Podcast

EU 92 audio

[00:00:00] Danny Iny:

There’s a great bill gates quote, you know, speed and technology applied to an inefficient process will just multiply the inefficiency. Right? So start small, see what’s working, see what doesn’t, et cetera. And see, what does it really take to deliver an outcome for my student? And then when you look at scaling it, you can look at well, how do I scale that in a way that makes sense and is cost-effective?

[00:00:21] INTRO:

This is experts unleashed, revealing all professionals and entrepreneurs transform experience into Gama while positively impacting the world. For years, Joel Erway has helped entrepreneurs develop and launch their expert based businesses, growing them beyond six and even seven figures a year.

Now a professional expert serves their community through paid training, education, or service. This podcast will help you design and execute your plan to become a six or seven figure expert without a massive team. To get more information or apply now, visit theperfectexpert.com. Let’s get started.

[00:01:04] Joel Erway:

Hey, what’s going on, everybody. Joel Erway here and welcome to another very special episode of experts unleashed. And today I’m really excited. We get to talk about something that I am very passionate about and I get to bring on a very special guest who also shares this same passion. And my guest today is Danny Iny from Mirasee.

And we’re going to be talking about courses, online courses, the hybrid course revolution. What’s the current state of the online course market and all things related to online courses. Now, Danny is, um, very well versed, very well experienced in producing, selling, launching, creating online courses. And he’s taught thousands of entrepreneurs how to start and grow their own online courses.

So I’m really excited to chat with Danny here today. Danny and I have been connected for quite a few years. I remember Danny, I drove out to Toronto a few years back where you had me in person for an in-person interview. That was a lot of fun. And I’m excited to have you on the show. So welcome, my man.

It’s great to have you.

[00:02:11] Danny Iny:

Thank you. I’m super, super excited. I was just thinking back to that time in the, in the hotel suite, when we recorded that interview, which was fantastic. And I was like, I’m looking forward to this. This is going to be fun.

[00:02:21] Joel Erway:

Really great. So, you know, we were chatting before this call and you were talking about the hybrid course revolutions, pretty catchy buzzwords.

So let’s kind of jump right in and, you know, give us an overview of what is the hybrid course revolution. And I think that’ll be a great kickoff for the direction of this call.

[00:02:40] Danny Iny:

Yeah, sure. So 30,000 feet, right? Why would someone pay you for anything? Right. People only want to pay you if what you’re offering is a shortcut to help them get what they want in less time at less cost or with less risk than it would take for them to just do it on their own.

Right? And so if you look at online courses as something that people have paid a lot of money for over the years, they’ve done it because an online course is a way of getting that shortcut. I’ll help you get this outcome faster or with less cost or with less risk of. But what it took to deliver that shortcut has changed over the years.

And I, I divide the, you know, recent history, recent meaning last few decades of online courses into kind of four agents. So the first age was the age of access, right back in those days, think like early two thousands, maybe even, you know, late two thousands, um, information was scarce. It was hard to find the information that you wanted.

And so if I have the information that you want in my course, and you can’t find it anywhere, Then that justifies a premium, just the information you can’t get anywhere else. That’s a shortcut. And that worked for a while until you know, all this information just exploded online. There are blog posts, there are YouTube videos.

There’s so much content out there. And then here take my course where you’ll find this information is no longer a shortcut because it’s like there’s information everywhere. And so then it became about. Curation and convenience. Right? I don’t just want to have access to the information. I also want there to be none of the information I don’t need.

Right. You just filter just the stuff that I want. And so now, you know, you’ve got these carefully curated, just the information you need compiled in one place. And it doesn’t matter if you can find a lot of this stuff elsewhere on blogs and on YouTube and on all these different places. But this is like one focus, curated experience.

And, you know, that worked well again for a little while, until curated information started to become ubiquitous. There are curated newsletters. You can find curated, focused courses on platforms like you, to me and masterclass and highbrow. And the list goes on. There’s a ton of curated information. And so people aren’t going to pay a premium for that anymore because they can get it in lots of ways.

And there’s something interesting that’s happening with this evolution along the way, which is there’s an acceleration. So back of the napkin, let’s say that first age of access, right? Let’s say that ran 2000 to 2012, then we’ve got this age of convenience and that runs, let’s call it 2012 to 2018. Right?

So that’s like half of the length of time of the previous. And then we get to kind of, let’s call it 20, 19 to 2021 or so. Right. So we’re going to just a few years, there’s information everywhere. There’s curated content everywhere. Everyone’s got courses they’ve bought, they’re sitting on their hard drive and they have the logins to, and they’ve never gone into them.

Right. And so it’s not just about, you know, is this even a good course? Good information. It’s about William. Easy and fun for me to go through it. Will you motivate me to want to go through it because in parallel with this proliferation of online courses, with the proliferation of digital media in general, right?

So you’re not just competing with, you know, the other dudes course on that other platform. You’re also competing with Netflix and Hulu and getting through. Right. So then we’ve got the age of entertainment, right. And gamification was huge then, right. This very much coincided with a lot of the pandemic where everyone’s suddenly at home.

Their attention is split 4,000 different ways. So it’s not enough to just give me the information. It’s not enough to curate the right information. Now the shortcut is you make me want to go through it. And that worked for a while. And that brings us to the present where there is so much information it’s so well curated, the gamification and the entertainment and the production value, even that has become table stakes and what the world is waking up to is the fact that fundamentally, again, we pay a significant amount of money.

We pay a premium to get a shortcut to an outcome that is mean. Outcomes that are meaningful. Take work to get us to experience them, right. It’s not easy. If it was easy, I wouldn’t need much of a shortcut. And that brings us to the age of transformation. It brings us to the hybrid course revolution where people will pay a premium, but they will not pay a premium for anything less than the transformation they’re actually looking.

And so what does it take to deliver that transformation? The answer is a hybrid approach. You’ve got to not focus on any one tool. I’ve been talking about hybrid courses for the last six months nonstop and people ask me all the time. So what exactly is hybrid? Does that mean coaching? Does it mean gamification?

Does it mean cohorts? Does it mean community? Does it mean microlearning and the answer to those questions is yes. Right. It’s not about any one of those tools. It’s about having the whole toolbox. So you can adjust the sliders and create the experience that will create the best transformation for your customers in a way that is scalable and practical and feasible for you.

So 30,000 feet, that’s what we’re talking about.

[00:07:38] Joel Erway:

That’s interesting. And for me, like I talked about courses. Admittedly talked very little about the delivery of the course. I’m more on the marketing side. Like, okay, what are your benefits? Like what are people really interested in? Like that’s where my specialty is.

And, and to have someone explain the evolution of the online course industry really opens your eyes, like taking us through the four ages, the age of access, the age of convenience, the age of entertainment in the age of transformation, it’s something that I’ve always done. I don’t want to say like ignored because like, in my personal experience, like I just want to make sure I get them the end result.

And so, you know, from a marketing standpoint now, like, you know, I know there are people out there who talk about. Game of kitchen, that becomes a real like selling point for their course in their product. Like this now becomes a selling feature. Like this is something that you have to promote, meaning like you have to really bring it to the attention of like, Hey, this isn’t just some cookie cutter course or some list of curated videos and a membership area.

Like if you want to really increase conversion rate, you have to speak to what’s going on in their customer, in the customer mind. And like, they don’t want that anymore. I like making that link because I’m a marketing guy, I’m a sales guy and it’s, it’s really great to kind of, to kind of see this. So let’s talk about the hybrid approach.

Like, let’s go deeper now. Like, and, um, what does this look like? You know, what does the hybrid approach look like?

[00:09:12] Danny Iny:

Yeah. So I love that question and it’s the hardest question to answer because every hybrid course looks different, but you know, when we think about the word hybrid hybrid means essentially neither a nor B, but a mix of both.

Right. So a hybrid car, isn’t all about, you know, gas and internal combustions. Also not all electric. It’s a bit of both, right? A mix of both of those technologies. And so let’s look at some of the different areas where you can look at a hybridized place for your courses. Right? So, um, one, one dimension you might look at is you know, is the course experienced live or is it experienced asynchronously?

Right. So am I going through this content along with everyone else? Or am I going through it whenever I want on my own time? Um, is it being experienced, live or prerecorded? That’s another day. Right. Is it going to be, you know, all the video or audio or all text or is it a mix of those things?

Am I studying on my own or do I work with a coach or again, is it a mix of both? Is it, um, virtual online or is it in person or again, a mix. And the point is not that you have to say like land right in the middle, on all of these dimensions, it’s that these are all sliders that you can adjust to this.

One’s going to go a little further left that one’s going to go a little further, right? Because the question you ultimately need to ask is. To your point about marketing at the end of the day, what is the outcome people want to buy? And once in a while we find ourselves in a niche where we’re selling something that everyone thinks is really hard, but we know is really easy.

And those are the best courses in the world to sell, because they’re really easy to put together and everyone’s like, oh my God, I can’t believe you can deliver this. But most of the time. The reason people want to pay a premium to do something is because it’s actually hard. And so you have to get people to do something really hard.

Right. You know, if they’re, they don’t have no sense of marketing and you wanna help them get good at marketing, you can give them the shortcuts. You must give them the shortcuts. So that’s the whole point, but there’s still a whole skill set to develop. And so you’ve got to help them climb that ladder.

And then it becomes a question of what will it take for me to do that? So will it take good clear instruction? Sure. Will it take an opportunity for them to apply what they’re learning? Sure. Will it maybe require that they, they applied it, but they didn’t apply at grade. So there’s a way for them to get some feedback in terms of how to do it differently or better.

Very little. You know, are they going to go through it all on their own meaning, you know, if they get distracted, then it gets just falls off their radar, or will we integrate some components of accountability and structure to keep them on track. Right. And the more challenging of a thing you’re helping people to do, then the more you have to be really thoughtful about how you blend these elements.

And it creates a really good opportunity to, because. You know, ultimately you don’t want to say, all right, I’m teaching something hard. And so I’m going to sit here and just be with you 24 7 to help you make this work, because you’re going to run yourself ragged. I’ll actually give you a great example. So someone that we worked with, his name is Ian.

And he’s an artist. He teaches a painting and drawing composition. And so when he came to us, he wanted to create a course teaching, drawing composition, and he wanted to go above and beyond create a great experience. So people paid $500. They went through this thing where it’s kind of like a challenge every week, they’re doing a certain amount of work.

They’re doing a drawing every day and they submit their drawing once a week and he would review each and every one of those and record a loom video with. And we helped them with the planning and with the course and with the marketing and because we’re good at it, right? His launch was super successful.

He made like 120 something thousand dollars in his first launch, which means he had a ton of people going through it. And he found himself with this great success. And you know, when he told me about it later, he was like, I called my studio, the loom tomb, because I was in there like locked, nonstop, you know, recording these.

And that was great for the first run and be solid people needed, et cetera. But as he went to be like, all right, it’s time to launch again. And I want to enroll even more people. I want to make even more money, but I don’t want to be tied to it in that way. You can start looking at how do I adjust those hybrid sliders?

Do I integrate. Um, an experience where people are giving feedback to each other, using certain criteria that I give them so that they’re able to do that. Well, do I work with coaches on my team or teacher’s assistants that I teach how to do this in a way that is scalable? So, you know, I can afford to, to spend a hundred bucks per student, if I’m charging 500, right?

The unit economics can work, but we looked at how do we adjust all those sliders? And fast forward a year, he launches it again. He makes $370,000, but he’s spending less of his. Supporting those students than he did the first time around. And that’s the beauty of hybrid. You can dial up the value that they get while dialing down the amount of your time that is spent, but doesn’t really need to be.

[00:14:00] Joel Erway:

Well, let me ask you this, because I think this is a question that probably a lot of people have, like when we talk about this hybrid approach, right?

The, um, hybrid approach to launching your courses and selling your courses and delivering your courses, where do you feel is like the biggest. Advancement or the biggest value add with hybrid, like in the eyes of the customer. Like if I’m going through a sales page and I’m looking, I’m considering buying one of your students courses who is selling a hybrid approach, what’s the benefit for me?

Like, what am I going to be really excited about? And like a core focus of, of a hybrid program. Like what is probably going to push me over the edge to get me excited about this?

[00:14:46] Danny Iny:

Yeah. Sure. So, so let’s talk about what’s in the course that makes it valuable. And then let’s talk about how it translates to the marketing that makes people understand that it’s valuable.

So fundamentally at the end of the day, I mean, yes, you’re talking about customer and student experience. Yes. You’re talking about learning design, that all that goes into it, but fundamentally at the end of the day, it’s about helping your students get the result that you’re after. Right. It is making your coursework.

And this is critically important. If you look at the statistics on how many people even finished courses, nevermind, you know, get an actual result from them. The numbers are abysmal, right? They’re like, you know, high single digits. Imagine if you sell toasters and less than one in 10 of them actually make toast.

Right? You’d be out of business if not, maybe in jail. Right. This is a crazy, crazy situation, right? People try to address that with, well, let’s just throw a ton of gamification at it, right? Let’s have lots of bells and whistles and the dancing unicorns and the cash register sounds. But that only goes so far because gamification is fundamentally a tool of motivation and motivation empowers us to do to the best of our ability, what we are already capable of doing.

So, you know, if I’m distracted or bored, then you know, dangle a carrot in front of me. Yeah. All right. I’ll jump in. I’ll complete module. But if module two is just hard and I can’t understand it, then no amount of motivation is going to help me. I need better instruction and support. Right? So all of this is there to help people get an outcome.

Now, how does that translate to marketing? The stronger, your course is the more strongly you can stand behind, not just the promise of here’s, what you will hopefully experience, but here’s what you will actually experience. So something that I’ve become known for over the last, I mean, going on close to a decade now is that we guarantee results in just about all of our products.

Right. You know, it’s always a conditional guarantee, meaning you have to put in the time do the work because our courses are great, but not magic. Right? But if you put in the time you do the work, you will get the result that we’re promising, right? In terms of launching your course in terms of making whatever amount of money is tied into the promise of the course.

And if not, we’ll give you your money back. We’ll keep working with you depending on what fits with that program. But we can say you will get this result. We guarantee. We’re only able to do that because of everything that’s going on the backend. Otherwise, a promise like that would bankrupt us, right?

People are getting much, much more discerning. Like if we look 30,000 feet at the evolution of any, any customer group over time, um, there’s a model called the diffusion of innovations from, from, uh, Everett Rogers. It was posited and I think the seventies or something, and we’ve all seen it. It’s those bell curves of like, you know, innovators and early adopters and the early majority it’s.

So, if you look at your early adopters and your innovators, these are people who like to be on the bleeding edge. They’re excited about upside. They don’t care as much about downside. They’re willing to take risks right there. They’re excited about trying everything new. If you’ve got a closet full of crap that you ordered on Kickstarter, then you’re an innovator.

And earlier. Most people are not like that. Most people are much more mainstream buyers. They’re like, I want to know that it’s going to work. I want to see other people like me. Who’ve bought it, that it will work. I want strong proof and confidence behind. And so in the early days, you know, think back to the age of, you know, of access, the age of convenience, et cetera, it was mostly innovators and early adopters buying courses.

And so you could get away with frankly, a much weaker promise and much greater, you know, shiny look at everything you could potentially. The mainstream market, of course, buyers is just not that willing to take a risk. They want to know that they can really trust you to deliver. And you can put a lot of those safeguards in place.

You can put guarantees, you can put, pay me after you’ve gotten a result. I’m not saying anyone should do any one of those things by the way, but you have a lot of the flexibility to stand behind your promise in a much stronger way that is much more compelling to your customer, but only if the course can then actually do it.

[00:18:45] Joel Erway:

So what now becomes the marketing for that? Meaning like what becomes that attractive hook? Is it just a stronger guarantee or is it kind of like anti core selling where it’s like, Hey, this isn’t just a, you know, self-paced study, you know, study program, like this is a coaching program you’re going to get, like, not only is it a course, but like, you’re going to get the support you’re going to get like all these other things.

Like how would you sell a hybrid program as like that hook, that sexiness.

[00:19:14] Danny Iny:

So it depends a little bit on how sophisticated the specific market that you’re selling into is, um, there’s this great line from William Gibson. Who’s a futurist. And he says that the future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

Right. And so that’s great. Yeah. And, and I tell a story to kind of illustrate this. This was like a few years ago. Um, I was traveling to some conference and I had a layover at a mirror port for a few hours, you know, I’m wandering around trying to kill time and I see a Brookstone store. So they have like all these like fancy gadgets.

So I walk into the store and on like a stand there, there’s this like, I don’t know, two feet tall, lifelike, a Yoda. Mike. Okay. This looks cool. I kind of just stepped in to take a look and its eyes open and it looks up like totally animatronic and it speaks, and it says, teach you to use the force. I will write in proper Yoda syntax, and I’m like, okay.

Um, and he continues. He says, stretch out you. And so, you know, I stretch out my arm a little bit like this kind of like it’s telling me, and he’s got these like motors or something. He’s like, he gets flung back, like, like I forced pushed him. And my first thought is, oh my God, that’s so cool. And my second thought is like, I have to get this.

And then my third thought is, no, this is stupid. My wife would kill me and it won’t fit in my suitcase. So I’m like, all right, cool. And I walk on and a couple minutes later, I stepped into the minute. And you see this row of men standing in front of a row of things like waving their arms wildly, trying to get the motion sensor to release the.

Right. That’s what it means that the future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed. Right, right. The technology’s there, it’s just not everywhere. And so, you know, when it comes to online courses, some markets are like, they’ve seen online courses, you know, nonstop for years, if not decades, they’re very familiar, which means they’re also very familiar with the shortcut.

And so in that scenario, yeah, you’re absolutely going to be positioning against what is going on in the course industry at large, right? This is not just some information only course. This is not one of those courses, which is just a bunch of videos in the membership site. This is not one of those courses where you’re on your own.

This is not one of those courses where we make big promises, but don’t deliver. So you’re very much doing the positioning again. In a less sophisticated market. One that hasn’t been looking at courses left right. And center for years. Right. You’re not going to do the positioning against, because they don’t know what you’re positioning against.

They don’t have that context. Then you’re just leaning into the strong proof elements. Right? These are the promises we make. These are the ways that we stand behind those promises. This is why you can trust us. Right. I think it’s Eugene Schwartz who said that, you know, anything you say as a marketer is.

Right. And claims are great, but people don’t trust marketers and usually for good reason. And so every claim you want to back it up with. Okay. And so there are different ways that you can essentially prove the claim you’re making. You will be successful. In my course, you will get that result. That is a claim, right?

We guarantee it. And these are the terms of the guarantee as a form of proof. This is the structure of the course that will deliver this outcome is a form of proof. And so, you know, you’ll mix and match, but how much you’re positioning against what is already in the marketplace, what kind of courses that you’re not doing?

Um, versus just speaking to the outcome. And then, then the proof of that will depend on how sophisticated and frankly, jaded and maybe burned the customer base is yeah.

[00:22:36] Joel Erway:

You know, it’s always got me, like, I’ve never really heard it. Position is like a hybrid program, you know, hybrid courses, et cetera, et cetera.

But what always got me with developing these is like, I want to create courses and I sell courses for like, obviously I want to help people, like, you know, it that’s primary. Right. But I also want it to be a lifestyle. And I have seen so many times, so many times similar stories to what you talked about with your client, Ian, you know, in the art space, who they launch a course, and they don’t realize how.

You know, it’s funny. Cause like normally what you’ll do is you’ll launch a course in like you want to support as many people as possible as that goes into your fulfillment, that goes into your promise. It goes into your offer, like, okay, cool. I’ll review all your drawings, not either number one, underestimating how many people are actually going to take you up on the offer.

Number two, underestimating how much time that’s actually going to take. And so that’s part of the iterative process. You know, it comes with its pros and cons, but. If you were to help somebody starting from scratch with a hybrid program and an evergreen hybrid program, like let’s forget a launch for the purpose of this conversation.

Like. How would you design a hybrid program that allows it to be scalable and evergreen? So the student gets the support that they need, but the instructor doesn’t get burdened. Is it as simple as, okay. Hire a coach to help support you, or have you found a way that, you know, you could design this around a one man band one man shop that provides us to be, you know, let’s just say infinitely, scalable with the support that’s needed.

[00:24:18] Danny Iny:

So it could be all of those things. So from a process standpoint, you you’d want to start small, right? I generally don’t advocate enrolling hundreds and hundreds of people into the first run of your course, because you know, there’s a great bill gates quote, you know, speed and technology applied to an inefficient process.

We’ll just multiply the inefficiency. Right. So start small, see what’s working, see what doesn’t, et cetera, and see, what does it really take to deliver an outcome for. And then when you look at scaling it, you can look at well, how do I scale that in a way that that makes sense and is cost effective? And, you know, I find that people often approach that question of scalability a little bit backwards, right?

They, they start kind of in the position that, you know, Ian was, you know, well, there are only this many hours in the day and I’m spending all my time doing this. So essentially the question is, well, how can I do less? And I don’t like that framing of the question, how can I do less for my customers? Right.

I actually like the framing of what if I wanted to do more, right. Because you know, let’s look at Ian, he couldn’t do more. He didn’t have enough hours in the day. So you’ve got to start thinking about, well, how will I resource it differently? And you want to make a few distinctions. One is separating out what has to be done from what you have to personally.

And the second is separating out what you can afford to deliver personally, versus what the unit economics of your course allow you to afford to deliver on a, on a, you know, cost basis for each individual course. So case in point, let’s say they took Ian, you know, a hundred dollars worth of his time to support one student through the course, you know, over a certain number of students that’s cost prohibitive for him in his schedule, but a hundred dollars of cost out of a $500.

You know, that’s totally doable if you can pay someone else to do it. And so you want to think about it in that way now, how do you scale? There are generally two approaches you can take. Um, and, and I mean, there’s also the, the just, you know, you streamline who you’ve removed the inefficiency, et cetera, but let’s say we’ve already done that.

So one is you can scale through. Right. So I don’t have to provide the support. If coaches on my team who know my methodology can provide the support. If I have the unit economics to do that, then, then the math works. Right? That’s all good. That’s how we work in our programs. I have maybe 20 coaches who work for me full time and they deliver a tremendous experience to all of our students.

And that’s why they get such great results. It doesn’t take a lot of my time personally. Right. But the students don’t care. How much of my personal time. Is involved. They care about how much support do they get to get them to an outcome. So you can scale through team. The other way that you can scale is through structure, right?

And that’s where you can look at a lot of, um, automated and peer based structured. So there’s really interesting research. Do you look for a Daphne Koller, Ted talk? She’s one of the founders. Of course, Sarah, she talks about this in her Ted talk, but when you use peer grading structures, meaning I submit my work and then I look at the work of three of my peers and I give them a grade or I didn’t feed back.

Right. If it’s structured correctly with the right incentives, with the right guidance, you end up with the same grades the professor would have given anyway. Yeah. And not only. What we found because we’ve implemented structures like this in a number of our programs. People learn the most from the process of giving feedback to somebody else, because you have to look at the work critically and like you’re just far enough removed from it that you’re not so close.

You can’t see anything. Yeah. So there, there are different ways you can do it, but there are a lot of options.

[00:27:48] Joel Erway:

Well, echo that final point and I’ll give an example. So in our workshops on the marketing, We run, you know, small, intimate, you know, $5,000 per seat workshops and we help them craft their message, et cetera, et cetera.

And one of the things that I learned, I learned this through a book called copy logic, which was written by Michael Masterson of Agoura. And he used this to train. Young green copywriters and help them level up their game. Very, very quickly to improve the efficiency of them producing more copy from our pro promotions in, in, in, you know, the juggernaut of a Gora.

And so what it was was, you know, Put five copywriters in a circle. Everyone brings the copy to be reviewed you present it. And then they have a very, it’s a group grading system. So it’s not up to the chief copywriter to critique it. It’s actually up to all the other junior copywriters to critique other people’s stuff.

And so we implemented that in our workshops and every single time, every single time you enter the workshop, you think, okay, great. I’m going to get my copy reviewed. I’m gonna get my offer reviewed. And they’re really excited and they sit down and. They realized they learned way more by critiquing other people’s work, because now you’re in a, you’re in a different frame of mind of trying to improve and you see other other people’s work.

And so every single time when the workshop is over and we ask for. 99% of the feedback and is, I can’t believe how much value I got from critiquing other people’s work. And I’ve always found a very, that’s a difficult sell. That’s a difficult selling point for the customer, because if you try and tell them like, oh, you’re going to learn so much by critiquing other people’s work.

They want to get their stuff. Like, it’s always like the flip side, but I mean, it’s, it’s amazing. It’s absolutely amazing when you implement that, that type of feedback loop. I’ve never, I’ve never considered doing that in like an evergreen format. We’ve tried to do it virtually and you know, just our, a particular structure and we found some, some hiccups, but like, if you’ve mastered that, like, man, I’m sure that the customer feedback of that, like, if you can, if you can deliver that on, on scale, like.

I know people would be thrilled like the is going through that process that are absolutely thrilled. Cause I’ve, I’ve experienced it. It’s, it’s fantastic.

[00:30:08] Danny Iny:

But in a lot of ways, that’s actually easier to do on an evergreen basis. Right. You know, if you’re doing a big launch, you’ve got, I don’t know, 500, a thousand people who just signed up.

You’re not. No individual student is like reviewing a thousand other things. So you’ve got to do like a sort of cell division, putting them in pods, matching them up, you know, doing that with a thousand people is like an administrative nightmare. It’s doable, certainly. But. You know, it’s a lot of work. Yep.

Whereas if you’ve got like, you know, 20, 30, 50 people joining your course every month and you just say, all right, we’ve got a cycle, starting a pod starting, you know, every week or every two weeks or every, whatever it is, it’s you and these five people. And there you go, you’re going to be reviewing and submitting your work and it’s nice and easy.

So there are a lot of ways to structure it. You also said something that I think is really important to call out from a marketing person. And this is really hard for people once they like get into it and they put all this effort at the design of their course, they’re like super proud and excited about it.

Don’t focus on selling the pedagogy. Pedagogy is not sexy. Pedagogy is not something that will get people excited to buy from you. Right? You can lean on it as a proof element. What you’re selling is the outcome that you are able to uniquely deliver because of the pedagogy, but the pedagogy itself is not why people are going to buy it.

And that’s a, that’s a really important thing.

[00:31:24] Joel Erway:

Yeah. I mean, it was just kind of one of these things that got revealed and we did these live workshops and I tried it once and people just left. Like I would have paid a hundred thousand dollars to go through this experience. Like, wow. I mean, that’s good feedback.

Like that’s how powerful it was. And you know, it’s not that, you know, I want to say that my stuff is amazing. It’s obviously great. But it’s because you just do the group feedback and you put them in a. It’s now, you know, it’s uh, oh, I’m going to stumble on how to explain this, but it’s like the ultimate form of learning is like the stages of learning.

And Danny, you probably know this, like, you probably know the official term is like, you know, you, you learn, but then like the ultimate form of comprehension is when you can actually teach other people’s and you learn first, then it’s, then there might be a step above that. But like, ultimately it’s like, when you can teach other people, I feel like there’s something there with, with the group, the group teach, like getting feedback.

[00:32:15] Danny Iny:

There is so I can tell her to tell you what’s going on there. Right. So, um, a lot of people have heard, I’m sure a lot of people listening to this are familiar with the 10,000 hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell popularized. Right?

If you want me to become world-class at something you’ve got to spend 10,000 hours. Except in this particular case, he got it wrong. He was quoting the research of Dr. K Anders, Ericsson about deliberate practice and that’s, that was not at all the point of the research. The point of the research was that it matters a lot less.

How many hours you spend practicing. It matters a lot more, how you spend those hours, like what you’re actually doing. So, what you want to be doing is deliberate practice and deliberate practice means practicing the part that is really hard, the part that you’re struggling with. So let’s say you want to learn how to, you know, you want to get really good at piano, right?

So if you have an hour to practice and you sit down and you spend five minutes doing scales, and then you spend 20 minutes practicing songs that are like super easy, just to warm up and you do some songs that are fun after that in the last 10 minutes, you practice the song that is challenged. And you, you know, you get stuck at the two-minute mark, so you do the two minutes and then at the end, you’re stuck.

Then out of that hour, you’ve practiced in a, in a deliberate way for like, I don’t know, 25 seconds. Right. What a professional would do is say, all right, I’m struggling with this 22nd part of this song. I’m going to spend an hour repeating that, repeating that repeating. And so when you’re doing this peer feedback, it accomplishes two things.

One, you get a lot more reps in, right. To just do the practice. You’re practicing specifically looking at the thing that you just learned that is like right at the edge of your abilities, but also you’re doing it like just far enough removed because when it’s your own work, you’re a very emotionally invested.

In it. So it’s harder to be objective. So it has this incredible ability, but to your point about being able to sell it, right. Marketing is always about using language that communicates the real value. So let’s say for example, that I’m hosting a mastermind retreat. So, you know, you’re going to get on a plane.

You’re going to come to me, we’re going to spend three days. It’s going to be amazing. And I say, and we’re going to serve burgers right now. Maybe I know that I have, like, I’ve got the world’s most effective gourmet chef of burger is it’s like a, it’s a life-changing experience. Right. But like a lot of people reading or like burgers, like think about McDonald’s.

How has that. Right. So you want to make sure that you’re, you’re using language that will create the right association for the person listening, not the, the, you know, to be the most accurate. So I might say, you know, even though I know it’s burgers, I might never use the word burgers. I might say, you know, and over the three days you will experience the wonderful delectable.

Uh, food’s prepared by chef so-and-so, whatever it is, right. Drawing on traditional American and other culinary cuisines or whatever I’m going to make them. Oh, this sounds great. Right. And they can be pleasantly surprised. Oh, it’s a burger. It’s better than any burger I’ve ever had. So, you know, if I was selling that kind of a peer-based workshopping experience.

I might say something like, you know, and best of all, you’re going to get to participate in our proprietary process that we have seen accelerates dramatically. The internalization of the learning of. That creates a quantum leap in our learning and understanding. I wouldn’t say, and that structure is peer feedback because people read that and they don’t know what it means.

They think it’s like, oh, that means I’m going to get homework. Right. So you want to make sure that you’re, you’re selling what, what will make sense? And with pedagogy, especially, you don’t want to get too technical, I guess, with every area. But, you know, I just, I see this a lot, like, oh, this is so cool what it does.

Let’s talk about, let’s talk about it.

[00:35:47] Joel Erway:

Well I think of the biggest takeaways for me. And I hope people understand this is that like implementing these, I’m going to call them high performance courses. Right. Because that’s ultimately what it is. I mean, yes, you want it. You want to raise the S like raise the standard of what programs are these courses or coaching programs, these hybrid programs, whatever you want to call it.

Bottom line is like, If you don’t care about your student success, like that’s a recipe for absolute failure. Throwing better marketing at an underperforming course is only going to tarnish your brand and your reputation faster. Like get a really good marketing system to sell an underperforming product is just going to tell more people that you have a horrible product, which is not a good, not a good thing.

And so, you know, one of the biggest takeaways for me is, you know, understanding how to improve. This at, I don’t want to say at scale, cause you, you explained it very, very eloquently, um, earlier on, but it’s like understand how to do this in a slowly scalable process that gets that amazing feedback. Like, you know, doing these pods, right?

Like I know group feedback doesn’t require my input. It’s a highly leveraged thing, but I’ve never been able to kind of like figure out how to do it in a level. In a leveraged delivery mechanisms. So I never did it. Like I just kind of threw it to the side and I like, I just never solved that problem. But like for you, anyone listening right now, like if you want to implement that group feedback, like inside of your course of your program, like implement the pod structure, like, Hey, every two weeks we’re gonna start a new pot and it’s a new group of five because now that’s like an internal launch system.

Okay. If you’re chosen in these first five or whatever, great, like you get that feedback. But if you miss out on that, like all the other students, like they see it like, okay, I can’t wait to get the next one.
I like it builds anticipation within your network and your community, but like there’s so much power there.

And that’s an, that’s a highly leveraged, highly leveraged thing that I hope people really take away from this. Like, that’s an actionable tip that you can go implement into your course in your program, in your hybrid program right now. And I just want to really highlight that. That’s a moneymaker that’s I mean, that’s a, that’s a game changer.

[00:38:04] Danny Iny:

Well, I want to add to that point. I mean, you know, we’ve seen amazing results with peer based feedback structures. You can do really great things with it and. Yeah, there are a lot of ways to structure them. And there are a lot of just other ways you can structure making it scalable as well. So, you know, that is a great thing to experiment with, but it’s, I would say it’s also important to like really get high.

Oh, this is the thing I’ve just got to do the pods of five. Cause that might not work in every business. Right. It’s one experiment with like, let your mind get creative about what are all the different ways I could try this because there are a lot of options when we really start exploring. And frankly, I mean, you know, to your point, you tried it, it was, it didn’t work when you were trying to set it up because.

It’s something very worthwhile, but also not super easy. Right. You’ve got to get it exactly. Right. And so this is an area where if you want to do something hard, work with someone who knows how to do it. I mean, where we started, this is, you know, people pay for a shortcut, you know, that’s what I do for people.

If you want to make this work, I have the shortcut. Right. That’s that’s what I do. Yeah.

[00:39:05] Joel Erway:

I’m so fascinated with this because like me seeing it, when you talked about it, like, I see so much potential in solving a lot of problems, but I’ll add just to kind of help close the loop on this. Cause we spent a lot of time on it.

Students love to show their work. It’s like the appreciation factor of like, look at me, you know, like everyone wants to get recognized, you know, whether they believe it or not, like you want to be recognized for doing good things and getting rewarded and, and, um, this idea of like, how can you implement more?

Show your work elements in your program. And I think that will drastically change the engagement level of your, of your program. And, um, I think you can add that on top of like this, this peer pod feedback. And I’d like, I don’t know. I just got really excited to improve my program.

[00:39:55] Danny Iny:

I could not have a better outcome from a conversation, you know, as, as a teacher, like that’s that’s music to my ears.

So thank you.

[00:40:01] Joel Erway:

It’s not a sexy topic to talk about. Like it’s not as sexy as talking about how to sell courses because it’s directly translated to money. You know, how to design courses like. Come on really? Like can’t, I just put videos together and like give it to people like, yeah, you can. But like, here’s where we’re going.

Like, you’re the four ages of the course industry. And like, if you want to do that, go for it and report back how your brand is doing, like how your students are doing and what the feedback is. It’s like, you know, it’s just, it’s not a sexy topic to talk about. So hopefully Danny, we’ve been able to sexify this a little bit on its interview and show people why this is so important.

But anyway, I digress, uh, which happens a lot when I get excited about a topic. And so, is there anything else that like, you wish that we would’ve talked about it or like maybe I skirted over that is really important to talk about with hybrid program.

[00:40:53] Danny Iny:

I mean, we, we actually covered a lot of ground, so there’s nothing that I was like, oh, I was going to talk about this, but we forgot.

Um, you know, there’s lots more we could talk about, of course, but, you know, we can do a whole other conversation at some point. Um, but I think we covered really a lot that is important. And the most important thing is not the tips. It’s not the tactics, not the strategies. It’s that fundamentally at the end of the day, What people will pay you a premium for what will be a real engine for your business, because you’re delivering outcomes is that you can deliver a shortcut reliably consistently help people get the outcomes they want in less time and less cost and with less risk, that is what people will pay a premium for.

And so putting the time and energy into figuring out how do I make sure my course actually does that. It just supercharges everything else you’re doing.

[00:41:40] Joel Erway:

Yeah. It’s, it’s so critical. I mean, you know, The way that the course industry is going, like, this is a must have, like, this is not optional anymore. This is a must have, because what you are seeing is you are seeing the commoditization of courses.

Can you compete with masterclass? Like, you know, we could always say, oh, you know, can you compete with you to me? You know, because they’re selling, you know, inexpensive courses and whatnot, but it’s not really, I’m sure I know there are great courses on Udemy. You know, there’s a way to position yourself better where you can sell a more premium version, but now you’ve got masterclass.

And what does masterclass have? Well, they’ve got, um, you know, Hollywood cinema production, Dave. Celebrities, you know, Stephen Curry, teaching basketball. How are you going to compete with that? Like not only do you have Hollywood cinema production, but you’ve got the best, literally the best shooter to ever grace this planet teaching it.

So if you’re going to create a course on basketball or shooting, or you need. How are you going to compete with that? Well, you have to look at what masterclass has not doing, and this is, this is the solution. So yeah, we are rapidly accelerating into a completely different world, a completely different age of the online course industry.

And this was a fascinating discussion. So I’m glad that we had it, Danny. Um, what’s the next step for anyone who wants to kind of take. That next journey with you. I know you’ve got your, uh, you’ve got a launch coming up and you’ve got some great resources to share. So let’s drop some links.

[00:43:14] Danny Iny:

Yeah, well, we’ve got a ton of stuff coming up and coming out.

So, you know, people should keep an eye open. I know that you’re going to be, um, sharing with your community, a bunch of that stuff. Um, in the absence of kind of like where specifically, should I go? We’ve got a memo that we put together of. Here’s how the industry’s changing. Here’s what you need to know. I call it the hybrid course revolution memo.

And I guess we’ll put a link in the show notes because you’re going to have a special link for everyone to, to go to. Yep.

[00:43:39] Joel Erway:

We’ll include all the links down below. So, um, Danny, it’s been awesome, man, really, really enjoyed this conversation. It got me jazzed up to, uh, we’re actually rewriting our webinar and redoing our program.

And this just gave me a lot of great inspiration for how to Uplevel the success of our students. And, uh, I’m excited. So thanks for spending the time, man. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. And if you’re listening to this right now, go check out Danny’s, uh, resources down below and we’ll see you on the next episode.

Take care.

[00:44:10] OUTRO:

Thanks for listening to this episode of experts unleashed. If you’re looking for new and innovative ways to design and execute your plan to become a six or seven figure expert without the massive team apply now at theperfectexpert.com.