Welcome to another episode of Less Is the Strategy. My name is Ant Hodges. This is the podcast that helps you to simplify, simplify your way away from that cult of hustle and complexity that we're always trained to jump into in our business, where we add extra things to our funnels and our marketing that overcomplicate things, that abdicate things to AI. I'm pro AI, but I'm pro human too.
In this episode I want to talk about something that I feel is really important, to help your audience see that you're a true expert. And I'll unpack more of that. But fundamentally there's this notion that if you want to build an online course, or a product or a program, then you go out into the marketplace and you sell it before you make it.
Now personally, I am not a huge fan of this approach, for a number of reasons. You know, I've done it before, twice, and things haven't panned out the way I wanted them to. The overarching commitment and pressure to deliver means that you have to have time blocks, you've got to be disciplined, and nothing in life can get in the way. You know, when you've got hundreds of people who've paid for your product or your service or your course, and then you have to deliver for them, for one reason or another that poses a huge problem. Not only to cash flow when things go wrong and you have to refund people, but also to the brand, when people start talking about the fact that, well, they say, I bought it and he didn't make it, and therefore he didn't deliver, so I got a refund. And so yeah, they wouldn't be impressed. And that's one way that it went for me, and that's one way I thought that it was gonna pan out for me, in a way.
But the flip side of selling it before you make it is that you don't have to spend a lot of time creating something that people just won't want to buy. So you're not wasting time. The argument, as I've seen, is that so many people think that they know what their audience wants in terms of creating a product or a program, and then it just hasn't flown.
So how do you do this, and which side of the fence do you sit on? Well, listen, if you are really truly an expert, and you know your audience, and you've served people for a long time, then you know the challenges. You're not guessing about what people want in terms of your content, and they know what they want in terms of transformation, and you in turn know what that is. The key thing is understanding the mechanism for delivering that transformation. It's not about knowing what to say and what to do, because you've been there.
The thing is that we need to understand, in today's market, even more. Because things like online courses and selling online training have been in decline. And there are still courses out there that sell extremely well, but they sell well based on a number of different things that are included within the offer. And it's important to understand that distinction, that courses aren't dead, they just sell differently today.
The courses that sell well, and the products and programs from experts, from coaches, from trainers, that sell really well today, are given in a way that actually opens up more access to the person delivering it. More access to the expert, and actually more access to that person who is positioning the offer. I think gone are the days of being able to create a product or a program in some kind of hope that someone buys, consumes the content, and gets a transformation on its own. You know, I don't think that people will just go in and consume videos and get the transformation they want anymore, because they want some level of access to you.
I will often say to my clients, and to those in my Simplify community, that there's got to be an element of human connection with you. We were built to be human at the end of the day. We were built to have relationship with one another. We were not built to deal with robots. Actually, relationship between other humans is what we were built for, and we need to ensure that that's facilitated. It goes right to the very core of our being, and actually it's the thing that people want. It goes back to the dawn of time. And that sense of community, the need to feel a sense of belonging, the need to have a place that they can feel safe and warm, to have accountability and challenge, but also encouragement and recognition, is this not what human beings really truly need? It's what I need, and I'm sure it's what you need.
When you're just dealing with an AI, you can ask it questions and you get answers, whether they're right or wrong is another matter. But then that's all you get. It's the human connection and the human experience that takes things to the next level. Course creators who tell me that courses are dead, and that AI has taken over, I think are just talking hogwash. What they're not doing is connecting with their audience in the best possible way. They're expecting to just publish something and see money roll in, while they can just swan off and go and do whatever they want in life.
Once you've built a business that's built on systems that does that kind of thing, yeah, why not go and enjoy life? But if you're in this build phase of your business, if you've got an idea and you're trying to get it to market, really you need to connect with your audience as much as possible. Human connection must go alongside what you're trying to sell people.
And I think there is this three pronged attack that we can take when we're developing our offers, and the things that we should have in our business, to be able to facilitate the transformation people want. Because people don't buy courses, people buy an outcome. We need to sell based on the outcome that they are gonna get. It's not necessarily the case of just asking, should we build it before we sell it, or should we build it after we've sold it. Because the sell that you do before produces this pressure I'm gonna talk about in a moment, you know, from my personal experience, and sometimes it makes a lot of assumptions as well.
The first time this happened to me, I was actually quite ill from the stress and the pressure of delivery. I was crazy running my agency business, and I was trying to launch the online training thing at the same time. We were building online courses and products and programs for everybody else, and I wanted to do it for myself. You know, the thing for me was, the launch wasn't as successful as I thought it was going to be, but I still had 46 or maybe 47 people to deliver on what they purchased. My commitment obviously was to deliver for them.
The first few weeks went quite well, and then I got some feedback and I created the next session, and things were going alright. And then I hit a wall. Stress, anxiety, not sleeping well, and a panic attack. And there were so many things going on in the background. These were the things that I just wanted to avoid, but unfortunately they manifested themselves in my life. And I had to put a pause on creation and delivery. And literally I had to reach out to all of my customers in that community, giving them the option of a refund, but helping them to understand what was going on. And do you know what, I had not one refund request, which was great. And I love my community, many of them are still around today as part of my community, and I'm honoured to serve them.
You know, it goes back to 2018 when I did this. And it was a time when courses were selling online, but everybody was still talking about sell it before you make it. And in 2018 it kind of worked for a lot of people. We eventually got it all delivered. It was delayed on the basis that I talked about.
But then the second time I did this, it was more recent. And actually, what transpired is that through the research that I did, and the conversations I had with my community, it gave me a really, truly good understanding of what they wanted. That came from surveys and webinars and live Q&As. That's where I got all the knowledge and presented the framework. When I presented the framework, I got a resounding yes, yes, yes, this is what we want, Ant. And I put an offer to them, and we were then gonna deliver over eight weeks some live training based on what they were talking about.
And then boom, lockdown hit. We were two weeks in and we went into a lockdown. And I was trying to use the argument, look, we're still connected, all online, we can still do this. But there were so many people who said, life is getting in the way, things are changing from their end. And it meant so many things went up in the air, and they were struggling with this. But then my own business, my agency, we tripled the agency during that first lockdown, and things got busy and tired again, and everything got in the way of delivering. So again it got to a point of delay. I did refund three people, three people who wanted refunds, no questions asked. And those three have since rejoined my community, been to live events with me, bought other programs. But do you know what, I think, from the outset of doing all of this online training, building stuff out for people, having many clients follow these blueprints of build it before you sell it, or sell it before you build it, I am firmly on the side of, I believe we should be able to use our knowledge and our experience to be able to build something that people really want.
I feel like the model for online courses, cohorts and things like that has changed. I don't feel, I know it has. I've seen it change. And I feel like the model has moved much more towards the ability for us to create a coaching or accountability program in a much more asynchronous way. And what I mean by this is that they receive training, coaching and accountability, but not in the order that we say. It's not about saying, this is the framework and this is the path, and you need to follow it. This is about every customer conveying their needs through conversations, you know, interacting with a human being. And it's about me saying, okay, well, I know I've got something that will help you with this challenge, do this first. And everybody getting their own specific way of getting the training and the accountability from me.
And you can only do that if you're working kind of like on a 1 to 1 basis. And so therefore a lot of people will go, well, do you know what, I don't want to do that for my business, because I want to scale this, I don't want to do it in a group way. But let me just tell you, it's the way I'm now running my mentoring. I have mentoring students who've grown with me through my agency, into my community, they're doing their business stuff, and they are now being mentored by me. And I have a portal, and inside that portal, it's their own personalized portal. They will ask questions, they'll send messages, we'll have calls, they're recorded, there are transcripts for those calls. But I can also set them like homework to do. They talk to me about a specific challenge. I can take a module out of one of my courses and just drop it into their portal. Not the whole thing, they don't have to go through the whole course, but I could just drop one thing.
And when I talk about this, it's something of an experience that they haven't had. They expect that when they buy a product or a program, they're gonna have to go through everything. But actually, when you sit there and you can say, well, I've got all of these resources... if you join my community, which you can join, the Simplify Community, and you go over to anthodges.com, click the community button and you'll learn more. You will be able to get access to the community. The people who are in that community, you'll be able to access training that's released every month.
But for the mentoring, for those who want to take that extra step and get even more high touch from me, that's where things change. The portal is called Backstage, and it's like the backstage of my business effectively. I'll be able to give you what you need. We'll create a portal that's customized for you and your challenges. We'll talk, we'll have conversations. You can use your phone and send me voice notes and messages to be able to talk to me and ask me questions. I will respond to you personally. And then if there's a specific training that I feel like would help you overcome one of those challenges, or there's a specific process that I want you to follow, then I can bring it in.
One example of this is, everybody who joins my Simplify community gets access to a number of trainings straight away, and then others are released over time. One of those trainings is my sales page training. It's a 19 part sales page framework for you to build out the best sales page, and I take you through, bit by bit, bite sized videos, each section. And one of those sections is what's called a video sales letter. And if you want to put a video on your sales page, I would always encourage you to do that. Knowing what to say, having the right script, knowing how to film it, knowing how to edit it, it's important to get that right. So one module inside this 19 part framework is a way in which you can create the perfect video sales letter script. I've got a template where you can fill in the blanks, and an AI tool that will help you to do all of that. And the AI tool is a tool that actually helps you build the entire copy for your website. It will ask you a ton of questions about your product, your audience, your offer, the payoff, the pricing, your guarantee, frequently asked questions, social proof. It asks you to give it all of that, then it synthesizes it and gives you a document with all 19 sections filled out, including the one section which is a video sales letter.
Now if I was working with people on a 1 to 1, and that's the one challenge that they had, because they had a sales page already but we talked about adding a video sales letter, I'm not just gonna give them the whole course and expect them to go through it. I want to give them just the video sales letter module. And within my Backstage, in their portal, I can create them a task. I can take my video and I can add it into their portal, and that video is just the video sales letter video.
That's how I believe things are gonna move forward. It's asynchronous coaching and training. It's responding to the customer's needs. It's exactly how AI is doing things right now. You go to it and you ask it a question and it gives you an answer. But actually, when you're being mentored by someone, and there's this level of human understanding and human connection, it takes it to another level, because it's the human experience that really makes it work.
So if somebody was to sit me down, if they were a client and they asked me the specific question, I want to build this course, should I sell it before I build it, or should I build it before I sell it... I think it's the wrong question. Because we're still in the mindset of saying, I want to build and sell an online course. Building and selling an online course is not what your audience wants you to do. Your audience is looking for a place of belonging. They're looking for a community that they can feel safe, and, like I said, where they can get challenge and encouragement and accountability.
So build a community where they can come into. Within that community membership, give them access to training, give them access to master classes, bite size things, things that they can do, and tasks that they can do. But offer them the next level, which is more time with you, more availability to you. Let down the velvet rope a little bit. You can have it as a premium level, but let the velvet rope down, and build out an asynchronous way of giving them coaching and training.
I can do this inside my Kajabi account. Kajabi is the system that I build my entire business on. If you want to know more about it, get access to Kajabi and a whole bunch of stuff, like bonuses, and even be able to jump on a 1 to 1 Zoom call with me to help you get your Kajabi set up right, go to anthodges.com/kajabi. That's my partner link on that page. If you sign up, you can get access to the offer that's on that page, but also you get access to me. We'll jump on a call. I've got my perfect sales page built in there, there's a video course in there as well, Two Hours From Zero to Cash in Kajabi, showing you how you could literally get everything set up, and send an email to your list, or some social media posts, to start generating sales within two hours. That's my promise. Go over to anthodges.com/kajabi and get your trial.
If you get Kajabi, Backstage is part of that, one of the payment plans in there. You'll be able to set this kind of Backstage option up, and second to none, it's the way things are moving forward. My community is my focus, I want to build my community. People in my community who want more time with me can then get the mentoring side of things. That's where things are moving, and I want to support more people through this, because that's what people are wanting. They don't just want a course, they want the human connection.
So asking the question, should you build it before you sell it, I believe is the wrong question to ask. What's going on in the industry today, and how should you deliver the transformation that your customers are wanting? Simplify things down to connecting at a human level. Less really is the strategy. We don't have to spend months building something. We don't have to put ourselves under a huge pressure to build something after we've sold it to a whole bunch of people. Why not use your knowledge, create some little master classes, load them into a system, create an opportunity where they can have access to you, and you drop them lessons based on their challenges, and away you go. That for me is how I think you should be building an online coaching and training business today.
Coaching is about asking the right questions and helping them realize change needs to happen. Training gives them the skills and the best practices to be able to then execute it. Mentoring and walking alongside, or providing a community, gives them the accountability and challenge they need to be able to move things forward.
The online coaching and course creation world has changed beyond all recognition from what it was a few years ago. We have to change the way we're delivering that transformation, not just how we're building what we think our customers might want. Less really is the strategy. And this is the podcast where I'm gonna share more things like this, to help you with an understanding of how we can change from practices of yesterday that are simply not working for us, and move into the future of how we deliver real transformation for our customers.
Thanks for listening. Do subscribe or follow, or make sure that you're hooked up to wherever you're gonna get notified of when this podcast is live next. There's a weekly episode every week, I'm here. Less really is the strategy. Why don't we just do this. Let's remove hustle, let's remove complexity, and let's simplify. I look forward to chatting to you on the next episode. Bye for now.