Patio11 launches his lifecycle emails course
training.kalzumeus.com
training.kalzumeus.com
Quote from co-worker: "It would be worth it even if we learn one new, non-generic thing to try" Of course, we sell software that goes for $x0,000+, so anything that moves the needle with leads ROFLstomps $999.
(I have been waiting to write a response to patio11 like this for a while)
I believe it's also the first time someone other than patio11 has used the word "ROFLstomp" on HN ;)
I mean, I was only checking on the price out of curiosity because I'm a broke student who doesn't even sell software, but if a broke student's first response to your offering is "Hey, that's actually only a little bit too expensive for hours worth of instructive entertainment!" to the point where I was tempted to buy for like two seconds, you can be sure that you could extract a whole lot more money than that from people who'll get actual business value out of it.
Well that makes it a no-brainer. OTOH sending a note to my boss when our SaaS offering is $9/user/month would be a much harder sell.
Also, I guess my suggestion is to have a more expensive option for those that are going to get a lot of value out of it. Even just segmenting 5/10 users vs. Enterprise would probably have us buying the enterprise version (I am part of a giant company)
The site also goes in to a lot of detail about the method used on WPEngine, unlike most of these product sites which only drip feed you enough information to convince you to buy their product. He even commended an article[1] which attempts to de-construct his method and share it. I personally believe that he is genuinely offering to share his help (for a fee - which is reasonable), rather than trying to extract money out of HN user's.
For someone who stands to make a lot of money from acting on the information here, I am happy to pay for it.
Frankly, if it were free, I probably wouldn't bother to watch it -- I already do a lot of email dripping -- free, to me, would mean that it's basic, and that I wouldn't benefit from it.
Excellent point! I feel the same way about most free Internet-busines videos. Plus, I'm much more inclined to listen to, and take action on, advice from trustworthy sources. By contributing so much to HN, Patrick has built up a tremendous amount of trust.
Respectfully disagree. If Patrick didn't have the incentive of making money on the course, he wouldn't have invested the time, effort and money to make it. I believe he hired another person to help with video editing too. Who pays for that?
Nothing creates a healthy ecosystem of knowledge exchange more than people being fairly compensated for their knowledge and hard work.
If on the other hand, someone only comments to promote their own products, I'd look a bit more askance at that.
I am sure that many of us has shared a ton of knowledge/code/whatever that has been far more worth than $250 (I know I have), but there is no need to sell this and monetize this, especially not here on HN.
You do the SEO, gather 1000 email addresses, drip feed and ab test the list till ten people pony up. Then they are incentivised to actually put the common sense into action, follow up with Skype calls and hey presto ten people who have actually put into practise whT the rest just talk about. And make great sales references for the remaining. 9990.
Not trying to be disparaging here but this stuff is more coaching than book selling. You are paying to get someone to prod you not action.
I hope that patio11 forgives the comment but I doubt very much there will be ,uch in the course common sense and a bit of reading won't get you. But for 250 why not get patio11 to summarise it for you and push you into actually using it.
Oh, right, http://www.appointmentreminder.org/
It's impossible to learn everything that could be useful. We have to prioritize.
In some cases, that means paying money for information we could get elsewhere.
At my consulting rate, I can buy this course in three hours (it's not technical consulting). Would I spend more than three hours of my time gathering all the information in this course? Most likely.
Therefore, I can actually save money by buying this course. And given that one additional sale of the product I'm using this for is worth the price of the course, it's information I am interested in.
I think analogy has been stretched past breaking point here.
Ok i'm going to have to launch something now just to try it out
Secondly, there's nothing wrong with getting paid for your hard work. If people don't want to pay, and other people want to give advice for free, that can and will still happen - the two models can coexist, they aren't mutually exclusive. I think some geeks are a little wary of paid products and would do well to try selling something they make that has value for users.
Here are some of the responses:
1) It must be free.
Well, he's always telling us how to compete with free. Nothing stops us from reading the huge set of equivalent material online, but it'll cost more for anyone who values their time.
2) This is too expensive.
He's repeatedly told us that people who say this shouldn't be the focus of our marketing. Focus on the ones who have the means and ability to recognise value. Capture the consumer surplus where possible.
3) It's too cheap.
Don't worry, he'll find a way to extract the consumer surplus at some point. This is a great lead-in to consulting.
And you know what? Great. Make the money, Pat. Tell us how to do these things, and then show us in a very tangible way how it works, by convincing us to buy something. If that doesn't teach the principles, not much else will.
His advice wasn't free. Oh no. The invoice is in now. Ka Ching!
I actually like Patrick, but come on people.
Knowing that, This comment is the funniest thing I've read all day. I SRS LOL'd.
If you want to spend years doling out awesome advice for free and then "cashing out" like this, I encourage you to do so. It would certainly be more valuable than bringing up the insipid "everything is selfish" argument.
And you say there's "no need" to monetize this, but what about the need to put food on your table or pay your bills? Patrick gives away 99% of everything he writes for free, and when he does start charging for that last 1% you still find a way to complain…
First impressions (ie., first 60 seconds on the course), it really seems like something created for a person sitting at a computer to watch it all. I wish there was a downloadable zip file I could download all the videos at once. I'm trying to download the videos now and I'm running into all sorts of errors and such (I think it's only letting me download one video at a time). Actually I'm getting error messages right now for all the pages. Is your site down?
Update: Ok, it looks like it's back up and running. When I download videos and try to right-click to save mp4 file, it downloads an html file and not the video. I need to go into the video to watch it and then option-return the url to start downloading. Very strange. This happens to the opt-in videos in lesson 2. optins-teardowns video doesn't seem to be downloading at all.
Also, your video sizes are really large. Example, 235mb for an 8:10 minute video (1024x768 resolution). You should be able to get the file size down to 100mb or so. For comparison, Kevin Rose's interview of Dennis Crowley in 720p is about the same size, 237mb, but the interview is about 20 minutes.
Your copywriting video is 686mb for 19:53 length... compared with Kevin Rose's Dennis Crowley video of 235mb for 19:20 length. That makes your video 3x the size of Kevin Rose's video (which is great 720p quality).
Honestly, this is a really sucky first experience. This is going to take my all morning to download these videos because the file sizes are 2-3x what they should be and because the links aren't all working.
And then after I download the videos, since they're so large I'm going to have a hard time fitting them in my iPhone and iPad. Please investigate getting your file sizes down. I think you can shrink the file sizes of your mp4 video to 1/3 the current size but keep the same resolution/quality.
Update: Your optins-teardowns.mp4 file is absent. I can't download it. Please fix cause I don't want to watch the lessons out of order.
You repeatedly drum into people that they shouldn't be just rails programmers who know skills foo, bar and baz, but rather people who solve business problems. You forgot that lesson in the video.
I'm not at the stage with my business that this'll be useful - but will be soon enough and email will be my primary sales channel. Otherwise this does look like excellent material.
Note, my criticism comes from a place of love. It's your first attempt and feedback will help you improve. Best of luck.
I'll write up the story and the mitigation later.
I'd like to preface this comment by saying that I'm a huge fan of your work. You've personally helped me a ton.
That said, I must ask what made you choose video as the medium for this content. Frankly, you're a much stronger writer than on-camera personality.
Even beyond congeniality, why is five hours of video at 150wpm superior to a medium-length ebook I can read at 800wpm?
Thanks!
Book pricing isn't as hopelessly broken as music pricing, but that is faint praise indeed. It's sad. Writing a good book is a great deal of work, reading a good book provides a great deal of value, but the psychology of the book market recognizes neither of these facts. People vaguely imagine that producing books costs approximately the time required to type them, and expect to buy books for the cost of buying, inking, and shipping the paper - if the paper is absent they expect the price to be negligable.
Whereas the one good thing to be said about modern college tuitions is that they provide a nice big anchor for the cost of a "course". Practically anything looks like a bargain next to the list price of an hour of TA instruction at Harvard. [1]
[1] That's a fun math problem: Assuming five courses at Harvard, five hours per week of lecture and recitation per course, a fourteen-week semester and $38k tuition and fees, I come up with about $55 per hour per student. Of course, Harvard does not bill by the hour, but that's a whole 'nother essay.
I think he's aiming to get better at his video production and presentation skills, and believes video delivers more perceived value than just text. Text is not a course, it's an ebook. Courses are worth more than ebooks every day of the week. Perceived value > actual value when it comes to sales... Who's going to pay $2,000 (site license) for an ebook?
BTW, I love video and audio players that allow you to speed up play - 1.5x, 1.75x or 2.0x . Coursera has that, love it.
The ideas are still there, but I admit, it needs to be at my reading speed to be interesting.
The buyers, mostly.
If you don't run marketing at a B2B SaaS company it is a wall of text. If that's you, I'll save you time: don't read it or, if you do read it, read it only for academic interest on doing copywriting.
If, on the other hand, one is in charge of increasing the sales of a B2B SaaS company, this page is basically designed to be total brain crack.
It presents an idea which is either new or which one is vaguely aware of, presents concrete suggestions for implementation, has a case study which the target customer will find incredibly compelling, teaches one thing they can literally execute on by the end of today, and then drumroll says that if you found the page to be valuable then there are five hours of very dense, action-packed video and guides where that came from, for a very reasonable price by the standards of B2B SaaS companies.
If purchasing this course lets us get a lifecycle marketing system going that is 10% more effective two weeks earlier than if we had to learn the lessons ourselves, it would pay for itself. Of course, if we had to smash our brains against it and try to pick out a cohesive strategy from across the internet it's very likely to take us a long time - months or years - to learn all the things in the course.
If you're in the target market for this product, and you know patio11 enough to trust him, the sales pitch boils down to "You give me several hundred dollars, and I'll give you thousands of dollars."
Haha, but even with that rational analysis done, the idea of spending that much on something pains my bootstrapping mind tremendously.
I am in the target demographic, we've just started implementing lifecycle emails at my company.
But if the topic wasn't of intense interest, maybe it would have.
Basically, zinga of marketing. Also see: 30 minute infomercials. "This towel will change your life!"
Still, it's quite clear how well you demonstrate value - that last paragraph is exactly one sentence long and yet has five concise, concrete pointers on what exactly makes long copy good. As such, I suspect buyers will be extremely happy with the content of the actual course :)
For now I'll continue to enjoy the rest of your excellent free content. Thanks and good luck!
(or is the long for content done only in emails and not on the site itself)
This is true. The video is poor quality - washed out. And despite wearing a bulky headset with an enormous microphone, there are weird feedback(?) "booms" every few seconds.
I personally couldn't get past the gimmick with the $100 bill. It was really tacky and is such a cliched TV informercial ploy for attention.
The red tracksuit doesn't help convey a sense of authority either. He didn't properly comb his hair (though this is an understandable issue for many people, get some hair gel). And there are distracting reflections on his glasses - an easy solution for this is contacts. The background of the room, all Japanese-y, is distracting as well.
Summary: if you're going to be a salesman on video, you need to look the part. Patrick most definitely does not look the part.
Well, he does live in Japan...
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/26/software-for-underserved...
You might not like this video, but I wouldn't generalize so prematurely.
Most of my consulting clients, and the people I build this for, are not in a gold-rush. They run profitable businesses selling software to other businesses. This is a business input for them which they have a clear path to profiting from. It is about as speculative an investment as a pizzeria buying basket of tomatoes.
If there is anyone hypothetically thinking of buying this basket of tomatoes because they want to aspirationally run a pizzeria one day, please don't. I don't want your money. Go read my blog. Found a pizzeria. Find customers for it. When you need this you'll know, and it will be a screamingly obvious mutual win.
If he comes on here and says I built this and you all need to buy it right now, well then he's obviously just a salesman.
If he comes on here and says I built this, don't buy it if you don't meet these criteria, I'm not even going to try to sell it because I don't want to turn HN into a sales venue, well then, he's a obviously just a particularly crafty salesman.
So while I see what you're saying I'm not sure how you expect patio11 to discuss this on HN without appearing like a salesman to at least a few people.
And if that did not convince you that this product rocks there is a glowing testimonial from a satisfied customer on the homepage right now.
Anyone who spends considerable time on HN should be allowed to sell whatever they want that relates to their expertise within reason.
Perhaps the jealousy surrounding people who view "selling" and "business guys" as bad comes from people who don't have the makeup to take rejection that comes with selling. Lest anyone think there is no value to a "business guy" that it's all about technology.
However, HN is fairly engineer heavy and sales carries a pejorative connotation, so when I read your posts they seemed (to me) negative, as in "Aha! You can't fool me! I'm wise to your game to sell stuff on HN!". I was responding to that.
I suspect we're basically in agreement, if you look somewhere on the page I'm effusive about Patrick's sales letter and I agree that by turning up, answering questions honestly and not trying to sell to people he hits the HN demographic dead on. My point was he may not even be trying to make sales here, just trying to interact with a community he's part of and the two look indistinguishable.
"Please do not recite a script written beforehand. Just talk spontaneously as you would to a friend. People delivering memorized speeches (or worse still, text read off the screen) usually come off as stupid. Unless you're a good enough actor to fake spontaneity, you lose more in the stilted delivery than you gain from a more polished message."
I particularly like the Do not buy this course section which qualifies potential customers.
[1] To be fair depending upon the target demographic the sleaziness can be increased without causing problems. If you were building a product for hard core sales guys Your Customers Can Still Afford Branded Groceries: Learn How To Capture This Wasted Revenue Today! might do brilliantly.
To justify prices in the > $2k region I think I would need to add some sort of interactive component (webinar or what have you), and I have no time on the schedule for that in the next couple of months, so I went with something which was totally self-guided for my first try. I might revisit that eventually, if there's lots of demand for it and if it makes sense for the business.
Buying is a trivial decision at $300. We sell a $350 product, with high margins. A single sale and this course pays for itself. (2-3, if you include my time spent watching and implementing it)
edit: turns out I didn't even notice the price. It's actually $250. I was prepared to pay anything up to $400 without thinking about it or discussing reimbursement with my company.
You want 2k+? -- offer to edit 3 emails -- you probably wouldn't get enough takers to take too much time. Also, it price anchors the $249 and you can do it like Kickstarter and limit the # of sales of bonuses like this.
For $10k or more, write a first draft of emails and look over the final draft after they edit.
Drip marketing means sending a timed sequence of emails to educate, persuade, and only then sell.
Here is a lesson in conversion: make your video auto play next time.
Other than that i really hate where HN is going upping this thread
Note that patio11 didn't link to anything--this was submitted by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=_pius
This page looks like a late night TV Amway infomercial, complete with third rate camera acting. Or rather looked before their webserver bit the dust.
But - separate from any conflict or cynicism that others have raised as far as HN becoming a marketplace, there was to much to read (and in fact I didn't read it, I skimmed it) so I wouldn't feel comfortable paying the amount you are asking which was located at the bottom.
I feel you should have started at the top with:
"If This Doesn't Create Value For Your Business, I Don't Want Your Money"
(pricing options)
Want to know more? Read below.
Just my thoughts. By the way I have no doubt that you have thought long and hard about putting that price at the bottom of the letter and could point to backup for that strategy (perhaps in something you've written before or generally accepted knowledge). But my reaction is my reaction so I just thought I'd throw it out there.
Also, I noticed you don't use paypal. Could you elaborate on that choice? My guess is that you know your demographic is used to using credit cards, and it eliminates a step, but I'd like to confirm
Stripe.
Could you elaborate on that choice?
Stripe! (No, seriously: I have the capability of running things through Paypal but a) that code is from BCC and written when I was young and stupid, and I was afraid of breaking something if I just copy/paste ported it over, b) this keeps my accountant happy, and c) there was a non-zero "risk" of this selling five figures in a day with $1,000 charges in the mix, which would mean Paypal and I would have to have a chat, and that was a complication I just didn't need right now.)
"I just wanted to say hello and thank you for your interest in WP Engine. I saw that you filled out our speed test form, and wanted to let you know that there is a real person over here, and that I'm interested to hear how you feel about us so far.
Do you have any questions or concerns? Can I help you make a decision either way?
Thanks!
Trafton Esler Lead Developer Champion"
There are so many things wrong with this email I don't know where to start. My only hope is that they inserted this email into the sequence /after/ Patio11's involvement; otherwise it's a warning sign (along with the awful video on the sales page) that his course is not all it's hyped-up up to be.
Good luck anyway, there's a sucker born every minute.
And then I stole that email in our campaign (with some modifications), to great results. I even got lots of "Wow, you guys are real humans and not robots" replies.
I'm interested to hear what you say is wrong with the email, because you haven't yet.
edit: The lead developer champion bit wasn't in the email they sent me.
I'm intimately familiar with the details of the open rates and conversion rates from WP Engine's email series; in fact, I was the one who helped sequence them and proofread/edit some of them after Patrick left.
I can tell you with 100% authority that you are dead wrong. That email converts extremely well. In fact, it used to go directly to Trafton's inbox and he had fun showing me all the responses people sent to him every day.
If you want the spoiler details, it converts well because people love to know there's a real human behind all this nonsense that we call "the Internet." (And it also converts well because Trafton is a machine who seems to never sleep and responds to everyone's questions quickly...another key ingredient. Everyone was always asking Jason how they could "hire a Trafton.") It speaks well for the people Jason hires, as well as the effectiveness of the email itself. There you have it, from the horse's mouth.
It's been working so far :-)
If you have more thoughts about the email, I'd love to read them and learn from your perspective. There may be a perspective here that I am blind to, and you could teach me something.
You know you've priced okay when (1) people bitch it's too high and (2) people bitch it's too low.
You know you've MVP'ed when (1) people bitch it's too ugly (walls of text!) and (2) people say it's not.
You also know you've MVP'ed when (1) people bitch the video's terrible (WTF? he didn't comb his hair!) and (2) others don't give a flip.
Now back to the price: it's not like big pharma has some kind of insta-power pill that chomps down all that consumer surplus. For a one-man show he did great.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4587080
EDIT - Linked to the other HN topic. Just click through for the story
Where I can I read more about annual billing decreasing churn? I've read your blog post (or email?) about switching to annual billing to free up revenue to acquire new customers, but I don't remember reading about how it decreases churn as well.
One additional point: Customers that commit to annual billing generally tend to churn less often overall -- because they've made a more "considered" purchase and committed more time to the purchasing decision.
There's also a lot of books and products available on copywriting. The only one I've ever liked is, well, everything CopyHackers has ever done.
http://copyhackers.com/product/handbook-how-to-write-a-long-...
$48 is a little hefty but its also frequently on sale on some of the appsumo/mightydeals type sites.
Congrats! You've shipped something of value to the world.