Last year in March, I launched my first mini course on running your own Facebook lead ads. Friends kept asking me how to do it, even just the basics, so I thought why not record something people can refer back to, and make a little mini course out of it at the same time.
Honestly I felt like a bit of a douchebag though doing it, though. I’m not the world’s most preeminent media buyer obviously, but I know my way around every lead gen campaign setup, so I shouldn’t feel bad helping complete beginners do this.
But in the end I sold 35 copies (!).
16 through Udemy, which surprised me. It seemed to go off like a rocket by itself, though as I noticed later, a lot of those were people buying with coupons and not really consuming the course.
And the rest through Gumroad, plus 2 freebies to existing clients for a total of 37. These mostly came off my email list, which is about ~450 people. I sent two emails about it, maybe three. Thank you to those folks 🙏.
Why I’m rebuilding it
Something I noticed looking back on my little portfolio of projects is that I’ve had a nasty habit of letting things go.
And it’s not because they don’t get traction, it’s just because of moving on too early.
For example, with Hypedeck.io, a previous idea, I sold 5 or 6 all one to one sales. But when it came to plugging in a scalable channel, I didn’t give it a proper go.
I got an awesome ad made, but I didn’t promote it, and by the time I got around to it the opportunity had passed. Everyone just generates landing page ideas with AI now.
So I’ve realized it’s one thing to filter my ideas, and then to get one to one sales. But it’s another to setup a channel that keeps selling the thing in a scalable way.
I’m somewhat bookmarking this thought as a 3rd gate for my ideas.
Thinking aloud – that’s probably why people doing well in the indiehacker space are often linked with particular channels like Danny Postma and SEO, for example, or organic social and old mate Levels.
(I haven’t seen many indie hackers who are hot on ads though, it might be because low ticket products are genuinely crazy hard to promote).
Anyway, since this course shows traction – I shouldn’t ignore it this time. So I want to press on and see if I can get it through gate 3. Using ads first, naturally.
Updating the price
Now, getting ads to work on a $27 offer with no upsell on the back end is pretty much impossible. And I’m not upselling anybody right now.
So I’m upping the price to $97, which gives me the leeway to make some profit on the front end. Or at least break even.
With a planned onboarding call included, I think it’s a no brainer at that price, tbh.
Ads for low ticket is notoriously hard, so I’m a bit shy doing this on my own course in public, because if I can’t get it working I look like a total dropkick lol. But to be fair, the course is about lead gen ads, not low ticket product sales through ads … haha.
Given this, I need to build the value to fit this new price point.
Building an offer
Following the Hormozi (more like “Bromozi”, am I right?) value formula, I’ve worked a little on the offer itself.
People might be lazy, so I’m including 5 static image templates with Canva, easy ones anyone could fill out. Plus I’ll add my 80/20 ad copy template so it’s easy as possible to get started. All stuff I use myself.
I’ll also be including an onboarding help call with me that I mentioned before for personal 1:1 help. Maybe I find some clients this way, too.
Improving the content
Here’s what I noticed people actually did with V1:
- Nobody did the playbooks 😞
- Nobody did the capstone
- People liked the strategy ✅
- Feedback was I didn’t help much with the ad creative bit
A big focus from this is to make it more completable. People have to actually use it in order to think I’m cool.
To do this, this time I’m focusing on 1 major “watch this and you’re done, A-Z” video. I got that advice from my friend Justin Hammond, who’s been doing well with micro courses. His point has been to focus on a single transformation you can make quickly for the course taker.
I’ve also planned out what could supplement it, so people get the transformation ASAP but can learn more if they want. E.g. setup for those who skipped it, things like finding offer ideas, creative research, landing page and Messenger variations, etc.
Gumroad or Kajabi? Or something else
For hosting this v2, naturally it’d make sense to keep it on Gumroad, but the experience felt a little too unpolished.
Meanwhile, Kajabi is kind of expensive at $143 (which is like a whole year of hosting?) for what is essentially a side thing.
So I thought, I’ll keep developing my Ruby on Rails skills, and make a mini custom LMS as practice and self host it.
I started by creating the functional bare bones:
Doing this, I got to play with connecting a payments gateway using Gumroad, so people who buy there get redirected back and added as users. And I also set up email servers for the first time, using Resend. Neat experience for a total RoR newbie.
Then I did the design with Claude Design.
So far, honestly it’s been about 5 or 6 hours tracked to get it here. And I guess it’s going to be a stretch of fixing of little details, so probably another 10 from here.
Ultimately, not the most efficient choice against $143 p/m of Kajabi. But I get the development reps and the control.
Where to from here
I’m still planning and recording the v2 content. But if you’d like to see what v2 looks like, the pre-sale version of the site is live here:
To be sure, everyone who bought v1 gets v2, so I’ll let them know once that’s done too.
I also made a little promo video:
Once the v2 content is complete, I can start my ad campaign.
Let’s see how it goes. Wish me luck.