After all the ins and outs of this course, only 4 people signed up. This is far from the target of 10 that I committed to in mastermind/accountability group. So I cancelled it, reimbursed everybody and closed my account in the e-learning platform (I don’t know if I will release it again nor when). In fact this puts on hold the other coworking courses I had in mind (marketing and sales).
Deception
I’m deceived, I cannot help it. I’ve worked a lot in the last couple months on this course. First in its video iteration and then in the final drip email all text course.
The response to my mail list and via social media has also been poor. I’ve seen a declining impact of social media in the last years, but even then with thousands of subscribers it should have worked better, not necessarily in sign-ups but at least in traffic. Only one person signed up via the mail list.
I’ve been cleaning up the mail list but I have to learn more about this. It is surprising to find robots signing up and clicking withing two seconds on all of the links, but they are not easy to identify and Mailchimp has not included an easy way to tag them so that they are eliminated and reported to improve future signups.
The weirdest thing here is that social media works better for me when I re-release evergreen content, it drives more traffic and gets viewed, liked and shared more.
Relief
At least I did not do the video course, which would have been a real killer. It would have taken me many months to shoot and edit all the videos. Doing only text was a good way to lower my personal investment and doing a test with real content, not just a teaser like the webinar I organized.
Also, it shipped! I hated not being able to finish the first video iteration.
Pride
The content of the course is really good. Chunking it for a 28 days delivery was a good idea and I think it would have helped the students get things done , and to think and remember more.
I loved having to do some more public speaking, like in the webinar. Recording the video introduction was also helpful to remember the thrill. I’ve given a small presentation since and I’m looking forward to do some more public speaking, but not to make a living out of it.
Oh, and the coworking is dead post caused a bit of a stir. Some got upset, some loved it.
What went wrong?
I don’t really know. Dates may have been a problem: the end of the course is in the beginning days of the European spring break, and the start of the course falls in the European carnival week (I completely missed this one). But 3 of the signups where in Europe and the USA audience (the main target market) should not really have had an issue.
Pricing may have been problematic. I probably went too high at the beginning ($199) and after a week I lowered price to $79 (listed at $99). But I sent out a lot of discount codes in the hope of seeing which price worked best, but nothing clear has come out of it. People have paid from $10 to $79.
I did have deliverability issues due to a problem with mixed content in this site. Some of the influencers I contacted probably did not receive my emails, but I also reached out through other channels. The issue then was that time was running out. I lost some precious days.
The launch phase was short. I gave myself a bit over two weeks because of calendar issues (I did not want to wait until after Easter to launch the course) and because I wanted to see if there was a strong interest. There wasn’t.
What’s next
I don’t know. I need some time to think about it. Next Monday I should at least have an idea for a small project to get some energy and ideas back.
I feel that I need to get more intellectually, more learning. It will probably be linked to more reading time for business related books and also finishing a spreadsheets course that I left unfinished when I started the projects.
This week I will also work on the three planners I got and on some documents to dig deeper into myself and my motivations. Writing in my shooting journal has a positive impact. It is time to try it for other parts of my life.
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