do want to do more YouTube because I think it's a natural fit for my audience. And I'm trying to figure out uh ways that I can leverage things that I'm talking about in the course and like maybe externalize those a little bit. Like if I have a tutorial that I put together inside the course, maybe I can post that on YouTube. I'm adopting um for 2026, my motto is going to be less is more. So figure out what how I can leverage things that I'm already doing, how I can automate things, um, and just keep small but do more with what I have.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, let me try and summarize that back because I feel like I'm missing something here. So you've got YouTube that you're inconsistent with and podcasts that you're inconsistent with, but both of them point to lead magnets to grow your list. So I get that. It's okay, it's not it's not consistent, but that's one of the sources, right? You've got the email newsletter, which you you've been doing consistently, so that's great. But did all of the leads in the email newsletter come from YouTube and the podcast, or did it come from like referrals with you know, it's like is it a word of mouth thing, or like how's that kind of grown?
SPEAKER_01:Uh it's I think it's all coming through uh I I blogged a lot early on. So I started my website back in 2013 and I built out I have a pretty pretty good library of of articles. Got it on that. So I am getting a lot of a pretty, you know, decent, it's changing now with AI, but I'm getting some decent organic traffic coming in.
SPEAKER_00:Do you know about how many website visitors you get a month?
SPEAKER_01:Uh I can tell you real quick. I know I I wrote it down, let me see. I think I'm getting around let's see. I get about six thousand views. So in October I got six thousand and six views. Okay. That's uh twenty five hundred eighty people.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, okay. And that's the bulk of okay, cool.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that's that's the bulk of where you know where things are coming in, where people the point of entry for people. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, that makes sense. So that's quite a nice return you're getting there then on like so you've got a small a relatively for a lot of people listening, small email list, but it's in a business niche, so there's people with money, right? So then they can afford to pay you the the thousand or the seventeen hundred dollars for the the main offer. And then how much was it to to remain a member afterwards if people stick around? It's eight hundred dollars for the year. So for the follow-up membership. Okay, super cheap. Okay. Yeah, I feel like you should have a higher retention rate on this.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I would say I I would agree, and I think in part it's that's on me because I haven't done a good job marketing it. Like I've been let's see, this is the 10th cohort I've taught of my boot camp. And I think I started it, I'm trying to remember when I first started it. The first boot camp was it was probably about three years ago. So I've been trying to figure out like the ideal model for it. And I I'm getting close because I would run it as a 12-week bootcamp and that was it. And then I started offering additional courses and I would sell those separately, and then I lumped them all in together into the academy. So it's been a it's been very much a work in progress, trying to figure out the exact, you know, what's what is the best for this moment right now. And I think that's I mean, I like to like tweak and sort of tinker with the model to see, you know, what makes the most sense. Um and that, you know, so it ha I didn't start like this is exactly how I'm gonna do it. It's been very much a let me feel my way through this a bit, more more sort of intuitive than analytical, I think.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. One of the things that you'd mentioned uh when we emailed before the uh before the episode is that you really try and focus on cutting stuff out of the course and making it simpler. Yeah. Could you I thought it was a really interesting thing to say because it's I don't know if everyone's thinking about it uh but not talking about it, or if people just aren't doing this. But I hadn't really heard many people before talk about how they're trying to like simplify the course and take out stuff from it. Could you kind of talk through like how did you come to that conclusion and how do you do it? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I've just again teaching over the years, my audience are they are prof like busy working professionals. In most cases, they're they're taking the course in their own time on the side to kind of better their you know, their their career options, their prospects, or even just make their their life easier. So with that, like they're very time constrained. And I feel like my obligation, and again, I'm I'm in that same situation. So I'm also teaching um, in addition to working full time. So my mindset is how can I reduce like the friction? How can I make it easier for them to learn this kind of complicated subject? And so that they can start building their own tools. And that's really my goal through the course is to give you fundamentals of programming, give you some understanding of the specific Revit API we're working with so that you can start realizing the returns on that. You can build tools that are going to make you know your life, your day-to-day work a lot easier. And so the way, the best way I can do that is to just shorten the time. Uh, and I'll give you an example because this is this is one that I'm I'm actually working through right now. One of the issues, and and I think this is in part why it's very, like it's a very small niche, is that um getting set up to program takes there's a lot of steps to it. You have to download additional software. There are certain templates that you need in that software, which is called Visual Studio, in order for it to connect to Revit. And like when I would do a boot camp previously, we'd spend, I'd spend a whole orientation session. You know, here are all the things you need to download. And then the first couple weeks would be just getting people set up with the software so they could write that first line of code. So it could take somebody a week before they can actually write any code. And they'd be like, you know what? I don't really like this. Like, or this is too hard.
SPEAKER_00:So there was I haven't got any dopamine yet, Michael.
SPEAKER_01:No, that's exactly it. There was no, there was no feedback. There was no benefit to it. And I had been thinking, like, man, it would be great if there was a way I could eliminate or make that that part easier. And so um, around this time last year, I thought, okay, why don't I just write my own software that would let students write code directly inside of Revit. They wouldn't have to use this other software to do it. They could just write their code right away. Uh, and this is one of the the great things with AI now. It's like I could, I started going back and forth with with AI. I use Claude and just brainstorming ideas for this plugin I could write that would let people write their own plugins. Uh and very quickly I was able to get something working so that I could just start writing my C sharp code directly inside of Revit and I could run and execute that. And that became the foundation for you know my course right now. So when you join the course, you get my plugin, it's called Launchpad, and you install that super easy. And then you can start in like 10 minutes writing code as opposed to downloading 10 minutes, man. Yeah. And and so that's been that's been really fun because there's like a lot of benefits to using these professional programming tools. But if you're just starting out, like you're not gonna realize all of those benefits till you're a year or so into the process. And and then and you can make that transition, but if you just want to learn how to write Revit code, like you should just write Revit code and you should write a lot of it. And so that was one of the things that, you know, I I really wanted to get people like getting that dopamine hit real fast. So uh Launchpad has become like the the foundation for my bootcamp class. And so students are in there, like they're writing a lot of code now, much more, I think, much more so. And and they can they can stay inside of that. Like that it's been I've built it out as a platform and they can share tools that they write um and things. Or if they want, if they're like, you know what, I really want to write, I want to use, you know, that I want to take that next step now. I want to use Visual Studio and I want to uh create add-ins. And so I have a bridge that will take them to it. So instead of starting that on day one, they can learn to program and then making that transition, you know, once they finish the boot camp, making that transition is not is not a big leap. So um I've been looking at things like that, like how can I remove friction from the course? And so how can I, you know, help them get because I know roughly like where they want to get to um in terms of what that capability is. So, like, how can I make that easier and and lower that learning curve? Um, that's been my like this past year, I've been working on that quite a bit within within the course. And and again, I'm I am a practitioner, so I actually use my my launch pad ad, and I use it all the time because it's just easier and faster.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So that that's been really, really fun. Did you so did you co you mentioned that you're using Claude a lot in there? Did you code that completely from scratch and code Claude just for ideas? Or are you using Claude to help you to write code? Both.
SPEAKER_01:So I will brainstorm kind of concepts and okay, this is how this is the the architecture of the thing. And then I mean AI is so good at generating code, like typing. And with coding, it will I can use AI and Claude will generate like a thousand lines of code in minutes, and me manually typing that out, it's probably gonna take me a day, you know, or longer. So like it can, and then I can just go through and it's like it's the difference between writing, you know, writing something versus editing it. So like I can it's gonna generate the code, I can test it, and then I can edit it as I need to. Or I'll say, like, hey, this is too complicated, we don't need this. And it's so there's a lot of a lot of back and forth with it. Um yeah, I mean, it would have taken me, John. I think I would estimate to do what I did in two weeks, it would have taken me two months, maybe more. And again, you might not have done it. And I wouldn't have done it, or I would have said, or maybe I would have I wouldn't have done it because I didn't know if it was worth spending two months. Like I've got other stuff to do. So yeah, it's really um really changed the game in terms of what what I can do.
SPEAKER_00:Um and I've heard people talk about this, but I hadn't done it until recently. My eyes were super open because I was just like, I was working on uh I was trying to learn on the bass where all of the notes are. So you can learn to play bass without knowing any notes by learning it from from tabs, right? It just there's a thing called tabs which shows you okay, play the fifth fret on the second string or whatever. Yeah. And you don't know what that, you don't know that that's a D, but you just you just put your finger on that fret. And I was like, I wanted to learn what these all were. It's like that's what I should be doing that. And I wanted to make it into a game, and I went online and I found a couple of little games. I was like, I wish it worked like this. And I was like, I wonder. So I went into Chat GPT and I was like, can you program a game for this? And it was like, yeah, sure. And and I got it to do, I gave it the brief, like two lines or something like this, and it wrote out the whole thing. And I was like, I tried it and I was like, oh my god, it works. It was amazing. Really cool, yeah. Yeah, so good. And then I was like, it started making suggestions. Do you want to add in this feature? Do you want in that? I was like, Yeah, yeah, let's add those all in, you know. And I started making all these little tweaks to it, and then I was like, I got it to where I want it to be. And the only thing that was really annoying was after it would it would ask me to play a note and I would like let's say uh D on the third string, right? Actually, it's very easy because that's just the open string. But um, then I would play it and I'd have to press the spacebar. And I was like, I wonder if I could get it to listen and check if I got the right note. And I was like, this probably won't work. But I tried asking it to do that and it and it programmed that in, and that worked. And I was like, oh my god, this is amazing. This is so much more fun than just me trying to learn it. Right. Because I've got a leaderboard and I can see if can I beat my previous time and like you know.
SPEAKER_01:Oh man, yeah. So you made your own right your own game essentially. And that made me scalar to the way that you want to learn.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. Exactly. Yeah. And it made me think, what else should I be programming with Claude or ChatGPT or something for business? You know, like and I haven't I haven't figured that out yet, but I was like, I know that there is stuff, you know. Maybe I should ask it, maybe should ask ChatGPT to create a channel. Here's my business builds. Yep.
SPEAKER_01:What should I build? Ooh, I gotta try that. Um one of the things I do with my students is I give them, like I've I've in Claude, it's called a project, which is similar to a custom GPT. And I have one that I use and I've trained it using, you know, all sorts of different scripts I've written and files based on standards. And so I give students access to that so they can create their own project that's tailored to work with launchpad. And so they can very quickly generate tools. And it's interesting because I a lot of students are like, I I want to get to that point, but I want to understand things first. Like I want to understand what the code is doing. And I know I can do that, but I don't want to jump too far ahead. And so, and I I understand that. Like they want to really know, you know, it it's like they want to work with their hands, even though we're we're talking about typing code, but they want to work with their hands first. And then once they have that understanding, they can really launch and like get way, way more productive. Um, so that's been interesting to see. Um, and I think that there is still, you know, a desire to learn, despite the fact that we have these tools that will just spit out thousands of lines of code for you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. What for you, what do you want to improve in your business in terms of the the email marketing, the funnels? Like what's what's the next kind of thing that you'd like to get better at?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, there's certainly the funnels are things that have been a weak spot. I have a couple of um lead magnets that I use. And I have some I have some old lead magnets that I've been using more more for my general audience. And then as I've been niching down, I have some that are specific to to the sort of programming course. Um, but I think like amplifying, getting that tuned in, I know that could certainly be better. Um and I think that that's definitely an area I could be be a lot better at. I've done different things, like I really like doing webinars. Webinar is probably one of my favorite uh marketing tools when I'm in in a launch period. Um what I'm looking to do is get do more of um, like my courses are run as cohorts, and I like that because I have built in urgency and it's like we're starting on this day, and you can join us, or you'll have to wait, you know, three months or four months to the next one. So that part is great. But I I would like to do some more evergreen sales. Uh so using a funnel into Evergreen, and I have um like a portion of my boot camp class, I could, I could sell that just as an isolated sort of experience, not as uh not as part of the the overall academy. So they would get access to the boot camp and then they could upgrade to the academy when they when they finish that. So I think there's a good I feel like the product ladder is there. I I feel good about what I have and what what that would look like. It's like connecting the dots between the lead magnet to you know, to the boot camp and then the boot camp to the academy membership and then then the follow-up after that. So it's taken a while to get the pieces aligned, and now it's just about really building the connecting bits between that. And I think a lot of that will be through through email and through funnels.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It sounds like you've actually got quite a lot of potential to to grow the business quite a bit, from what I'm hearing from you so far. It's like if someone was in the, let's say, some kind of hobby space, you know, teaching, teaching bass or teaching piano or something like this, then with an email list of 8,800, they're probably only going to be making a few thousand a month, something like that. But you're in the business space and you're selling higher ticket offers, and that makes a world of difference in terms of like potential revenue from a from a certain email list size. And so that's one thing that tells me that. But another one is it sounds like you're only doing email promotions, I I think you said like a few times a year, something like that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, really, yep. Yeah, I'd say I probably have four, three to four sales events, if you will, um, a year. Yep.
SPEAKER_00:But you've got quite a lot of different offers, actually. You know, like you're doing the cohort for getting people through from the beginning, but you've got some intermediate stuff, you've got some advanced stuff, you've got an ongoing program, you've got like different, you've got a tool, you've got different bits and pieces. It's like, oh, I reckon there's something it it sounds like you could do at least eight promotions per year. You know, we find that like you've probably you've I know you said you you've been listening to the podcast, so you've probably heard me say this as many times as you've listened to episodes, but you could probably do an email promotion about every month. Right. Yes most in most uh audiences. Yep. And um if you have enough offers that you're able to repeat without you know repeating yourself too often, you know. And it sounds like from what I'm hearing that you've kind of got all those offers, you've built this all this stuff out, this whole kind of um uh interconnected series of different levels, and you've got the tools and you've got the in-person, you know, not in-person, but the the live offer and you've got the courses and you know, yeah, it's taken a while to get there to that point.
SPEAKER_01:But I feel like it's like I feel good about about the offers now and where they how they stack up and what like what that path is. And like I said, my challenge now is just like the building the infrastructure to like get it out there, make people aware of it, you know, encourage them to join that part.
SPEAKER_00:Definitely. Okay. So you want to improve at your lead magnets and getting more people onto the email list and more probably also exactly the right people will make a big difference if you've got if someone opts in for a lead magnet about programming, they're way more likely to be the right kind of person to be signing up for the course as well.
SPEAKER_01:And I have some lead magnets that are like a adjacent to people who are interested, but maybe not 100%. Like I I built out a series of tools using my launch pad, like the productivity tools for Revit. So it's a toolbar and it has all these different tools. And that that actually does really well as a lead magnet. But somebody could do that and they're just like, hey, I want to use Revit more efficiently. I don't care about programming. So it's kind of like a demonstration of what the Launchport Launchpad platform can do that anybody can use. So I feel like it's a good, it's a good lead magnet, it's a good advertising, but it's not targeted to like, hey, I want to learn how to do these tools. Like I want to learn how to make my own. So I need to separate out. I I I did a um like a five-day challenge a while back that was, you know, hands-on programming. And right now I don't, I don't have that as a recurring lead magnet. It was kind of a one-time thing. So that's something I want to read, like build that out into uh an actual lead magnet.
SPEAKER_00:And how did it do? What was it? Was it you doing live sessions with people, or what was the structure to it?
SPEAKER_01:It was uh that was all it was an email course. So they got they got a very stripped down basic version of my launch pad software so they could actually do programming. And then it was a five-day like email lesson every day. So they would get the lesson, and then they could do the programming right there as they're going through. Uh so that was like in it was interesting because I did that uh in lieu of doing a webinar. So typically I was launching just a a version, like a um a version of my boot camp. It was like I was redoing all the content at that point to focus uh using Launchpad itself. So I did, I called it the Launchpad Accelerator, uh sorry, Revit Automation Accelerator. And I I did it just as kind of as a pilot almost. And so the the sales event like for that was to do this five-day challenge. I think I had, I don't know, maybe 300 or so people sign up, and then I ended with up with I think 20 or 30 people enrolled. So it was pretty, pretty good. But I in comparison to doing a webinar, I'm not sure if it, you know, it it it did okay, but that the webinars are it was more work than a webinar, and I'm not sure it was more effective in the end. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um so I'm I webinars are amazing. I mean, challenges can be uh awesome. You know, I've worked with somebody who did he used to do the biggest launch I've ever seen. The amount of revenue was very good. It was two he did$200,000 in the the launch that we did with him, but the amount of amount of elements to it that were included was the biggest I'd ever seen. So there was a challenge that would lasted a week, and there was multiple webinars, and there was an email promotion, and there was a downsell and an upsell, and you know, every every single it was like, what if we did every thing? It turns out that works great. It's great, it's it's just an enormous amount of work. Um and what he was doing during his challenge was uh it was a um drawing uh portrait. Oh, cool, yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And um, so he would be there live throughout the week, giving people feedback on their portraits, and it built an enormous amount of trust. And those people were like, Oh, this is my guy. He said, Like, I love this guy, this and it led very naturally into the next step and what have you. But it was just like, oh, this is exhausting. Um I think as a general rule, webinars is like apps, especially at like a higher priced offer, absolutely fantastic. Like they've they're one of the best marketing uh conversion mechanisms. Like, how do you actually get people to buy? Like they're definitely, especially for more expensive courses, they're more effective than than email to a sales page. Um and if you do them right, they just they just convert so well. How long have you been doing those for? Since probably since I started doing courses.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. So yeah, I mean, I I really like I enjoy doing a webinar. I think it's fun. I love the buildup to it. It the you're you know, you're teaching, but you're selling as well. And it's a challenge to like merge and find that balance between how much teaching do you do relative to how much selling. Um but I I like the it goes back to the urgency too. Like I'm gonna do this this, you know, I'm doing a webinar here. Here's what we're gonna cover. It's on the state, show up. You know, there'll be a recording, but um I I really like them. So I have no problem, you know, for me, it's like, yeah, we'll just do a webinar. Um, why not? And I thought maybe a challenge would be just different, something different to try. And I did want it to be hands-on. Uh so I was curious to see how it performed relative to to that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, it's worth running tests, right?
SPEAKER_01:If you run the test and it was a good test.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And you go, oh no, the webinar's better. Okay, cool. Great.
SPEAKER_01:That's totally valid. Going back to your point, John, too, about like, you know, you can you can sell once a month, and that that seems to be a good um, and there's also you know, the idea of doing like if you did a webinar a month, and then like that can tie into like different sort of sales. And I think you're also sign what I like as well is it helps clarify my thinking about a topic, and then it generates content that I can leverage elsewhere. So I find it as an exercise to be really, really helpful to do it.
SPEAKER_00:Nice. Well, that sounds great then. It might be that might be part of the the plan, then do a webinar every month that leads into a different offer or something. Yeah. I had a a friend, she was at a a conference that I was running in London, and for for a session that I did there, I uh I helped three different people improve their funnel and then kind of showed everybody what did we, you know, what did we do, what were the results from it. And she had run a webinar to her audience. I think she'd heard me say to do it, and she'd run the webinar, and she'd made$70,000. And she was like, okay, cool. Now what do I do? I was like, we're gonna run another webinar and we're gonna run a webinar every month forever. Because like, and we're gonna figure out what what is the requirement that allows you to be able to do that. Like, okay, do you need to grow your list so that you've got new people coming on? Do we need different topics that we're covering? Are we gonna do webinars to partners' lists as well? So she did a webinar to a partner's audience, and that worked well. It's like, okay, every month you're gonna do a webinar, and you if you can make an extra, whatever, let's say average, you know, levels out at 40,000 a month from that, it's like this is this is great. All you don't have to do complicated, you know? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I like that question though. What is the requirement to do that? Like, what do you need? You know, what do you need as far as topics? What do you need for audience growth? Like, where do you want to promote those? What channels do you want to use? Like it's an that's a that in and of itself becomes a really interesting and compelling lead magnet, would be just these these webinars on different topics.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it absolutely can be. What I found with webinars is if you compare the opt-in rate to a webinar versus the opt-in rate to a regular lead magnet, let's say PDS, it'll be much lower because someone is is committing to spending an hour or whatever amount of time it is with you, but the conversion rate from them to sales is considerably higher. So it's like it can totally be worth it just as a lead magnet rather than just to your to your audience. Um and it can be a good lead magnet for okay, we're gonna do this in conjunction with somebody else in my industry. Right. And you know, they're going to maybe they get a um uh a percentage of the sales or something like that. You know, that's like an option. All of these, you know, introduce complexity as soon as you introduce another another thing that you're doing. So you have with your limited time, you're gonna have to choose very carefully. But yeah, maybe it's not every month.
SPEAKER_01:But I think that it goes back to again, like I'm I'm for 2026, I'm all about less is more. So like webinars were are things that I enjoy, like my email newsletter, I enjoy like there's certain things that I'm happy to to lean towards because there's less friction for me to do it. So um, yeah, no, that's a good good way to think about it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, giving some sense to focus on things that you you actually are likely to do consistently because you enjoy it as well. It's like that definitely makes sense. Yeah, yeah. If you like doing a certain thing. It's part of the reason I I chose the podcast, is like I thought for a long time about do I start a podcast? And I was like, I really, really wanted to. I was like, okay, well, in that case, maybe I can do because I don't want to just do 10 episodes and and give up on it. And we're I don't know, 200 episodes. That's what I did. I did 10 episodes.
SPEAKER_01:I don't know what it was. It was just harder to like it came down to what do I what do I talk about? What am I gonna talk about? And I didn't have a good system in place in some ways. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:If you have guests, it's a guest-based podcast is a very different type of podcast because much easier for that. Right. And then it's a conversation and you yeah, yeah, much more natural, very easy to be natural with that. Um, okay, this has been fantastic. If somebody wants to go check out your website, kind of see how is it working, what are you doing? I the odds of us having somebody who is a client for you as very low. Very low. Let's always go check you out. Where should they go?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's uh arcsmarter, so www.arcsmart arc, arch smarter.com.
SPEAKER_00:Perfect. As always, thanks so much for listening. Really, really appreciate your time. Um, if you want to uh help us out, then just go and leave a review for the podcast or just a rating, you know, for as long as you like it. If you don't like it, don't do that. Um and that would be great. We'd really, really appreciate that. Um, Michael, thanks so much for coming on. Really, really appreciate your time.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, this was really fun. Thank you.