The Art of Selling Online Courses

268 This Video Alone Paid Me $60,000

• John Ainsworth • Season 1 • Episode 268

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Dr. Andrea Furlan is one of Canada's top pain physicians, a full professor at the University of Toronto, and a senior scientist at the country's largest hospital. She's also a YouTuber with over 830,000 subscribers and 78 million views, which her colleagues definitely did not see coming.

When Andrea started her channel in 2019, she wasn't chasing subscribers. She just didn't have enough time in appointments to teach her patients everything they needed to know. So she started recording it. Her colleagues thought it was a strange move for a serious physician. She did it anyway.

In this conversation, John sits down with Andrea to talk about how she built that audience, what she's learned about YouTube after 240 long-form videos, and where her business is headed. One shoulder exercise video she filmed in her home during the pandemic, hair a mess by the end of a full day of recording, has now crossed ten million views and generated over $60,000 in ad revenue on its own.

They also get into the practical side of things: how Andrea runs two separate email lists for patients and healthcare professionals, how she uses AI to help develop scripts and thumbnail ideas, and the funnel advice John shares live on camera for growing her healthcare professional list faster.

Andrea is thoughtful, generous with what she's learned, and genuinely funny. If you're a course creator who came from a professional background and wondered whether your credentials could translate into an audience, this one is worth your time.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Check out Andrea's work:
🌐 https://www.doctorandreafurlan.com/
📸 https://www.instagram.com/dr.andrea.furlan
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@DrAndreaFurlan

Hook And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_02

That video alone already paid me more than $60,000. One video only in the last uh 48 hours I got 53,000 views. So it's more than a thousand views per hour. I have now 240 long formed reviews. I have more than 25,000 people now my patients mailed.

SPEAKER_00

Hello. Welcome to the art of selling online courses. We are here to share winning strategies and secret hats for the top performers in the online course industry. My name's John Ainsworth and today's guest is Dr. Andrea Ferland. Now Andrea is a pain physician in Toronto. She's a full professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at UHN, the largest hospital in Canada. She has published more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific studies on chronic pain. And in 2022, she was named Toronto's top doctor in pain management. Back in 2019, she started a YouTube channel for a very simple reason. She didn't have enough time in her appointments to teach her patients everything they needed to know about managing their pain, so she started recording it. Now the catch is plenty of her colleagues thought that a serious position had no business teaching patients on YouTube at all, but she did it anyway. And that channel has now grown to over 830,000 subscribers and more than 78 million views. She's published two books, including Chronic Pain, written over a dozen booklets of exercises, built online courses that train other healthcare professionals, and she still reads and approves every single comment on her channel herself. Andrea's done something most experts only dream of, taking deep technical world-class expertise and turned it into an audience of hundreds of thousands of people whose lives she's genuinely changed. Exactly the kind of journey I know a lot of our listeners are on. Andrea, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you so much, John, for inviting me to talk to you today. It's a great pleasure. I love your show.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Chronic Pain As A Brain Alarm

SPEAKER_00

So, what kind of problem are you solving for people?

SPEAKER_02

Well, as a pain doctor, I see a lot of people who have uh musculoscleral, uh chronic pain. These are back pains, neck pain, fibromyalgia, knee, hip, ankles, all kinds of uh muscles, tendons, and bone pains. And uh when the pain becomes chronic, it's different from an acute problem. If a person has a sports injury that they have a tendinitis, it's uh they go to the orthopedic surgeons and they fix it and they don't come to me. But chronic pain is a different disease, which now becomes a neurological disease. The pain system, the alarm system of the body doesn't turn off even when the injury has healed. So they continue having pain for years and years and years, even after the injury has long healed, and that's when they come to me, because the pain now becomes the disease itself. And education, lifestyle modification, explaining to them what's going on, how their emotions, their psychological state plays a big role in maintaining that pain state, because it's basically a dangerous signal in the brain that keeps going on and they need to turn it off. But that takes a lot of communication and teaching and education, and that's why I needed help, because um in the daily clinical work, we have very little time, resources, and we are not ready, the patient is not ready to be learning, and so I needed something extra, and that's how I had the idea to use YouTube for that.

Being A Credible Doctor On YouTube

SPEAKER_00

And what was the deal with the other healthcare professionals saying that this isn't something people should be doing on YouTube? What was their reasoning? Why were they saying that?

SPEAKER_02

I was actually very afraid of telling even my colleagues when I opened the channel in 2019 that I was a YouTuber. Because at that time and still today, YouTube is 80% of the YouTube videos are more for entertainment, for fun, and less than 20% are educational videos, although people use entertainment education. It's a mix of both. And um my colleagues kind of um they were, I even even tell, even when I opened, didn't tell my parents or my colleagues because of this. My reputation as a doctor, as a scientist, is mainly to publish in the scientific literature, hope that everybody will read my papers and change their lives. And why would I go to a social media and become an influencer? Why do I need to be a creator? Uh and it takes too much time, and then you get a lot of negative comments. So that was that uh perception. But I insisted, and uh I tried to use YouTube for serious uh medical education. And I'm glad to say that even after, I think recently 2022, is because of the pandemic and a lot of misinformation that was spread, uh, YouTube became very serious. They have now YouTube Health. That there are it's a commitment of YouTube to close channels that spread misinformation and promote those who are evidence-based by professionals who know what they are talking about.

SPEAKER_00

I saw you had a little like a badge almost under your channel that like other people I've I've never seen it before. And it was saying basically, you are a registered health professional who knows what they're talking about. This is a good idea. Yeah, this comes from YouTube.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. This is yeah, this is part of the YouTube health initiative that um they want to promote professionals and institutions that are credentialed. So I had to submit my medical license in Ontario to YouTube. They verified, and only after they approved, a human looked at uh to see she's real a real doctor in Ontario. And every year they send me an email saying, Are you still maintaining your medical license? And then that banner appears on every video that I post.

SPEAKER_00

How have you d does it still fit with the original mission? I'm guessing this it's got a lot broader right now. You know, like originally you were doing it so that your patients you could just share information with them, but now you've got 800,000 subscribers, you're reaching a much bigger audience than that. How do you kind of think about what you're doing with YouTube now?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah,

Building A Video Library From Questions

SPEAKER_02

it's I still do my videos for my own patients.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Uh yeah. I when I started the channel, I had a actually my husband asked me, Andrea, do you have enough videos, enough topics to have a channel? Because a channel means a lot of topics. And he said to me, Why don't you write down the list of topics that you want to teach your patients? Because those are things that I repeat over and over, John, in my clinical. Like in the same day, I may repeat the same thing five times. So why should I do that? At the end of the day, I'm tired, I'm not in a good mood, I may do like a mini lecture of one minute. And um, so I initially I created a list and I said, Oh my god, I have a hundred topics that I wanted to teach my patients. But then I what once I posted those 100 long form videos, I had another 100 because every time that I see myself teaching something in the clinic that I don't have a video, I open my cell phone in my notes and I say, Oh, I need a video for that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And so I have now 240, I think, long-form videos. And I still have a list on my yeah, I still have a list of videos that I thought my library would be complete.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

But people always ask me more. And I try to make one video for each question. So if a patient asks me a question and I say, Oh, I need five minutes to answer this, that is a video topic that I will go one day and record.

SPEAKER_00

Nice. That's cool. What size is the audience now? You've got 830,000 subscribers. How much do you do you know about how many views you get a month on YouTube?

SPEAKER_02

Yes, it varies. It varies by month, it varies by day. I just checked uh because I knew you were going to ask me that. I just checked uh my analytics, and in the last uh 48 hours, I got 53,000 views. So it's more than a thousand views per hour.

SPEAKER_00

Wow, nice. And how big's your email list now?

Free Handouts, Email Lists, Clear Rules

SPEAKER_02

So I have two email lists. Um one, so let me tell you this. So when I opened my YouTube channel, I I wrote down my ground rules. And my ground rules said that um I wanna make uh if I want to make anything payable or for profit, would be from healthcare professionals.

SPEAKER_01

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

I didn't want to charge patients because uh they they already suffer a lot from chronic pain. And uh uh although I have books and booklets, uh, which are they have to pay for the books and the booklets, but um everything else, like I have a lot of handouts that I give for free on my website, more than 50 handouts. Each video that I have, that is basically there is a handout that a one page that they can remember, I make that free, put on my website. And so in order for them to download those handouts, I from my website, which is free, I collect their emails. That's for that's for people with chronic pain. And the reason that I wanted to do that is because if I am uh doing a collection of handouts, like sometimes I have four, five, six videos for shoulder pain, and I want to do a newsletter saying these are the videos that I have for shoulder pain, because people find it difficult to locate my videos on the channel. So then I email them. So for the patient's list, I have uh more than 20, I think 25,000 people now on my patients' email list. And but then I also realized that uh there were a lot of healthcare professionals, doctors, pharmacists, physiotherapists, nurses, psychologists, who communicated with me and they said, I'm learning so much about pain by watching your videos. Do you have a course? Do you, especially the topic of nosoplastic pain, which is that I just explained to you in the beginning of this video? No soplastic pain is when the pain transforms from acute to chronic and becomes a neurological disease. That's called nociplastic pain. There is a lot of biological mechanisms that happen in the spinal cord, the sensors, the brain. And I teach this a lot to medical students, other doctors here. And people start asking me, oh, I need to learn more about this. I need to learn. So I decided to do a course for healthcare professionals. And um and put all my slides there and teach and give cases. And that's when I started creating also a mailing list for healthcare professionals, which now has more than 1,000. I have 1,000 emails on that list. And so I use that list um regularly to do webinars with them and uh send some promotions to them saying, oh, it's Black Friday. If you want to take my course, here's a a coupon for discount and something like that.

SPEAKER_00

And

Lead Magnets, Funnels, Better Links

SPEAKER_00

how do you find out when someone signs up for anything from you whether they are public or a healthcare professional?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I'm using MayoChimp.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

For that one. And so I get a notification that people signed up. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

But but how do you know which of the lists they've signed up?

SPEAKER_02

Like how do you know if it's a moment you've signed up or if it's yeah, they go to different leads. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So what's the what's any of your best lead magnets for the healthcare professionals?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so for the healthcare professionals, I I do some videos that are specifically explaining the complexities of diagnosing pain. And then I have a free handout that I give to them, and that takes them to my MailChimp, a mail list. So if they download that one, um, they go to my mail chimp. I also tell them that I have a wait list for other courses if they want to be put on the wait list. I have I'm I'm still planning to do more courses, and unfortunately, I can't find time to do more courses. But they ask me like courses how to treat fibromalgia, how to treat neuropathic pain, how to treat uh how to diagnose, how to differentiate. So I still have a list of courses for other healthcare professionals, but my main course is the nociplastic pain course, how to diagnose and treat this one. So people here um and I have some funnels on um on MayoChimp. I know you are expert in this, and I'd love to hear your opinion about this. And uh so if when once they subscribe to the mailing list, they already get notification and they get three emails that go to them by telling them about the nociplastic pain course.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Do you know I'm just looking through your YouTube channel trying to find one of the diagnosis videos that would point to that. I've just looked at a couple and I couldn't see any links from them. Do you know one, like any one video that would be good?

SPEAKER_02

It's called uh the difference between neuropathic and ossoplastic pain.

SPEAKER_00

Let me see if I can manage to spell that. Never mind, know what it is. It's hard.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, the other thing that I also created while you were searching, I can talk about this. Because my videos, I have two more than 200 long-form videos. I created an index. All my videos are numbered, and uh the index can be downloaded. And every time I give a talk, and I mention my YouTube channel, I put a QR code. I just gave a talk this morning and it's uh it's going to be released to an international audience because it's they invited me for an international conference. And so at the end of my talk, I put a QR code and say, okay, if you want to find videos on my channel, download the index. Because the index tells you the topic and which number is. And if they download the index, it also goes to my their email. They have to leave their email.

SPEAKER_01

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

And then um I collect their email. So I know exactly how many people came because they downloaded the index, how many people came because they wanted to be on the wait list? How many people came because they were interested in the the freebies, like the handouts that I gave for doctors?

SPEAKER_00

I'm gonna just share screen and show you. I found the video that I seems like it's the one you were talking about, but it might be. There's more than one on that topic. So let me just share screen. Is this the video that you were saying about?

SPEAKER_02

No, I think no, that's not the one. Uh let me find for you.

SPEAKER_00

Got it. All right. This one?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, here. For and in the description of the video, there is a sentence that says, for healthcare professionals, download the summary handout here, and then there's a link for it.

SPEAKER_00

Got it. Okay, cool. And so that's how you know that it's healthcare professionals that are signing up for that. How often do you promote those kinds of healthcare professional type uh lead magnets?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, good question. Um not so often.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, too bad.

SPEAKER_00

So here's what I found as I was kind of going through, like I looked through a lot of your videos and I looked at what you were linking to from there. And you've nearly always got a link saying to get one of my 50-free handouts, go to uh go to your website, and it links to your website. Um The thing that if you wanted to grow the email list overall faster, and then we can kind of get into the details of the healthcare professional specifically, there's a few things you could tweak. One is for each of those videos, choose one lead magnet that's the most relevant.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

And then link directly to that if you can. The second thing is it it seemed to me, so I I went and then I tried to sign up for to get one of those 50 free things. It seems like what you do is sign up for the free members area. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_02

Or is there like a No, no, that's for the patients. There's there's one here that I just on the V8174 takes you to a no, it doesn't take you to the free area, it takes you to a different one and um it goes to my it it it goes to a different the it I forgot how I linked that. But it they don't need to become a member. The member is for the patients.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So they can download immediately the then they it takes them to a next page that they can download that freebie and the moment that they enter the web the the email, I get uh email notification.

SPEAKER_00

Here's what I'm I I'm wondering like how many people are watching some of your videos that are the the general videos that the person might be a healthcare professional. Let's say it's it's gonna be a small percentage, right? But it's some of them.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, but no, yeah, but they're yeah, I don't know what's the percentage, but um I guess there are lots.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, even if it was like, I don't know, let's say it was half a percent, just for sake of argument. When you've got 78 million views on your YouTube channel, half a percent is still a lot of people. Yeah. You know. So I'm wondering about like if we if you had two lead magnets that you promoted per video, one that was for general public and then one that was for healthcare professionals, and then made it really clear kind of which was which, and had those linked. And I the other thing I would suggest in terms of where to link them, I'd put them much higher in the description.

SPEAKER_01

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

So if you have um you know when you have the description, there's that little uh it puts like two or three lines of it, and then you have to click more to see the rest. If you put the link above the bit where it says more, then you get a higher opt-in rate. Yeah because it's more obvious, it's more kind of in their face, you know. Um and I think if you had one for public and one for healthcare professionals, made it clear which one was which, and then had that uh had that right at the top, I reckon you'd increase your your opt-ins of both lists dramatically. Like, and I know that the the real focus on is on the healthcare professionals, but you you know, maybe it'll be useful at some point to have the email list of the um like when you're publishing a new book, it's probably great to have a list of uh uh of the public to be able to point to that as well.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

That's been my experience. So most people can get about a 1 to 2% opt-in rate from their YouTube per YouTube view to uh to the email list. Now, for you, we don't know exactly right what percentage of people watching your videos are healthcare professionals, so we don't know what number that's going to end up being. But I know we can definitely get out from, I think you said you're getting like 20 healthcare professionals a month or something like that. Was that right?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's uh that's uh how much I get. Um it varies again, it varies. Like I when I give a lecture and I put a QR code for the index, then I get uh a hundred at once. But um Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So I would I I would think it should at least be hundreds a month. That would be my expectation. I think that's doable. What I'll do afterwards, I'm gonna get uh message Josip as well, who's like my head of funnel strategy, and I'm gonna get him to give his thoughts to you as well about like exactly what he would do because he's like he's in the weeds on this every day, you know.

SPEAKER_02

I may I would do an experiment. So um I'm about to record a couple of videos um preparing the scripts. And uh what I can do is um for the next uh let's say five videos, I will think about uh two separate handouts, one for patients, one for healthcare professionals, talk about show them in the video um and say the description is here. If your healthcare professional is a more technical for you, and here is a simplified version for the patient, put the links there, and then I can see how that drives uh uh subscribers. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Perfect, perfect. Because

Analytics Mindset Plus AI Workflow

SPEAKER_00

then you'll just do something. Everybody, pretty much everybody in my team has got some kind of uh like uh maths or engineering background. Because I think of everything as like I think of everything as as I think of business through numbers. I'm like, okay, what's the conversion percentage at this step? What are we gonna do about it? How are we gonna analyze it? How are we gonna check is it statistically valid? Whereas most course creators that I talk to are like creative types. Yeah. And they're like, I like creating things, I like making things, and which is great, right? But it's just so different to the way I see it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I spend a lot of time looking at my analytics, downloading the Excel tables, creating graphs. I that's what I do for a living for research, and I love and looking at my data and seeing where are you know the the thumbnails with a low CTR, and then I go and change them, and then I observe if if that made any difference or not.

SPEAKER_00

Usually it doesn't, but um what have you what have you learned? There's a lot of uh nearly everybody listening is a YouTuber, so what have you learned about what's worked for you in thumbnails and uh click-through rates?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's a good question. I'm what I is trying to use AI now, and I Learning the last year I've been using AI to explore ideas for the thumbnails, for the titles, for the scripts. So I prepare the script, and the script has to be my own words because when I'm reading the teleprompter, if it's not my own words, it doesn't really uh go well. But I'm using AI to generate. So if I if I have a list of questions that my patients ask me, and then I need to create a video on that, I will research the topic to see what is the evidence, what is the latest. But then once I have the evidence and I find, let's say I found a review published recently that is scientifically sound, evidence-based, and I learned so much reading those reviews. Now, how do I make that scientific paper a script for video? And then I'm using AI, and I upload that paper, and it's like, please here, help me to write a script. And then from that script, I rewrite on my own words with my own accent. I'm from Brazil, so I have my own language, my own lingual. It has to be me, cannot be a robot talking. And then I ask, yeah, can you suggest five titles for this video? Can you suggest uh 10 scripts for shorts? Because at the same day, on the one when I record a long form video, I this is my studio here. This is where I record. It's my home. And then I set up on one day and I batch record. I record as many videos as I can uh in one day. And after I record every single long form video, I already grab my cell phone and do short, short, short, shorts. But I ask um AI to help me, you know, with ideas for the shorts. How can I break down this topic into a couple of shorts topics? So that works really well. And then ask AI to suggest a thumbnail. And then from that thumbnail that AI suggests to me, I basically go to my Canva and do my own. I like the creative part, John. I I don't my my my videos are edited by my son. My son is the one who edits for me, but um even at the end, the final touch, I open the video editor and I add my final. I know how to edit. If he's unable to do because he's on vacation or he's too busy, I can do from beginning to the end the whole creative process. Because I love it. I find editing, cutting, creating thumbnails is fun. I wish I had more time, but I'm still a full-time doctor. I still have to travel for conferences. So sometimes I spend a whole month that I don't create anything or post anything just because I am at conferences and um teaching. Um yeah, but um I even forgot what was the question that you asked me.

SPEAKER_00

I was asking what you you'd said that you were testing stuff, A-B testing with like thumbnails and click-through rate. Like, is there anything you've learned in terms of what works for your audience for those kind of things?

SPEAKER_02

So I do. I create uh testing titles, testing thumbnails. Like I if I create three different thumbnails and I upload to YouTube because they allow you to test three at the same time, they usually the results come 33% for each one. No winner. Um Yeah, there is an art of creating thumbnails. And um Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

What does make what does make the difference for you then in terms of your videos? Like what makes a difference in terms of how many views it gets?

Topic Selection, Evergreen Videos, Ad Revenue

SPEAKER_02

The topic.

SPEAKER_00

If it's the topic's like the biggest difference.

SPEAKER_02

The topic. What my audience wants and expects. Yes. Uh one of my most uh successful videos has more than I think 10 million views. I I really like the way I show up in the video. Like I do my hair before, put makeup.

SPEAKER_01

That video, John, is the my worst hair of all my videos on because I was doing exercise.

SPEAKER_02

So that video of shoulder exercise, exercise for shoulder pain, I did during the pandemic. And I I I spent the whole day. I only recorded that one. My daughter helped me to record because I wanted to have like a session of physiotherapy, because during the pandemic, people could not access um physiotherapy. And I am I'm a physician, but I am a physiatrist. That's my specialty, which is I prescribe a lot of exercise. And I want to demonstrate to my own patients when they go to physiotherapy, this is the kind of exercise I want you to do. But because during the pandemic they couldn't go, I started recording videos that I demonstrated those exercises. And I wanted this exercise, this video, it's long, it's 40 minutes, to be like almost a full session of physiotherapy if someone had shoulder pain. So I spent the whole day. At the end of the day, my hair was upside down. I was so tired, my makeup had just drained, and uh so but that's because the topic was so helpful and useful. It's it's still my number one video, watch it today. Today, if I go to which videos are being watched most, that is the that is the best seller. And that video alone already paid me more than $60,000. So one video only.

SPEAKER_01

Wow.

SPEAKER_02

In ad revenues, just add revenues. So I'd say if you find what your audience needs, if you do it with quality, if you do with um evidence-based, if you do it well, that will help the person, they will keep I I published that video um 2021, I think, five years ago, and it's still the best seller. People are watching today is the most watched video right now, because it's still helping people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

I see you've got a lot of exercise videos uh have done well for you. It's not like every top video is an exercise video, but like quite a lot of them are exercise and diet.

SPEAKER_02

Uh, those are the ones that I did during the pandemic.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Because I needed, I needed those exercise videos during the pandemic. Because I was still seeing patients during the pandemic, but then um when I told them, oh, I think you need this exercise, they couldn't go. So I started doing over and over, did many during the pandemic. And uh those are the ones who are still being watched today. I do need to reduce some of them. I think the exercise for osteoporosis that I did uh in 2020 needs some update because there is new evidence um showing that some exercises could be added to that routine. So I need to do that one. But the other ones are still, they don't need updates. They're really pretty good.

SPEAKER_00

Hmm. Nice. One

Courses, Webinars, Pricing, Promotion

SPEAKER_00

of the things that you mentioned uh a few minutes ago is that you were doing webinars for your um health professionals. Are those free or paid?

SPEAKER_02

What's the uh the webinars were free.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. And how often do you do those?

SPEAKER_02

I when I have time.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

When I had uh all the time that I wanted in my life, and I I was doing once a month and sending to my mailing list. So invited all the, you know, 500, and then the mailing list continue growing. Now I have 1,000. So inviting the 1,000-something uh healthcare professionals, I'm going to talk about this topic of paying. It's only for healthcare professionals. I'm going to teach you how to diagnose. And I clean my mailing list because a lot of people go, they download the index, they say they are healthcare professional. But when I ask them, I say, okay, you need to say here, what is your profession? And then they declare that they are not a healthcare professional. So I go to my MailChimp and I clean and I tag them that has no healthcare professionals. So at the end, when I invite people for webinars or things that are more professionally oriented, I don't invite those people that they might be in the weak list, but they are not healthcare professionals.

SPEAKER_00

I uh when I was just testing your your sign-up, I just signed up for your healthcare professional. Oh, you just signed up. But I put in brackets fake afterwards. So it'll be easy to spot.

SPEAKER_02

You will be touched as name more healthcare professionals. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Um how often are you promoting your courses to that, to the uh healthcare professionals?

SPEAKER_02

Not that often. Yeah. Just because uh uh my limited time. Yes.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

But I still yeah, I I still go I yesterday I got someone who found my course and subscribed. So they do find uh here and there. I I don't promote that much. I sh maybe I should be doing more.

SPEAKER_00

What's the goal?

SPEAKER_02

And the course is so good, John. I'm so proud of that course. It's the best course uh on else plastic paint, but it's a little long. I think uh what people are scared when they see the course um um length. It's about 10 hours.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Yeah, it's a funny thing. A lot of people I think it's less so now, but people used to like promote the number of hours of the course as a positive thing. Like this is this course is so valuable because it's gonna be it's 15 hours worth of courses. Oh my god, I haven't got 15 hours to spare to take your co your massive course, you know. Um what's the goal for you like with the with the channel, with the healthcare professionals that you're sending to? Is it just about trying to get it out to more people? Are you like try actively wanting to make more revenue from it? Like, what's the goal for you?

SPEAKER_02

Okay, I wish I could retire from my medical profession and just live on my courses. This is not happening yet.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So my goal uh at this point, my goal is to spread the knowledge. Um, maybe one day when I have more time and I want to reduce my clinical workload, I will invest on more courses. There are so many ideas that I could invest.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

At this point of my career, I still have, you know, I still supervise a lot of PhD, master's students, and teach residents, and I have a job. Uh, but I'm not saying that in a few years from now, when I am close to retirement, that this would not be my main source of income. So I'm kind of testing the waters to see what works, what doesn't. And uh but at this point, my goal is to have, first of all, the course is for me to have some something that I can teach. Like a a doctor in Africa, he contacted me. I think he was from Cameroon. Yeah. He was watching my YouTube videos. He's a neurologist there, and he was watching my YouTube videos and say, I'm learning so much, but I don't understand anything about this nocyplastic pain. Would you please give me your slides? Would you please give me your lectures for me to learn? And I said, No, I'm not going to give my slides. This is my proprietary, my intellectual property. That's when the the it clicked to me that maybe people are interested. And uh, and of course, uh, if it's a doctor from Cameroon with very few resources and he wants to help hundreds of thousands of people in Cameroon, I give free access to him to my course. So I do give a lot of free access to people who are. I hope they're not listening to this podcast because then a lot of people email me, oh, I need a free access. But I I I do a lot of um, I would say not charity, but I I want to help them if they don't have the resource because the course is quite expensive for a doctor in Cameron. And um, or I give like a big discount for them. My students who rotate with me, I make it mandatory for them to take the course as part of the rotation. If they're going to spend a month with me learning about pain, it's mandatory for them to take the course, but of course I give them a coupon. They don't need to pay because they are my students. So I use this to spread the knowledge so more people with chronic pain can be helped.

SPEAKER_00

I got a somebody I worked with before, Dr. Shannon Weeks, and he was selling courses on it was some really like obscure bit of medicine. And like, but if if you needed to know it, then this was the guy, this was the the the the guy in the world who was like, right, that's the one that you go to. People travel internationally to go study with him. And I'm just kind of thinking about like how much bigger your audience is than his was. And it's like I think that that I I'd need to do them, we'd have to have a look through, but it seems like the idea of being able to make make enough money from this to retire is like seems realistic. I don't know how much money you need to retire, so it depends. But like, yeah. I'll I'm gonna I'm gonna uh message with Josep and you about this afterwards and just see if we could figure out like, well, what is realistic? So you kind of know what the potential is of what you could be doing. Um what's uh what's next at the

Scaling Impact Through New Courses

SPEAKER_00

moment? Like, have you got just is your focus at the moment on just keep making more videos? Have you got any more courses you're planning on making this year? Like, what are you working on?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, there is um there is another course, how to treat neuropathic pain, which is another type of mechanism of pain that is in my books to to do it. Um I am hoping to release this year because I already have a wait list for that course. People are waiting for that course. And um and then be more proactive promoting those courses because again, I I I put a lot of time I already had the material, uh, but it was still a lot of time to to put them together. So before the courses become out of date, because in medicine, especially the this concept and this knowledge becomes outdated quickly. It's important to the other course that I also did was how to use YouTube for medical education. I see now becoming uh a doctor on YouTube, and people come to me, and a lot of a lot of people out of nowhere they said, Oh, would you mentor me to open a channel? And I was spending time with them on the phone or Zoom, teaching them, and I said, Wait, I don't have time to do this. So I put everything that I knew at that time, um how to do from beginning to the end, from medical education. And I just now I just tell them, go and buy the course and take it. So that's also going well because um after they take the course, which is much shorter than the 10-hour course uh that I did for Pain, they they know everything, like all the specifics, how you set up, what about your medical license, what can you talk? Uh they're worried about losing the medical license because they can be, you know, there might be lawsuits against them. So I talk about all of that in that uh YouTube for medical education. So they take the course, and if they still want me to mentor them, then I offer a program of mentorship. And I did this with a couple of uh I did this with a couple of people. Some did not go and didn't do well. They opened a YouTube channel, but it didn't go well. But one of them is my prodigy. She followed my recipes, she did what I asked her to do. She's now a physician and she has reached more than 100,000 subscribers. Oh, yeah, so it's uh very nice to see someone else uh going on that route. And um yeah, she's doing really well, but it's tough. Um, as you probably know, maintaining a YouTube channel is not an easy task. A lot of people start, which is easy to start, post some videos, but maintain, sustaining, and updating and answering comments and keep the channel moving. It's a it's um I would say a lot of work.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's um it's a funny one because nearly I mean nearly everybody I talk to, nearly all the course creators who I work with or who I interview are are YouTubers. And I I see like I do publish the podcast on YouTube, but I'm not like aiming to try and grow a big YouTube audience. So I'm not doing it in quite the same, in quite the same way. Not having to think so much about scripts or about thumbnails or whatever else, you know. And I see the amount of work it is for people, and it's um to do it really well, it's like it does, it just it's it's like you gotta keep doing it every week, every month, whatever it is, you know, publishing your new video. It's like a lot of work.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

Links, Resources And Closing

SPEAKER_00

Andrea, I think what you're doing is awesome. I absolutely love this. Um, I really appreciate you you coming on today. Uh, if people want to go check you out, they want to see your YouTube channel, they want to go and look at uh maybe download any of your your free lead magnets, where should they go to?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so the channel is just my name, Dr. Andrea Furlin. And my website is uh also easy. It's doctor, but do c t o randreafurlin.com.

SPEAKER_00

Perfect. So that's Andrea Furlin, and that's F-U-R-L-A-N. Um so go check out Andrea's channel. And um Andrea, thanks again so much for coming on. I really, really appreciate your time. This has been absolutely wonderful getting the chance to talk with you.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you for inviting me. It was lovely chatting with you, and I learned uh some new tricks now that I will try.

SPEAKER_00

You're very welcome. As always, thanks so much for listening. Really appreciate you guys, and we'll see you next time.