4 Lessons I Learned From a Failed Course Launch
I lost money from a course launch, and now I am sharing what I learned.
Last November, I launched my first course entitled the “Scientific Dissertation Academy”. While I had over 70 people registered for my webinar, only 15 people attended live.
Before I finished my webinar, I had one student purchase my course. I then waited my entire launch week with no one else purchasing. On the very last day, a second student purchased the course.
While I hoped for more, I was ecstatic that I had two people in the course. I had made almost $600, with another $400 that would come over the next five months due to one student choosing a payment plan.
I felt like I was finally becoming a true entrepreneur.
My luck soon changed when my first student asked for a refund. I quickly refunded their purchase, even though I was losing money due to the transaction fees.
A few days after the first refund request, I received a refund request from the second student. Again, I refunded their purchase, losing more money on transaction fees.
I became a failure
Despite the work that I had put into this course and the webinar — not to mention the coaching I had invested in — I had ultimately become a failure.
For days, I debated whether I had made the right choice in pursuing the entrepreneur life and developing this business. I still believed my business could be successful and could help many graduate students, but I didn’t know if I would ever reach success.
A quote that I had read recently made a huge impact on my ability to move forward.
“There is no failure, only feedback.”
This was my first opportunity to put this quote into practice. I challenged myself to look away from the failure and dive deeper into the feedback I was receiving.
I had done something wrong in the launch of my course, but determining what it was would take humbling myself, pushing past the sting of failure, and analyzing my entire process.
After going through this process, I wanted to share what I learned from my failed course launch.
1. Desperation will lead you astray
Entrepreneurship is about making money. However, desperately chasing that money can easily lead you to make ill-advised business decisions.
In my case, I set my webinar date before I had even completed my course. Honestly, I had barely started working on the presentations when my webinar date was set for only a month later.
The odd thing is that I had a plan before starting this business, and there was no good reason for me to set my webinar date that soon. However, I had not only become desperate for money, but I was desperate to prove that I could make money. I needed to show everyone that I could be successful.
Therefore, I made an awful business decision by choosing to launch my course before I even knew what I was selling.
Desperation convinces you to make compromises that you know you should not make. Since I didn’t have adequate time to complete my course, I later discovered that all of my audio had been recorded so low that you could only barely hear it even if you turned it up to the max. I didn’t have the time to do extensive editing in my lessons, and I failed to spot this.
Furthermore, I only gave myself one day to complete all of the recordings. As a result, the quality of my presentations decreased as the course continued. After 10 hours of recording, you stop focusing on being the best teacher and focus on getting it done.
While the way I learned this lesson was hard, I now know that when I feel desperate, I need to take a step back and reanalyze my situation because desperation is only going to derail my efforts.
2. Your audience comes before income
Analytically, you could identify the source of my failure if you looked at the size of my community. When I set a date for my webinar, I had 28 people on my email list. I can see now that my only focus should have been on marketing and growing my community.
While the webinar added over 60 people to my email list, these leads were not warm leads at all. The majority of these emails came from Facebook groups, and they didn’t know who I was outside of my webinar.
I had not even developed one superfan, yet, I was expecting a large number of people to buy my course.
In the last two months, I have developed novel lead generators and have increased my list from 110 to over 500 people. Now, I am turning back to focus simultaneously on marketing and product development.
I still don’t feel comfortable with the size of my list to launch another course. However, since I know I will spend longer on creating my course this time, I want to start the process while my audience is still small.
Overall, I have learned that audience always comes before income.
3. Always serve the customer first
When you become desperate, you focus primarily on yourself. Leading up to my launch, I was focused on my needs and not on serving my future students.
A hard truth I needed to realize is that no one owes me anything. Just because I have put work into a product doesn’t mean anyone should give me money for it.
Instead, the only reason people will give me money is that I am providing a product that eases their life enough that it’s worth the money.
Since my failure, I have shifted my thought to always serving my audience first.
This has changed the way that I approach my free content. Before, I focused on what I wanted to share; now, I have placed more effort into my free content to serve my audience better.
When I catch myself focusing on my wants and not focusing on my audience’s needs, I will stop myself and remember why I started this business: to serve and help graduate students thrive in graduate school.
4. Price right
The final lesson that I learned from my failed business is to price your product correctly.
The only coaching courses that I was using as comparisons were business coaching courses. Of course, my courses will never sell at the same prices as business coaching courses.
Due to the desperation and the focus on my potential income, I priced my course at $497 as introductory pricing. While my course would walk students step by step through how to complete their dissertation, I completely overpriced my course.
I needed to spend more time researching comparable courses in my niche.
It’s better to go too low initially in your pricing and then raise your pricing versus having a high price initially.
This lesson plays right into serving the audience first. In the future, I plan to price a course where I still feel like I am serving my audience.
Learning from failure
When I first launched my course, I felt like I had done everything I could, and students were purchasing my course. Not long after the launch, my entire business stood in the balance as all my students were refunded.
At that moment, I had a choice to focus on my failure and allow my business to fade or look at the feedback that my failure provided to build my business better. It was hard to look at what I did wrong, but I can already see a flourishing in my marketing and email list due to the changes I have made.
The lessons I learned:
- When you feel desperate, reassess your goals and slow down your decision making to avoid catastrophic mistakes.
- You cannot sell to an empty room. First, focus on building your audience, then focus on creating products.
- Focus on serving your audience first. No one owes you anything. Therefore, it’s your responsibility to make them want to buy.
- You need to price your products based on your niche. It’s easy to think your product is worth more, but price your product to serve your audience.
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