Launching a 6 figure course Pt.2

There we go. I can play this. OK, so officially, this is a building, a six figure learning course. It's more of a learning ecosystem, but that's just too many words. This is part two and it's called number two. Last week we went over why teach? And we talked about the overview, and it was kind of broken before we got into the blueprint. So I'm going to do a quick recap. I want to acknowledge some people who had done some homework. If you want to call it that, some self-study work and we want to keep diving in. I'm going to make a request of all of you. Please keep your mic muted. I can hear this little breathing and the rustling of the hair against the microphone, and it just messes me up. If you do want to say something, feel free to Mike and unmute at any time. And then just jump in. I'm totally good with that. OK, so we last time we went with why teach and this? This self-study guide developed by Dr. Samuel Holtzman from Art Center and some of you actually went in and filled it out. And if you're like me, this is actually kind of difficult to do. It was real tricky because it's like you really have to think about the outcome and to be aware of the experience for your student and in the one question up at the top right there, it says, how do we know that they know and are able to do and to what degree is actually a really critical question? It's something you really need to think about. So what are they going to be able to do? How will we measure it and to what degree will they have success? And so first up, here's Connor. Connor submitted something, and I just wanted to let you guys know it's under today's call the event. If you want to look at what he's written and if you want to respond to it. And I hope is on the call. I didn't do a quick scan. I'm pretty sure he's here. But anyways, he wants people to learn art skills and 3D tools to be able to plan, create and deliver a 3D art project. That sounds really awesome. 3D super sexy, especially if you're an image maker. It adds a whole new set of tools to use and ways for you to realize what it is that's inside your head. I think that's really cool. And so I'm going to really focus on the workshop component of it for today. So you can see here that Connor is assigned 45% of his 10,000 month revenue to the workshop. And so it's not quite half. But it is a lot, and with some tweaking, we can work on this and you can see how much easier it is to get to your goal when you break it down like this. So he's thinking, OK, this class is worth $150. Perhaps he's done some market analysis to see what other workshops or classes there are, and he's like, OK, I'm at the top, I'm at the bottom, I'm in the middle. But it's important to kind of just look around the block, if you will, to make sure you're fitting within the space and how you want to be positioned. He thinks he can run a workshop for 15 people. That tells me a lot. It's probably a really hands on workshop where he can only give so much feedback. So he's limited by the number of students, perhaps, and we want to talk about that later. So he's thinking he'll do this twice a month. And if he's successful at filling in 15 seats, twice a month, that's 30 students total. He's going to generate $4,500 of income. That's going to be chipping away at its $100,000 goal. I think that's fantastic and eventually that's going to lead into his course. OK, so just keep that in mind. So so Connor's goal is to hit $4,500 in his workshop. Just burn that into your mind, OK, or just write down a piece of paper. It's actually better. OK And then Ali, let's see here he's how to structure the sales page for their online education business. So this one's kind of meta without being sales or pushy. OK, so he's going to teach people how to structure a sales page four course. So everybody here who's interested in launching a course may be interested in Ali's course on how to start your sales page. And so he wants people to be able to create and launch the sales page for their online education business with confidence. I know that the prompts can be redundant, but it's important for you to really sit down and think about that. So let's add some details, some specificity, if we can for this one, OK, Ali, maybe create and launch a sales page in two days or week. Um, with no experience or using these tools just to if you can be more specific than it gives you a roadmap as to what you actually need to build. And I say that for all of you, I didn't mention it with Connor, but every time you answer it in one of these prompts, try to answer it a little bit differently with more information, and it's just really to get you unstuck to really be thinking about. Ultimately, this is what you want to be able to deliver. And when you write it in a much more specific way, probably the marketing that you do for it, the copywriting you do for the sales page will probably be a little easier because you're doing a little bit of the pre work here. OK, moving on to the bottom here. He's attributed 90% to the workshop, which I love because that's what we're going to focus on today. So he's not thinking about a course yet, but he does think that there's going to need to be some one on one coaching because despite people doing the workshop, they're going to need more information. And so everything seems very reasonable here. He's choosing to do this four times a month. The frequency is good. It's once a week. It's pretty typical for someone who's actually teaching a course to meet with their students every single week. So if he can get this going and build the funnel for it, it's going to get into a really nice cadence and flow. And you can see here he's going to be able to do $9,000 alone just from that. And if he's successful with the workshop, the coaching will just become very natural extension as part of the workshop. Supernatural, right? Like if you took Marty Neumeier branding workshop and his class, there's probably a good chance you're sitting there thinking, hey, does Marty offer a one on one coaching thing? Because I need some more help? So it's supernatural, right? If you're successful with the workshop, everything else falls in line, so that's why we're going to focus on that. OK so the overview, remember everybody we're trying to get to 100 k, which works out to be $10,000 a month. If your ambition is to do more than 100K because we have some people here who've successfully launched 100,000 course and they want to get to 7 figures, so whatever number that they want to put in there, you just do that and you do the math and then you work towards that. I want to caution some of you to not start too high because it can be debilitating to see such a big goal and to see that you're so far from that goal, you want to make it something you have to stretch to get to, but not like you have to build a building and a ladder and then get a piggyback just to reach it, because sometimes that's a little bit too much. OK we broke it down into their four main components. You remember that and it looks like that. And for today's purpose, I'm going to really just focus on the workshop. So I hope everybody's figured out how they envision getting to that $10,000 a month if you haven't done so. I want you to go back to the previous call, call one, I believe, and then just listen to that and do that work in case you're just jumping into this later on. OK so the blueprint looks something like this. Now we all want to do the workshop. The workshop is the foundation. But even doing the workshop is a little scary. So what we're going to do is we're going to do a prototype of the workshop, a bare bones version that we don't overcommit to, that we're going to use for a lot of learnings, ok? And so the natural thing is we're going to make an announcement so that people understand that we're going to be doing a workshop and there's a couple of different ways of doing that. And then we're going to actually run the workshop, the prototype. And it's like, I said, it's going to be a minimum viable course or workshop. And we want to reduce the threshold of resistance like we want to make it very easy for people to say Yes to. And I think anywhere between the 25 to $50 range is going to be a no brainer. If you're truly delivering something of value to people. Asking someone to come into the workshop for this price point should be relatively straightforward. And the goal is to get to 10 students. So at the bottom end, it's 25 times 10. That'll give you $250. But that's not why you're doing this. You're doing this to get the experience, to get the feeling and to get the feedback. Those are all very important parts. OK, so everybody, your goal is to launch something to get 10 people enrolled, each and every single one of us should have 10 people. We within our immediate circle of people, we know acquaintances, peers who we should be able to reach out to and make a value prop. And if they are like, yes, I have this problem should be able to get 10 people to enroll. Now, if you don't fit into that category, let's talk about it a little bit. So just make a note. I need to talk to Chris about this, and we'll get into it. OK, so how do we announce well, this is going to start to reveal some of the weaknesses of your reach right now, your influence? The first thing that we're going to look at is our email blast. Do we have an email list? If we don't, we're going to need to start capturing emails really soon. And there's the old way and then there's a new way. I don't want to talk about that a little bit. And if you're posting frequently on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Facebook or Instagram and sharing things that you're doing on clubhouse, it will not feel unnatural. And I'm going to talk to you about how to do this in the most organic way that you eschew the quiet, shy introvert who hates to sell people. Things can do it in a way that is congruent with who you are. OK, now any concerns. I want to pause right here and we'll talk about this part because obviously you can't launch your prototype if you can't get anyone to show up. So I'm going to pause. Let's switch over the screen here. OK Uh, either Italy or undress, can you? Scan through any of the charts to see if we need to talk about anything here, is anybody concerned? Go ahead and raise your hand. It's right up to reactions, ok? Alejandro, I see you. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah have a quick question regarding maybe sometimes you don't. You don't feel the authority to teach a course and sometimes you do. So like, for instance, one of these days, I realize that I've been talking to different entrepreneurs that have been having issues with Hiring. And I work at Amazon, you know, and I done hundreds of interviews, but I never hired somebody that is from the creative industry. So that's something that I should explore. Or should I get more authority? But when you know that you have enough authority to give one of these things. Yeah, I have a section in my presentation today to talk to you about the knowledge gap. And because I anticipated somebody is going to say, well, I don't yet feel I'm qualified to teach a thing that I want to teach, right? And I've taught for many years feeling this exact same thing, so I'm going to address that. So is that what we're talking about, andr��s and alejandro? Yeah thank you. OK, the knowledge gap. OK, so I want you to hold me accountable. So if I don't address that, you're going to say, you remember that question I had. Can we go back to that? OK all right. Yeah OK, sorry. You can go first this. I can go after. I see a question in the chat. OK, beautiful. We'll go to Phyllis and then we'll go to Annalee to read a question in the chat. Phyllis, go ahead. I'm sorry. My question is I. I made up a workshop on the fly for a client and I actually charged $600 for the workshop. If I want to make sure that it's something that's consistent, should I drop it back down to see if I get more feedback or should I keep it at the current price? OK, because it was something that wasn't really planned, right? What you do as a client service is highly bespoke. It's one on one. They're you're dedicating your time specifically for them and only them. And I think that should come at a high price. That's a bespoke service, but when you're teaching a class and you're doing one to many, it's a totally different experience. I don't think you have to worry too much if the client's going to see this and say, oh, why didn't we sign up for that? However, if it does concern you. It was only my suggestion to price between 25 to 50 because I'm assuming everybody that's on this call is still thinking about launching their first ever class. And I don't want you to set the price too high where you get three people and then you start to doubt yourself. OK everybody needs to adjust that to their own taste. OK, you know. Thank you, sweetie. OK, great. Thank you very much. Now we're going to bounce over to Emily and then we'll go to pula. So, Natalie, go ahead. OK, Jeff asked something here, and I know I can see why, because it's a little bit confusing sometimes, and it's about it's workshops, live and courses pre-recorded. can we just clarify a little bit different? Excellent question. Excellent question. Thank you so much for asking that question. OK workshops are live. There's life as you can make them, even virtual workshops are live, and when you feel like the workshop is going really well, that the feedback that you're getting and people are so excited and then you're going to start to take that, you're going to start to map out your course. You've already now done 80% to 85% of the work. The real trick will be to how to translate the workshop loops, the workshop experience into a pre-recorded class that self-study. That one is tricky, and we will get to that. OK very big difference there. Everyone, you need to understand that. OK, now those of you, including Alejandro, who might not be like ready to make their course. You know, I want you to think of the workshop is, you know, what can you deliver to someone more value than what they paid? And I think everybody here for $25 can deliver more value than what someone pays, and if you can't, we have a problem because people have authored PDFS, guides, templates and they sell them for $25. Right? color presets on Photoshop are worth $25 because the amount of time I have to do it at my hourly rate is much, much higher than $25. So I'd rather just give someone $25 so that I don't have to do it. So you need to solve a problem that's more than $25 and you'll be fine. You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to be the best. You just need to give more value than what you take in. It's that simple. So keep working on the value proposition there, so that it is in favor of your student client. OK, excellent. All right. So Pooja, go ahead. So what I was wondering is if in the long term, your goal is to sell your workshop, say, at a much higher price points like $200 or $300. My first question is, would the toe selling it initially at $25 hurt that price point at all? And then the second question is what are you? What is your view on making this first prototype round more of a pay, whatever you like model. So that you're reaching out to friends or family? Just pay whatever you like. You don't have to. OK, OK. Those are all. Those are very good questions. Yeah, I'm just tripping out because you sound like somebody I know, and I was like, Oh my god, I'm just like, the face doesn't match. But the voice. So matches right now. Like ding, OK, so I'm going to try and get over myself here. All right. Your first question is, is it going to hurt you to sell it for. So low? And I'm going to tell you, no, because I'm going to tell you exactly the plan to do this minimum viable product. This is not the workshop. This is just the first draft of the workshop, and I want you to reduce to pressure on yourself to do too much and find out it doesn't work. I now know several people from the group who went off and made their course, and it didn't do the numbers that they wanted and they put so much work into it. They worked on it for months. It kind of was a bomb. I'm trying to prevent you from going there. So later on, when I get into like, how are you going to make this MVP minimum, viable product or workshop? I'm going to tell you, I want you to write a one page outline. You don't get to do slides. There's no downloadable as you're just going to teach. You're going to get into the habit and practice of teaching and see what works, ok? Because I know that big first step, it's going to be too big for anyone in this group to take, and then we're going to have a really high rate of failure. I want a high rate of action and then we'll course correct as we go. So did that answer the first question? Yeah makes a lot of sense. OK just think of it as a rehearsal that you get paid for and we're just trying it got it right. It's like the little it's a much more, much more contained. Yeah and when I say to you, could you teach something that's worth more than $50 or $25. Everybody here should say pretty emphatically, yes, I can. But if I say, could you teach something that's more than $500 of value or 2000. Now it becomes a real problem because in our mind, it's like we have to give an excess of $2,000. So we'll spend six months reading. And other people are spending all that time making that's a difference there. OK, now pay what you want, has pros and cons. I would prefer for right now, and I need to think about this a little bit more for you just to set a price because it's going to get you into the flow and way of thinking like, I have a goal. And you can't take the class unless you pay that price, because otherwise you may get flooded with hundreds of people who are going to donate to you. Several different things. But then now you have no idea. Like, is it worth it? It's not worth it. Like, why did they sign up? I want you to work on your marketing game, too. So we're going to learn how to market a product, right? The product is partly you and the things that you make and your knowledge. And then we're going to start to see like, oh, this is what I have to do to get $25. So now I know how much work is involved to get to the next level. OK yeah, thank you. Yes, you're very welcome now. If you're curious about a pay what you want model, I want you to try something jump on clubhouse, ok? Teach a class there with audio only. And just ask people to give whatever they want. You'll see that not a lot of people are going to give you anything. That's the problem with free. Right OK. And I'm not here to teach you to make free content, that's a different call. But this one is really to seriously help each and every single person who's on this call to get to 100,000 in revenue, teaching or building an ecosystem around education. I would love it. If 100 people hit 100,000. So I think we can get there if you're willing to do the work. OK, so up next is mohabbat and then going to go to dirigo. Thank you very much. Yeah Chris, my question is a follow up on what I mentioned. The first question is where if you are charging, let's say, 25 or $50 in the beginning, should we mention that this is a discounted price? Yes Yes. You're going to say this is a prototype. I have room for 10 people. And it's a massive discount on the actual workshop, which you can show. You can show that price. So let's say it's going to be 290 nine, whatever the price point you all have set, you can cross at the 2.90 nine, you can say $25. Now, sometimes you may not want to do this because it'll seem like this is a ridiculous offer and you're going to have to explain why. And we'll get into that too. Why is this course. So low? I'm looking for feedback. I'm looking for testimonials. You are part of my beta group. OK all right, beautiful. Next up is Mariam. Hi, Chris. Hello OK. Wondering what suggestion you have on designing your course to help end burnout for a demographic that is way too busy and overwhelmed to take in more info? Mentally exhausting. I have some ideas, but I'm just wondering that. What you're suggesting? OK, we understand the conundrum here, people are too busy to do more things. So you want to sell them something that's going to require them more time to do something right? Right? this is like one of those mental detox things, right? Right OK, I have to think about how to do that. Yeah, but I'm pretty sure. There are many people who have done this right. Richard spa's, you know. Have you looked into how they mark it and talk to people? I will look into that right now, this demographic is overwhelmed, overworked. They can't really step outside of where they're working to go on retreats. And so it has to be something that is accessible to them where they are working, you know, or in home. So I will have to think about that and to break it down into bite size pieces like I just started 1 minute running, running for 1 minute. So it's like, really, break it down, you know? So I was just, yeah, maybe it's OK if you don't, there's no answer right now, but maybe just from the group, anyone who has any suggestions and yourselves, you can let me know and I will look into because the other, the burnout or stress reduction workshops or retreats that are out there is for yeah, it's luxury. It's like very privileged. You have the privilege of time to go there. But when you're ready. But can't step out, so what do you do? Right? Yeah. Maybe the structure of your workshop and we're going to use the workshop in the loosest possible terms because it can mean anything is like two minute daily reminders. Spread out over a period of time. It could be an app. It could be a series of things cards, postcards that you send them every single day for three weeks. I don't know what it is, but we can open up our mind and we can test ideas. OK, awesome. I don't know what that is just yet, but I don't want you to think of a workshop as well huddled together for three hours. And we're going to do this, especially because for your client type, the transformation that you want to create for them isn't going to line up to that at all. Now, did you by any chance, fill out that worksheet? Like, what do you want them to feel with? What do you want them to think? What do you want them to know, etc.? Did you do that yet? I was, and I haven't done it because there were two demographics I was thinking about. But now that I'm in a conference and actually more in touch with the demographic and learning more about them. Yeah so the conference is three days. So I'm in it right now, so I'm learning more about this demographic and how to approach them. So I'll fill it out. We'll do it. The answer's no. It's still a relatively new idea that you're mulling over right with this demographic. Yeah OK, so once you have an idea, fill out the worksheet, it will point out holes and it might point you in the direction of solutions. OK, awesome. Yeah right. I found the worksheet to be super helpful myself, so I would I'm sharing it with you. I learned it over six weeks, so I'm hoping that you'll go through that and you'll see the benefit of doing it. OK all right. Thank you very much. So let's move on to IKEA Kia. Talk to me. Hey, Chris, and everyone, here's my question. I want to record a lot of content for a course of cooking technique and fundamentals course. So it's going to be like extensive, but I'm wondering if I should. I don't know how to package it if I'm packaging and packaging it as a course or if I'm shopping it to my members because I really want to create a membership community. So I'm not sure what to do with this video. Oh, OK, so you're probably in your worksheet. You would probably be leaning heavily into the community component of it, right? Yes OK. I think I know how to do this, potentially, but I'm going to ask everyone to hold off on the marketing questions because I'm going to spend all the time solving individual marketing problems and how will what to do with the rest of my time here? OK, here's what I'm thinking. If you have a membership community, what are you promising to them? And I want you to think about that. What are you promising? Archive calls, live interaction, sharing of ideas, recipes, access to you. What is it that you're providing them that's going to be a value to them in the community? And I'm thinking, could you live teach content as a stream that's on the channel to build interest in people joining your community? Would that work for you or no? Of course, that's a possibility, an idea. But, you know, I guess the real question is I'm going to create this library, this archive of resources. And I kind of wanted to be a long term game because people can't wait for them to have access to it. And maybe it's an annual commitment, it's not like a monthly thing where you can come in and out because the investment just to create it is. Is it is a bit robust, so. OK OK. You're right, so we're getting into the mechanical parts like the very detailed bits. And you're probably right that they do need to enroll in something that's going to be a longer commitment for them financially and time wise. But you know, I was just thinking, there's a woman her name is, I think. Linda, I'm not I don't remember her name right now, but she's a grandmother. She's an Asian older grandmother and she cooks all kinds of crazy stuff. And I feel like her. Her grandkids made her make TikTok like videos, and she her channel has blown up. She's I think she's over a million subscribers, and she started like a year ago. And so they're super short. They're hilarious. You can't learn everything, obviously in a minute, but they're so entertaining to watch, right? And I wonder if that's like super easy because I'm thinking, like, what is the easiest thing that you can do that lowers the barrier or resistance to you making that thing and it's shot on an iphone? It's hilarious. Do you know what I'm talking about here? I have to look her up. You keep talking about this Granny. Yeah, she's good. She's good. That's why I talk about her. Ok? my grandma. No, I think she really literally goes by linga like her name is Linda. But a ninja said they put it together. OK it's hilarious, right? I'm going to create it. It's no. It's no barrier for me to create it. I'm it's going to be work. The thing is how to shop it and package it. How to market it. Yes so let me think about the how to market it for a community based annual subscription thing. Let me put my brain on that for a bit. OK, let me cook. I'll get back to you. OK, thank you. Yeah, thank you. OK annaly, you get the last comment or question here. Yeah, I do have something that I would love to hear your opinion about because, you know, when I did my prototype for the course, I did a five hour workshop. And it's a lot to plan a five hour workshop if that is going to be the prototype. So I'm wondering like both for myself, but for other people as well. Like how do you start out with the first prototype? Is it better to maybe do an hour workshop or what do you recommend? Well, I'll get into that too. Yes, very good question, Natalie. Ok? OK, yeah, we'll get into that. So I, as we have 90 for people here, there's going to be 90 for individual customized things that we're going to have to do. So I'll tell you what I think you should do. And then we need to tailor it because key is going to have a different execution of that and you might have a different one. Everybody's going to have it slightly different. So so let's get back into that. Ok? all right. Let me. Share the screen, thank you, Thanks to everybody for answering your questions. Let's get back into it. OK all right, so I want you to identify perhaps the top two or three ways that you're going to be able to announce this and whatever it is that you write, it might not even be on this list. It could be YouTube. It could be. I don't know what else, twitch. It could be Discord. I don't know where you have your community, but I obviously start where you're strong or identify one where you definitely need to get a lot stronger at OK. And in a little bit, I'm going to talk about a different way to market that I'm experimenting with. I'm having a lot of success and I'm going to be speaking to an expert at this. But basically, when you announce this prototype that you're doing, I don't even need, I don't think you even need to get too crazy into sales pages and all that stuff. I think you could just do this via Eventbrite. Again, I'm trying to make it super, super easy. If you're more sophisticated in building funnels and sales pages, do it the way that how to do it. But for everyone else, let's just launch an Eventbrite page and on the Eventbrite page, it's going to give you a couple of prompts in terms of the things that you need to be able to write about to describe what people are getting, any specific concerns you're going to have to do. In fact, those kinds of things. And essentially, you're a member. We're trying to get 10 students. I wouldn't be super sad and to feel despondent if you only get five but 5 to 10 students is enough for you to get feedback. So we're doing this thing mostly to get feedback and to get practice. So I feel like for some people, a one hour workshop is going to create a lot of stress and anxiety, and they're going to be forced to speak really fast. And it's going to turn into a lecture in which we don't necessarily want to do so. Anywhere between 1 to 5 hours is fine. So I just wrote three hours, three hours to give you time to take breaks, to do Q&A, to give people some prompts that they can work on. And give you plenty of time to get feedback. If you think about if you give each student five minutes of feedback and there are 10 students at your best, it's going to take 50 minutes just out of your three hours. So don't think that three hours is a lot of time to work with. And what I want you to do is as soon as possible, I want you to write your one page outline. Pen and paper, what I want to teach, and I'm going to break down exactly how I've done this and make it visual so that you can see it OK. So 5 to 10 students, three hours long. You're going to write a no brainer offer, learn how to make three art using the free version of cinema 4D that's already included in your Creative Cloud license. I'm going to teach you how to compose, build light, texture, blah blah blah. In those three hours and then you're going to walk away with a cool piece of art like this. That's the no brainer offer, and you're going to do it at, and I'm looking for 10 beta testers to go through a three hour live workshop with me when within the workshop launches, it'll be x dollars. OK, so the whole point remembers to get feedback, and we're going to create this little loop. So you going to launch it, you're going to feel pretty good and you can feel pretty terrible. I'm just telling you that right now because I'm going to keep it real with you. You're going to say, Oh god, I fumbled through that. I was super nervous here or that exercise or that talk was just a total dud. And so what you want to do is, prior to actually hosting this event, you're going to need to write some questions, maybe a type form or Survey Monkey thing and you're going to have people in the workshop that's part of the bargain. I'm giving this to you at a substantial discount because I need your feedback, your honest, unfiltered feedback. I want you to devise a list of questions. Keep it under 10 questions and keep it directed, but open ended so that you can get feedback that you weren't anticipating. If you ask simple Yes or no questions, you're not going to get a lot of valuable feedback. So you need to design the feedback. Because you're investing in the 10 students you've selected. So that you can make your workshop better. So I ran my Carrizal clinic now three times for Instagram. I feel I'm ready to record the course each time I would sit together with my team, read the feedback, we would make adjustments and each time I think the course got a little bit better. I manage my time better. I cut out parts that I think were less relevant and overwhelming for people, and I gave them more of what it is that they wanted. So for each and every single one of you, I'm going to take a break here. We're going to do small breakout rooms, theoretically, now you have an idea as to what you want to do. It's OK if you're not committed to it, totally fine. We're going to break out into small groups and you're going to sit there and think about what are the three learning outcomes you want to create for your students. OK and before we do that, before you all panic and jump off this call, it'll be OK. Everybody just relax. It'll be all right. I want you to work on it, and then I want you to reflect with your group. And we'll figure that in a second. So it's going to look some. When we get deeper into it, so here's what I want to teach, here are the three things that I want to share with people, all the things I want them to learn. Learn the learning outcomes and then how are you going to teach them those things? And so what we do is we just take a big thing and we keep chunking them down into smaller and smaller bite size pieces until it becomes really, really clear. So I'm going to stop here. They want to get back into it. OK, so far, is everybody clear? I'm going to teach lettering. I'm going to teach pricing. I want to teach client negotiations. Well, what are the three skills that students need to have to be successful at this? I want to teach digital illustration. OK, I want you to break it down into the three core skills they must possess to be successful at this. Whether it's an intermediate level or an advanced level, what are the three things, ok? Having said that, I'm going to create some rooms. How many rooms I want to create, I'm going to sign this automatically. I think we're going to put you guys into groups of four. So I'm going to say like 25 rooms. 24 rooms. I'll do fewer rooms with three rooms. OK and OK, you have a question. Yeah, just before we jump into the room, I my question was if the workshop were designing and this might be true for many people is a much longer thing. Is the idea then to for the prototype session to take one of those sessions. And then make it a self-contained thing? So if I was initially planning to have 10 sessions, then I'm just focusing on one of those sessions, breaking it down and then launching that and then ending it and then correct redoing it. OK yeah, you would. Let's say you want to do something really big. Like, if you want to teach architecture or you want to teach, there's no way you can do in a workshop and get someone successful at becoming from 0 to being an architect, right? So you're going to take time to be an architect and you're going to break those things down into three or five things and you keep breaking those things into three or five, then you're going to figure out. This feels like a meaty workshop that I'm going to build a course around. So when we're all done, once you have the formula for success, you may repeat this many, many times and have multiple courses and be well on your way to seven figure teaching ecosystem. But right now, I'm going to ask you all to just boil it down so that you have success. We fail more often because our goal is too big versus it being too small. I want you to set a small goal. So we can just get a victory. You know, under our belt, we want to win. OK, so here are the instructions. I'm going to give you about 10 to 15 minutes, 15 minutes max. OK I want you to spend five minutes just reflecting and writing, and if you all are ready, then you would stop and you would just share with the group. And I would like for you guys to give each other feedback, like the learning outcomes feel clear and it's worth whatever it is that you're planning to do. So if it's $25 workshop, yes, I think that's worth it or this learning outcome is unclear to me. OK, I want to make sure that everyone you identify like I can participate or I can't, so you know how much time you have to manage. So five minutes max for you to sit there and write and reflect and then I'm say just the right, and then I'll give you another five seven minutes to share with the group to get some feedback. So 1 minute sharing a little bit of feedback, 1 minute sharing a little bit of feedback. OK, so you're going to have a maximum of 15 minutes, but I think somewhere between 10 to 15 minutes, you're going to see me ping you and say, start to wrap it up. OK, everybody. So go to your rooms, here we go, I'm opening up the rooms. So you guys a little bit. So well, doesn't lie in the room. Are you serious? Yes when you come back? Oh, OK. That's so sad. Oh, OK. All right. So I'm going to I want to ask everybody here, if you don't mind just writing the comments, and so I'll monitor them. Is there anything that you saw you want to reflect or share? And then we'll try to pull from whoever made a comment. OK, so go ahead and right in the chat. Is there anything that you discovered? Did you feel like your partners in the room? Your friends were clear about their course learning outcome? The clear direction or do they need more work on what it is that they want to the transformation they want to create? And Christine joined us. So Christine, you hopped into a room probably without context and you'd even know what was going on, right, christine? Yeah, but I had really great room buddies. You filled me in, really? Can you share what you saw or heard? So Ken and I'm going to Jacob. Jacob have sounds at the end of your name gave me some really good Jacoby's thank you advice on really being specific about your learning outcomes. And the thing that I think we nailed was that to do that, you need to know who your audience is. So you have to have a really, really clear idea about who you're serving. So then you can be clear about why they should want to learn the things that you want to teach them. 100% Great. So I'm going to recommend to everybody if you're unclear about your course, your course designed to structure the learning outcomes, you probably have to go back to like, oh, snap, I don't really know who I'm talking to. I don't know what the problem I'm trying to solve. So great. OK, so Andres and Emily, if you're still here, can you just monitor the comments and see if somebody had something really important to share? Irving, I see your hand is up. What's up? Sorry you're already pretty much answered what I was going to say, so my group, our biggest thing was lack of clarity and multiple arenas of the course, so. Yeah all good. OK, good bye, Ivy. So the challenge for all of you is to actually to make it simpler. Keep reducing it down. It's kind of counterintuitive, as a teacher, you want to give more. You want to teach more. You want to share everything. That is that, you know? But actually, that is overwhelming. So let's reduce it down. It is a question here about was it 3 learning outcomes to teach in 3 hours or teach one outcome in 3 hours, three learning outcomes in 3 hours. So if you have a workshop in one hour, it's one or. You don't want to have a workshop in one hour. You could try anybody, do whatever they want. They get to have 10 learning outcomes in 10 minutes. That's the one option. I can only recommend best practices that you have learning outcomes, and it's between 1 to 5 hours, whatever it is that you pick. OK, OK. Yeah, because I've shared this before with a group called explain how they gave us a jar of stuff to do, and the whole workshop lasted an hour and I think it became very clear as to whether they were teaching us, and it was really, really good. The simplest of exercises, they're awesome at doing these exercises, and I don't have the book in front of me, but if I find it during today's call, I'm going to recommend it to you because they also wrote a book on how to design games. And a friend of mine gifted it to me, and I have yet to read it. But when I realized it's from the same group, I now know that I have to read this book. Yeah, and I can all. I really want a second. What you said about three hours. It's not much because I honestly panicked when I thought about doing a workshop in four or five hours. But then you realize that people want breaks and you do breakout rooms and you get questions and time just flies. So when you have a workshop in two hours, it's almost never enough time. It's so stressful. So I think, yeah, that's my experience, at least like to have a 90 minutes. It's almost more difficult than to have three four hours. Yes, there is some magical formula for the things that you need to teach and what the ideal amount of time is since you're in control of what you want to teach and the time you shouldn't stress out over it, like Anneliese. Exactly right. Because when somebody says to me, Chris, teach about pricing strategies and you have 18 minutes to give a talk, I'm like to come on. Right, or if they say teach me something fundamental about topography, it's going to be 17 weeks, something like that's too much time, and I don't know what the heck we're going to do. So you get to control the outcome and expand and contract the time as you think you need. I'm going to just give you a Warning here. You'll need more time than you think. Christine, since I have you here, you shared something with Ben burns and then he shared it with me, and then I probably butchered it via the telephone game. I think you said something to the effect, and please correct me if I could get this wrong. Lecturing is the best way to teach in the worst way to learn. Is that right? Yeah, I Stole that from Stephen kasen. Lecturing is a great way to teach in a terrible way to learn. Somebody also said lecturing is the process of words coming out of an instructor's mouth into the ears of a student without it going through the minds of anyone. OK she's the OK, this is good stuff. So Christine today, bringing the levity to humor, you could be my sidekick and bring in that intellectual humor. I love it. OK we have a whole bunch of hands up and we're not even through this. May I just say quickly, Phyllis, if you have something undressed and then you just really quickly? Oh, I was just going to say I didn't get this share mine, so I just wanted to share it right quick, please. That's OK. I called mine a branded heart to cure imposter syndrome, and it's helping people understand their brand heart as far as their purpose, their mission, their vision and their values, and then how to use that in your messaging because it is not your message. So that's kind of what I was going for. That's it. Wonderful you know, I saw that. I think it was Shari who wrote, this simplicity is not easy. 100% 1,000% to take complicated things and make him easy and an analogy or metaphors to make it something you can remember that is an art in itself. I'm going to suggest that every person here go out and watch a few videos from people who you think are master teachers and try to dissect and reverse engineering what it is that they did. Make it super easy for people to understand. So, Phyllis, thank you, and I know you and I are doing a call sometime in the very near future. So I look forward to doing that undress. What's up? Connor's comments really stood out to me, he says. Abdullah had a great suggestion to leave a cliffhanger at the end of a workshop if you have a lot of workshops courses planned. Yes, wonderful. I would also say very carefully do that because it'll feel like they were super happy. And then now you're promoting something else and they're like, Oh my god, this I'm in a funnel and I paid to be part of a funnel. Just be super careful because I've been in courses like that where it clearly wasn't about teaching, it was about getting me to buy the next big thing. I know a lot, of course, creators and people who sell e-learning products do this as part of the way to get you to buy a $10,000 product. So just be very careful. Give them a satisfying conclusion to their thing. They'll naturally ask you, so what's next? And then you can just lay out the road map and just be very careful how you handle that. OK, pull the last comment, and we got to move on. Sure I was just wondering if you could provide a quick example of how you would distill a larger topic into this three outcomes, the thing that you're talking about right now. Maybe from the topography course or something else that was successful? Yes OK, that's a good question. I think it's a fair question. I'll answer it right now and we can dive in deeper in subsequent calls on this, where I'll have examples and I'll prepare it ahead of time. So very good question. So I remember the very first time I had to do this was with Dr. Holtzman. He was helping me to become a better teacher. I was still teaching actively at Art Center. I wasn't yet making a ton of videos on YouTube. So he says, Chris, here's the problem like, teaching is about the transference of your knowledge to someone else. So that they can learn how to make decisions and learn how to see the way that you see. And the old way of teaching design is for you to just critique and tell them what to do, but they're not having any transparency as to how decisions are made. And at this point, I'm teaching storyboarding and sequential design. It's the deliberate design of images. In in a sequence to tell the story. OK, and you can use any tools that you want. So he asked me, what are the five things that you're thinking about when you look at this work? And it became very clear, like he asked and I wasn't prepared, but I was able to tell them. And that became the foundation of like how my students look at the work now. So the first thing that I tell my students when you're looking at a sequence is, is the frame clear or is it confusing? So clarity is paramount because if I can't tell what it is, you've drawn or put together because it's too dark. Then there's no point of me looking at it. So first of all, is it clear, step number two, is it interesting or is it boring? So yes, it's clear your image. But yeah, so what? So what it's interesting for me to look at, because the camera angle or the staging or the lighting or the subject in the frame isn't interesting, and there's things that we can do to make it interesting. And then we go on, and I think the third one was like, do does it? Is there a non sequitur? So it's clear it's interesting, but when I get to frame three, I can't figure out how it's connected. The fourth one is when they're all clear. They're all dramatic, and I can tell that there's a sequence here. Did it add up to something meaningful? Did it surprise me at the end? And the last thing I wrote down was, were there ways that you can develop transitions to make the moment from each moment in the story flow a little bit better or to add many surprises to it? And so of course, each one of those things, how do you make a frame clear? And then we would then list out what that is. How do you make it interesting, and we would list it out? And now I would post it up on the board, and now we can look at the sequences together and all the students can critique their own work. So that's how you would break down how you do sequential design into five components, and now I could probably teach a course or workshop on each one of those five things. And it turns out the lecture on transitions was by far still the most popular thing that I taught. When you can see students like writing notes like mad and asking for the video examples, which I never gave out, but that's a different story. Ok? are you lecturers recorded anywhere? No, they're not recorded anywhere. You go it is going to be dynamite when it is. I'm telling you, she goes on to get in on the Advanced tip there. OK, puja, go ahead and then want to get back into the call. No, thank you. Yeah OK, so but it sounds like this is an example like this, you just kind of covering touching on what the topics are. It's kind of like an introductory overview rather than sort of, I guess this works better for a topical course. But if it's a hands on thing, you wouldn't really have time to go like, actually teach any of those things right? So it's no more like this was in class hands on. Absolutely yeah, yeah, I'm just talking in the context of this MVPD three hour course, I don't think we would have any time to do that. Oh yeah, yeah, OK. So what you want to do is actually you can surprisingly, you can. But I would caution everyone not to get too overambitious as to what you're trying to teach in 3 hours and just get some, ok? Look, I think I mentioned is I've taught for over 15 years at different private art schools. And so the reason why I think going to YouTube wasn't that big of a deal and offering courses wasn't that difficult because I've been doing this for a long time. For many of you, this will be the very first time you teach in any formal way at all. OK, so let's just take one small step at a time, and let's not stress out too much over like how it's going to work out. You need to just get Miles on the car. You know, you need to get road time in, and then you'll start to figure out, oh, this part works really well. And then we'll all sit around on a camp at a campfire and share war stories about how we're just terrible teachers and how we can get better. But we're not there yet because we haven't done it. Right so I almost feel bad for the first five years in which I talked because it was like a terrible teacher. I'm not sure I'm a good one today, but I'm not as bad as I used to be. OK, so I'm just letting you know, I'm also embarrassed as to how my taught that first year it was rough. OK, let's get back into it. I'm going to share the screen. And feel free to reach out to me at anyone afterwards on circle and just DM me. OK, so whatever it is you want to teach between 1 to 5 hours, three learning outcomes and then each learning outcome needs to have exercises built into it so that you can then share some of that knowledge that you want with your students. OK and so when we are ready and we feel like we're past the prototype stage now, we can really get into the fun stuff, actually making money. So if you use your worksheet now, we're getting ready to do the workshop. So you can see here a class that's $100. And I'm just using big, easy round numbers here so that the math doesn't get too hard for any one of us. I don't I'm not recommending that you do a workshop for $100 but there it is. There's 25 students and you can do this twice a month and you can see you can hit your numbers quite quickly. Now from a different call that I did. Um, I read this book called The workshop survival guide. It's an excellent book, I'm going to recommend every single person here, buy it and read it ahead of your workshop. It's going to give you a lot of ideas at one point. We're supposed to interview the authors, but then they canceled and I haven't followed up, but I hope to have them on a call soon. But they broke down the several types of things that you can do during a workshop, and they say lectures are good for delivering facts. So if there's a lot of facts you want to share, then you do it via lecture. But as Christine and I have already joked, it's probably not the best way to learn. It's probably the least effective way to learn. So when you have small group discussions, they can have a lot of personal discovery because the students learn from each other. And it's engages them because there's nowhere to hide. They have this thing called try it now, which is. Here's a quick exercise. I want you to go and write something so that's where you can. You can get some, some practice at applying what it is that you've learned. Uh, for Kia, it might be like, OK, I'm going to give you three ingredients you have 30 minutes, I just want you to make a dish or something. You know, and everybody here can do something like that where you reduce down the number of variables and you say, go for it. It's a stripping away of things. So when I'm teaching topography, I'll give everyone one typeface. You can choose one point size and you can choose one weight. You must use all the copy go. And it turns out that's the best way to learn. You can also do the scenario challenge, which is, I think when you give someone a scenario via case study and then you ask them, how would you run the marketing campaign? How would you write the tagline, what would you do to make this a success? And so the designing of the case study or the curating the curation of the case, that is super important. I think that's the scenario challenge. And then the last part is Q&A, and to minimize Q&A because Q&A is not the Q&A is for clarification, and too many people use Q&A. As a way to teach, but it's disorganized is the problem, and you are going to be subject to the quality of the questions that you're asked. So if you have high quality questions, you're going to have an awesome workshop and you can have terrible questions. It's going to be miserable. So I think you're going to want to lean into items to through for some lecturing a lot of doing OK. And now let me switch over to next part, ok? So naturally, some of you are going to feel that there's a knowledge gap between what it is you want to teach and what you actually know. And so I'm going to highlight to you my own experience in launching my first course. So I have a bachelor's degree, so I kind of know things from art school. I've been running a business for 21 years, but despite all of that, when I went to launch my topography, of course, I felt like I didn't specialize in type. And I don't know the history. I don't know my typefaces, my designers, as well as I needed to. So there was definitely a knowledge gap. And so with the knowledge gap, what I did was I quickly started to fill that in and I did this mostly in the form of books. So these were the books that I bought and read as quickly as possible because I knew I was going to launch the course relatively soon. And when you read with the intention that you're going to apply it somewhere, you read very differently than just reading for fun. And so that also meant, like we're chapters meandered and things that I didn't think were relevant. I just skipped those. And that's how I was able to read so many books in a very short period of time. So for those of you that don't feel like you're quite ready that you have enough experience or anything, just ask yourself. What do you need to do to fill the knowledge gaps? And then make a list for yourself. I need to watch these videos, I need to enroll in someone a competitor's course or a complimentary or an adjacent course. Or I really like the way they structure their teaching, and you would just do that as part of your homework. And hopefully, as you fill the gaps, you're going to start to feel a lot more confident. So despite being a professional practicing designer and someone who taught for 10 to 15 years at that point and having a degree from a really good private art school, I still felt like I didn't know that's why I had to read those books. OK, so now we get into the marketing part, and so this is going to help you shape a little bit about how you're going to build awareness around this because when you decide you want to launch, it's going to be too late. Because now nobody nobody knows, nobody cares, so I'm going to show you the roadmap is to what I've done, and then you can map it to the way that you need to do it. OK, so you all know this already. So the formula is you have to build awareness and then people become interested and then there's desire for more and then the White triangles when they convert. So a IDC, OK, ADC, so awareness, interest and desire. So I'll show you exactly how we did this because I've done this the wrong way before and now I feel like I'm doing it the right way if the right way exists. So when I wanted to sell a course on typography, I had to go back and say, OK, how can I build awareness around that? I'm good at design. I know how to use type and I want to teach you type and you need to type 2. So I wrote a 10 page guide. It's just 10 pages, 10 tips. And this is where I'm just sitting there thinking to myself, if I had to take a novice designer and teach him about topography, what are the 10 rules I can just share with him that are quick wins that if they apply these rules and know nothing about nothing else, about type, they're going to feel more empowered and their designs are going to improve. And so I wrote that and I'll share that with you in a little bit. And then I converted that into literally a slideshare, which is a PDF that you can upload now, it's owned by LinkedIn. It's less popular than it used to be. I would just upload it and that became my highest engaged, most viewed thing on SlideShare. Naturally, because people thought, wow, these are really great tips. I took that same topography manual, the 10 tips. I sent it over to an animator, and he and his company animated the video for me, and that helped to build more interest. So now we're seeing the topography come to life. It's called kinetic typography. And even if you're not that interested in it, at least it's visually interesting to look at. And then prior to launching a course, I started to do a series of live streams where I would critique people's design, we would critique their poster, design, their layouts, anything that I thought, yep, there's a lot of type on this and we got a lot of submissions and people started to become aware like, hey, this guy can talk about design and type, and this is helpful to me. So this is building up to desire to the point in which we're going to convert, and that's when I talk about guys, I'm going to be launching a topography course. This is the pre-launch I haven't recorded this class, but if you want to enroll in it, you're going to get the best possible price ever. And I think we sold it for $79 today. It sells for $250. I think. And so to the question of somebody saying, if you start low, is there a problem? I would rather start low and have success and raise the price over time, then start high and have no, no success. Or little success and then feel totally dejected. One other thing that I did, I'm not sure I would do again, but because it was my first course, I live recorded each of the modules and gave everyone on YouTube free access to it for 24 hours before we lock the videos. When we did it the first time, I think we had 400 or 500 people tuned in live for the whole time, which I don't know how long we recorded, but they were there the whole time. And then we told them they could watch it for 24 hours and it's going to disappear. I think they thought it was a stunt. So when it disappeared, a lot of people were upset that I told you it was going to disappear. 24 hours later, it disappeared. We did this three more times by the time we did it for the fourth live session and they knew it was live and it was free. Who is going to disappear? I think we had 1,600 people on it. It's the most we've ever had in the live stream. And so they knew I think it was always Friday, Friday at a specific time, once a week, for four weeks, I'm going to do this and it built up a lot of momentum and it drove sales. And when we went to finally launch, that's when we did our six figures in sales. OK so awareness for me is I'm going to give you a high value resource. For me, it was a 10 page e-book. I did it in one sitting. I had some friends help me out with the proofreading and grammar and all that kind of stuff. But it's a very, very straightforward. This is what it looks like. I did this in Adobe Illustrator. I just wrote the rules and I gave them examples, and that was it. What I didn't know at that time this was going to be one of the highest viewed pages on our website, and the PDF is now required reading for some design classes at Art Center. So that was all working in my favor. I knew something, I had to document it, I had to share it with the world because the world can't read my mind. So the interest, as I was telling you at that point, at that point in the conversation, we convert it into video and animated video. So to date? But the video has 1.3 million views. India actually has made it some money, too, so you can see that graph there over time, the lifetime upload, you can see their periods in which it spikes, and it's kind of neat that it has a long tail to it. So it's still spiking, even most recently in August. There's a reason why because we're bringing a lot of new people to the channel via shorts. I built further interest by taking the words of famous designers. This one is Massimo McNeely and making very simple posters and then sharing that on pinterest, on Instagram and everywhere else I could. So Massimo McNeely is the legendary designer. He has a really incredible way of phrasing things. But when I went to search for his thoughts, his ideas. I saw that people were designing them, but they were not designing in Massimo spirit. The design was bad, so I was like, I could I can make this better. So I made a series of posters and shared on social media. So all of this stuff, it's going to be hitting a lot of different people in different places to build awareness around what it is that you want to do. OK, so remember, I was telling you about the design critique, so you can see here a lot of these videos have substantial amount of views 31,150 1,066 1,000. So all of that is potential customers for you. So it does take work, and the reason why I'm sharing this with you today is because I don't want you to start launching tomorrow and then there's crickets. OK, so the conversion there's a sales page, like I said, I think we sold it for $79 originally at a steep discount to the $150 that was being sold for. I think we've raised the price since then by $100. It's still selling really well. There's one last letter that I didn't share with you. A is for awareness, eyes for interest. These four desires sees for conversion. And there's one last in there. So it's ADC. And the last one is advocacy. So when your students go through and they are able to create transformation, that becomes your best selling referral lead that you can ever get. So when students take your work and then they do work like this, this is from one person. Now I'm not saying this is the typical result of a person who's gone through the topography course, but this person has gone on to make some killer designs. They use the principles in which they've learned in the class, watching other students' work and hearing the critiques, and this person happens to know three software and they just know the tools really well. So that things are able to create are just amazing to me. And then you get testimonials like this one. And this person says, you know, everything has an underlying layout, which blah blah blah. So there are only 19 years old, and they said this was transformed them. Sears says it completely changed my life, not just the way I design, but the understanding that everything. Blah blah blah. OK, so that's your best way to recruit more students is to deliver on the promise that transformation. Now there's one other thing that I want you to become aware of is that people buy. Because you have social proof and social proof comes in different forms. It could be that you have a degree you've been teaching. You have experience. You have an amazing portfolio. Their associations are wards, et cetera. So you kind of just have to think like which three can you claim? And if you can't today, you need to start to develop it. So three forms of social proof that you can claim. So that people will believe that you're a credible source. And I just want to let you know, familiarity sometimes is associated with being an expert or an authority. So just by being more prolific at content creation, being more visible and transparent, people then start to assume that you're very good at something. And I share the story and I'm just going to leave it here in case you've not heard this before. Oftentimes, people will ask this question out into the universe. Who's the best designer that you know, every once in a while, people write in my name. I do not consider myself the best designer. I do not have proof of this, and I can only say they wrote my name because of familiarity. Well, people say, I love your design is like it's been a really long time since I've designed something. And it that is the power and in the age in which we live in right now, so some of you are probably the world's best kept secret that you're very good at something, you're an authority and expert, but nobody knows that nobody writes your name down as a response to a question like that. And so that is just me. Giving you a very gentle kick in the ass to get out there and put your work out there in any form that makes sense for you, it could be a podcast, it could be still image, it could be an illustration, it could be a live demo. It could be a clubhouse call. Just start doing it. OK, real quickly. The product breakdown. So you can see. Sorry, Yes. Go ahead. Back to the slide before there were a lot of people asking about that one. So if they can take notes or screen, yes, these this is just my list because I sit there and I comb through people's profiles on Clubhouse and on Instagram and elsewhere and LinkedIn, and they are going to claim one of these things, sometimes multiple parts, right? And so there's lots of ways to measure if you're credible and a degree is an old way, and the new way is just your work, the clients you've worked with. I'd even put that up here. So your client list? Awards are pretty easy way to just let people know you're credible, and so when you apply for awards, I'm going to just tell you. Apply for the best known kind of name brand awards because winning an award that nobody's heard of probably won't do much for you. There's things like press getting press releases, appearing on the podcasts of other people. Just say like I was on the xyz podcast that helps you to build credibility. If you if you work with certain people, if you've been a student of someone famous, you can write that too. I was my mentor is x Albert Einstein. Wow I was Leonardo da Vinci's understudy. Wow so you can borrow authority from a lot of different places, and if you're curious about this, we did, I think, two calls on authority, but I'm not an expert. So go back and watch that video and that'll help you, because that's a deep dive just on this one slide. Uh, can anybody else think of anything that's I haven't mentioned or written here is in terms of social proof? Feel free to shout it out before I move on. Amount of followers on social media. Yes oh, yeah, you're right. Yes, that is a measurement of influence and authority now is how many followers you have on social media. Excellent. Thank you. Anybody else writing a book? Absolutely authoring a book. Writing a white paper having been published by someone credible. A best seller, I don't talk about it being on TV, being on TV, does that feel this? Yeah, and that was makes me hard. Yeah one of the few people in this group, I've been on TV. Absolutely Yes. Go ahead. I was going to say media coverage, any media coverage, any media, any blogs. Absolutely And you know what, if you learn how to write a press release and you get the list of editors from different quote unquote entertainment news sources online? There's a high probability that they will publish it because they just need stories. You can also tap into LinkedIn. We talked about this before. They're always looking for top for people to write on topics that they think are trending. And so if you're featured there, so being included on lists recently annually was on a list of, I think, 10 10 reliable, credible resources for brand strategy. You can be on the helper reporter as the source. Yes yes, that's absolutely kind of coverage, I'm actually just doing that, I just joined that and I'm just now answering to serve what's a thing that's like, yeah, that's something I do know about. So, yeah, absolutely. So you see, just in a short amount of time, we can really expand this list and it's almost like we've doubled the list without even trying. So don't become. Don't be intimidated that you don't have some of the traditional things you can go down. Traditional, we live in a very fluid world now, so lean into that it'll be OK. Wonderful Thank you very much, everyone. Now we'll do the product breakdown. So this is the anatomy of my topography course, which I think I have mentioned to you continues to sell. It's one of the best selling courses we have right now. It's at 6:39 thousand, even though the sales are actually much higher than that when it's bundled. I don't have the individual breakdown there. So the launch was, I think, $79. The launch was 150 and I think it's down to 99 post-launch, so it just increases in price. The initial course included four modules because I just sat down like people need to know what the rules of topography are. In a very practical application, they need to understand how to use grids. And there's some really fine details that they need to understand and then they need to do the work. So it's broken down like that. And then after we launched many months, maybe a year and a half later, I started adding additional modules because as I was critiquing more people, I started to see some patterns in which I needed to correct. So we included additional bonus modules now, and that's the most beautiful thing about launching a course is you can continue to add to it over time. You can upload new modules, you could delete things, you get all kinds of stuff. And I love that. It's like clay and the promise and the value prop that I make to all of our students is the best price will be the first price and you are now included on Lifetime updates. And I don't want to sell you additional modules unless I offer a more advanced course. You get all those things. So I just keep adding to it. And I think that's really cool to reward the people who bought in early. And that's what you want to do. You want to assure people that if they buy in early, if they get on the ground floor, they have the best price and they're going to continue to receive value long after their purchase. So really quickly, the timeline looks something like this. I was live recording the courses as I was going, so I would just prep enough during the week to be ready for Friday's live stream and then to catch my breath. And then the rest of the week I was prepping for the second live stream. Week after week. So look something like that. And as we were going, as we finished recording each week, my team was going in and cutting up the live sessions, adding additional materials and preparing so that when we were ready to launch, it wasn't just a ton of work all at once because we were doing on a weekly basis. And so here's my weekly calendar as to how I was doing it. You're probably going to want to do something like this where you map out what you need to do. So you won't have a plan and a strategy. Otherwise, you're going to be spinning your wheels, so the way I did it was I knew on Friday I was going to record the first module, which is about all the rules of topography and how am I going to explain all this stuff? And I wanted to make sure. So that's when I had a gigantic pile of books. I would scan each book just like, OK, they're saying something here that's going to add to what it is I'm teaching, or, hey, this is a conflicting idea. I need to figure out where I stand on it. And so I would spend about two days reading. Like full on 8 to 10 hours of reading, highlighting, taking notes, et cetera. And then so the Wednesday mid midweek, I would start to prepare the assets and I would start to design the deck. Back then, it took me a lot longer to design a deck today I could do it in a day, but I would give you depending on your level of experience with deck design. How are you going to present what the exercise is going to look like? The worksheets, et cetera I would give yourself more or less time, depending on your own experience. And then Friday, we would rehearse with the team. We would get ready to shoot and shoot everything that we needed and then we would shoot b-roll. For some of you who are not familiar with b-roll, it's additional camera angles to make the content more interesting. It can include a wider or tighter shot. It could include an overhead or just things that are just nice to look at, like people working, sketching or moving through art supplies, et cetera. I would then export the screen recording and any additional slides at the team would need. OK And then when you get into the actual course itself, I'm getting ahead of all of what we're doing because I want to give you a preview as to how this is all going to come together, ok? So for me, we have a few modules or chapters, if you will, and this is what it looks like once you enroll in the course, at least on the admin side, and this is what it really looks like. So it follows a very it mirrors that the thing that I've been talking to you about three learning outcomes you need to know. The rules about how to develop good topography and good topography is about repetition and contrast. You have to have elements that are familiar and you have to break that. Otherwise, it's boring. Budget, too, is about grids. Module 3 is about the details, and so you just write an outline like this is what I need to do. And if you can't write it like this, you probably are not confident enough or you haven't done this often enough that what the big points are. OK, so once you get to this point, I want you to write it, your 28 day plan. 28 days because there's four weeks, seven days in each week what you need to do and to get ready for your thing when you're ready. This is when you move beyond the prototype, when you get into the workshop and into the course. OK, I'm going to stop here. I'm sure there's a bunch of questions, so let me just stop this part, ok? Next week, we'll go into the pre-launch what you need, and I'll make a really long list next week is going to be super information too heavy, and we're going to have Ben burns to help us. OK, so I see Ari, you have questions from this point forward. I'm just answering questions. If you can ask the question that we all can learn from that, that would be fantastic versus an individual like, hey man, I need to solve my problem. OK, Ari, go ahead. Question, I'm curious how often you go back and refine or add more modules to your current course. I'm going to give you the simple answer. I'm a lazy bastard. I don't do much. If something really bothers me, I will, and I'm going to prevent myself from the perfectionist syndrome by like reviewing things because I know I'm going to flub things and otherwise, why did I use that word that was stupid? And then I'm going to obsess over this, and what we're going to realize very quickly is the return, the diminishing return of investment of time. More time you put into it does not make the course much better, does not make anything better, but now you're not thinking about the next thing. I would spend that time and energy building more content to build awareness, to the product itself. But would you? Well, my question would be also on, would you recommend all of us to at least review the current course to see if there is anything that we should add on? I'm just like, just once you create it, just leave it be. OK good question, good question, if you're doing it the way I suggest that you do it, you have not a lot of issues with this. If you did it the way I did it, you're probably going to have to do exactly what you're suggesting, Ari. This is why I say prototype prototype. Iterate this as many times as necessary. Learn from those things and then like, oh, this is a gold exercise. This was a really great talk. They love this part. This case study was excellent, and now you have so much confidence that when you go to record this as a course or run this as a real workshop. It's solid. Because you've been testing it the whole time. Now if you do it the way that I did it, it's like I'm not getting a lot of feedback. I'm just writing down what it is that I think I need to teach. And then now you have to sit there like, what is the student work look like and how are we going to fix these things? Awesome, thank you. Yeah, you're very welcome. OK And then Jacobus and then Connor. Oh my god, there's a line of people. OK, let's go. So I had a question when you were talking about the schedule and the three week schedule of like doing these things. And what are you still talking about the MVP stage or at that point you were talking about the actual course? Of course, at that point, I was talking about the course, the MVP. It literally is that you get on a piece of paper. And you write down your ideas. Right this would be as much as I'm going to do for this MVP. Let's see if I can get this. Here it is. That's it. That's all I need, I could teach a whole class right now, just on this. I could run my workshop, and that's the kind of commitment I want to make, because when you overdesigned and you spend too much time doing something, you will not course correct live during the workshop where people do not understand what's going on their loss because you're so committed to the amount of energy you put into teaching something that it's actually not hitting anybody. OK, so if I understand this correctly for the typography workshop that you are using as an example, did you go through this alive workshop phase or no? I did not. I'm a smarter copy creator and educator than I was back then. So I've now authored, I think, six or seven courses or done lectures or whatever. And the most recent one that I did follows this strategy. I did, which means that I did something called the carousel clinic, which is to teach people how to write and create better content for Instagram carousels specifically. And I ran it as an Eventbrite three workshops, live teaching, and it was, I think, for it wound up being 4 and 1/2 hours. It started out as three, 3 and 1/2 and then became 4 and 1/2 hours because there's just not enough time. I have yet to run each session, right? OK I was wondering about the course, but then each session that you ran, was it the same thing but with different people or was it different content? It was the same thing. So you ran it 3 times? Yes, team thing. Different people. Each time I would edit and change things, I would add things. I would pre-record parts of it. So I'll give you a lesson here. Ok? when I did it, the first time I went into a lecture was teaching them a lot of things about content strategy and and then I also gave them live demos on how to like, excuse me, to design their layouts. And then afterwards, my team said, Chris, why don't we just record this and send it to anyone that registers for the class? Because then we can maximize the time in which they can learn from you. So that was an adjustment. We made from workshop one to workshop to all the parts that could be done better pre-recorded. We pre-recorded it. Does that make sense? Uh, no, I didn't. OK like, for example, I was doing live demos, right? I was doing live demos, teaching people how to do a layout. And so people are watching me literally work. And then the teams that Chris, why don't you just record that ate the heck out of it and it'll be like a 10 minute demo. And it's a much more efficient way of delivering information like that. So then I will use some prerecorded I disagree recording the live shot. Correct so in the live workshop, what I did was I either sent them once they registered for the class, the videos that they're going to need to watch anyways. So I can free up that time from the live workshop or I played the videos live during the workshop, but it was delivering the information in a much more succinct way. And were you also planning to do the vice versa to include some material from your life workshop in the finalized prerecorded class? Yes OK, now you're getting into the recording of the course, right? Here's what I would do after you run the prototype a couple of times, you're really confident. Now you move into the workshop, you're charging real money, you're working with real students and things are going great. Everything's good now. You're ready to take this thing and you're going to make a course. You're going to Evergreen this whole thing, right so that you can teach at scale. I would then suggest that you pull back 3 of the five best students from your course and ask them to participate, even pay them if necessary, so that you get the interaction and people can see their work. I think master class does something like this. I don't have any kind of authority to say this is what's happening. But when they invite people to do the class with them, I think there's some screening process. So they know who's going to be really good, right? Chris Voss, for example, he does the negotiations class. He's the author of never split the difference, and he brought in a woman didn't bring in a student. They brought in an actress because he knew he needed someone to play against somebody who was really good with their imagination and being in character. The I think that was pretty genius. Because that's what he needed. So it sounds like, essentially, we're talking about a three stage process, the first stage is the MVP. We might run it a few times. Then you move on to a live workshop, which is actually a paid product, and then you use material from that live workshop to then record a pre-recorded class that lives on forever. And then you might upgrade it as you go. You now have the plan on how to build a six figure eco learning ecosystem. And then what happens is people who take the course are going to say, well, we want to support. So we need a community. Then you develop a community, you need a community, and when they're inside the community like, well, we want one on one. OK, so you see people have different thresholds of time and money, and then you deliver it at different levels, right? So now the cheapest product that you're going to have is probably the course. And then it's coupled with the community, some people do different things. They want to sell you the community. So they give you the course for free. Sign up for the community. Get the course for free. Some people want to sell the course, so they're like, sign up for the course. It comes with a year's support with the community. A lot of different ways to do this. Everyone Some people might do all of this to sell some high ticket, one on one coaching for like $5,000 whatever it is. And so it's up to each and every one of you. But right now we're getting too far ahead of ourselves. But I love the questions that you're asking puja, because now you guys can see how this is going to work. I just had a real quick question based on what you said about those three steps, it should be quick. When you say what's the difference between the MVP and the live workshop, then because I thought the MVP was the live workshop. It is so the MVP, you're just testing ideas and now you're like, OK, you know what? Me freestyling some of this stuff and the diagrams, the whiteboarding, it all worked. Now I'm going to go back and actually do all the work. I got to make the slides beautiful. I've got to. I've got to figure out all this parts and pieces. I'm going to do the worksheets, the self-study stuff, downloadable, whatever it is you need to make and do not underestimate. This is a freaking lot of work. Anybody here who's authored a course before at the level in which you want to deliver it is a ton of work. So the workshop is just let's keep it loose, I'm going to teach you if you guys all wanted me to teach you a personal branding, I could do it right now just on that one page of notes I have. I don't think you'll have a good time. But for me to sell you a course or workshop man and I really got to get into it, and that's the part I hate doing the most going, to be honest with you. I hate doing that part. All right, George, got it. Thanks you're very welcome. OK, Paula, I'm going to just move along the line. I'm sure you and I could sit here and talk about this until tonight, but just to make sure that was incredible. Thank you. You're very welcome. Sounds like a very good plan. Yes now, now I know exactly who you sound like. You sound like my good friend from Art Center. His name is Luis. He's a creative director at an ad agency. So, all right, let's move on. So now we're going to move to Jacobus. Hey, Chris. Hello my question is around your knowledge gap. So obviously you're inside yourself, so you don't know what your gap is. And how do you kind of address that? I mean, you mentioned a bunch of books that you listed that you kind of use to fill that gap. But how did you compile that list or where do you kind of start filling this gap? Wonderful question. OK, so this has to come into some levels of self-awareness here. I'm pretty sure if we sat in a room and asked each and every one of you, whatever topic it is that you want to teach, what is it that you feel like you're an impostor at? Because I know I don't know my type history as well as I need to. I don't know the origins of topography and design. I don't I know how to do it. I know how to help you get it better. But I don't want to be the guy who's like here. On the surface, I don't know where all this stuff comes from. Like, where did all this stuff start? Why? why are there? Why is there an uppercase on a lowercase? And so I knew I had to dive into the history, and I knew I didn't know a lot about book layout and design and grid systems. I use grid systems all the time, but only from what I learned in school and not much else. So I read a whole book on grid systems on how to draw, how to design, and I was just marveling at it. And in the process of filling those knowledge gaps, I feel like I became a more confident, capable, competent instructor. Like, I learned tricks by reading, it's weird, you read books and you learn stuff. Who knew? So Jacobus, you'll have to know, like you are like, you know what? I know about how to do this kind of pricing, and I can teach that. But I want to understand larger like economic theory. That's why I'm personally now reading. This book called implementing value pricing, it is a beast of a book to read. It's sometimes very dry, but my god, it's written by a guy who's a CPA who's quoting like economists. I'm a graphic designer. This stuff is weird. It's interesting, and I know every 10 pages I read, I have to take a break because it's like it's so much in there. Right, and one day I'm going to sit here and I'm going to do like 17 calls with you and teach you the whole book. It is that dense. So that's how I fill in the knowledge gaps. I mean, just of the just roofing, obviously doing the MVP, you're going to get a bunch of questions as well. So that would also see where your knowledge gap maybe is and you're like, get a question that you don't actually know the answer to. That's right. I guess it's a process you're building, the gap is as you first discovering the gap and then one discovering it, you're like, cool, I need to fill it. And then obviously that gap gets smaller and smaller. That's right. So I'm going to do this personal branding workshop, right? And I'm going to do it with you guys for free. And I want to tie comic book mythology, Joseph Campbell's hero's journey and the things I've learned about branding and storytelling. I'm going to smash it all together, but I don't know my comic book mythology as well as I thought I did. So I bought two encyclopedias on DC Comics and Marvel, and now I'm reading about them like, Oh my god, I didn't know that. I did not know Peter Parker's parents died in a plane crash. I don't know when that was revealed. Right, and so that's where I think it's so fun as a teacher, as a student, as a lifelong learner. I just look forward to the opportunities to read more books. So I have all these books around me. I read the books as needed. I'm a just in time reader, you know, like I have to lecture about something. Guess what? I'm going to be reading that book. Gives me a lot of motivation. OK, so maybe you are the same one who knows, right? But it's so wonderful to learn and I'm such a nerd, so I'm just going to put that out there. Not that I had to tell you. I think you already knew. OK, so next up is Connor Connor. Go ahead. Hey, Chris, I think you actually answered my questions, but I just wanted to run it through again because I was also confused about what the actual live like because you were streaming the workshops to YouTube Live. And so the MVP, you were working on the typography. $79 MVP for a few weeks before you decided to start streaming them live to youtube? No, no, no. Let me clear clarify, when we're streaming on YouTube, we were talking about a pre-launch I had at that point, OK, I'm sorry. Let me take a step back. Let me just try and clear all this stuff up. OK, thank you. All right. I'll tell it in one sequence. So everybody understands. So the reason why I authored it topography, of course. Now not making a liar of myself is because I actually was teaching my interns and designers that was paying money to how to get better with type. So we would do this on company time. I already knew how to teach it because I just borrowed my professor's structure, his assignment and his framework, which he borrowed from his professors from Basel, Switzerland. And so I already knew this is going to work. I knew it was going to work because I've been teaching many people over the last 15 years how to design with type. And so I started to live stream critiques to build interest and authority in people seeing me as a design teacher, not as a guy on YouTube, talking about pricing all the time. OK, and then we said, let's launch a class. Now that we have interest demand and have established some authority and the pre-launch price is going to be $79 at that point when we announced it. I didn't have any product at all. I didn't write anything. And then somewhere in there, Ben burns and I were talking. I said, I will live, teach this whole thing. They'll give it away for free just to drum up interest in this product. People had already purchased the $79 thing without the live stream, but during the live stream I was constantly telling people during the live stream. At some point this price is going to go to $150. That's what we did. And so we are live recording the course as we're selling the course, I know that's super confusing to everybody. Right? and that's how we did it. And you just edit it out that promo when you actually edited the clock out of this thing and we would rerecord components of it because it was not good. Mm-hmm Yeah OK. And my only other question, because I started doing critiques, three critiques for three art like once a week and my Discord and I establish I'm establishing authority with my discord, but my Discord community already knows that I'm an authority figure. So should I. Should I be doing these on YouTube instead because I have zero followers on youtube? Like none starting from the ground? That's a super specific question, and I just guys, I have to pull the parachute, I'm so sorry, I have another call. I can't believe I'm at duty again. I promise no cliffhanger endings. And here we are. We have five amazing people who still have questions to ask. I'm so, so sorry, guys. I just checked my schedule here. I had to jump. I'm super sorry. I'm already now going to be late for my next call. And so, Alejandro, I agree. Jessica and Katie, I will get to you. I promise. So can we pick this up on circle? I will do my best to answer those questions there. OK, so let's start a thread on circle under general discussions and just title it. Today's call, which is called number to undress. You're still here. Can you just start that thread for me under general discussion and then prioritize alejandro? Agree Jessica Thomas and Katie. OK, let's do that with that. Guys, I'm going to stop recording.