User Power
Value/Post Ratio
230%
- Jul 13, 2018
- 175
- 403
The premise of this thread is to generate and capture demand for a course before creating the course.
You can think of it as validating the idea without first spending the time/energy/money needed to create a course.
This thread may end up being a dead-end (or a "failure" as some may call it). Maybe no one wants the course. Or it may end up being a huge success. Either way, I'm doing it anyway.
Background
I was a music major in college just graduating last June. When writing music, you often use music notation software. My preferred program of choice is Finale. Finale is one of the industry standards because it produces the best quality results. However, it's very difficult to learn to use, even more difficult to master, and few people know how to be insanely productive with it. It's not the most intuitive to use.
But I'm a believer that you should know and understand the software you use on a daily basis. So in college, most of my classmates would turn to me if they had issues with Finale. So I started a YouTube channel to also help anyone else out who might be watching. Since then, it's grown quite a bit on its own. Here are some current stats:
Now I've mainly been focused on my business and not the channel, but the business does not cover my day-to-day expenses yet. So, I've been freelancing, mainly with blog-writing but also writing/arranging music. It would be really great if I could separate my income from my time so I can focus more on growing my business. Since there's already a demand for the free Finale tutorials I'm putting out on YT, there might be demand for a paid course.
This thread is to test that hypothesis.
The Plan
So the plan is simple:
Inspiration
As for what's on the landing page, I'm modeling it after Harry's prelaunch landing page.
The Landing Page
So like the Harry's page, the quick site I setup has two pages. The first one just has a headline with an email signup, and the second one has social sharing options. As for the tripwires to encourage people share it, I'm giving away tools I've created for myself to be even more productive in Finale. So theoretically, even just referring their friends/colleagues should provide value.
Now, though the Harry's case study does provide the source code they used, it's out of date with known security issues and I'm not too familiar with Ruby on rails (which is what I think it uses…).
So instead, I coded up a quick site page myself and used Growsurf for the referral automation/validation.
Next Steps
Just shot a video today to upload to my channel. Won't have time to finish editing it today, so perhaps I can edit/post it tomorrow. Then I'll add a link to the description of all 100+ videos.
Updates coming. Feedback always welcome.
You can think of it as validating the idea without first spending the time/energy/money needed to create a course.
This thread may end up being a dead-end (or a "failure" as some may call it). Maybe no one wants the course. Or it may end up being a huge success. Either way, I'm doing it anyway.
Background
I was a music major in college just graduating last June. When writing music, you often use music notation software. My preferred program of choice is Finale. Finale is one of the industry standards because it produces the best quality results. However, it's very difficult to learn to use, even more difficult to master, and few people know how to be insanely productive with it. It's not the most intuitive to use.
But I'm a believer that you should know and understand the software you use on a daily basis. So in college, most of my classmates would turn to me if they had issues with Finale. So I started a YouTube channel to also help anyone else out who might be watching. Since then, it's grown quite a bit on its own. Here are some current stats:
- 507 Subscribers
- 100-250 daily views
- 2K unique viewers/month
- 5.5K unique viewers/quarter
- Growing at around 10% MOM for the last half-year
Now I've mainly been focused on my business and not the channel, but the business does not cover my day-to-day expenses yet. So, I've been freelancing, mainly with blog-writing but also writing/arranging music. It would be really great if I could separate my income from my time so I can focus more on growing my business. Since there's already a demand for the free Finale tutorials I'm putting out on YT, there might be demand for a paid course.
This thread is to test that hypothesis.
The Plan
So the plan is simple:
- Get YouTube viewers onto a very simple landing page
- Have them provide their email if they want to know more
- Encourage them to share the news with their friends
Inspiration
As for what's on the landing page, I'm modeling it after Harry's prelaunch landing page.
How to Gather 100,000 Emails in One Week (Includes Successful Templates, Code, Everything You Need) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
This story is about the launch of Harry’s, a new men’s grooming brand. Specifically, it will explain how they gathered nearly 100,000 email addresses in one week (!). This post includes all the email templates, open-source code, and INSIDERS tricks that you can use to replicate their success...
tim.blog
The Landing Page
So like the Harry's page, the quick site I setup has two pages. The first one just has a headline with an email signup, and the second one has social sharing options. As for the tripwires to encourage people share it, I'm giving away tools I've created for myself to be even more productive in Finale. So theoretically, even just referring their friends/colleagues should provide value.
Now, though the Harry's case study does provide the source code they used, it's out of date with known security issues and I'm not too familiar with Ruby on rails (which is what I think it uses…).
So instead, I coded up a quick site page myself and used Growsurf for the referral automation/validation.
Next Steps
Just shot a video today to upload to my channel. Won't have time to finish editing it today, so perhaps I can edit/post it tomorrow. Then I'll add a link to the description of all 100+ videos.
Updates coming. Feedback always welcome.
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