Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

#53 I Have To Redo My Entire Course *sigh*

iniartworksmallDon’t you hate getting to the end of something online to realise you need to start all over again? Well that happened with my today with my course sigh

Don’t you hate it when you do something and yet all the way to the end and then you’ve realized you’ve made a mistake and you need to start all over again? Maybe you built some sort of furniture using the instructions and you go on all the way through and then you’ve got a bolt left over and you need to undo the entire thing and start again to work out where that bolt goes.

Hey, I’m Ryan from Instructions Not Included and that’s exactly what’s happened to me with the course that I’m creating at the moment on suburb research. It actually happened to me 12 months ago, almost to the day, where I was creating the complete self-leasing kit. I spent a whole month of my life on it and then, ended up finding out that the end of that that the market didn’t actually want this product and that I couldn’t even sell it and it wasn’t even worth marketing it.

But this one, the suburb research course, what happened was, I was creating the product, creating all these videos about how to research a suburb if you’re looking at investing in property. There’s a lot of data that you need to look at and you need to be able to interpret that data correctly.

So, I’m just teaching people how to do this. What happened was, I got 80%-90% of the way through it, was just about to create one of the last videos and realized one of the free tools that I’ve been using had changed their data. Like change the data they display and so they stopped displaying certain portions of the data and I was like, “Oh my goodness! This sucks!” So, I need to work out, well, how can I get access to this data in some other way?

And so, I started googling and when I was googling, I came across a couple of articles on suburb research and how to analyze statistics by this guy who is super awesome, really clever and it just blew my mind, some of this stuff that I was learning. And things that I thought you needed to look at for certain suburb ended up to be incorrect. And so, some of the things that I was teaching in my course weren’t actually correct. And also, in the midst of that, I discovered a tool that gave me access to better data than I’ve had access to – more up to date, shows you the trends and everything.

So the entire lid was blown off my course because I could now teach people more advanced techniques. I could now provide them access to better data for free and I’d learnt some new things and learnt that part of what I was teaching was actually incorrect. Basically, I’m 80-90% of the way through this course, about to launch it. It was meant to be on the 15th of October and it was like the 13th and this is when all of this was happening.

So, I was like, “Yup, final tweaks on this. Ready for launch on the 15th.” And then I realize on the 13th, oh my goodness! I am going to have to re-do this course completely. And so, that was extremely frustrating for me to have almost completed this course and then to have to go ahead and re-do it.

Now, this course, once it’s completed, is going to be absolutely awesome. It’s going to be something I’m going to be so proud to recommend. It’s going to be better than anything out there in the market. More straightforward for people, really give people a basic understanding of suburbs and how to research it.

I know that this is actually a gap in the market because compared to the self-leasing kit that I released last year that hardly sold, this one has sold $600 worth of product before I’ve even launched it. And I haven’t done any big marketing campaigns for that or anything and it’s already sold $600 worth. So, I know that there are people out there that want this.

I know that this is going to be a popular course over its lifetime and make me thousands of dollars. But, yeah, it was just very frustrating to have realized that I’ve got this far into it and now need to reset it. So, very annoyed at that, but I’m going through, I’m creating it.

I’m more than halfway through creating all the new videos now and I’m hoping to get it done by the end of this week. But I’m guessing it’ll probably be sometime next week that I actually get this finished and get this course completed. At the same time, my computer decided to basically die. I always get the “rainbow wheel of death” is what I call it. On the Mac when it’s loading, it just brings up this rainbow wheel and I think my computer’s on the fritz. So I bought a new second hand computer yesterday. So I spent about $1,700 on a new 27-inch iMac. It’s not new, it’s second hand. I got it off Gumtree, which is kind of like eBay here in Australia. I’m just setting that up and I’ll be using that moving forward.

My old computer, another 27-inch iMac did me 2 solid years. So, I think this new computer will probably do me I think 18 months is how long this computer will last me before I need to upgrade to another computer again. I just use and abuse my computer because I do so many videos, so many podcast, lots of editing. I use it all the time, so it just gets used and abused. I think 18 months, give this new baby 18 months and I think it’ll be going solid.

A good news is that Snappy Checkout, who’s the payment processor that I use to collect all my payments. I’ve been talking with Mike, the guy who runs Snappy Checkout, absolutely awesome guy and he’s decided to allow me to become an affiliate of Snappy Checkout. I’ve been asking him, can I become an affiliate? I want to recommend Snappy Checkout to people on my podcast because I think it is absolutely the best payment processor out there. Paypal, you know, it’s so old.

I think Paypal is still a good option for convenience. People like using Paypal and Snappy Checkout integrates with that. But this is just a beautiful overlay so you got your sales page; you click “Buy Now” and then, the pop-up overlays over your webpage. Or, if you don’t have an overlay, it opens a new page with a black background and so it looks like it’s overlaying, even though it’s not, which is really clever. I went through so many different tools that I was looking at and this one was just the most beautiful one, so that’s why I chose it.

After I was using it for 6 months or something, I realized, it’s actually the cheapest one as well. It has super cheap fees. I think the maximum you ever pay for a transaction fee is $2. So, I was previously using Gumroad. If I do $1,000 transaction through Gumroad and I do sell some things that are that expensive. Then, I do pay 5% to Gumroad, so $1,000, I paid $50 in transaction fees.

With Snappy Checkout, you integrate with Stripe so you pay 2.9% through Stripe, so of $1,000, that’s $29. And then Snappy Checkout takes a maximum of $2 off the purchase price for their transaction fee. So, rather than paying $50 per $1,000, I’m now paying $29 plus $2 from Snappy Checkout. So, it actually ended up being super cheap and I really, absolutely love it and so, I’m very proud to recommend it.

I’ll talk more about it, how to use it. Maybe I’ll try and integrate some lessons to talk about how you can collect payment, how to do a pre-sales. Maybe I can teach you guys some of that sort of stuff that I’ve been doing and we can then talk about Snappy Checkout for those of you who want to try it. And then, that can be my revenue source for this podcast. So, we’ll see how that goes. My affiliate link for Snappy Checkout, you can check it out. Just go to pelt.co, so P-E-L-T, which is my overarching business name. pelt.co/checkout and you can go ahead and check out Snappy Checkout over there. You can see what it’s like and go ahead and create products. I’m probably going to create some tutorials and stuff for it and some comparisons between it and Gumroad in the future.

This is the first product outside of my own products that I’ve been excited to market to people. So, I’m not just going to do it through this podcast. I probably won’t do, “This podcast is sponsored by Snappy Checkout.” But I will just mention it whenever it makes sense and mention my affiliate link as well. You guys obviously won’t pay more through that, but I just get a commission for recommending it to you.

Also, something that I’ve been doing is a video course. I did a video course with Ben Everingham, who’s my buyer’s agent. This was even before the video course, the last month, had about 3 people go through him and ended up signing up. And so, I get a 25% commission on that. I think it was $1,700 or $1,800 in revenue. So, for me, it comes out to a bit under $4,500, which is great because this month hasn’t been that good for me in terms of product sales.

Because I’ve been focused so heavily on creating my products, I haven’t been actively marketing them. So, it’s really good to have that partnership with Ben and to get those sales through him to get that income through so I don’t have to stress about money. Especially because I just had to buy a new computer and spend $1,700 on my new computer. So, yeah, it’s great to have that coming through.

I’ve got a new build video series with him as well. In the 4th video, we do a call to action where people can book a free strategy session with him. So far, I’ve sent that out to just probably about 1,000 people have received that course all the way through and I’ve got probably 10 people who signed up for that free strategy session through that. So, it’ll be interesting to see how many of those people convert.

It’s just another source of revenue for me. The problem that I have with this is I’m scared of being reliant on someone else for my income. So, it’s a great kicker. A piece of advise I got from a very successful young businessman who I used to actually rep to, he was saying that when the money is there and when the money is flowing – like when there’s a profit opportunity, milk it for all it’s worth because it won’t stay around forever. So, I think with Ben, I’ll work with him and we’ll do this partnership for as long as it lasts and as long as it makes sense and in an essence, milk it for all it’s worth for both of us and to just make the most of it.

But I also want to prepare for the rainy day if that partnership ever does dissolve, then I’ve still got my products and my own source of income and stuff like that. So, even though I might be making more income because I’m recommending people to him and such a high dollar-value, I guess I don’t want to build my business on expecting that revenue just in case something happens. Our partnership is awesome at the moment, but obviously you got to be prepared for things like this. So, it’s a great source of revenue, but something that I don’t want to build my business.

I’ll just use it to use the income that comes from it to grow my business even more. I don’t know. I’m excited about it. I love working with Ben and I love partnering with him. I love having someone that I can chat to about the stuff that we do. But, yeah, I still want to make sure that my business is going to be rock solid moving forward into the future years because it’s absolutely my livelihood.

Alright guys, that’s it for me for today. That is my update. I’m working on my course hoping to get it done by the end of this week, but I think probably early next week is when it’s going to get completely finished. Released the video course I did with Ben. That’s going out to quite a few people this week. So we’ll see if any of those people end up converting into customers. And I got a new computer that I need to migrate everything over to. So that’s where I’m at. I hope you guys are having a great week.

I’ll try and talk more in the future about Snappy Checkout and how to collect payments and teach some lessons and stuff like that. Until then, you can check out Snappy Checkout yourself through my affiliate link. Just go to pelt.co/checkout and you can have a look at Snappy Checkout over there. I absolutely recommend it. I love it. I love Mike. Customer service is awesome. They’re a great tool.

Until next time, guys. If you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.



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