Maven Webinar 2021-10-19

Introduction

• On running a CBC:"Look, it's the best job ever. You get paid well to teach a bunch of people about something you're really excited about. It ebbs and flows, so you have serious off-time throughout the year. Also, it's a massively expanding market. So it's just a phenomenal gift to get to do this for a living." / "At the same time, it's really difficult. It requires, at times, really long hours." - David Perell
• "I remember these brain explosions. She would just talk. She's really good if you have a specific problem." - DP on Wes Kao #ravingfan

• Building culture is key, e.g. The Dean is an intentional part of WOP culture

Speaker: Wes Kao

• "80% of the work in developing a cohort-based course is up front... but once you do that, you have this asset you can use over and over - you can improve on and iterate, you can use over several years." - Wes Kao
• "You can build your brand and charge a premium." - Wes Kao
• "You're probably already doing things that have a lot of scale: tweeting, writing a newsletter, creating a podcast episode. These probably reach a lot of people, but you don't get to charge a lot for it - a lot of these are free." - WK
• "Coaching, consulting, speaking - all of these... activities you can charge a hefty price tag for, but you're [capped by selling your time." - WK
• Tiago Forte has 3500 students for Build a Second Brain, enough for a thriving community
• Don't need to chase volume

• pain in the ass to stitch together a platform, fixing Zapier, yikes!

• "We've launched a bunch of features recently - figuring out student applications (having a central place for that), emailing students, setting up class sessions... [with] many more on the roadmap." - WK The offer -- 3 week free CBC on creating your CBC
• "How do you organize all the ideas in your head.. and distill it into a format that makes sense for your students?" - WK
• "You also have coaches you're assigned to - a coach that's with you the entire way... there's marketing coaches, pedagogy coaches, and peer feedback too." - WK
• Maven Terms: You own your content, no exclusivity, you earn 90% of course revenue, Maven takes 10% (in exchange to end to end software, tooling, course accelerator, coaching support, thought partnership helping you build your course)
• "We recommend running a tighter, smaller initial cohort to get your feet wet" and get experience running a CBC, then "expanding from there" - Wes Kao

• Maven teaches how to nurture waitlist so there's a constant stream of learners

• "One thing we see with first time course-creators is that sometimes you have analysis paralysis: thinking I want to keep improving my course, I'm not sure it's ready... both ended up shipping sooner than they felt comfortable. Now they've been gathering wait list signups." - WK

• Creators with small audiences
• Shivani Berry (sp?)
• Before deciding, was an inhouse operator, product manager
• https://weascend.co/
• Tapped into bigger audiences (by interviewing famous people)
• Started posting on Twitter, LinkedIn, her own subscriber list
• Offer value before asking for the sale
• Do webinars with different companies and meet with their employee resource group - give a talk, etc.
• Average price point: $500-1000 per student.
• David Perell: "Questions to ask yourself: (1) Can you build a course that a business might buy as a package? (2) How can you leverage the professional network you’ve already built and the reputation you already have to sell your course?"

• "Right now we're at about 60% of people who finish MCA ship their course within a couple months after launching. Most instructors will ship within a month of finishing. We had the course as 6 weeks before... we shortened it to 3 weeks going forward; it's tighter, it's shorter, it's meant to be more approachable." - WK
• Course manager is a good idea for steady business
• Maven teaches how to find and set up course manager relationships

• MOOC → CBC is like movie → live theater
• Important to survey audience during course creation!!

• "What else does Maven do to provide support on the distribution aspect?" - Christin Chong
• "It's a delicate balance, because we want to respect the audience you've built and your community - and not necessarily cross-sell too much... but it is something we're thinking about doing in the future." - WK
• "Right now our business model is a platform, like Substack… Substack doesn't do a lot to promote or cross-sell between newsletters." - Wes Kao
• "It's a delicate balance, because we want to respect the audience you've built and your community - and not necessarily cross-sell too much... but it is something we're thinking about doing in the future." - WK
• "Right now it's providing that software, tooling, infrastructure.. for you to have more time to [market and cater to] your audience." - WK
• "How do you measure success of the courses on Maven? What criteria do you apply? How do you ensure courses on the platform have high quality and a high standard?" - Julia Saxena

• David Perell - worked for 10 days with Tiago in Mexico

• "If I were you, I'd just write all the time, put a bunch of ideas out into the world, and content triangle your way into some kind of idea of what you're thinking about. Then, sign up for the MCA. Do it. It's free. And, if you're like hey, Maven works really well for me, then launch the course, go on the platform. If not, having that MCA and signing up now I think is a really good incentive for you to develop ideas. When we were making MCA, the most helpful thing.. I went down to Mexico City with Tiago.. we worked so hard for 10 days... every single day, we took notes I already had from the Information Capture System, put articles I'd already written with the same strategies.. and it was so much easier that we didn't have to come up with ideas on the spot. We could take ideas that I'd already written by now." - DP
• "The biggest opportunities are the ones that aren't yet proven... all of you know that CBCs work. The biggest lesson from the pandemic, from a media perspective, is that online education DOES work... the reason that online education didn't work this last year and a half is that people don't know how to do online education... a lot of aspects of online education right now is like Crypto in 2014, 2016." - DP
• David Perell: we know the secret to online education that other people don't. Teaching something is the best way to learn something. Area of high leverage.
• "It's one of those things we know to be true, that most people would believe is absolutely crazy." - DP

Christin's Personal thoughts

• Think of mini ideas to get into potential audiences
• Importance of making an "enterprise" friendly course—the benefit is reaching people who might not be exposed...vs building something more niche/one is passionate about
• Maybe it's not all or nothing. An "enterprise friendly" version and niche version can co-exist?
• Important to survey audience during course creation!! course curriculum = only a hypothesis, need to be careful to tailor to those willing-to-buy