Last week I went over how much effort you should put into a course funnel. One reader reached out with a follow-up.
“What about the course itself?”
New courses all carry a certain amount of risk.
There are three ways you can approach this:
- Build nothing and pre-sell the idea.
- Throw together an MVP (bare-bones that does the work) ← my favorite
- Create a full produced course that may or may not sell
I don’t find pre-selling very appealing unless you already have a large built-in audience. A trusting audience will purchase anything and this does not always transfer well to cold audience.
You might get a false positive, then build out a full course and run into problems.
Without this audience, you’re going to have to throw targeted traffic at this offer (which comes with its own problems).
…finding them, getting their attention, dialing ads in etc..
So if I have to spend money to test an offer… let me at least try and get some of this investment back with an MVP (lower priced sale) and see whether this converts.
Also, cold traffic is unlikely to purchase something that does not exist from someone they do not know.
Here’s my thought process:
- I don’t want to build anything without knowing it will sell
- I don’t want to run traffic if I have nothing to sell
- Therefore… low effort MVP
On the other end of the spectrum. There are those that build out full courses without any validation.
You’d be amazed at some of the messages I receive.
“I built out this amazing course over 12 months. Spent the last X years selling it. Made zero sales but I know it is great so can you help?”
I find these sad and disturbing.
My response is always the same.
“WHY?… to all of that. There were two other paths and you chose the worse one…”
Be smart
