![[QUĀY.jo]](https://theartofonlinebusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/AOOB-Logo-White-150x118.png){kind=logo}
In this episode, we delve deep into the captivating story of Kwadwo’s journey from ideation to successfully pre-selling his Facebook ads lead generation course, the Lead Gen Cheat Code. We discuss the power of effective messaging, team delegation, and the technical challenges he encountered along the way.
Links mentioned in this episode:
- https://youtube.com/@theartofonlinebusiness
- https://quayjo.com/toolsofthetrade
- https://quayjo.com/leads
You’ll hear about Kwadwo’s approach to creating a winning sales page, his strategy for pre-selling the course, the value of delegating to a remote team, and even some technical challenges he had to navigate. We’re also spilling the beans on the tools and software that made it all possible.
Whether you’re an aspiring online course creator or a digital marketer looking to up your game in the world of Facebook advertising, this episode is a goldmine of knowledge. Listen now, and let Kwadwo’s journey inspire and guide you in your own course-creation endeavors.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- The importance of trusting your team and delegating effectively.
- The power of pre-validation and pre-selling courses.
- How to create a clear promise for your course and boost sales.
Please support the podcast by giving an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes!
Rick Mulready’s Links:
- Visit Rick’s website
- DM Rick on Instagram
- Full episodes of The Art of Online Business Podcast on YouTube
Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie’s Links:
- Grab the Facebook Ads Lead Gen Cheat Code course to cut your lead costs and double your email list!
- Visit Kwadwo’s website for Facebook Ads help
- Visit Kwadwo’s website to learn how he can hire a VA for you:
https://quayjo.com/hireyourva - Say hi to Kwadwo on Instagram
Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction
01:51 – Pre-Selling: Validating your course idea
03:44 – Behind-the-scenes strategies
08:16 – Early member input shapes the course
10:34 – The challenge of defining your course promise
13:21 – Target audience: Course creators under $150K revenue
18:38 – Crafting a high-converting sales page with ChatGPT
20:28 – Turning a disappointing experience into a creative launch
25:02 – The value of live calls
27:14 – The pitfalls of false scarcity, delegation, and growth
34:08 – Hiring right, delegating wisely, and learning along the way
38:33 – Quarterly updates and lead generation with Facebook ads
40:37 – The rollercoaster ride of working with founding members
Speaker 1:
If you don’t pre-validate your course, you really just don’t know if people want it. Then the funny thing is, as you actually accept people in as, say, founding members or on the ground level of your course, what always happens, I found, rick, is I make a lesson, they consume a lesson. They come back and say, oh well, what about this? Well, what about that? You end up having so much feedback and it ends up really influencing the direction your lessons go, and so this is the only way what’s up, my friends?
Speaker 2:
Welcome to today’s episode on the podcast Kwejja. You’re sporting quite the Shiner today, Shiner.
Speaker 1:
What does that mean? Oh, like you never heard that.
Speaker 2:
Shiner black guy.
Speaker 1:
Never heard of that you never heard. I got a Shiner. I guess they don’t use that in Seattle, where I’m from.
Speaker 2:
Are you holding like a raw steak up to? Isn’t that like what they do in cartoons? They put like a raw steak, that’s so terrible, it actually worked.
Speaker 1:
No, I just use those heated rice packs every hour, or so so you’re putting heat on there, not cold. The doctor said cold in the first several days and then now it’s just heat, you know, and to keep the swelling down. And, as you can see, the swelling is not down.
Speaker 2:
Well, you said that right before we hit record. You said that people are still DMing you and they’re like dude, what happened, and we’ve been talking about it here on the podcast for several episodes. Do you tell them to tune into the podcast here?
Speaker 1:
You know I should. You know, I just take them for caring and stuff and all that happened is I fell off my bike. It was a lackluster bike accident but unfortunately it broke a couple parts of my face. No, yeah, eye socket bone. They had to literally literally put some titanium in my eye socket to keep my eye from falling into my face, and I’m still healing up. Still healing up.
Speaker 2:
Well, you set the metal detectors off now at airports.
Speaker 1:
I did ask them that, and they said I can still go through security, just fine. So that’s good, yeah, that’s good.
Speaker 2:
Well, today we’re going to be talking about validating a course.
Speaker 2:
So for everybody who’s been listening to the podcast for a long time now, you know that I’ve talked about prevalidating, so validating your course before you create it, and I’ve been talking about it probably since day one of this podcast, which is now seven years.
Speaker 2:
The reason for that is I have never created a course without selling it first, and the reason that we do that is we want to validate, we want to make sure that people are going to buy the course before we spend a whole bunch of time creating it. And so many people when they hear that, they’re like well, wait, you’re selling the course before you actually like how does that even work? And so I have talked about it on the podcast here before. But I thought today would be a really cool opportunity because you’re going through this process right now with your lead gen cheat code, which is your Facebook ads course. So I thought it’d be fun for me to sort of interview you on how you’ve gone about this and sort of the ups and downs through the process, because I know people listening can totally relate to everything that you’ve gone through in the process.
Speaker 2:
It’s definitely, we’re ups and downs, I mean, and we started talking about this, geez, I don’t know like a long time ago, because there are people who really want to work with you in your Facebook ads business, who manage their ads, but yet they’re not at a point in their business where they can really afford that or it really makes sense for them to do it. So now you want to make you know like hey, you can do this yourself. Here’s a very excessively priced course that teaches you what you do in your ads business. Is there another? Am I missing anything as to why you’ve created this course?
Speaker 1:
No, I mean literally step by step, behind the scenes, of the same strategies I use for my ads clients. But you know it’s like we were talking. There’s so many people that are here with online course businesses right yeah, online courses and it’s a small fraction of those that you know work with me as their Facebook ads manager. Yet everyone who is growing their email list so everyone who doesn’t have a super big organic following which is, like most of us, regular folks who need to grow their email list needs to start Facebook ads, and it’s something that you know I’ve seen over the years that people struggle with.
Speaker 2:
When you started this process, like what was the first step that you did? To like, all right, I’m going to create this course because of the reasons that you just mentioned, that you want to be able to help a wider audience who either aren’t ready to work with you for you to manage their ads, or maybe they can’t afford it or what have you. What was sort of your first step in that process? Like, all right, I’m going to create a course.
Speaker 1:
I’ll tell you my first step. But first I feel like there’s probably a listener or two who is still on the fence about pre-selling a course. Wouldn’t you say you’ve gotten a lot of resistance when you put forth that concept?
Speaker 2:
Yes, but, and it’s really interesting, right, because this whole concept, I feel like, has been talked about for so many years. It’s not just me, right, like I’m not saying like invented it by any stretch, but I talked about it for so many years and we are recording this on a Monday and on Friday this past Friday, I’m in a peer mastermind that it’s not a forever, it’s like a 12-week mastermind that I’m in with some peers these are multiple, six, multiple, seven-figure business owners Nice, I would say several times. On that particular call, this whole conversation of creating a course for their business. And there was a hot seat going on and people were recommending this person create a course, and other people were like, oh yeah, I need to do that for my business, et cetera. I literally put in the chat box because other people were talking. I said please, anybody who’s thinking about creating a course for the first time, validate it before you spend all the time.
Speaker 2:
Tell me they all were doing that, right? Well, they hadn’t even gotten to that point yet, but I didn’t get the sense that they were even thinking about that. They’re just like I have an audience, I have a successful business, so I’m just going to create this course? No, and I was just like no, no, no, no, no. Go through this validation process first. It will save you so much time and also it’ll allow you to refine the course as you go before you release it to the public. So that was a little tangent here. But what would you say to the person who is a little bit skeptical about? Wait a minute, how do I sell this course before even buying it, especially people who have very few people on their email list or a small following, or what have you?
Speaker 1:
Well, I had some mental hangups I can share personally from that, which is so. I’ve made the mistake, first of all, in developing a course and spending hours recording, Back when I had my old online business teaching folks how to speak Chinese, back before I ended up being one of the paid members in New York Accelerator in 2019, I spent a whole summer recording a course and it was good. I did all the animation for the graphics myself and I launched that thing and let me tell you, it was at a six figure lodge.
Speaker 2:
I’m so glad you said that and I’m not dogging on the fact that it was good or not. But people, I hear that all the time. They’re like I created this thing and it’s so good, but they haven’t sold anything. It’s good in your eyes, but who cares what we think of our own thing, whether it’s good or not? That is going to be told by people taking out their credit card and saying I want this course, using it and actually getting results. That is moral on the lines of what it means to be oh, this is a good course.
Speaker 1:
And I’ll add that it was good. I think it was good. It sold so little, like maybe $200. It was just quite pathetic and I was super upset, super disappointed. But you know what happens. This is for you, the listener who’s listening right now. What happens is is, if you don’t pre-validate your course, you really just don’t know if people want it. And then the funny thing is is, as you we’ll get into this in a bit but as you actually accept people in as, say, founding members or on the ground level of your course, what always happens, I found, rick, is I make a lesson, they consume a lesson, they come back and say, oh well, what about this? Well, what about that? And you end up having so much feedback and it ends up really influencing the direction your lessons go, and so this is the only way. One unlock that I had was somebody explained it to me, maybe it was a podcast Pre-selling a course isn’t anything special.
Speaker 1:
Everybody is already ready to buy something in advance before they get it. You think about movie tickets are pre-sold. You buy an airline ticket before you even get a chance to go on the airplane, you know and you’re not even guaranteed the flight’s gonna leave on time or leave at all, like they can’t. My mother-in-law’s coming, no, my mother-in-law, my stepmom’s coming to visit me and they canceled her flight. She booked that thing six months ahead and then earlier on, like the end of September, she’s gotten email. They canceled it, you know. So you think, about sports events, lots of things are pre-sold and so pre-selling. I heard that and I realized, okay, I can do this pre-validation thing too, and really it sets us up to serve the people who are coming into our course in a better way. So you asked me what I did first. First thing I did was I came up with an outline of the course so that I could have something on the sales page that would let people know where this is going to go and what my vision for the course was.
Speaker 2:
I would even argue that there’s probably a step before that where you thought through the vision for the course, like what was the promise gonna be of the course? Not necessarily like clearly writing out the promise, but like this is what I wanna teach in the course.
Speaker 1:
In fact, having coached with you for so long, I did have a promise and a premise, because technically, the outline is the process. What’s that fourth P that you teach the price?
Speaker 2:
Price yeah, so what was the promise that you’d come up with? And now you did the promise before the outline, correct?
Speaker 1:
Yes, I did, Rick. You promised that you wouldn’t ask anything that I didn’t already have prepared in an open tab.
Speaker 2:
So we joked before we hit record here, because there was an interview that we did the other day, or no, an episode that you and I did the other day, and I kept asking Queijo a couple of questions and he didn’t have the tabs ready for the information, and so before we hit record today, he was like I got everything open, I like whatever you asked me, I’m gonna be ready, and so I just stumped him so while he’s looking that up. So one of the biggest challenges I see with course creators whether you’re setting up your outline or thinking about what this course is gonna be, so pre-sale, basically so validation, or whether you are selling lots of courses so many people cannot answer the question of what is the promise of this course. So when somebody goes through the course, what’s the result? What can they expect to get out of the course? And so few people can actually answer that question. And I guarantee you that if you cannot answer that question, and even if you’re making sales in your course, your course sales are suffering, because if you can’t answer what the promise is, it’s not coming across in your messaging or in your copy or on your sales page or in your emails. You’ve gotta be clear on what your promise is. What can people expect to have or accomplish or be able to do at the end of your course?
Speaker 2:
And then the premise generally you’re saying like it’s the easiest way, the fastest way, the only way. Somebody could argue that right, and so we are looking at it. For those of you who are listening right now or if you’re watching on YouTube, so Quaggels’ premise is the easiest way to get high quality and affordable leads without having to pay for an ads manager. I love that because it’s very clear. But I might read that and be like, no, that is like this course is not the easiest way to get high quality and affordable leads. That means it’s a good premise, because I could argue that. But Quaggels, on the other hand, as the course creator or you as the course creator, listening with your premise, you wanna create something like this the only way, the fastest way, the easiest way, the simplest way, something like that, to build your outdoor garden. What have you? And then the promise Course creators grossing below 150K annually follow a DIY step-by-step blueprint to use Facebook ads to provide high quality leads for your business at the lowest lead cost possible.
Speaker 1:
Before you ripped that apart, I didn’t have the chat GP to help me on the grammar.
Speaker 2:
So I would argue that that’s long and wordy, but what I do like about that is number one. It’s saying who it’s for Course creators, membership creators who are grossing below 150K in revenue. That’s part of the promise is telling you who it’s for, and then you follow this blueprint if you want to get high quality leads for your business at the lowest lead cost possible. So the elements are there. I think it could be condensed even more, but there’s got great elements there in that it’s who you know he’s stating Kwejo’s stating who it’s for. Especially with the revenue level, that’s going to filter out people right off the bat. And then it’s like okay, this is what you’re going to be able to do. It’s going to give you a step-by-step so that you can have a plan exactly how to do it yourself to get high quality leads for your business at the lowest cost possible lead cost possible. So you have the promise, you have the premise, you know what you’re going to teach in the course now. So then do you move to the outline?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that’s where I moved to the outline and in that screen share. If you need a link to the YouTube channel, you can go into the show notes below. But in that screen share, that was my first, the first iteration of my outline very, very, very, very simple, as you can see, outline and that is, I believe, the version that I ended up putting on my we’re clicking to it now. My founding member beautifully designed a sales page. You’re laughing because the first time Rick saw the sales page he threw like a four letter word at it. Yeah, yeah. But you know what? I got the sales page up and running, that’s right.
Speaker 2:
That’s right.
Speaker 1:
It’s just pushing through, trying to have everything perfect and I could have took. I could have taken another five days to go patchwork like sales page design skills together from YouTube videos. This is actually the first version of the simple outline that I put on the sales page. It’s not the complete outline, but it is the gist of what I would deliver in the course.
Speaker 2:
So the reason that the outline is so important, my friends, is that when you are looking to validate your course, this is what you’re selling. You’re selling the promise, you’re selling the premise and you’re selling the outline, and the outline is basically the features of the course, because people need to know, like, what’s going to be in the course. The benefits are really the promise and the premise. And if you didn’t want to write a whole sales page now, did you use this sales page for the founding members? Yes, okay.
Speaker 2:
So Coagula literally could have just sent people directly to an order form, to a checkout form, if you wanted to, with, and he could have just stated the promise on there, the premise on there, and maybe outlined a few of the modules that are going to be in there. But he put together a really basic sales page here, super basic, which accomplished what he was looking to achieve here. So again, the idea here is always be asking yourself if this were easy, like what would be the simplest way for me to validate this course and allow people to purchase it? So did you set a goal of how many people you wanted to have as a founding? How many founding members Do you have a certain number?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, like you can see on screen right here, I did choose 50.
Speaker 2:
You had 50, okay, yeah, so 50 members. And so what would happen if you got 17?
Speaker 1:
So I very clearly communicated on the sales page, like once we hit, it’s right here. Actually, once we hit 50 members or 50 registrants, the course goes into production and if we don’t reach that magic number, then I give everyone a full refund, no questions asked. And did you have a deadline?
Speaker 2:
to hit that.
Speaker 1:
You know I didn’t have a deadline. Maybe I should have had a deadline, but I didn’t. I think in the first onboarding email I did give a deadline. Actually, yeah, I’m pretty sure in the first email after somebody became a founding member I said that my target was to actually October 16th. Believe it or not may have been the actual deadline I put in the email.
Speaker 2:
So you’ve got the outline. And so what was sort of the next step from there? You’ve got this sales page that looks terrible, but again it’s achieving what you wanna do. So you’ve got the sales page. You got the outline. What was next for you?
Speaker 1:
To my defense in the. Let’s call it.
Speaker 2:
I’m just giving you a hard time about your sales page.
Speaker 1:
But I will say that in my experience in running ads for myself or like for my own clients, and then even before that when I was working inside of the Facebook ad agency, you would be surprised at how well some of the ugliest sales pages convert because they spent time on their messaging. I would agree. Yeah, I’ve definitely seen sales pages where I’m like dang, you feel like the really this converts.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 1:
So I used chat GPT to write the sales page because I’m a horrible writer and I needed to get this done.
Speaker 1:
We covered that in another episode, which has yet to air, but it’s how I made a sales page in 30 minutes with chat GPT, and that’s also a YouTube video that’s my editor just finished editing, so that’ll be coming out on my YouTube channel soon. So the next step, though, was I wanted to get feedback from the founding members, so what I did is I created a Google form with the more detailed lesson outline and ask the founding members to ask their questions that they had about those lessons. So I literally took my outline, put it into Google, or like, made a Google form, and every question was the title of a lesson, right, and then, at the top of the form, I just said these are the lessons I intend on teaching. Please ask me ahead of time I gave them a deadline what questions you have about each of these lesson topics. That way, I could start to make sure that my lessons were actually delivering like the knowledge and the value that they needed.
Speaker 2:
All right, so hold on. Do you feel out that you have this form, this Google form for feedback, but how did you get members into it? How did you get the founding members?
Speaker 1:
Oh well, I guess we’re getting really meta here. I made an ad. Wait, did I make an ad or did I write a script and you recorded the?
Speaker 2:
ad. I recorded the ad, you wrote the script and then I rewrote it.
Speaker 1:
Actually did I write the script and then chat. Gpt helped me out a little bit and you still rewrote it. I still rewrote it.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah, okay. So you ran a promo on the podcast here. That’s right too, because I remember like literally should be. A podcast came out like on a Wednesday and you and I were chatting over Slack or something like that two days and you’re like I’m disappointed because I’ve only made like seven sales. I was disappointed.
Speaker 1:
Okay, wait, I need to say something here, though, because I’m sure the listeners like that’s nice, quaidro, you are the co-host of the Art of Online Business podcast.
Speaker 1:
You threw up an ad and you got all your founding members. Let me say that when I was running my old Chinese business elementary Chinese I did a founding member launch and I did not have quite a big of an audience, as like all the listeners of the Art of Online Business, and what I did for that founding member launch was I basically went to all the other people that I knew in my network that had YouTube channels and Instagram accounts. Let’s say, I partnered with people in parallel niches, so these were people who had influence in China and, you know, among the X-PAT community, and I basically cut them a deal and said look, if you take my founding member sign-up link, you know I’ll have this little form where people can select when they sign up, who they heard about it from and I’ll give you a percentage of every founding member sale. So I just want to give like that as encouragement to somebody who might not have a large audience themselves, but you can still reach out to your network and still promote Much like you would, I guess, an affiliate launch. So I guess what I did was like an affiliate program for my founding member launch.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely what you did. There’s other ways to do it.
Speaker 2:
I still think it’s so interesting that, yes, this podcast reaches a whole lot of people, but you did seven sales in a matter of 48 hours and you had, and I said to you I remember this I said you have just become the co-host, so people are learning who you are and you know you’re a stop. You were in the process of establishing credibility and, to the point about, like people that don’t know about your bike accident, we are like why don’t they know about it? Because we talk about it on every episode. But we have to remember, like, not everybody listens to every episode and so it’s the same. You know, it’s the same sort of thing. So, alright, you were disappointed after 48 hours or so.
Speaker 1:
I was really disappointed.
Speaker 2:
So what happened? What happened then?
Speaker 1:
Well, I may have cried no, I didn’t, I didn’t cry but I was disappointed and I just I kept going through the weekend because that was on, that was on a Friday, and so I don’t think I did anything on the course in the weekend. I just didn’t give up. You know, I think you did encourage me and I kept going.
Speaker 2:
So did sales pick up sales trickled in.
Speaker 1:
Maybe there was one or Two a day. It would go like two one day, one the next day, zero the next day but they were trickling in.
Speaker 2:
Okay, and so After say, a week, do you remember, ish, how many people you had?
Speaker 1:
let’s just say I had around 20 after a week, because I don’t remember the exact number. What I do remember was getting excited that we were almost halfway there and I do remember talking to my wife and saying I think we’re going to hit 50. I need to start Actually setting up the course, you know, and getting ready to, like you know, completing my outline, getting ready to start developing this if we get, say, to 35 or 40, because I didn’t want to get caught or not get caught, but I didn’t want 50 people to be waiting, yeah, and then me to start actually recording the course because there’s a lot of setup involved. So sure, I was excited and I started putting the wheels in or spinning the wheels, setting the wheels in motion, whatever that phrase is.
Speaker 2:
What was the finding member price? It was $87 $87 for the for the whole course and I added some extras to $87. What will be the public price, if you will like, when it’s for sale Widely? What’s the price gonna be? Or do you know that yet?
Speaker 1:
I do know that. It’s on my checkout page, which I have open in another tab. If you want to see it, it’s a hundred and sixty seven dollars. Once it launches publicly, one sixty seven. Okay, and at the time of this recording it’s already public.
Speaker 2:
It went public on October 23rd okay, so your founding member price was Just under 50 per. You know, just about just like 40 ish percent of the overall price, right? Were they any other sort of special perks or is it just a matter of like yeah, you can get in for the $87 price there’s?
Speaker 1:
another course called Tripwire mastery oh, I’m smiling because we called a welcome offer now, but still everybody knows it as a tripwire. So in planning out the course, I planned out an upsell which to me make sense, because if somebody’s bringing in leads and building their email list yeah, and they’re kind of like my ideal person to help inside the course their funnel probably isn’t converting the best, and I know that for a fact now because I’ve already had my first life call. So I did give three life calls to the founding members, which adds tons of value for them because they were taking, you know, quote-unquote risk. Right, they’re buying into a course it’s not developed yet, so I’m like, let me give them some of my time. But it also provided another feedback loop where I could jot down their questions and then use those to enrich my lessons that I gave. So, yeah, I came up with an upsell that was called tripwire mastery and the promise of that was just to recoup some of your ad spend and learn my strategies and Kind of how to do that.
Speaker 2:
So wait, were you selling that for founding members, or I gave it to them for free?
Speaker 1:
So that’s an additional perk. Yeah, an additional perk was. They got like a forty seven dollar offer for free. Yeah, why are mastery?
Speaker 2:
This is just another lesson, y’all, where, like, if you’re, if somebody else is doing a valid you know a pre-validation and they’re pre-selling their course, might be a great time to get into it. If it’s a topic that you’re interested in because you know nine times out of ten, you’re gonna get much lower pricing and as great as saying hopefully you’ve established some sort of trust in that person, but but you’re also gonna get these other perks that you’re not gonna get at the public price, if you will. So Eighty seven dollars are getting all of that now. Oh, they started to trickle in. You hit 20 people. Where are you at now, on October 16th, when we’re recording this episode, which is about two weeks prior to when the this is being released?
Speaker 1:
Okay, so it’s time to get super transparent. You ready, let’s do it. I’m at 67 people 67 people 67 people.
Speaker 1:
And so, okay, listener, I know you’re like wait a second. What did you do there? Was this like false scarcity or something? And actually what happened is life happened.
Speaker 1:
I had to learn about delegating to my team. I’ve always delegated, but this time because of the accident Well, I could only look at the screen maybe two to three hours we’re talking like two weeks after the accident happened without like my face starting to burn and like my eye hurting. And so what happened was is as I was learning to be a better leader in my business and delegate Properly, you know, because it’s one thing to say have a vehicle, write you an email, it’s another thing to have them do like a whole project, you know. And so what happened was is I had the scarcity, as we’re looking on screen, where I was only going to offer 50 founding member spots, right, but then I was pushing myself way too hard and my face was just hurting and hurting and hurting and I actually didn’t have the time to update the sales page To the pre-sell price. So it was at like seven founding member spots and I literally told my team look, I just can’t get to it right now.
Speaker 1:
So for every two people that sign up, just lower the number like by one, and I will be able to get to it and update the sales page, and that didn’t happen for like Four days. And so there’s the whole story. You know, it wasn’t a perfect Process. I’ve learned. Now, like now I’m able to delegate, and I had somebody on my team set up the whole Checkout page for the pre-sell, but back then I was still learning. And this is, this is all like a three-week process. So that’s how many people are in the course 67 people that have signed up for the course.
Speaker 2:
First of all, congratulations, thank you. Thank you hit your founding member, by the way. Founding member, I’m glad that you called it that, because when people call it. I don’t recommend people call anything a beta, because A beta sort of signifies that it kind of sucks, it’s not going to be very good.
Speaker 2:
Now, if it’s a sass thing like or something like for right now with with my pick rick’s brain, coaching ai, I have a very small group literally there’s about 12 people in there and I’m calling it the alpha version of the tool, like before beta, right, and they have been in there for about five days now and like I have a slack channel. They’re giving me feedback, but I very intentionally called it the alpha version and they’re getting free access and so in exchange for their feedback. But anyway, don’t call it a beta, call it something else a pilot. Founding member, whatever. So you’ve got all these people in there, yep, what? I want to cover two more things specifically. Sure, so you’re delegating to your team and You’ve also had some technical issues. So Tell us about the technical issues, because this is something that everybody listening right now just leaned in or whatever is like, or they turn up the volume On their you know air pods and are like oh, please tell me more about this, because they can totally relate to tech issues.
Speaker 1:
Right, and if you are curious about the software that rick or I use, there’s a link in the show notes below. It’s a quajocom slash tools of the trades. So the technical issues Well, let’s see. The first one was I signed up for kajabi. You know, everybody knows kajabi and it’s decent for hosting a course. But at the time I thought they have a built-in checkout page, so I’m just going to use their checkout page and, long story short, I had three people DM me saying that they were trying to purchase but that they could not purchase. And I’m like the first person. I’m just like, okay, you know here, you know, try this, try that. I’m like it’s one person. There’s always somebody who can’t figure it out or who has difficulty, but after three I’m like good lord, no, I need to change this now, because how many other people didn’t even DM me? They just decided to walk away. So that was one issue Was a kajabi’s checkout page, and so we ended up solving that issue by switching to thrife cart.
Speaker 2:
Don’t they make you log in to buy?
Speaker 1:
it’s this weird yes, they do like you have to tick a box and put in your email address. And so I got on with kajabi support at the beginning of the week that I discovered this issue and they told me what to change in order to get rid of the issue. And then I still got two more two of those two more of the Three total DMs saying that they couldn’t get the course. I’m just like kajabi, come on. So, before that, like one other solution was, is I use uh, it was a recommendation. That’s what I love recommendations.
Speaker 1:
First of all, like it was one that you gave me. It’s called honey book. Yeah, I use that as my client management software, and so one thing that got us through, or my business through, was I used it. It’s more for people who are like service based clients or clients of service based businesses, but I still used that as the checkout, you know, tool for a while, and actually a lot of people Went through that. Just fine, you know. And so eventually we ended up with thrife cart, and thrife cart looks great nice.
Speaker 2:
So I want to kind of like sort of start to bring this full circle, because this is a part where People get overwhelmed with the entire process, meaning like, oh, I have to do this and I have to do this and I have to connect, you know, thrive car to Whatever, to my course platform and all this other.
Speaker 2:
I have to create the sales page and write the emails and and so forth. You said that you, that your team, really stepped up during the you know that your bike accident and when you were sort of down and out for for quite some time and you have an overseas team. Yep, a lot of people have this sort of like. Well, I can’t really, if I have an overseas team, I can’t really do anything with them other than give them tasks, like tell them exactly what to do. But you know, you had them design graphics for the course, you had them set up the course in Kajabi, created the Asana board, attract the project, upload the lessons, create descriptions, etc. You also use ChatGBT to write the sales page copy for the checkout page, the onboarding email sequence for when founding members purchased.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
So how did you get to you know and I think we talked about it in a previous episode or an episode that’s coming up, I’m not sure, but how did you get your team up to the point where they’re like, are you giving them explicit directions on what to do, or how are you getting them to run with things where it’s not a specific checklist?
Speaker 1:
Well, first I did my hiring right, so the right people are on my team. How I went from explicit tasks it’s just a learning process. I did start out always just giving very simple tasks and then over time I realized if I’m just giving out tasks then I’m not really running a business. You know, I still have a job that I’m just delegating and part of it was this growth process that I, as the business owner, had to go through. You know, because I put it like this, why would I have ever started out thinking that somebody who is in another country that’s college educated couldn’t think for themselves? And you know that sounds pretty bad, but that’s what we’re doing. When we’re like I’m going to give you these 50 tasks or I’m going to take 40 minutes on a loom to break everything down into tasks, like you know, step by step by step by step, it’s like wait a second.
Speaker 1:
No, it took me realizing and again, this sounds bad, but this is the growth process I went through over the past four years of working with VA’s. You know I had to go through a growth process that if I’m just breaking down step by step for them, then I’m not giving them an opportunity to really succeed. You know they can figure out how to do these things just like I could. And so that’s what happened this time with my team is, I had to learn the lesson again and I kind of had to give them an outcome. Maybe at times not, maybe definitely at times I would use loom to show them what the outcome looked like and get specific about the outcome, but I couldn’t outline the intermediate steps. I had to tell them, for example, my VA, joyce.
Speaker 1:
She’s phenomenal and she designed the Thrive Cart checkout page. She connected Thrive Cart to Zapier, to Kajabi, and put together the onboarding email sequences and such and such. You know I had to tell her this is the result I need, but I can’t figure this out. I need you to figure it out, you know. So that it works like this, and that’s how I did it with my team.
Speaker 2:
So you’re at a point now where so the team has done all these things. You’re at 67 people. So where are you in creating the course and sort of what’s next? Because I know that you’re selling, you’re calling it a pre-sale for the course. So where are you in creating the course? And then what is this pre-sale?
Speaker 1:
Well, I had, I think, 19 lessons and I’ve made all but five of those. So the course is almost done. And at the time that we’re recording this episode, it’s Monday, october 16th, so the course launches in another week. The lessons that are there. I might have my video editor go through those lessons and make them a little more fancier, a little more snappier, if you will. And currently the course is pre-sailing. So what I decided to do is pre-sale the course at $127. And then anyone who takes me up on the pre-sale offer gets like a $40 discount, and then they get access to the course when it goes live, and then the course will be at $167 from there on out.
Speaker 2:
So for people listening right now again, this episode is coming out on November 1st what can they do to go? Because Facebook ads course on $127,. I get emails all the time from people saying, hey, do you still sell Facebook ads courses? I’m like I don’t. And before you created this course. Because they always say, well, who like, who do you recommend? I honestly couldn’t answer them because no one had a course that A I thought was really very good and B was accessible to most people, and so if people want to get in on the course, where do they go?
Speaker 1:
And you can go to quajocom slash leads, that is, q-u-a-y-j-ocom forward slash leads L-e-a-d-s.
Speaker 2:
One final question for you, and this is a question that always comes up when it comes to ads courses. Will you update the course?
Speaker 1:
Quarterly. I will update it quarterly because, yes, facebook ads manager, they’re always changing things, so I’ve committed to updating it quarterly. And I also should add the reason I can take this course and promise, like the outcome, somebody can learn to manage their lead generation ads Like I can is because I really had to narrowly define the scope of the course. You know, because there’s way more to do with Facebook ads than just generate leads. Like you know, run an ad towards a free, something like a lead magnet or a free webinar. You know. But I had to decide if this course is really going to serve people the way I want, it has to have a very like well-defined outcome and then I can take people through that journey and train them how to do what I do.
Speaker 2:
But is this for people who do want to like grow their email list?
Speaker 1:
Yes, specifically for the online course creator, who is on the rise and has not yet hit $150,000 a year in gross annual revenue, and so for that course creator, in their mind, it doesn’t make sense to hire out ads management services, so they’re still doing that themselves Now, lowering their lead costs. It’s accessible. It’s attainable, because this skill is difficult to learn in the beginning, and I made a course that helps people do that.
Speaker 2:
Our next conversation on this will be me telling you to raise the price. Yeah, $167 is far too inexpensive for a course, and you know what I’m going to say. There is a perceived value. This is true In the course, right. So somebody says, oh, $167 ads course? Ah, can’t be that good. But the cool thing is and I think the fun thing about it is you get to blow people’s doors off with like, hey, this is the course. You got it for $167 in liquid you’re accomplishing. And wow, how good this course is. And wow, I can’t wait to get to $150K in revenue, because then I want QuageO to manage my ads.
Speaker 1:
Right, and you know it’s been a pleasure working with the founding members so far. We had I’m talking past tense, especially because when this episode airs there’s no way to become a founding member. There isn’t a way to become a founding member now and the final course as it is. You know the founding member perks aren’t there, but the founding members got a live call with me and it really it just lights me up to be able to be on the Zoom call to help them and to realize that I have all the answers that they need, like the questions they’re asking. I’m like boom, boom, boom, let’s answer this. Come on, let’s go, let’s. Let’s get your campaign set up so you can start growing your email list so that your business can serve more of the people who you were meant to serve, right?
Speaker 2:
So yeah, it’s been good, and you’re getting testimonials, you’re getting case studies that you can use in future. You know marketing materials, whether it’s emails, whether it’s Pdua webinar, you do. You know sales page what have you? So it’s quageocom forward slash leads Q-U-A-Y-J-Ocom forward slash leads. Thanks for taking us through this. I think a lot of people can relate to this and hopefully, if, if you’re listening right now and you’re like thinking about oh, I have this course idea, this gives you some motivation to go do it. Yeah, pre-sell it. Don’t spend a whole bunch of time creating it and then sell it to crickets. Pre-sell it first and then create it.
Speaker 1:
Just have to do it. My final closing thought will be it’s a Cody Sanchez quote. It says the greatest muscle you can build is urgency. At least the time between having an idea and getting it done. Everything changes. It’s a great quote. It’s a good quote. It’s a great quote. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you in the next one. Bye.
