For five years, David Perell had kind of a dream online business.
Perell sold a high-ticket, cohort-based course, Write Of Passage, teaching people how to write online.
Write Of Passage sold for $4k a pop. It had 2,000+ buyers.
Like I said, a kind of dream business, at least in the little space of online course creators and such.
I mean, Perell was writing and helping people to do something positive for themselves. He was working in line with his own values and interests. And he was pulling in great money with it.
And then, last November, Perell shut it all down. In an email announcing that the current cohort of Write Of Passage would be the last one, Perell wrote:
“You need more than a great product to make a business work, and the main thing we were missing was a dependable flow of new students.”
I agree with Perell’s first conclusion. I don’t agree with the second.
You do need more than a great product to make a business work. Particularly if your product sells for a one-time fee (even if that’s $4k), and if you have a whole supporting team of coaches and facilitators and staff and whatever, and you’re running ads or paying affiliates to get those $4k sales.
But I don’t agree that the solution needs to be MORE NEW STUDENTS.
I’ve been making a 6-fig income off this newsletter for the past few years, off of just a few hundred buyers, way fewer than Perell’s 2k. I’ve even embraced this attitude formally. My goal is to make more sales from the same number of readers.
It’s a well-known direct marketing truth that all the profits are made on the back end.
It does take more than a great product to make a business work. But instead of chasing the mythical “dependable flow” of new students… you can just commit to creating a sequence of great new offers. (An offer by the way, doesn’t require creating a new product, though a new product will typically make you a new offer.)
Now about that:
As I wrote in my last email, last year, right around the time that Perell was shutting down his multimillion-dollar dream biz, I came up with a new system for myself to help me get more predictable success with new offers.
I applied this system when I had the idea for my Daily Email Habit service. It worked great.
So far, I have only shared my system with the people inside my Daily Email House community.
This month, I will make this system available a bit more widely. I’ll be sharing it with a few people on my list, if I think it can actually be useful to them.
I will make you a deal right now:
If more predictable success with new offers is something that could be useful to you, then hit reply and tell me a bit about your current offer situation. In turn, I will add you to a private announcement list, so you have the opportunity to get my system when I release it later this month.