Yesterday was the first day of a new course I’m taking, “Ultraspeaking Fundamentals L1.”
It’s a cohort-based course, delivered live over Zoom, which gets you better with public speaking in 15 sessions over 5 weeks, 3 to a week.
There are two parallel cohorts. I’m in cohort 34A, which has over 50 people inside. I’m guessing the other cohort has similar numbers.
The price tag for this course is $995. If you assume 100 students for the 5 weeks, that’s $100k in revenue, I’m guessing 95% of which is profit.
Sounds like a pretty nice education business. And if you ask me, it all comes down to the unique way it’s organized and run:
1. After a bit of waffling up front by a team of two coaches — really previous students who are probably getting paid something, but not much — the 50+ attendees are broken up into small “pods” of 3 participants each.
2. The pod members self-organize so one of the participants becomes a “pod leader.” The pod leader basically shares on his or her screen the day’s instructions from the Ultraspeaking course area, keeps time, and hits play on a couple of videos that walk through key concepts.
3. The pod members then take turns playing little games that build up core public speaking skills.
For example, yesterday mainly consisted of “rapid fire analogies”:
You get a sequence of randomly generated analogies — “a bicycle is like ice cream because…” — and you have a few seconds to both read out the prompt and to complete the analogy in some way before the new prompt pops up.
The point is not to come up with a clever analogy (“because they make childhood sweet?”) but to develop the core speaking skill of staying in character, and to authoritatively say whatever stupid thing you have to say (“because they both have wheels”) so that it looks like you know what you’re talking about, even if you don’t.
4. The two coaches who waffled at the start roam around the pods and offer occasional “expert” feedback.
5. But really, this entire experience is largely prerecorded, almost entirely student-run, and from what I can tell so far, fantastic.
I’m sharing this with you in case you also sell information, or rather, transformation.
The fact is, regardless of how good the information you sell is, it’s 100% useless unless your students put it into practice in some form.
If on the other hand you’re looking to sell transformation, it makes sense to think about how to bake that into your product. As Ultraspeaking shows, this doesn’t have to spend a ton of your money or time to make this happen. But it’s not just about making the course more transformative.
In my case, after I heard how Ultraspeaking was organized, it was a very easy sell, even at that $995 price tag. Also, I imagine most of the 100+ people who are going through it with me right now will be very happy with the investment, and will go on to proselytize for the company.
Compare that with a $995 pure information course, which typically takes a lot of selling, both before and after, and which even so the majority of buyers will not complete or do anything with, and will only think back on with a mixture of guilt and regret, regardless of how good the info inside is.
That’s something to think about, again, if you sell information or transformation.
In entirely related news:
My offer for you today is Most Valuable Email, about an email copywriting trick that is not stories… not personal reveals… not controversy… not conflict… not contrarian points of view.
Instead, the Most Valuable Email trick is something entirely different, something that I would do from here til doomsday, every day, if the email marketing gods forced me to use just one kind of email without ever changing.
Part of Most Valuable Email is a set of Most Valuable Email Riddles in the end of the course, in which I give you a prompt, invite you to apply the Most Valuable Email trick, and then compare your answer to an answer I provide.
That set of riddles is a bit of experience and transformation that I baked into the course. But really, the whole point with Most Valuable Email is that the value of it is when you take the MVE trick and apply it to your own emails, every day, or every week, or however often you want to charm your audience and make yourself into a more valuable marketer.
As course creator and email marketer Rafa Casas wrote after going through Most Valuable Email the first time:
“Thanks for the course. It’s true that it can be read in an hour, but it needs more resting time and practice to get the full potential out of it. Which is a lot.”
If you’d like the full info on Most Valuable Email: