Created
Apr 16, 2023 8:44 PM
Tags
- Big Later: EBC on personal finance/money with humor (a vacuum for financial content, usually dry)
- Important to differentiate with a niche, consider humor/lightness
- Started when Will taught his friends basics of personal finance
- Taught it at Salesforce where he worked
- Productized it into an email-based course (EBC)
- An email a day for a month
- Now converted it into an enterprise solution where employee packages are included with financial literacy
- Monetize by converting to enterprise solution
- EBCs are a good alternative to CBCs, MOOCs
- MOOCs: videos are a lot of work, even more to edit
- CBCs: require facilitation
- Nowadays people's relationships with email are evolving with the advent of newsletter revival
- EBCs are also a lot of work though...Will's tombstone will read "he opened 1 million browser tabs so someone can read 1 email" 😂
- Upside is that it's one-and-done (email is the product) and one can shift quickly to marketing
- Low-risk entry point to teacher-student relationship (for both creator and the consumer)
- EBCs are not newsletters because they are a product in-itself
- Will codified the process of making Big Later so others can make Big Later (need to research where this is??)
- They can co-exist with newsletters
- EBC learnings
- Non-negotiables for successful EBCs
- Take every opportunity to set expectations
- Read time
- Key takeaways
- Progress tracker
- Ability to enable self-pacing
- Allow fast-learners to fast-forward and get the next email earlier, receive additional content
- Allows identification of the "1000 true fans"
- (There's 2 months of content for Big Later!)
- Cherry-on-top
- Better copy/humor/Wait-But-Why style writing?
- Structure of the email - Hook, Set Expectations, Define New Concepts, Put in Context, Why You Should Care
- Provide the sensation of learning
- Style and Voice
- Feel like a conversation with someone who has interesting things to say
- Use a Q&A format
- Metaphors used to deepen meaning
- Personal touch
- References to personal life
- Inside jokes developed over-time
- Develops student-teacher relationship too
- Business models/monetization
- People don't value free stuff
- Price is a signal!
- Will has a $5 EBC and a $299 EBC (!)
- Out of 1500 customers, 1 requested for refund (b/c content didn't apply to their country)
- Open rates were higher when people pay $5 for a product
- How convincing is your landing page?
- Really dial in the free trial option (tricky to improve conversion rates)
- Moving from B2C → B2B
- One size fit all product → different skews originally, but ended up going straight to B2B
- DO NOT build a business around a $5 product 😅
- Upside is 1500 customers and beta-testing
- Was forced into B2B because he priced too low in the beginning...
- B2B
- works for Will b/c the "current product" is so terrible (ancient 401K rep giving an hour long lunch-and-learn...)
- Reasons to make an EBC
- Are you interested in teaching someone something?
- Teaching pedagogy
- EBC content can be leveraged into other media
- The craft will force one to distill ideas and easily transpose into workshops, MOOCs, CBCs, etc.
- Will's writing rituals
- Cyclical, content + selling + operations, typical founder stuff 🙂
- Writes best early in the morning
- Solving problems in subconscious
- Divergent → convergent thinking/outlining process (open research → 3 key takeaways)
- If you are surprised when you learn something, then someone else will be surprised too
- Audience Q&A
- Why $5 then?
- Base product is just $5 to make financial literacy available for everyone
- What are typical EBC pricing ranges?
- $299 is on the high end
- Philosophically, where is email heading?
- The move of corporate communications to Slack has improved people's relationships with their email inbox
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