A couple years ago my good friend, Dan Martell, told me he was investing in a new site called Udemy. A marketplace type site where you can upload your courses and sell them to people. They handle customer support, refunds, merchanting and all of that.
There seems to be a couple of these that come along every year and they all reach out to me (and im sure anyone who has training products online for sale) and I ignore them.
I HATE THESE BUSINESS MODELS
Why?
You basically build their business for them. You upload all your content, promote it to your people/family/friends whatever, send them a bunch of buyers, take your cut, but now they have your list of buyers. And they proceed to promote other people’s products to your buyers making FAR more money than you ever would have.
Also you get next to ZERO data on people that purchased your product. Marketers like me segment people based on what they buy to optimize their experience (AKA my profitability) when I try to sell them shit in the future (just to put it bluntly).
So I have never gave it a thought to participate in these companies. Just not a good fit for me.
But this is my friend and anyone who has ever known me knows that I value relationships much more than money and Dan is a really good guy who has helped me a lot so told him I would do it…. but I would not promote it.
So I had one of our interns download all the content from the ShoeMoney System made in 2010 (VERY dated btw but still a lot of good applicable stuff) and upload it with descriptions and stuff for Udemy.
They reached out to me a lot on how I can sell more but I have enough going on that I just ignored them. I told them price it however you want. I honestly never thought it would sell anything.
Welp I was wrong.
Shortly after I put the content online I had people on FaceBook messaging me saying they were seeing my ads for Udemy.. what? I didn’t do any ads… Udemy was pixel retargeting. Thats cool.
I never logged in to check stats UNTIL I got my first payment. It was pretty sizeable. And it continued on. I kept thinking people would complain like THIS CONTENT IS OUT OF DATE or whatever.
Ill let the numbers speak for themselves.
As you can see – to date it has almost 10,000 – students as they call them. As I said above I gave them permission to sell it for whatever they want and the price points have bounced all over the place. 19.95 to $197.00 but based on total numbers I would estimate its around $50 per student.
The stats are pretty amazing. I could only get it to go back 1 year. As you can see it bounces around a lot. But again as I told you above I have never devoted any resources in promoting this. There might be some links from my auto responder or something I forgot about but nothing I can recall off hand.
Evidently it caught fire last december with almost 1,750 new “students”.
So here is the thing that is most surprising to me. On average, my “students”, are almost twice as active as the average for the business category. Also the course overall has a 4 star rating. And to top it off 76{6fac3e6a3582a964f494389deded51e5db8d7156c3a7415ff659d1ae7a1be33e} of the “students” say its great.
So I gotta say putting a course that is 5 years old on Udemy that has produced hundreds of thousands of dollars in my bank account is pretty cool.
Also what I said above about not being able to communicate with the buyer’s isn’t 100{6fac3e6a3582a964f494389deded51e5db8d7156c3a7415ff659d1ae7a1be33e} accurate. You can make “announcements” which go out to your “students”. I am not sure if it emails them or just shows they have a message. Might depend on their settings.
Anyway I just wanted to share my experience with it and when I am wrong I will say I was wrong.
SOURCE: ShoeMoney – Read entire story here.
