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Jacques Hopkins, a seasoned online course creator and coach, joins me to discuss his journey from an electrical engineer to creating and marketing successful online courses.
We’ll cover how Jacques leveraged personal experience with his own course, “Piano in 21 Days,” to teach others about effective online course creation.
Plus, Jacques shares his initial struggles and breakthrough moments that transformed his approach to online business, making his insights relatable to both new and veteran course creators.
Watch the episode ‘Boost Online Course Sales Ethically Using Urgency with Jacques Hopkins’ (releases October 23rd).
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Jacques’s Links:
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- Listen to Jacques’s podcast: The Online Course Show
Speaker 1:
Welcome back to the Art of Online Business podcast. I have Jock Hopkins as a guest and I also have my wife, who’s going to be accompanying me, as you’ve seen in previous episodes, and so in this episode we get to talk to Jock. He’s a unique online course creator coach, where he teaches online course creators how to do marketing and all these things to sell their course, but he also did it first himself with his course called Piano in 21 Days, so he actually knows a lot from personal experience about creating a course, marketing it and selling it in a niche that has nothing to do with teaching people how to make money. And before we hit record, doc, you were even saying like the fact that you did it with your piano course does make it like more relatable, and I agree. Like rather, fact that you did it with your piano course does make it like more relatable, and I agree like rather than I’m just yet another guest who teaches people how to make money with their courses, and that’s how I make money.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, exactly, look, quajo. Jamie, thank you so much for this opportunity. The art of online business I mean, what a great name for a podcast. I know it’s been around for a while. I’ve certainly listened here and there over the many, many years I’ve been doing this a long time. The art of online business Absolutely love online business.
Speaker 3:
I’ve got a couple of businesses myself. That first one was teaching piano online, right In an online business, and yeah, I do kind of have like a course on courses and I help people with courses now. But it’s kind of hard to start there, right, you got to have some credibility. You got to have you can’t just start there, because why would I listen to somebody teaching me how to do a course? Who’s only ever made money from teaching people how to do a course? Right, that’s a little weird, right? So I’ve been doing this for 11 years in terms of my piano course business. And then my second business, because I love the art of online business. I love that so much. I now talk about that the business side as well. I love that more than piano now.
Speaker 1:
I can’t wait to dive into your journey from being an electrical engineer yeah.
Speaker 1:
All the way to the course and then to doing what you are now. I want to let the listener know, though, this is the first of two episodes, and so in the next episode we’re going to be diving into the ethics of using urgency. I know that can be a very touchy subject and we want to know how to do it right Because, like Jock and I understand that like and you listening to you get it that the longer you leave, the longer of a timeline that you make or give somebody to join, like so many people just end up, although they have the best of intentions, taking action, life gets in the way. But then, when we talk about urgency, we don’t want to do it the wrong way. So what is the right way?
Speaker 1:
You’re going to have to tune into that episode and we’ll be talking about the three types of urgency you can use that work best and, like I always say, if you can’t see us right now and you can only hear us, hop on over to YouTube. The link is in the description below and then you can see all of the podcast recording that we’re doing right now. So my first question for you, jock and thank you for being here again is what in the world motivated you to jump from such a secure career as engineering electrical engineering at that to start your course. And I want to know did you just jump cold turkey, so to speak? Did you have savings? Did you do the safe way with a course on the side as your side hustle until it replaced most of your income? How did your wife and her thoughts about this factor in? We want to know it all, because you built two successful online businesses and we’re here to talk about that this episode.
Speaker 3:
You said we would start with one question. That was like about 74 questions in one. It was You’re right. I’ll do my best.
Speaker 1:
I’m sorry, I committed the podcast hosts in, but now you know all the questions in my mind All right, let’s start attacking it.
Speaker 3:
So you mentioned the word secure job. That’s a really interesting way to put it, because that’s very true. It was a very secure job.
Speaker 3:
One of my motivations for picking engineering certainly was that I was into math and science and not so much you know I’m not right brain, I’m very left brain analytical and I was looking at my career opportunities, you know, going into college, and I wanted a four year degree. I didn’t want to have to go to graduate school and then optimize how much money I could be making and I was like, wow, engineering seems perfect. I only need one degree and I can start making really good money coming out and it aligns with what I feel like I’m good at. So I went into engineering and I never considered really anything else, including entrepreneurship.
Speaker 3:
Entrepreneurship scared me. It felt like it did not feel like it was for me for a few reasons. What was in my head was that you needed a lot of upfront capital, whether that was debt or outside investors. You needed a brick and mortar presence. You needed a lot of people working for you. You needed to work 100 hour weeks, like that’s to me what entrepreneurship looked like. And then, for some reason, when I was a senior in college, about to graduate this was 2008, I picked up a book. You may have heard of it. It’s called the four hour work week.
Speaker 2:
Yep.
Speaker 3:
I guess the title drew me in and I read that book and that book was important for me because of the paradigm shift I had around entrepreneurship. I was reading about all the amazing things that the author, tim Ferriss, was able to do because of the online let’s call it online business that he had set up. I was like, wow, this is a totally different picture of entrepreneurship than what I have in my head. I want this version. This version is really, really cool. I already had my job lined up.
Speaker 3:
I went to work all the while trying to create something, so I am not a big risk taker. So you asked did I go all in or anything like that? I worked as an engineer for eight years. So you asked did I go all in or anything like that? I worked as an engineer for eight years, for eight years. After I read the book, trying things and I tried different things. I tried blogs, I tried apps, I tried inventing physical products, because in four-hour work he doesn’t talk about online courses he gives you all kinds of different ideas. There’s like t-shirt businesses, all kinds of random things and all kinds of different ideas. There’s like t-shirt businesses, like all kinds of random things, and so I tried a bunch of different things. None of them worked, none of them made a single dollar, and it was I think we did try an app.
Speaker 1:
I’m curious how many things did you?
Speaker 3:
try Seven. The piano thing was my seventh one that I tried.
Speaker 3:
Seven, wow All right, all right, and the previous six, I never took it too far. I always ran into a big roadblock that told me this is not for you, right? So, for example, I started a blog Well, one or two blogs in, oh, I forgot, I don’t like writing and I’m not good at it. Right, that was. That was easy products, right? Well, you know I was engineering, right, like I can design things, do that. Like I had this idea. You know, this is gosh, I’m struggling with math.
Speaker 3:
16 years ago, right, standing desks started to become all the rage, right, and I was working as an engineer, I went to Home Depot and I rigged up my desk to have a standing desk and so I tried to invent something that would raise up your existing sitting desk to a standing desk and it went kind of on the bottom of your desk. It was called desk docker. That was the name of it. Okay, but just like getting prototypes and inventory and just it was just too many headaches, something I didn’t want to deal with. Plus, like better ideas came out that go on top of the desk. It’s called like Vera desk or Versa desk, like there’s way better designs than I came up with.
Speaker 1:
That was another example from Ikea. That’s what we got better ideas.
Speaker 3:
I mean the one, the one I have right now. This has a button in it. It’ll just like electronically go up and down. It’s amazing, but what happened was I was, you know, I was working. It was a demanding job, a good job, and I would come home from work. I had you know, I was married at the time no kids yet and I was kind of exhausted and I knew that I should be working on my side hustle, whatever that thing was that. I was working at the time and I was procrastinating and I wasn’t working on it just because I didn’t have the energy for it. Plus, you know, I wasn’t all in on any of them and I would procrastinate by playing my piano, and so one day, I was just sitting there in early 2013, playing my piano, not working on the side hustle.
Speaker 1:
And it just kind of hit me.
Speaker 3:
It just hit me. I was like huh. I was like, if this is what I come to when I don’t really want to do anything else, like maybe there’s a business here. And it just so happens that I have a story around piano that is kind of unique. Well, part of it is actually not very unique, and the other part is. The part that’s not unique is that I took piano lessons as a kid. I actually took them for 12 years and.
Speaker 3:
I was a terrible piano student. I never practiced. I hated it. I only stuck with it to make my parents happy. They wanted me to do it and I was a good kid, followed the rules. I wanted to make my parents happy. The part that’s maybe not unique is after those 12 years. I looked up.
Speaker 1:
I could only play two songs, oh, but I went to yeah, it was that’s because you want to make your parents happy. I know.
Speaker 3:
Well, I thought just going to the piano lessons was going to make them happy and I didn’t like those two songs, right, they were just like Mozart, like old stuff.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
But I went to this retreat with somebody asked me to play because they knew how to play. I played my two songs. They weren’t very impressed. I didn’t have anything else. Another guy comes and sits down after me and plays tons of songs and they’re modern songs. He played Black Eyed Peas and Ark and really cool stuff and church songs. He didn’t have sheet music. I was like how are you doing this? My mind was blown because he was doing something that I’ve been playing piano. I had no idea how he was doing it, so for the first time, he showed me a different way to learn and play piano. It’s a way that involves chords and some improvisation. So I started to learn that way to play. So, fast forward to 2013, when I’m just doing my chords and improvisation, playing, enjoying piano, I’m like, oh, like. I learned the traditional way. It didn’t work for me and I learned this other way. I wonder if I could share this other way of learning piano online. So I don’t know how many of the questions we got through, but that’s kind of.
Speaker 1:
That’s okay, I got new ones. I’m looking at this. Hey, I’m Joc. I help regular people learn to play their favorite songs with the fastest online piano course. That’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool right there. So you actually learned how to improvise, though, or improvise yes.
Speaker 2:
Okay.
Speaker 1:
I feel like you were a little too early because I watch so many not so many, but I follow a couple accounts of this friend, like these various people who I’ll call it freestyle piano, and they sit on the piano in public spots and they play these famous songs and sometimes famous people show up many times. Other people are just busting out their violin or like singing, and I have no idea if it’s all like planned out, but it just seems magical and you can do stuff like that.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, look, I’m not a world-class pianist, but I’ve got this way that works really well for me. Like I said, I hated piano growing up, but once I started playing this way, I actually enjoyed it and being able to just like you know, we do a lot of traveling and we were in France over the summer and a lot of the French train stations have pianos that anybody can sit down and play and when you know how to play like this, you don’t have to have your sheet music with you. You just sit down and play and it sounds like you know what you’re doing.
Speaker 1:
It’s a joyful experience, right? So then tell me, because you did over 4 million in sales with the piano course, yeah, what was the low point when you were?
Speaker 3:
starting that business. Well, there was a couple. Can I share two?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, the first one would be when I launched the course and didn’t make any sales. So I got the idea in March 2013, still working my job. So when I had the time, I was putting the course together. It took me about eight months to put the course together and I launched it. And, look, I’m a big podcast junkie. I told you how much I’m excited about being on your podcast. I have a podcast. Much I’m excited about being on your podcast. I have a podcast. Quajo, you were on my podcast. It was awesome, it was an honor, and I was listening to a lot of podcasts at the time. I would hear course creator success stories and they would talk about how they got their idea and then they launched. And then it was always the same, like they would get distracted. They’d go have dinner or something and they’d come back to their bank account. All of a sudden there was $2 million sitting in their bank account because it was so wildly successful. And those were the only stories that I would hear.
Speaker 3:
So, that was the only possible outcome, because that’s the only story I would hear. Right? So when I launched it and then didn’t get any sales, I was devastated, right, but what happened was the next day. Well, I woke up the next day. I didn’t make any sales on the day of the launch. The next day I woke up and I was like, okay, well, this is it right, money while you sleep. Somebody bought while I was sleeping. Right, wake up, check my phone still nothing. My wife’s like get your mind off it, go get us some coffee. I went to Starbucks and I’m standing in line at Starbucks and my phone dings and it was my first sale and I literally started dancing in line at Starbucks. I’ll never forget it. That was amazing, but it was only one sale and the sales were very slow going, so it was far from an overnight success story, I would say.
Speaker 3:
The other low point was I quit my job at the end of 2015. Point was I quit my job at the end of 2015. So, a couple of years in, and I was I’ve been working on it hard. I was up to about a thousand dollars a month, okay, so I was selling three, four copies of the course every month. Okay, not enough to get by like it’s a good, decent side hustle, but like I wanted to quit my job and I wanted to do all the cool things that Tim Ferriss did, things like that.
Speaker 3:
So I was making about a thousand dollars a month, but we had paid off our mortgage. My wife was an engineer as well. We had some savings and we had a six month old baby, so my wife actually retired when our oldest daughter she’s nine now. When we had her, my wife quit.
Speaker 1:
Hold on, unpack that a bit. You quit your job, you’re at 1K a month, and what questions are floating through your mind?
Speaker 2:
I mean, I’m the wife here, so I’m thinking what did your wife think?
Speaker 3:
Well, I painted the vision for her as well. Right, she loves adventure, and so we built up to this. We had some savings. We quit, knowing we could make it by for a year living very frugally. Quit, knowing we could make it by for a year living very frugally. And then, like you know, I learned this from four hour work week he he said when you’re making big decisions, look at the best case versus worst case scenario and like rate that out of 10.
Speaker 3:
Right. So I was looking at, I’m like, okay, best case scenario is clearly a 10 out of 10.
Speaker 3:
Right, that’s the best case scenario, worst case scenario is like a six out of 10. Like, I go back to work right. I had eight years of experience, had a good resume, I had a good degree. I’ll go back to work Right. So that made it an easy call. Plus, we’d set ourselves up. Well, the problem and the low point came eight months into that year I was still making a thousand dollars a month. Okay, I hadn’t grown it, my I was sitting in the living room and my daughter I guess she was maybe a little over one then comes up to me with a book, and the book was called Little Miss Big Sis, and that’s how my wife was telling me that she’s pregnant with our second kid Number two, number two, so that maybe sped up the timeframe a little bit.
Speaker 3:
I literally started applying for jobs because I’m like I got to take care of my family. But it was at that exact time, like that exact month, where I discovered funnels and I implemented my first evergreen funnel into my business, and that alone, with the same traffic and the same course to next my business. And I started making $10,000 a month, and it’s been bringing in five figures every month ever since this was late 2016. So that was the low point, followed by a nice high point as well.
Speaker 2:
Right, okay, so I have a couple of questions too now from there.
Speaker 1:
All at once, I know rapid fire.
Speaker 2:
So my first question, though, is how did you initially launch your your course? You said you’re like what platform did you initially launch your your course? You said you’re like what platform did you use? How are you marketing your course?
Speaker 3:
I wasn’t marketing well. So I did start a YouTube channel and threw a threw a few videos up there, but they were just, they were just song tutorials and it turns out that’s not a great marketing mechanism for for my brand. And so I had a few views and a very small email list, like less than a hundred people, and I just sent out an email. There was no, there was very little launch strategy. I was just like, hey, it’s not available, go buy, right. Just because I thought it was going to, I thought that’s all I needed to do, right. So I launched the course, focused completely on the course itself, without really knowing much about marketing and sales, and so that’s what I kind of had to learn, slowly over the months and years to eventually make it work. And for me it just happened to be the funnel was the last piece. I kept putting pieces in here and there, and the funnel for me was the last piece that made it all come together and work.
Speaker 1:
Okay.
Speaker 2:
Nice.
Speaker 1:
It almost sounds like back when we were in Seattle, our pastor at church there always talked about like the disney. What would he say? Like the disney swirl.
Speaker 1:
The disney twirl, where you see, like you know, the kid growing up and then there’s like the epic song and just twirl. Now they’re an adult and they’re doing the the cool disney part of the movie. It sounds like we just got that from you, when you dropped a couple phrases about how you discovered a funnel right after you learned that your second daughter was on the way and that month you 10x your income. I think you said it in about three sentences. I’m sure the listener would want to know what kind of funnel was that? Could you map it out really quick?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah we want details, please. The type of funnel it’s called a product launch formula funnel made famous by Jeff Walker. Okay.
Speaker 2:
All right.
Speaker 3:
What happened was I was listening one of the podcasts I’ve always listened to Smart Passive Income by Pat Flynn.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
He had a guest on that was an expert in selling online courses. His name was David Seidman Garland and he was talking about his funnel that’s amazing for selling his courses and in that episode he walked you through exactly how the funnel worked and and I guess I don’t I don’t know that he even said this at the time, but it is a classic product launch formula funnel, originally created by Jeff Walker, but it’s it’s the. It’s the pre-launch content videos. So before the cart is open, you send out three value videos like send video one, wait a couple of days, send video two. Wait a couple of days, send video three. You tease the launch coming up and then during I had a five day open cart period or have cause, I still have basically the same funnel in place eight years later and then one email every day during the open cart and two emails on the last day.
Speaker 2:
That’s basically what the funnel looks like. How often are you launching your course? It’s just open and closed throughout the year, or so it’s an evergreen funnel.
Speaker 3:
So that was kind of. The key to it is that it’s not just a launch funnel where I do it a couple of times a year. It was an evergreen funnel. So depending on when you first go to the website and opt in for the lead magnet, your deadline will be different, you know. Kweju you were talking earlier about urgency. We’ll talk about that in the next one. Right About that. But urgency was one of the key reasons that it was able to 10X right, it’s the whole funnel plus the urgency, so it’s an evergreen funnel.
Speaker 3:
You can go to my website now and you can buy at the full price, but inside the funnel you get a 20% off discount and that’s something. I changed that a couple of years ago and I know we’ll talk later about the types of urgency. That’s the discount model. For years I did the availability model, so when I first implemented the funnel you couldn’t buy the course at all on through the website. You had to get into the funnel and then it was available to you or not available to you.
Speaker 3:
So I’m never actually launching or, better better said, I’m always launching right, Right, Massive, big launches. And then what happens is once somebody goes through the evergreen funnel, it’s about 12 days. So you go to my website today, you opt in for the free workbook, you’re in the funnel that lasts about 12 days. So, Quajo, you go today, your deadline will be 12 days from now. Jamie, you go next week, your deadline will be 12 days after that, right, and then for people who do not buy or unsubscribe in the evergreen funnel, then you’ll get repitched and go through a version of the funnel every three months until you buy. So I have people that have been through the launch quote, unquote 20 times that have been on my list for years and now was the time for them to buy.
Speaker 1:
That’s so good. I feel like sometimes we forget that it can be evergreen and it doesn’t just have to be once. If somebody doesn’t actually buy the first time, put it on delay and have them get repitched again.
Speaker 2:
So I’m looking at your website. They say there’s fortune in the follow-up.
Speaker 1:
There’s fortune in the follow-up and I see, oh see, I’m not good with asking. I have so many questions I want to ask. I see Tim Ferriss, it says, featured by Tim Ferriss. Take us to that moment when you were featured by Tim Ferriss, the author of the book.
Speaker 3:
I was driving to take my daughter to her grandma’s house in Alabama. I was driving, I dropped her off, I was on my way back and a good friend of mine, my accountability partner, called me and was like hey dude, tim Ferriss just emailed you out. I was like what? And I pulled over on the side of the road and investigated. So what happened? I was featured on a pretty decent sized podcast 2017 maybe Side Hustle Show with Nick Loper and because of that interview, a journalist from NerdWallet reached out to me and did an article about me.
Speaker 2:
Okay, oh cool.
Speaker 3:
And then Tim Ferriss. I don’t know if he still does it or not, but he had this five bullet Friday email newsletter where he would pick five interesting things, and the first one that Friday was the the nerd wallet article to to my story on there, which you know. I talked a lot about him and his book in the article, so that’s why he linked it out. So that was pretty cool, wow.
Speaker 2:
Wow.
Speaker 3:
All right.
Speaker 2:
Well, that’s exciting. Yeah, that is exciting.
Speaker 1:
What about when did you feel you? When did you first feel like you’ve made it? Or that sigh of relief from success in your business?
Speaker 3:
You’re just like lobbing up to me and I’m going to try to hit it. So if you make $10,000 in a month, that’s cool, but I needed something sustainable, right? So was it going to keep working? And I remember the third month, in January 2017, brought in over $20,000. And so it was three months in a row of five figures and I just I remember looking at numbers. I was sitting on the couch and I looked at my wife. I was like. I was like babe, it is working, it is working.
Speaker 3:
That was the moment just looking at her and you know she’s she’s been with me the whole way, super supportive. But I remember whenever I first brought the idea to her for an online piano course, she was like, oh, that’s cool. You know, I had lots of ideas. I was working on different things.
Speaker 3:
I was like she was like that’s cool, what do you think you would charge for something like that? And I was like babe, I don’t know I was. I was thinking maybe around $300. She goes, who in the heck would pay that for that?
Speaker 2:
Super supportive wife.
Speaker 1:
So then, what happened in?
Speaker 2:
this conversation.
Speaker 3:
I was like we’ll see, we’ll see, and the rest is history, cause a lot of people have ended up paying that and more for it.
Speaker 1:
Wow.
Speaker 2:
What do you? Am I allowed to ask what it’s at now, or do people have to find out when they go through your funnel?
Speaker 3:
Oh no, no, I’ll totally tell you. So. If you go to my website Quajo you said you were there there’s an enroll button at the top. If you click that, we have two different tiers. There’s the essential tier, which is basically you get the online course, and it’s $4.97. So that’s the bottom end. And then I have my ultimate package, which includes the online course and every bonus I could possibly put together. There’s bonus courses, there’s support, there’s a community group, and that’s $9.97. That’s our everyday price, right? So inside the funnel, which is where the vast majority of the sales happen, those tiers come down to 397 or 797.
Speaker 1:
Very cool. Nice, very cool. I’m looking at all the testimonials you got clearly. You got geez. You have a ton of just people here sharing in video how much they like it.
Speaker 3:
That’s cool Testimonials are important and for and you know, there’s text testimonials and video testimonials For my niche video testimonials. For my niche Video testimonials are very important because you want to learn piano, you want to hear what people sound like right. So I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of great students with great results, but also very generous in sharing those testimonials of them talking about the program but then also showing what they can do now on the piano.
Speaker 2:
Right Gotcha.
Speaker 1:
Gotcha.
Speaker 2:
So then, how did you transition from that to hey, this piano course is really working. To now? I want to teach other people how to do this.
Speaker 3:
So I was never I was never crazy passionate about the piano. It was just like one of my hobbies and it just, you know, it wasn’t the first thing I went to when I was trying to start a business Right. And so there are piano teachers that are successful with piano courses and they’re just like super passionate about piano. There are piano teachers that are successful with piano courses and they’re just like super passionate about piano.
Speaker 3:
I, through the process, learned that I was way more passionate about the business side of online businesses, like I was talking about earlier, and I learned all that stuff the hard way and it worked in a non-money-making niche, and so I wanted to see if I could start a second brand around that area that I enjoyed so much more, and I didn’t really know where I was going to go. Is it going to be a course on courses? What am I going to do? So I was just like, let me start a podcast. Like I love podcasts, I always wanted to start one, but it didn’t make sense for Piano In 21 Days, because you really need that video element. The main traffic building mechanism I’ve always had for Piano In 21 Days is my YouTube channel yeah but for talking about online business and online courses.
Speaker 3:
A podcast made a perfect sense, so I started the online course show in 2017.
Speaker 2:
Okay, right podcast first and then from there kind of just built the whole business around the podcast. I am just not good at making businesses work quickly.
Speaker 3:
It took a few years for that one as well. I did launch a course on courses and a huge mistake I made was I hadn’t built up that audience very much, and so I was like well, I have an email list of like 50 people on my online course show email list, but I have an email list of 50,000 people for Piano. In 21 Days, let me launch this course on courses to my piano audience. That was crickets again. That wasn’t a good idea, totally the wrong market.
Speaker 2:
They were probably like what’s going on here.
Speaker 1:
Right? Oh yeah, I think I’m just talking to the listener really quick because I got to give you credit. I have interviewed a lot of people who their course. It’s hard to do an online course whenever, but plenty of folks came online with their course. So’s hard to do an online course whenever, but plenty of folks came online with their course, so to speak, during the pandemic, like during like the latest online boom, and you grew your course before that. And I think that’s quite significant because it’s not like all these folks were sitting at home quarantining first, thinking I’ll pick up this extra skill because I’m working from home now and I don’t have to commute to work, Like this was pre pandemic, Like that’s. To me that adds like a whole nother level of legitimacy to everything you figured out being, you know, however you figured it out.
Speaker 3:
Dude, can we, can we talk about the pandemic for a second? Like, obviously it was.
Speaker 3:
it was a terrible situation but, to your point, like I was ready for it, so many people were home looking for things to do, and piano is such a bucket list item, right, everybody knows what a piano is, they know what it sounds like when somebody can play it, and so many people want to be able to play piano. It just what’s what? They just don’t have the time right, don’t have the time. Well, all of a sudden, the whole world had the time to play piano and I was ready, I was there, I was established, and so, as far as the business goes, the pandemic was very, very good. I didn’t really know what was going to happen. I was like, oh shoot, like is this going to tear my business apart? Because at the time, it was the only income stream I had for our family was piano in 21 days. I hadn’t monetized the second brand yet went really well.
Speaker 3:
That first month of the pandemic brought in 145k, which was like wow, yeah it was way, way, way more than normal and the next month brought in like 140k and then it started trickling down slowly, but it was, it was. I was there, I was ready for it, fortunately, and a lot of a lot more people learn piano during the pandemic, which I’m very grateful for.
Speaker 2:
Congratulations.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I mean that’s really cool, I’ll. I’ll take 145 K and trickling down slowly from there. I wonder like what your brains were doing, like you and your wife, cause you’re like who knows what’s going to happen with this pandemic. Can we even spend this money?
Speaker 3:
Right yeah.
Speaker 1:
So before we go into the next episode, where we’re going to listen to you talk about, I guess, some of the urgency in your piano funnel and then how you apply that ethically when you teach people how to use the same types of urgency, I have one last question, which is why do you want somebody who’s listening right now to listen to the next episode? What can they not miss?
Speaker 3:
For me, urgency was a huge deal. It was a huge deal because it worked so well and continues to work so well, but authenticity is extremely important as well, and so you put those two together. We want to do things that work, but also that you feel good about doing it. They’re ethical and they feel authentic. There’s a way to do it right and there’s a way to not do it right. I think if you do it the unethical way, you can get by on the short term, but in the long term it’ll come back to bite you. So that’s really what I’d love to talk about is how to do the urgency thing more specifically, how to do it ethically and authentically. Well, let’s go.
Speaker 1:
Sounds good, we’ll hop into the next studio, the listener. You can go right down to the show notes below or the YouTube description below and click over to the next episode. And until the next time we see each other or hear from each other be blessed and we’ll see you in the next one. See you soon. See you soon. Thanks for being here, jock. Thank you.
