The Art of Selling Online Courses

235 How To Actually Scale by Doing Less

• John Ainsworth • Season 1 • Episode 235

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🔥 Grow your course revenue up to 30% in 7 days - no paid ads, no sales calls 📈https://datadrivenmarketing.co/roadmap

Marnie Ginsberg built Reading Simplified from a private tutoring clinic into an online academy that's served over 16,000 members and reached more than 3 million children... and she did it with no business background and no outside capital. Which is just remarkable.

In this episode we get into something that I think a lot of course creators will really resonate with. Marnie's business is literally called Reading Simplified, and yet her own instinct in business has always been to complicate things... trying every marketing channel, building out in every direction, doing all of the things at once. Sound familiar?

We talk about what made her decide to stop, why doubling down on one channel is so much harder than it sounds, and how the same diagnostic thinking she uses to help struggling readers maps almost perfectly onto how you can find the bottleneck in your own sales funnel.

We also get into her membership model, how she structures coaching without it eating up her margin, and the high ticket offers she's building out for 2026.

If you've ever felt like you're working flat out but not quite moving forward the way you should be... this one's worth a listen.

📚 We mention Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson and The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt in the episode... both well worth picking up if you haven't read them.

And if you'd like to get hold of my webinar resources, just drop me an email at john@datadrivenmarketing.co and I'll put something together and send it over to you.

🔗 Connect with Marnie:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReadingSimplified
IG: https://www.instagram.com/readingsimplified/
Website: https://www.readingsimplified.com

#OnlineCourses #SalesFunnels #CourseCreators #DigitalMarketing

The Cost Of Spreading Too Thin

SPEAKER_00

Being spread so thin means that you can't do anything really well. It's embarrassing for me that I have to say, here's my business's name, Reading Simplified, and we really do simplify reading, but all I try to do in business is complexify things. I'm just gonna be in 2026 recklessly focused on one channel, do it well, iterate, you just can't do it all.

SPEAKER_01

It became clear to me that for us, the podcast was by far the best thing, and we doubled down on it, and then it became by more the best thing. Nearly all of the people I interviewed on the podcast, nearly all of our customers have got one or maybe two marketing channels that are like that's what got them where they are. And so I think that there is benefit in expanding our doing many marketing channels at some point. It's just probably not that early. Hello and welcome to the Art of Selling Online courses. We're here to get winning strategies perhaps top performers in the online courses. My name's John Insburg, and today's guest is Marley Ginsburg. Now Marley's the founder of Reading Simplified. And what they're doing there is they're teaching teachers how to teach reading, which is fascinating and needs that people wouldn't necessarily even think that existing. Basically running Reading Simplified, they're an online academy with teaching educators how to teach using a streamlined evidence-based approach. It started out as a private tutoring clinic and it's grown into a business that served over 16,000 members and reached more than three million children. Marnie, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you, John. I'm glad to be here.

SPEAKER_01

So talk us through a little bit with this. Like how did you get started teaching teachers? Were you a teacher yourself? I'm guessing.

Discovering A Reading Crisis

Tutoring Breakthroughs And Fast Gains

Research To Practice Gap Exposed

Founding Reading Simplified

SPEAKER_00

I was, yeah, yeah. Well, uh, way back in the day, I taught sixth grade um English language arts in um the late 90s. And my students, I finally discovered, were reading two grade levels below sixth grade on average. And of course, some were much worse. And I didn't know how to solve that problem, even though I had a master's. And this is sadly something that a lot of teachers will resonate with. We just haven't been well prepared in the US and a lot of English-speaking countries for how to teach reading, which is kind of mind-blowing since it's the foundation of everything. So basically that set me on a journey to try to find a solution. I looked high and low, finally did find something, and it had a significant impact on two boys that were literally non-readers in my sixth grade class. So they'd been in school for seven years and couldn't read even like Dr. Seuss's hop on pop. So that's a tragedy. But I was able to, with this new thing that I discovered, I was able to get them up to like the four uh middle of the third grade reading level. And that changed my life. I was, I was like, how could I not know? And how could it be kind of that kind of easy where like me as an amateur could make such a difference in such a short time? So that's really when the tutoring came in. I left the public schools, started tutoring, and we had great success. We were regularly getting kids to reading at grade level in 12 hours of tutoring, which is unusually fast. But then they were being sent back to the classroom, and the teachers were saying things like, um, don't look at the, don't look so carefully at the word, look at the picture, make a prediction, look, make a guess. A lot of um mythology that was circulating at the time about how we should learn to read. So that sent me to go to university to do more research. And I realized, oh, we actually, it's not, we're not doing the wrong thing because of lack of research. It's just really getting the ideas out there that's the issue. So then an unusual thing happened. Uh senior professor got a large grant um from the US federal government to create a uh randomized control trial of a program to help struggling kindergarten and first grade readers. And she couldn't find the faculty to help her create it, so she turned to me as a doc student. I was thrilled to do it because I had been having so much success with tutoring. I created something that turned out to be uh very successful and has been in multiple journal articles and um is what recognized in the US on our What Works clearinghouse and other things that show that it was successful. And there's been millions of dollars spent on this program from the federal government, and yet it's not actually in any schools, by and large, other than where the research studies were. Oh this exactly. This is very classic research to practice gap. We have this one mechanism to develop research, and then this totally different thing to get it out there. So when my family moved uh from that university area in North Carolina to Wisconsin, I decided to try something different. And the idea for Reading Simplified, which is built on the prior work, came to me in 2013. And it's more it's just basically taking the same approach, same diagnostic thinking, same small set of activities, but disseminating it more widely. And as you mentioned at the top of the show, you know, we've reached a lot of people, and I'm really proud of that. Um I did this without really having any business background and no capital. It was just all self-funded, you know, um, because I was really determined to to make a difference.

SPEAKER_01

Lovely. I used to work in um sport and fitness marketing, working trying to get like hard-to-reach groups into physical activities, like cancer patients, disabled people, that kind of thing. And there was it was very similar in that there was tons of research into what was it that was actually effective.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And like there was studies and it was done by central government and department of health, and I'd I'd worked with them on a lot of those things, and we'd figured it out. But when you said to people, right, this is what it is that works, we're like, no, I've got an idea. I just said, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, we did that. We came up with some ideas. We test can't just I mean you can whatever, we'll just do their own random thing. And you're like, but don't. Why would you do that? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I feel you. I feel you on that one.

SPEAKER_00

It's rampant in education.

Membership Model And Pricing

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. My mum's a teacher, and um she's retired now. She used to be a teacher. She still does tutoring, but just like you know, two or three hours a week, just that's fun. Bit of fun, you know, keep a hand in kind of thing. Um so I saw I saw some of this stuff firsthand within the education in the UK of just like what uh some of some of the things that you look at that doesn't make any sense. Like, no, no, it doesn't. But that's how it is, you know. What's the um you you've got this the academy, right, as your main your main product?

SPEAKER_00

Reading simplified academy.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. And how many people are in that? We'd said earlier it was sixteen thousand ever, right? And how many people are in there like right now?

SPEAKER_00

Around two thousand.

SPEAKER_01

And how much do you charge for that?

SPEAKER_00

Um the forward-facing price is forty-three dollars a month or three eighty-seven uh a year. And then future years we did do we deduct it quite a lot for loyalty and it's one forty-seven annually.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. And you know you've said you kind of offer quite a lot of support from coaches in there as well, right? How does that work from a financial point of view? Because this is something we've talked a lot about this recently on the podcast. Is a lot of people are finding courses aren't selling as well as they used to because there's maybe because there's more stuff out there, maybe because of AI, maybe because of whatever. But people are now trying to figure out like how do I make it better? How do I improve the standard? How do I get better than the competition? And one of the things that people are doing is adding in more coaching. But one of the downsides to it is it again gets more expensive. So how do you find that works? How is it for you?

Coaching At Scale And Quality Controls

SPEAKER_00

Right. Well, um, we we built the online model off of the prior work that I had done at the university, and coaching was integral, and we had like a gear model of coach, teacher, and child, and they all work together. And we wanted to pull that in-person model into the online space. And so um, that's been the model from since the beginning of the Reading Simplified Academy. And um, one thing we do is you can't progress and get more of the materials to work with students until you watch a whole video, and then you also have to pass a quiz. So there's some kind of built-in uh mechanisms for um quality and just ensure that people learn. And then we also have what we call our teacher's lounge, which is an online discussion board. And at the end of each um unit, they're prompted to go to the teacher's lounge and say, um, this is what I did with the student based on this new activity that I've learned. Um, this is how it's going, these are my questions. So it uh we that um going directly to get coaching help is built into the course progression. And um, and so that really helps tremendously to kind of get a discussion board going because as you know, a lot of discussion boards and online courses are crickets. Yeah. Um, even so we're really proud of it. Um, but it is still just a small proportion of our members that uh utilize it actively. Um and so that's really where the financial um possibilities come in. So our coaches are all part-time. They came through the academy. I noticed them asking smart questions. I, you know, could see that they had really um good diagnostic sense, good interpersonal skills. And so I I would, you know, just as they've come in, I've like, hmm, do you want to help us out? And uh so we train them and um oversee their their support of the teachers. And so they're um they're not working that much, and each of them works maybe um uh c you know, on specifically coaching a couple of hours a week. And usually it's just about one hour of of um work per coach um per day. Um and and I should be more clear, only one coach goes in on a day. And so it's just one hour of work, and they're just boom, boom, boom, knocking it all out. So we get people are there, you know, and people can ask questions, but within 24 hours on a weekday, they're gonna get a response from a coach. And it's just one hour.

SPEAKER_01

The answers that they're giving on the discussion board, are they all public answers?

SPEAKER_00

For the members. Yeah, they're public for the members.

Retention Tactics And Risk Flags

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so that's what I meant.

High-Ticket Offers And Guarantees

SPEAKER_00

But like that's not like a one-to-one thing with each person answering their questions, no, not in that situation, but now we're um um up in the ante and we're going to be doing more email outreach from the beginning because as you also probably well know, is um just getting people over the initial hurdle of logging in, uh knowing the lay of the land, that's where you lose a lot of people. So we're gonna really um put more time into emailing and nurturing people that way. And I'm banking on that being profitable because we will get better retention, but it is still a new experiment. We're tra I have a uh Filipino VA who's really smart and she's tracking every member where they are and on a Excel site type of dashboard. And um, you know, then we and then she's like got some AI to try trigger whether or not they're um at risk for jumping ship. And so those will be our targets, especially. Well, we'll reach out to everyone, but um, and uh that that's that's the current ecosystem. And then we also have developed a high-ticket program offer where it's way more support. I mean, it costs, of course, a lot more money. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_01

How much are you charging for that?

SPEAKER_00

Well, we have two. We have um 12 weeks to reading at grade levels where we support a teacher or a parent or a tutor to uh work with their one child and get them to grade level really rapidly, and we give them all the resources they need and coaching, and that's$3,500. Your your audience may not know it's unheard of to offer a guarantee to get a kid to grade level in 12 weeks. So that's why we can charge a premium offer for that, because that's kind of high in the education space. And our newer thing is to offer uh reading simplified certification because a lot of teachers and tutors um ha have you know really valued our approach, but they're we don't have like a um a more in-depth way of coaching them. And so we're leveling that up and we're gonna start at a$3,000 price point, it'll probably go up. And that will be a lot more coaching. We will get uh video samples of them working with a child, a couple different, you know, some various criteria for things we need to see, and we'll watch them across um the child's development as a reader, give them feedback, and we'll be able to ensure that quality check mark that they're really understand our model and how to think diagnostically. And so these folks will go through the academy. That'll be the stepping stone. You've proven that actually I can I can get this reading simplified system. I've shown enough commitment, and now I'm ready to get this other layer of coaching. We're not just gonna have people jump straight into the high-level certification ticket.

SPEAKER_01

That makes sense. Do you have any sense yet of what percentage of people will upgrade? No, it's too early.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, well, the thirty yeah, yeah, the it's too early. We had good success with the$3,500 product, but I really wanted to um support the people have been clamoring for this for a long time, actually.

SPEAKER_01

Nice. Cool. And what's your main traffic source? I know you've got like about seven and a half thousand YouTube subscribers, but you've you've got an email list of like sixty thousand. So it's like, is it the Facebook group or what is it that's the biggest traffic source?

Traffic Sources And Market Shifts

SPEAKER_00

Uh it's um it's been changing quite a lot since I started. So um Facebook is a heavy uh source, uh, word of mouth, and um word of mouth is really big for us now. We used to look put a lot more money in Facebook ads. Um we've been pivoting and trying different marketing channels ever since really the iOS update happened a while back. Um and also changing um there was a big shift in our traffic with the Google update about, I don't know, 18 months ago. So we're trying different things. And that's one of the reasons that I'm interested in is hire a ticket off option. I can really dive in and give really good quality, and I don't have to have tens of thousands of people to be able to serve and keep a business running. Um, the other thing that we're moving towards is uh what Brian Harris at Growth University calls bar other people's audiences. So it's just more collaboration and partnerships. I'm excited to do that. I've dabbled with that, but we're gonna really be very um systematic about it and try to do like email swaps or um I might interview folks for the YouTube sh sh channel, um, try to get a webinar of ours uh in w in front of their audience and that kind of thing. But this is just early days.

Partnerships And Borrowed Audiences

SPEAKER_01

Okay. So you that's kind of like a an another experiment that you're gonna be running rather than okay, okay. That makes sense. And because yeah, because you said something really interesting uh in the the info you sent me before we started talking. You said you half-heartedly believe that you have to be everywhere all at once and do all the things. Yeah. What's talk me through that? Like why why do you think that? What what's have you seen that yourself? Is that stuff you've learned from others?

The Myth Of Being Everywhere

SPEAKER_00

Like, I do consume a lot of online marketing um advice. And uh we did get to that spot um in the in the uh with COVID where we were really growing like gangbusters. And I thought, you know, we are at that stage where we should build out a big team and and we should have some social presence on every platform, and we should be doing really well with SEO, and we should um have ads and you know, all the things like a growing business. Um, and we like I said, some of the challenges that we face with iOS update and Google update, um, and just people being less, you know, a little less interested in online things, um, have made me decide to shift. And um also um being spread so thin means that you can't do anything really well. I mean, and that's just it's embarrassing for me that I have to say, here's my business's name, Reading Simplified, and we really do simplify reading, but all I try to do in business is complexify things.

SPEAKER_01

Reading simplified, but business complex. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So I'm it's my nature to like, ooh, I got I learned this thing, I want to implement it. And I have uh unrealistic expectations for what I can actually accomplish. I'm working on um I'm just gonna be in 2026 relentlessly focused on one channel and do it well, iterate. I'd be I'm expecting it should be better, but it there's gonna be in the back of my mind, oh, but don't forget, you're you're you're reels.

Doubling Down On One Channel

Lead Generation And List Building

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. So I'd been really conflicted on this for a long time. So traffic's not my main expertise, right? So we're really, really good at uh funnels and how do you take the traffic that you've got and convert that into paying customers and repeat customers. And I wasn't good enough for a long time for my own business at um at the traffic side of things. And I was also doing lots of different tactics and lots of different things, and I kind of had an equal proportion of uh of customers coming in from webinars for other people's audiences, from guest podcasting, from our own website traffic, from our own podcast, a few different things. And I'd heard the advice from a number of people that uh to reach one million dollars in revenue, you needed to have one marketing channel, one customer avatar, one product, what have you. And I was just like, I just haven't found that to be the case for myself, but I knew a bunch of other people who had, and I was kind of conflicted. And it became clear to me that for us the podcast was by far was was was the best thing, and we doubled down on it, and then it became by more the best thing, and then it's like, oh yeah, it's clear. Now I'm like, oh yeah, that was kind of right, wasn't it? And maybe I did just need to double down more on one thing that was working. And um and nearly all of the people I interview on the podcast, nearly all of our customers have got one or maybe two market channels that are like that's what's got them all of the like to where they to where they are. And so I think that there is benefit in expanding out and doing many marketing channels at some point. It's just probably not that early. Right. So hard to get any one of them to work right. Right. Instagram is so different to YouTube, even though they're both content marketing. So in that way, they're actually kind of similar, but they're really different in terms of what exactly what kind of content are you creating for it.

SPEAKER_00

Right.

SPEAKER_01

So yeah, that's my my I I suspect, yes, if you can find whatever one's working the best and just get, you know, two or three times better. Even 50% better at that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I just need to wash that over my my brain from John.

SPEAKER_01

But you are you're clearly doing something right because you've got an email list of like 60,000. Yeah. So that's you're you're doing something right. So what is it then that has brought the bulk of those? You mentioned a few different things before.

Solo Teams And Prioritisation

SPEAKER_00

Well, a lot of it is historical. Like I said, we were just we were really successful on Facebook, organic and ads. And um I I have um opt-ins on all over our site, some you know, landing pages um that are designed to just get the opt-in, but also just a lot of blog posts that have um a lead magnet that's tied to that content. And so I think we get leads pretty easily, um relatively easily once they hit our site. Um and we do try to nurture them well. And we're also we're also offering something that's different from the mainstream. Um and so those are things that maybe keep keep people on our list. But um, yeah, uh we haven't it's it's it's dwindling lately as I've been basically I've not put any energy into traffic really um in um in a couple in really two years. I've I've tried a couple of things, but mostly I've been trying building out the team, improving the product, um make creating other offers. So you just can't do it all.

SPEAKER_01

Everyone listening is probably like feeling you very much right now. Yeah. It's like everybody, it's like it's all like nearly everybody who listens to this podcast is is uh one person, or it's one person with a team of like two or three, or some of them have got like, you know, five or six. I know that they're I know that there are people at least one person listening who's who's got like a team of 20, but it's that's not the common way it is, right? And so people are like, right, well, what do I work on? Do I work on traffic or my email marketing or my funnels or my courses or other things along with the product, or building the team, or like what bit do I work on the most? And it's you kind of got to do all of them, but that's really difficult, you know?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I totally resonate with that being like a constant struggle. It's just like that self-questioning. And uh I've really benefited from getting someone else to to look into the inside parts of the business and and give me direction and and and see if I can actually follow it.

Nurture Journeys And Live Webinars

SPEAKER_01

So one of the things that you did say actually, in terms of obviously my focus and what my thought is always about like the email marketing and funnels, is that one of the things you want to work on is the customer journey to lead them into becoming a member. What do you mean by that? Like is it are you talking specifically about like the first week or two when someone signs up, or is it like overall uh however long they've been on your email list? Or what do you what are you thinking about?

SPEAKER_00

Well, yeah, we definitely have an initial nurture sequence to give them some of the best of our stuff and kind of um, you know, demonstrate what it is that Reading Simplified can offer. So that's important. And then we will regularly give out um emails that are free, um, good ideas and resources instead of just pitching. So we are going to be careful about the proportion of pitching that we do. So those are some things that um I think has helped repair our audience. And then we do a lot of live events to um also offer complementary training, and then a lot of those live events are well pitch. At the end, but the event, the you know, the training itself is still standalone gonna have a lot of value.

SPEAKER_01

So um is that like free events? Are they paid events? Or how does that work?

Teach Vs Pitch: Webinar Design

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, well, usually we do a lot of uh uh free webinars. Okay. It's probably been the bulk of what I've done. I I started out doing a ton of Facebook Live and then um having a bigger thing, um, you know, a weekly Facebook Live and and and then a bigger thing that would be like a a monthly or a quarterly webinar. And we do a couple different times. I've pulled back on Facebook Live weekly, but we still do um webinars pretty frequently.

SPEAKER_01

Do you do webinars every month?

SPEAKER_00

Um yes. They're not always they're not always new topics. Sometimes we just call you know, tweak the the intro, the title. Yeah. I have a lot of content. Yeah, that's not the problem.

unknown

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

But there are problems, but that's not one of them. Okay, yeah. Um I love webinars. I think they're a great conversion tactic. How's that working for you? Do you do like is it like a teach and pitch thing? You're doing like just teaching something, and at the end you do like a little how long do you spend on teaching? How long do you spend on pitching?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Um this again is one of those areas where I'm struggling with my nat my nature and myself. Like originally I did a full hour, for years I did a full hour of teaching, and we gave really the best of the best. In fact, I could teach like the core things that you could teach anyone to read in an hour, and I wanted to give it all away. And you know, but people all the online marketers are saying you just can't hold people's attention for an hour and you should do it for 45 minutes and then start your pitch. So I've been like struggling with myself for that for a long time. And now um I'm in in 2025, I've been transitioning to much less this is how you teach this, this is how you teach reading, and much more about, you know, a belief um change.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

Offer Structure And Payment Options

SPEAKER_00

And that um worked really well for us in the spring of 2025, and it was not as successful in the fall of 2025. I'm still trying to work it out. And we're gonna that's part of the iteration that we're gonna do in 2026 is just really analyze the heck out of that webinar and polish it up. So yeah, it'll be c it's gonna be much more like uh 45 minutes of training um and then the pitch.

SPEAKER_01

Got it. I I love the fact that you're working on the how do you actually change beliefs? Because it it is it's difficult to to create a good webinar that is built like that. But if you get it right, it's it converts fantastically well. Like we've done them a lot and we've had I know a lot of people who've done them and they've had incredible results with them. But it's are you following uh Russell Bronson's framework or what have you?

SPEAKER_00

I did, I did originally, yeah. But now I I don't know that if he has a newer one. Um no, I'm I'm I don't think so.

SPEAKER_01

It's it's it's already the perfect webinar framework. Oh yeah. So it's like, you know, I don't know if there's anything else that he's added to it. But um like the expert secrets book's really, really good for that.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

Certification Demand And Rollout

SPEAKER_01

Um and I'm trying to think if I've ever done an episode about webinars for anybody listening who's so if you if you're listening and you're like, I really would like to work on doing a great webinar, then Expert Secrets is definitely a really, really good book to go through. It breaks down the entire thing um from beginning to end. There's a lot to it. I've I've done presentations about how to build webinars, and I've got a ton of resources on it, and I have never done a podcast episode about it, and I feel bad about it. Ding ding ding. I apologize to all your listeners who are like, No, you know what to do next.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Um but if you want, if you want to get my framework, it's basic, it's based on Russell Brunson's stuff, but I like to break things down into like how do you make something super practical? Like so it's kind of like workbooks of all the steps. If you want to get hold of that, drop me an email, John at datadrivenmarketing.co, or I'll gather all my resources together and I'll I'll send it over to you. Awesome. Um But um yeah, when we've built them, that's that's the system that has had the highest conversion of of any system is to do is to do webinars. Like we do email marketing promotions all the time. And one of the reasons we do that rather than doing webinars all the time is because most people are just like, oh God, this webinar thing is too difficult. It's too much, it's too big of a project to take on. Whereas an email marketing promotion that's like you can kind of just do more simply. Um so that's really interesting to hear that it's like it worked great one time and not the next. Did you have any feelings as to what was different and what what changed?

Diagnostic Thinking For Teaching

SPEAKER_00

Um I suspect that we really hit the bullseye initially and and um got some of the audience that was maybe didn't need the best the world's best pitch.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_00

And and then it was a little I I still didn't really master the the model that I'm working on. Um so to get the kind of uh you know, that will next layer out from the bullseye. That's my one hypothesis. Um it could also be the economies change. We're gonna try um a monthly um payment instead of that upfront sticker shock of 3,500 or 3,000. And I'm thinking that that will be a little easier sale um at the point of conversion instead of you know having to get on a sales call.

SPEAKER_01

What I'm gonna do after this uh is I'm gonna message this podcast episode to Josip, who's my head of funnel strategy. And he he does he's much more hands-on than me working with people on on building all this kind of stuff out. And I'm gonna get him to like have a look at stuff with you, message with you, kind of help you get any resources that we've got to kind of help with this. Because it sounds like this is gonna be a big deal for you. And I think once you get it right, it's gonna like you know help move the business forward. Um Yosip's great. Everyone listening probably heard him on a bunch of episodes, but he is uh uh yeah, he's very smart, and uh he uh he's very good at like breaking it down and finding out exactly what is it that is needed to help kind of move forwards.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's so helpful in any any niche. That's what we do in reading. Just it's a little harder to extrapolate to marketing.

Mapping Diagnostics To Funnels

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Um so what's next for you? So is it this you you'd mentioned the focus on the the doubling down on the uh the uh collaborations? Collaborationships, yeah. Is that the is that the next focus?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, um it's pretty much two um two parts, just the to get more traffic, more leads and sales through the collaborations, and then um enhance that webinar so it's a really solid and persuasive so we can increase the conversions. And also we still have to operationalize the certification that's just launching. So I've got my hands full at the early part of this year. But my team is excited. We've been talking about certification for so long, and they it's so so they're very mission-driven, and that that really kind of helps smooth over some of the the bumps of starting something new if people are really excited about it. And there's a lot of demand. We I put a post up on our Facebook group, um, and our Facebook group is just for members, so it's kind of small and it doesn't it gets some good engagement, but um, you know, maybe uh a typical post will have like seven comments. And um I said, Do you guys want in early January? I said, We are you we're thinking about starting up this certification. Are you interested? And within 24 hours, we had over a hundred people saying yes, and now it's up to 150.

SPEAKER_02

So I was like that's a lot.

Theory Of Constraints For Growth

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, good so I think there's the demand there, and so I just I've been DMing and I need to reach out more and um and then get these webinars on the road.

SPEAKER_01

I want to dig into something that's there's an approach that you you're I think you're taking from a couple of things that you've said with the way that you uh uh helping students that I I think has some parallels to some of the way that I approach business. I want to try and delve into this and see if I see if I've understood right. You said in advance, you said I think about meeting the teachers' needs as a diagnostic challenge, just like finding what the student needs. And you said a minute ago, when I was saying about how Yosip dives into the marketing and figures out like exactly what is it that's needed, you said that's kind of what you're doing with with students. Could you talk us through that? Like, how does that work? How is this diagnostic approach work?

SPEAKER_00

In reading.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

AI As A Thinking Partner

Building Internal AI Tools

SPEAKER_00

Well, one of the things that we have as an asset is I've created the system um that we want the teachers to implement. So I guide them through our system. This wouldn't necessarily work for any um exactly the same for someone who's never used our system. So I first say, what reading level are they on? Which tells us which of our pathways. We have one page kind of this is how to start, and this is these are the steps you go through. So I know which pathway they're on, and then I know I ask them what step out of 12 steps they're on, and then I ask them to describe their issues, um, what they're observing. And then we have a um um a developmental model of how reading can improve. And we know that there's, you know, this phase one, and there's a couple of key features here, phase two, phase three, so to speak. And so if they're talking to me, oh, my student has a blending problem, then I know that we're on the early phase, and I know what the um the typical re problems are with blending, and I know the the activities that you can do to solve the blending problem. So um I might have to also double check, okay, so it sounds like you know, we we've got the grade level, the the program you're on, what step you're on, and you've identified blending, but I'm gonna poke around and make sure that there's nothing that feeds into that skill level that is um that is missing, and uh just kind of get more context really. And then it's usually um pretty easy then to diagnose what what the answer is um because a reading development is actually not when you're in our system anyway, it's not that complex. There's only so many variables that could go awry. Mark um, so I don't, it'll be it might be a little trickier to um extrapolate to marketing, but I guess if you're thinking in terms of like a funnel, there's only again so many variables that could go awry. And so um that's what we're doing is like what is it that is the issue in in light of the the development of the child's abilities, and then build the context um to really understand it completely. And then usually there's a a a tool that we know solves that particular problem. Um and then uh since we've done it so much and kids do typically present the same kinds of issues, it's not that hard to pin that down. I can do that often in just a Facebook group with very little of my time just asking one or two questions and then give them this is probably where you need to go, and it almost always works. The one area that we have more difficulty with is when there's a behavior problem, that kind of opens up a big can of worms because it could be so many different things, there's so many variables. Um, and then that takes a lot more brainstorming about what's going to actually be meet that particular kid's um needs because that's really idiosyncratic. That reading development is a lot more um constrained.

Will Reading Survive Voice Tech

SPEAKER_01

It's really interesting. It's it's it's very similar. So the approach that I'm able to take and that the the guys on my team are able to take with someone who's selling courses and we're looking at their email marketing funnels is is similar in the approach, in that we know what all of the steps are and we know what the benchmarks are for each of the steps. And so we can go through and do the analysis and find, right, in your webinar, right, what's the opt-in rate, what's the attendance rate, what's the completion rate, what's the conversion rate to the sales page, what's the conversion rate to the checkout page, what's the conversion rate to buying, how many people could bought the upsell, how many people bought the order bump, um, what's the is there a follow-up sequence of play? All of these steps we can look at them and go, right, well, this one, this one, and this one are fine. These two are like uh we could approve a bit, but this one, which is on the critical path, we could actually double the sales if we just improve that one bit. So that's that's like really similar to the kind of thing that you're talking about. The thing I've been working on that's a bit broader is like how do you extrapolate out from that into problems that you don't know how to solve. And do you have you ever come across the book called The Goal by Eli Goldratt?

SPEAKER_00

Oh, I don't think so.

SPEAKER_01

It's a it's it's the best book I've ever come across about uh bottleneck theory or the theory of constraints.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

Where To Learn More And Free Game

SPEAKER_01

And and he's breaking down he's you he it's written as a novel, and he's talking about how do you There's a there's a guy who's running a uh factory, and he has taken over, he's been put in charge, and it's not performing well enough, and he's in trouble, and he needs to get it to work fast, and he doesn't know how to sort it out, doesn't know what's wrong, and all of the measurements they're using are wrong, and it's very confused. And some mentor of his helps him to kind of figure it out, but doesn't give him the answers, he just gives him the questions. So you kind of have to figure it out with him. You go on the journey along with him figuring it out, rather than it being like a textbook, you do this, then this and this. And the concept of it is is trying to identify very similarly to what we've been talking about, what is it that's the limiting factor? Right. What is the bottleneck?

SPEAKER_00

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

But how to start to try and figure that out when you don't when you haven't done this 50 times before. Right. Like you've helped hundreds of kids reading, right? You know what the framework is.

SPEAKER_00

It's a pattern recognition, but if you don't know the pattern, right.

SPEAKER_01

So how do you do that? So I've been working on like how can I use that in my own business when like I've only run this business now. Like I haven't run 50 of these businesses that are kind of the same, right? So I've got to only base it on the own my own patterns. And I've been doing a lot of work on it recently, like how to get good at doing that. Um and it's it's I find it much easier to do it for other people's businesses than my own, of course. But I've been getting better at doing it for mine, and it's it's made an enormous difference in terms of like the focus, like my ability to really get down to like this is the one thing I need to be working on. Right. And it's not these 17 other things, it's this one bit. That that is a really simplified message.

SPEAKER_00

And uh yeah, it's I I'm sure that that could be extrapolated to business because there are an infinite number of things that we could do, but that's just what that's just what causes us to have the in a stranglehold. And um really there's the one point of constraint. And it's different for everybody's business because you know, what works for me is gonna be different than what works for you. So I think that's really cool. I found it be uh AI to be a nice little thinking partner when I'm out out of my league in the content. Like I just don't know the knowledge, and so I can uh ask it to ask me questions and give me a little bit of background and then, you know. I get closer to being an expert. I'm not I, you know, in a in a field that I'm not expert in. I'm not this it's not quite the same as being an expert, but I I I feel like it's a quick level up.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's it's definitely helpful. I've been using AI for a lot of stuff recently. I've started building out a lot of AI tools that are in the business, not for anybody else to see, but like something that used to take someone, whatever, five hours a week. It's like, can I build an AI tool that just does that? And then that saves that person time and then they can spend their time on something else. And it's just like, and it's it's so much further along. It's so much easier than it was six months ago.

SPEAKER_00

Like, yeah, just in the last three weeks, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm kind of scared now. I'm like, I don't, I just made a an app and it's really smart. And I didn't I don't code. I just wrote a couple of lines. What you can what you can dream, you can create. And that it didn't like you said, yeah, it wasn't always like that. You could maybe make some slop before, but I I feel like it's way beyond slop a few in in certain realms. I I I have I was trying to get one where it could help kids blend sounds together because that's a perennial early, as I mentioned earlier, it's a perennial early problem. Like and so I've got it to do everything that I wanted, except when it says the sounds, it should say mop for blending the word mop. And it'll say M P. I mean, it's just all caddy wampus. I'm like, I can't figure out how to retrain it. But it and my other apps I'm like, it's practically perfect, just out of the box.

SPEAKER_01

Wow. It's it's fascinating. I think it's it's such such a power I know I bang on about this on the on the podcast a lot. It's like it's such a powerful thing that I think if people aren't getting on board with it, yeah. I hate it it's like a danger that you get overtaken by competition because it's there's there's some things that if you tried it a year ago and you were like, oh, this is useless.

SPEAKER_00

Right.

SPEAKER_01

And then you think it's still useless now.

SPEAKER_00

You're you're not right. Yeah. Oh well, I I mean like three months ago I had this. I I think I I'd worried about it like three years ago, but three months ago, I was like, you know what? Voice recognition is so good. Like, are we gonna be reading in 10 years? Am I gonna not to need to be teaching how to teach reading?

SPEAKER_01

Oh. Oh. I never thought about that.

SPEAKER_00

How visually are how visual driven are we now? Yeah. People, it's it's gonna, I don't know. I was like kind of scared about it. I uh you can have a higher level of of of knowledge and and then you with reading than you can with audio, but it can serve a lot of people pretty well with um alone. Wow.

SPEAKER_01

On that bombshell less end just mic drop, like we're even gonna read. Money, if people want to check out what you're doing, where should they go? What's the website? What's the YouTube channel point people where to go?

SPEAKER_00

Thank you. Um readingsimplified.com is a great place to start. From there you can go, you can see a lot of our the activities that we do. If you're more thinking more of a business side, you can see a lot of uh funnel um prompts probably in a lot of places. Um we're also on YouTube um at Reading Simplified, I think. YouTube.com board slash at reading simplified, I think. Probably just Google it. Um but uh we have one activity that uh for any of you and your audience members who actually have a child that they're concerned about, one really quick activity that we call switch it. It just takes five minutes. Kids think it's a game and it really unlocks a lot of the the problems that kids can have um when they're reading, whether they're beginning or strugglers. So I would recommend going to readingsimplified.com forward slash switch dash it to get that free game, how to play it and everything you know you need to know to um test it out with your child.

SPEAKER_01

Beautiful. Thanks as always for listening. And Mani, thanks so much for coming on today.

SPEAKER_00

It's been a pleasure and thanks for the convo.

SPEAKER_01

Um if you want to get a hold of those webinar resources, like I said, drop me an email and I will put some stuff together and I will send it over to you. Um and otherwise, I look forward to uh seeing you guys on the next episode.