It’s 2012 and it’s 3 o’clock in the morning. I’m lying on sweat-drenched sheets in bed staring at the ceiling.
I can’t sleep because I’m worried about bills, again.
A few months earlier my friend and business partner siphoned off cash from our business bank account to pay down a DUI.
I somehow survived that situation, disbanded the partnership, and took a couple of our clients with me. But earlier that day I got in a fight with one those clients about us needing to scale up faster. So now I’m worried he’s going to "fire" me despite everything I’ve built for him.
Really, I was laying there thinking of ways that I could start my own full-time business. I wanted to be free of that client and to earn all the money I was making for him, but for myself.
I desperately wanted to create and sell a product of my own, but I couldn’t seem to come up with any good ideas worth pursuing.
Laying there, feeling at the end of my rope, I had a "f*ck-it moment". I decided I was going to try something radical.
I thought to myself, "I’ve got an idea for a course and I’m going to start taking orders for it tomorrow (before I create a single lesson)."
Well, turns out that that wasn’t a radical idea at all.
My plan worked. Just 12 hours later I had slapped together an email length pitch I sent to some friends in an entrepreneurial forum called the Dynamite Circle, including a payment link at the end.
20 people sent me $20 for a course that didn’t exist (yet).
That’s not a lot of money but it was enough to show me that there was demand. That course was the first version of CopyHour and here we are now…. 12 years and millions in sales later.
Now, what I want to show you this week is NOT how to pre-sell a course. That’s not a revolutionary way to approach building courses or even a solopreneur business.
Instead, I want to show you how to build a course in real-time, using daily email delivery. This is exactly how I built CopyHour and my most successful products. Frankly, I’m shocked more solopreneurs don’t use this method to build their offers and courses.
There are a tremendous amount of benefits to putting together a daily email delivered course that I’ll explore this week:
Email delivered courses take ALL the pressure off the course idea and course content. You can put together a guess of what people would want to buy – you don’t have to create ANY course content – and then you take orders. You risk nothing, not even your time, because if people don’t buy the course you don’t make it. If only a few people buy you can just refund them if it’s not worth going through with it.
You start building the course only after you know there’s demand and then you get to build the course in basically real-time – customers can even help you build the content as you go. I can’t stress how easy it makes your life.
Email-delivered courses also put you in full control of your messaging. You don’t have to pretend to be an expert if you’re not and you’ll still be able to sell courses like crazy because the delivery method becomes your biggest differentiator (we’ll go into greater detail on this, this week).
And best of all people LOVE to consume content that’s dripped out daily (not in a firehose all at once) because it produces better end-results.
I’ve built CopyHour into a mulit-million dollar course without spending over $1000 total on paid ads in the last 12 years – mainly because people love the product so much and they recommend it to their friends. Plus, affiliates love promoting CopyHour because their customers love it (and get incredible results).
This week I want to show you how smart, simple and immediately profitable it is to build an email-delivered course in just a few hours that you can start selling right away.
Again, you don’t have to be an expert to create a course this way. You don’t have to spend a ton of time or money coming up with ideas or building the content of the course before you start making sales.
If you’ve been thinking about how you could start your solopreneur business or launch a course that could potentially make you money for years and years, you won’t want to miss this week’s emails.
We’ll dive in tomorrow with some examples of what these email delivered courses look like.
Talk then!
– Derek