My experience from launching first online course (with first synthesizing discoveries!)

Oct '22 (edited) in Wins🏆

's advice I decided to finally start trying to add value to the community. I'm here already for pretty long time but always feel that most of you are more advanced than me. That brought fear of making useless posts and I was pretty silent.

Now it's time to punch fear in the face and press POST.

I have a Russian-speaking YouTube channel about music production, recording and mixing called "Freimann Music". But despite having 7k subs at the moment on YouTube and 1500 people on my email list I don't have a steady flow of students and clients for my studio. Sometimes they come but it's not enough.

All my YouTube work for 1.5 years gave me enough audience to launch my first course to finally monetize my audience better than just waiting for them to email me. Still I wasn't sure how to sell my course. I was really afraid to sell. Even though some people couldn't wait to buy a course from me!

So after doing about 20 interviews to find out what my audience wants, I launched the course with a group of 17 people. The price was $600/$1000 per person. I sold on 1-on-1 free calls to find out people's struggles and desires. That was the strategy of my online business coach. And it worked really well.

I didn't film any content for the course because of fear it wouldn't sell. Plus, all the coaches on the internet told not to film anything before launching too.

It became one of the hardest grinds of my life... Writing a song, filming content with explanations, then editing it. I had days with 20 hours of work, going to sleep at 6AM, to be able to put the content out on time. Then I suffered from not enough energy to continue producing my song for the course... I got ill at one point and delayed everything for a week.

A lot of problems, fears, mistakes... Enormous amounts of stress...

But, September became the most profitable month of my life. I hired a full-time assistant who is editing my videos for the course. I paid almost every debt I had (yes, I had them too, and it was another reason to be stressed).

And now about the Synthesizing part.

During filming the course and having 2 calls per week with the course group (each call is 2-3 hours long), first time in my life I found out how much value I'm able to add for my students!

Turned out that the biggest problem for them was really bad SEARCHING skill! People didn't know how to search in Google their questions about using a DAW (software for music production), they didn't know how to search for virtual instruments, how to search for information (for example, which synthesizers were used in Michael Jackson's songs). Haha, play on words with synthesizers here 😁

With all these enormous amounts of information on the internet, nobody really showed people how to search for the right information! And that made me realize that for the first time in my life I share my Specific Knowledge (term used by Naval)!

As more calls were done, I realized that a lot of comparisons, analogies and examples started to evolve from me, and I repeated them a lot of times because they solved my students' problems really fast! Next week I'll celebrate finishing first half of my course!

And I realized that my future courses/launches will be more passive. I will film and edit content before selling the course, even though a lot of people say that it's one of the biggest mistakes. And I will sell some courses using evergreen model too. And now I want to shift to English content and courses too. Because the market is much bigger, and I didn't see any people with similar Synthesizer-like approach in music production niche yet.

My question for you: do you think that going through a season of pain to make drastic progress is worth it? Or do you prefer more slow and steady growth with less risk and stress involved?

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