Creating and selling an online course is not as hard as you think. Instead of building an audience in order to sell your course, you should build your audience through selling.
Melissa Guller, the founder of Wit & Wire, provides us with her knowledge about building online courses and selling them. She has the experience and talent to help you get there.
Read on for gems she drops about creating online courses and building your audience through selling.
How to build your audience by selling your product
Develop a Founders Round
The Founders Round is a small group of people enrolled, and paying, in your course that you help get an outcome. This small group is paying you to get access to you, as you develop this course, that students in the future will not have access to you. Think of the Founders Round as selling a service rather than having a big course launch.
The Founders Round is not the forever strategy. This is the phase one strategy. This is where you earn a couple of $100 or even a couple of $1,000. You can earn meaningful money doing this. And then at the end, you have a course.
And that’s why this approach of having this founder round, getting paid to develop curriculum, and then moving into strategies where you can automate both the course experience and your marketing strategies, makes sense.
What does a successful founders round look like?
The size of your audience
If your audience is your mom and your two followers, that’s okay. You have a bigger audience than you are giving yourself credit for because you know people in person. You have real friends and family, and even if they are not your audience, they might know people in your audience. You are on some kind of social media or LinkedIn like you have some people in your network who would want to learn from you.
The size of your course transformation
Deciding on the price point can vary. If it’s something that they could accomplish within roughly a month, it’s going to change some element of their life. But it’s not going to be like the absolute game-changer. Don’t charge anything less than $100 for that experience.
As their time commitment to achieving the outcome goes up, it changes their life. The bigger the transformation is, the more you can charge. If you’re helping somebody get a new job and that new job is going to earn them $5,000 to $10,000 more dollars per year, you should at least be charging $1,000 for that transformation, no matter how new you feel as a course creator. Because ultimately price is about perception, it’s not about your experience.
How to overcome the risk of undercharging
If you undercharge, people will not believe that you are the expert that you say you are. They also don’t have enough skin in the game. You need people to make a purchase that is literally an investment of their money and their time, because the more they pay, the more seriously they’ll take you.
Reframe your mindset about the Founder Round
While you should be charging your lowest price for the Founders Round, it shouldn’t be as low as you think. Your Founders Round is not proven yet, so there’s lower certainty of reaching the outcome. So you should charge a little bit less. However, you will be more involved as the instructor and they’re will be getting more personalized attention from you. This ups the certainty.
As you get more testimonials, you aren’t just raising the price because it’s fun to raise prices. You’re raising the price because the certainty of your prospective students has gone up. They believe you more. You are more of a sure thing, and they’re willing to pay for a sure thing.
For the founders round, people want to be treated like real humans. So, lean into the fact that it is a new program. Tell them, “I’m doing this new program and I’m looking for just a small group of people. You’re going to get personalized attention from me and you’ll get to know the few students in this course.”
Students want accountability. They want somebody to hold them to a schedule and feel like they’re not alone. Even though you haven’t developed any curriculum yet, they get all of this extra support and attention. They know that as they have questions, you are going to either create a curriculum just for them or you’re going to review their work personally. So all those little things add up.
Moving forward with the Founder Round despite your fears
You don't need an email list
The biggest fear we address is “I don’t have an email list or I don’t even have a service.” While these are valid fears, if you imagine the way that you could help one person, imagine the exponential benefit that you could do that with a few people. With a small group, students are seeing others in their shoes and learning and leaning on each other. This is the unexpected benefit of doing a course versus a one-on-one offering.
Nobody feels ready
And if you’re worried that you’re not ready to start, no one ever feels ready. All of us are just making it until we make it. What’s nice about the Founders Round approach is that you can create a Google Doc or a very simple page that has key information about the program to start selling. You’ll quickly learn if this is something people will pay for.
If you can help solve a problem, you can be a course creator
You don’t need to be a guru. All you need is the mindset of wanting to help people and believing that what you’ve done professionally, personally, or have the skillset for could serve others.
In fact, we learn best from people who are just a few steps ahead of us. People will see their life as you three months ago, you two years ago, and they’ll feel a real connection to you because you’re exactly their person.
It’s not about being the number one course in the world. It’s about being the best course for your exact person who resonates with you.
About Melissa
Melissa Guller is the founder of Wit & Wire, where she helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses through online courses. Not only did she build her 6-figure business in a year, but she previously worked full-time for Teachable and Ramit Sethi (pronounced: ra-MEET SAY-tee), so she brings a unique perspective to the industry. Melissa is also a top-rated instructor at General Assembly New York, and she’s on a mission to help business owners earn more without drowning in client work.
